Chief of Police of Malibu

The term “Class Warfare” has been used by Conservatives a lot in the past decade or so, usually an accusation against Liberals who would like to reverse trends of regressiveness in the tax system and spend more public funds on people who make less money.  Recently, John McCain has used similar rhetoric in attacking Barack Obama’s plans to let the Bush tax cuts expire for people who make over $250K per year and introduce a tax credit for the first $500 or so that working people have to fork over in payroll taxes.

Leaving aside the fact that most people who use the term couldn’t tell you the difference between Trotsky & Bukharin if their lives depended on it, the most infuriating thing for me is that those who use the term accusingly have been the ones actually practicing it, and most effectively, for the past 30 years against those of us who fall outside the upper class.

John & Cindy McCain together made well over $4 million in 2007, putting them well within top 1% of income earners in the US (as of 2005, $364K annual income is the floor of the top 1%).  This group, the richest one out of every hundred households in America, took home 10.02% of the nation’s wealth the year Ronald Reagan was elected president, leaving nine tenths of the country’s income for ninety-nine hundredths of the nation’s people.  In the intervening three decades, the top 1% has waged a highly effective class war against the other 99% of us, wresting an additional 13% of the nation’s income away from us and brining it home as the spoils of war.  Now we 99%-ers only get 77.18% of the nation’s income to split amongst ourselves.

Some people might say it’s the “invisible hand” of the market, that there’s nothing purposeful about the way the 1%-ers have increased their share of income and reduced ours.  But does anybody really believe that decisions to increase retail prices, raise executive salaries, maximize shareholder value and issue dividends to the investor class, squeeze yield from dubious mortgage applicants, refuse to actually pay for medical care for insured people, refuse insurance to sick people, cut costs by laying off workers or reducing benefits or cutting benefits entirely some retirees spouses, are not designed to increase the income of the people making these decisions, and decrease that of other people affected by such decisions?

In some cases (like during the 1990s when tax rates were more progressive) the commonplace decisions of businesses at every level to increase their own incomes resulted in a less brutal type of class warfare, where the 1%-ers got a lot more, and we 99%-ers got a little more (in absolute terms, though we were still getting a smaller and smaller share of the whole).  But in the last five years, according to the Wall Street Journal article cited above, the 1%-ers have increased their earnings by over 3% while the median income (i.e, the income at the 50% mark), has decreased by 2% (and that’s including the top 1% in calculating the median–if you calculated the median income of everybody outside of the top 1%, that is, the income at the 49.5% mark, the drop has certainly be more than 2%!).

Now, if you love capitalism (like I do), you might say, “Well, that’s just too bad–that’s how capitalism works: it increases inequality.”  But it is also class warfare.  They have more and more and we have less and less, and they’ve been fighting tooth and nail to make sure that, to paraphrase John Robinson of Virginia, they keep it for themselves, instead of letting the government have more of it to do things like fight terrorism, alleviate poverty, improve schools, and generally make life better for those of us 99%-ers who don’t have the benefits of eight houses and thirteen cars and such.

So now Barack Obama wants us to vote for him, and elect a more Democratic Congress so that bills can be proposed and passed by Democratic majorities and he can sign them into law to change the tax system so that the top 1%-ers (or perhaps 1.5%-ers, to be fair) pay more taxes, and we 98.5%-ers pay less taxes.  And this, conservatives howl, is class warfare.

I do not disagree.  It is class warfare.  But (as Joe Biden might say), ladies and gentlemen it also democracy.  In democracy, we have majority rule and minority rights and procedures by which bills are passed (or not passed) and signed into law that do things like set tax rates.  It is not socialism.

Socialism (real, existing socialism, not the social democracy of those capitalist Western European countries that have passed laws ensuring less straitened circumstances for their 99%-ers than we have in the United States) entails extra-legal seizures of property, forced collectivization without any channels of protest or redress, arrests of those who oppose such policies, not the opportunity to start their own media outlets and campaign to win back power in fair elections.  It involves the abrogation of the right to have any private property at all, as well as a whole series of other rights under whose protection opposition to socialism might otherwise be mounted.

If Conservatives want to see real class warfare, McMansions burning, car-jackings and home-invasions, the execution of people whose income is from successful investments, a command economy and the abolition of private property, then they should keep going down the path we’re on now, of more and more flagrant concentration of income and suffering of the 99%-ers.

This is the road to revolution: it’s what happened in France in the late 18th century, in Russia in the late 19th and early 20th century, in Cuba in the mid-20th century, and is what we see now in places like South Africa.  And it is the tax policies that have been promoted by Republicans for the past 8 years and that John McCain has embraced in his campaign that will lead us further down the road to the creation of a 21st century American Leon Trotsky.  Then we’ll see real class warfare.

The class warfare that’s been fought against us 99%-ers (who’ve largely neglected to hit back) by the 1%-ers for the past three decades has been painful, but it’s also been a skirmish that does not have to end in revolution.  It’s been waged against us with a most powerful weapon that the 1%-ers have wielded with increasing skill and tenacity: capitalism.

But we have a weapon to fight back: democracy.

And we should use it, not to destroy capitalism and liquidate those who’ve targeted us as their class enemy, but just to get back to where we were three decades ago, to win back that territory, that 13% or so of the nation’s income, and to hold it, in a defensive posture against the 1%-ers.  And maybe if the class war is fought to a standstill, then the 1%-ers can be convinced to sign an armistice, allow for a class truce on the old borders, and perhaps even the kind of class cooperation that we see in some European societies where homelessness, hunger, soaring infant mortality rates, and health-related bankruptcies are as unknown as 8-residence households.