By John Pickard
It isn’t very often that columnists in the Financial Times quote Karl Marx, so when they do, it makes you sit up and take notice. A recent article by Rana Foroohar, entitled Corporate America’s Deal with the Devil, commented on the fact that that business leaders, in a “rigged” system, have a massively disproportional degree of power.
These business leaders are overwhelmingly in favour of dumping Trump; stability, after all, is what big business really wants. But when thirty chief executives of America’s top 100 largest companies got together in an on-line parley last week, the FT correspondent noted sarcastically that these same executive would have cheered Trump when he was giving away trillions of dollars in the biggest tax cuts for the rich in decades.
Tiny cabal of business leaders
But the main point of the article was to note that this tiny cabal of business leaders – a vanishingly small number of people, compared to the general population and far less than 1 per cent – have more power between them than millions of voters. In response to all those conspiracy theorists claiming that this tiny group might have an inordinate amount of influence, Ms Foroohar replies, “Sadly, they wouldn’t be delusional to think so. Anyone with a pulse know that in the US today the system is rigged in favour of the wealthy and powerful.” (Financial Times, November 22)
To show the influence on business on the electoral processes, you need to look no further than the recent vote in California on November 3 on Proposition 22. This was a proposal, aimed to exempt many gig workers from the benefits they would have had if they had been recognised as ‘employees’ instead of being ‘self-employed’. As the Financial Times pointed out, companies like Uber, Instacart, Lyft and others spend $200m to railroad the measure through the state legislature and will probably now push for the same policies to other states.
Trump’s disruptive behaviour
Having been enriched by Trump’s tax cuts, the big company bosses now want rid of Trump because of his disruptive behaviour. “As Karl Marx observed”, Ms Foroohar writes, “it is only under threat from the masses that the owners of the means of production recognise their common interests. Corporate America got what it wanted from Mr Trump, namely tax cuts and deregulation. Big business in America now knows that there’s nothing more to be got from him. So they are eager for him to go, taking with him those disruptive tweets of which they were sometimes the target.”
The Financial Times article refers to investigations by the Institute for New Economic Thinking, which looked at the political influence of big business leaders, first in 2014, and then again later in 2020.
‘Uniquely substantial power over policy’
In 2014, they looked at nearly two thousand cases changes in public policy, tracking them over twenty years. Looking at the influence of ‘public opinion’ as regards the opinions of top executives, they came to the view that “Not only do ordinary citizens not have uniquely substantial power over policy decisions; they have little or no independent influence on policy at all.”
In 2020, they took a fresh look at the data, this time using more sophisticated AI analysis techniques and they reaffirmed their earlier findings. The investigators “flatly dismiss notions that anyone’s opinion about public policy outside of the top 10% of affluent Americans independently helps to explain policy. Knowing the policy area, the preferences of the top 10%, and the views of a handful of interest groups suffice to explain policy changes with impressive accuracy.”
Subservient think-tanks
The influence of the top 1% or 2% of the real opinion makers are the by-product of “social networks, subsidized op eds, subservient think tanks, and journalists seeking applause and better positions. That is how the reality of money-driven political systems shows up in surveys”.Throughout the period analysed, the investigators found that the social standing of organized labour “steadily deteriorated, while economic inequality soared”, change, they ascribed to “affluent authoritarianism.”
Their conclusion, not a huge revelation to socialists, of course, is that “it is high time to start framing problems in terms of money in politics, not public opinion”. Money talks, in other words. Like the $2bn spent on the US elections three weeks ago.
What is interesting is that the Financial Times columnist should make a reference to this study, noting that “the cynicism and anger of many left-behind voters who supported him [Trump] will remain”. The answer, she suggests, is that instead of just is to promote a different agenda.
“I’d love to see business work with the Biden administration”, she writes, “on a way to build a good national healthcare system similar to what most European nations enjoy. That would benefit individuals such as those gig workers, as well as companies that have to carry the burden of healthcare costs. Or how about engineering a public-private solution to the US’s $1.6tn student debt crisis?” These are nice ideas, but it remains to be seen how well the Devil can be encouraged to renounce Sin.
Machinery of influence
This Financial Times article dealt exclusively with the tops of big business in the USA, but all of the arguments would apply with equal force to the big corporations in the UK. By lobbying, informal contacts and through secretive corrupt practices, the tentacles of business reach right into the heart of government, political parties – including the right wing of the Labour Party – and the civil service. The whole machinery of influence is secretive, and necessarily so, because it cannot be revealed to the public that their millions of votes in elections count for less than the ‘old school tie’, the social contacts of the super-rich, family ties, or just plain old bribery.
It is the task of the labour movement, not only to expose the rottenness and bankruptcy of this system, but to engineer its demise. “Affluent authoritarianism” is not a momentary slip; it is something that is rooted in the DNA of capitalism and it is the system, therefore, not just its aberrant behaviour that needs to be done away with.
November 23, 2020
