Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont calls himself a Democratic Socialist. I actually think many of his policy proposals make him a more a New Deal Democrat rather than a socialist but let that pass. However, in his diagnosis about what is wrong with the United States, he is very much a socialist. I delivered this commentary because I had just read a review of his new book, IT’S OKAY TO BE ANGRY ABOUT CAPITALISM. (NY: Crown Publishers, 2023), written with John Nichols.
[The review I read is available here. Here's another really good review.]
I start with Senator Sanders echoing an old labor organizing song, WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?
“Florence Reece, the wife of a United Mine Workers organizer in Harlan County, Kentucky, wrote the song ….It told about how the owners of a mine in the county had paid the local sheriff, J.H. Blair, to hire a gang of thugs to threaten union miners:
‘They say in Harlan County/There are no neutrals there/… You’ll either be a union man or a thug for J.H. Blair/Which side are you on, boys?/Which side are you on?’
[Sanders continues]. Which side are you on? … These days corporations like Starbucks and Amazon don’t hire gun-toting thugs. Instead, they have anti-union consultants and pollsters and politically connected lobbyists – many of them Democrats – to thwart union organizing. But the fundamental premise remains. You’re either on the side of workers and organized labor or you’re not.” (173)
Here is a summary of Sanders’ analysis of the reality of the US economy and society:
“The simple truth is that unfettered capitalism is not just creating economic misery for the majority of Americans, it is destroying our health, our well-being, our democracy, and our planet. . … There is nothing wrong with a business or an entrepreneur making a profit. There is something profoundly wrong, however, when massive corporations controlled by the wealthiest people on earth, lie, cheat, bribe, and steal in order to make profits that are funded by the destruction of our lives our environment and our democracy…there is an American oligarchy every bit as dangerous as the oligarchies we decry in other countries … [will we] continue to be ruled by a small number of extremely wealthy and powerful people who are motivated by greed and could care less for the general welfare?” (100-101)
The idea that we in the country are ruled by “an oligarchy” probably sounds absurd. But consider the very simple fact about power on the job. When I taught economics, I often posed a question to my students --- when you run a business, does that give you power over others? Most of my students immediately understood that if you own the business you “run” it --- you determine how the work will be done – you have “power” over your employees.
Scale that up to a CEO of a large corporation. You have great power but you use it indirectly. You hire upper managers who hire middle managers who hire line managers ---who tell workers what to do --- you only indirectly exercise power. But that power is real – and much greater than the power of a local restaurant owner over his wait-staff, cooks and dishwashers. The power of a CEO may be enough to create or break politicians.
And the most important implication of what Sanders is saying is that there is a terrible imbalance between the economic elites and the arrest of us. Sanders focuses mostly on political influence and his book catalogues all the ways that our current political system is skewed towards the superrich. However, at the base of this imbalance is the simple one (most of) my economic students recognized instinctively. The workers have to listen to their boss if they want to keep their jobs.
[Side digression. I once asked my class why they were so sure, given that the argument that bosses have power over workers was a kind of subversive, leftist point of view. “We’re mostly business students,” was a typical answer!]
Those who either own businesses as individuals or partners or who control large corporate entities from the top of the managerial food chain give orders to those who work for them. Everyone else has to work for some entity or other – and take orders from bosses. It is that imbalance that Sanders is objecting to. It is that imbalance that socialists have complained about since the modern system of capitalism emerged.
Most politicians in the United States focus on cooperation between workers and bosses. Sanders and socialists like me think that no matter how NICE owners of businesses are and how much they WANT to treat their workers well, when it comes to a choice between staying in business or not, the interest of the business comes first before that of workers. That’s why when business is bad you see these owners on TV sorrowfully complaining that they just HAD to lay off workers even though it was painful to them. That’s the inherent conflict between owners and workers that socialists focus on --- that Sanders recognizes --- and that most politicians refuse to acknowledge.
But that is why even Democrats help major corporations fight unionization. That is why under both Democratic and Republican administrations, the percentage of the population in unions has continually declined for almost 70 years. And THAT is why income and wealth inequality in the United States has skyrocketed since the 1970s. That is the kind of situation Sanders wants to reverse.
The National Labor Relations Board has accused both Amazon and Starbucks of illegal anti-union activities (often firing workers who are organizing their work places). [See for example: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/feb/26/amazon-trader-joes-starbucks-anti-union-measures]
Why do these corporations resist unionization? Why not adopt a stance of strict neutrality? Why do they care? The answer is that for all their anti-socialist rhetoric, these business owners know what socialists know. The power of business owners over their workers is an essential feature of our modern capitalist society and owners believe it must be maintained. If workers had power over the way the business were run, they might get the “subversive” idea that they didn’t need a boss to run the place.
Bernie Sanders and I strongly agree with that potential worker sentiment. Democracy in the workplace would actually be a very good idea--- and it would work quite well.
[For some useful but brief arguments in favor of workplace democracy, see Sanders and Nichols: 203-209. The economist Richard Woolf has been working on the concept of workplace democracy for decades. See the website for an organization he created Democracy at Work.]
Michael Meeropol is professor emeritus of Economics at Western New England University. He is the author with Howard and Paul Sherman of the recently published second edition of Principles of Macroeconomics: Activist vs. Austerity Policies
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