By Richard Mellor in California
The CEO of Axon Enterprise Inc. is a happy camper right now. Axon is the company that makes Tasers and sells them to all the nice security and police forces around the world, keeping us all safe and free. Patrick Smith’s pay package last year was $246 million and that was about 20 times greater than the media pay for an S&P boss even though Axon, with a market capitalization of $3.8 billion, is too small a company to be included in the S&P 500 index.
You have to think about the society and world we live in, when someone whose life activity is spent producing weapons that are overwhelmingly used as a means of social control and oppression, earns that sort of money. I spoke to a local politician a few days ago who told me, as we are so often told, that there isn’t the money for education. I mentioned that I was opposed to these parcel taxes that are heaped on homeowners to place the recurring band-aids on an education system that the private sector and its political representatives are bleeding dry. These band-aids don’t work. They always come back for more and this makes it harder to build a generalized movement that can actually build a real, functioning democratically-controlled public education system.
But as we can see from the Taser business, there’s plenty of money in society.
In the main, politicians at the local level, regardless of their desires and intentions, end up acting as agents of the billionaires, carrying out their policies that are intended to make workers and the middle class pay for capitalism’s inability to provide basic social services and needs for the population. No local or municipal board can halt this assault on US workers alone, and it is intensifying, as US capitalism cannot maintain its position as one of the world’s dominant powers without driving the living standards of US workers down further. As we have stated on the Facts for Working People blog many times, Lyndon Johnson’s claim of being able to provide of guns and butter was never really possible in the best of times, and it certainly is not possible now.
This does not mean a local council or school board could not have an affect. If a local candidate(s) made it clear that they cannot halt this drive to the bottom alone but would use their position to point out where the money is and to build a wider, generalized movement to get it, this is a start. They would have to campaign on a promise of refusing to take part in any cuts whatsoever, always explaining that the movement is the answer not individual politicians, no matter how well intentioned. They will have to openly reject the idea that ‘the market’ is the answer to all things and that capitalism is the only form of social organization. Like the heads of organized labour, if they do not see a movement of the working class as the force that can change society, then they have no alternative to capitalism and always try to save it from itself at the workers’ expense.
DSA has considerable resources, wasted boosting the Democrats
If a local municipal body were to have a majority of candidates with this strategy of mobilizing people around direct action, and fight-to-win tactics, this would be a pole of attraction to those who have lost all hope that political action can make a difference. It would seem to me that the Democratic Socialists of America, with its considerable resources, could play this role rather than helping advance the interests of the Democratic Party. A city council that had a majority with this approach could then use its base to spread it to neighbouring municipal bodies and communities, attending council meetings and supporting activists and candidates for these bodies who join the movement, help build it and support openly a program against austerity and to make the rich pay for the crisis of their system.
The $246 million package of Axon’s CEO is dependent on Axon growing, reaching market capitalization milestones, increasing revenue and basically making profit. What that means really, is that state security forces, the police, the more militarized urban security forces like those being used against the French workers and the Yellow Vest movement at the moment, need to grow, and they surely will as the crisis of capitalism intensifies.
We will see much more of it here in the USA. The police that are basically occupying forces in the urban centres of the US have been quite free with the use of Tasers, as well as live ammo, as we all know by now. So the future looks good for Mr. Smith – for a while.
I can think of better ways to use the resources of society, human labour power and money capital than the Taser industry. But capitalists are driven to protect themselves and their system and, as with all things, make a lot of money doing it.
May 10, 2019
From the US socialist blogsite Facts for Working People, at https://weknowwhatsup.blogspot.com/2019
