Why coup may happen in America -Part 2

Today, however, advanced productive forces have now spawned what may be called a generalised immiserised working class working to pay bills and eke a bare existence.

A 2019 report by Lawrence Mishel and Julia Wolfe published by the Washington-Based Economic Policy Institute offered a great deal of insight into the state of inequality in the American economy.

The summary of the reports noted that: “The increased focus on growing inequality has led to an increased focus on CEO pay. Corporate boards running America’s largest public firms are giving top executives outsize compensation packages. Average pay of CEOs at the top 350 firms in 2018 was $17.2 million—or $14.0 million using a more conservative measure. (Stock options make up a big part of CEO pay packages, and the conservative measure values the options when granted, versus when cashed in, or “realised.”) CEO compensation is very high relative to typical worker compensation (by a ratio of 278-to-1 or 221-to-1).

In contrast, the CEO-to-typical-worker compensation ratio (options realised) was 20-to-1 in 1965 and 58-to-1 in 1989. CEOs are even making a lot more—about five times as much—as other earners in the top 0.1 per cent.

From 1978 to 2018, CEO compensation grew by 1,007.5 per cent (940.3 per cent under the options-realised measure) far outstripping S&P stock market growth (706.7 per cent) and the wage growth of very high earners (339.2 per cent). In contrast, wages for the typical worker grew by just 11.9 per cent.”
 
Similarly, a 2020 Pew Research Centre report by Juliana Menasce Horowitz, Ruth Igielnik, and Rakesh Kochhar also stressed the point that “The share of American adults who live in middle-income households has decreased from 61 per cent in 1971 to 51 per cent in 2019. This downsizing has proceeded slowly but surely since 1971, with each decade thereafter typically ending with a smaller share of adults living in middle-income households than at the beginning of the decade.”
 

In an opinion in The London Guardian, Sanders noted that: “Today, half of our people are living paycheck to paycheck, 500,000 of the very poorest among us are homeless, millions are worried about evictions, 92 million are uninsured or underinsured, and families all across the country are worried about how they are going to feed their kids.

Today, an entire generation of young people carries an outrageous level of student debt and face the reality that their standard of living will be lower than their parents. And, most obscenely, low-income Americans now have a life expectancy that is about 15 years lower than the wealthy. Poverty in America has become a death sentence.”

For Sanders, it has to be fixed for the progress of American democracy. In his words: “The United States cannot prosper and remain a vigorous democracy when so few have so much and so many have so little. While many of my congressional colleagues choose to ignore it, the issue of income and wealth inequality is one of the great moral, economic and political crises that we face – and it must be dealt with.”
 
Warren takes inequality as given. Her solution lies in pre-distribution that differs from redistribution but entails regulatory reforms that cover labour regulation, financial regulation in ways that ensure justice in returns, and antitrust. Warren’s Accountable Capitalism Act that togs at roots of inequality in wealth and power in America is a statement of commitment.
 
President Dwight Eisenhower in his 1961 farewell address to Americans prayed that “peoples of all faiths, all races, all nations, may have their great human needs satisfied; that those now denied opportunity shall come to enjoy it to the full; that all who yearn for freedom may experience its spiritual blessings; that those who have freedom will understand, also, its heavy responsibilities; that all who are insensitive to the needs of others will learn charity; that the scourges of poverty, disease and ignorance will be made to disappear from the earth, and that, in the goodness of time, all peoples will come to live together in a peace guaranteed by the binding force of mutual respect and love.” The logic of the capitalist system, that is, profit maximisation, has undermined Eisenhower’s pious intent on equality.

Racism which Richard J. Perry defined as “…the grouping of people on the basis of physical appearance for the purpose of social discrimination” is a social reality in the USA being a social construct sired by specific historical occurrences.

As John Rex has noted in his entry in A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, “In the United States the descendants of slaves have had to compete with free immigrants workers in a newly created capitalist metropolis and have had to struggle for a place within a political order based upon those free immigrant workers.” The social consequences are what we see in the activities of the Ku Klux Klan and the resistance Black Panther Party for Self-Defence. It is what we see in the inequality among different groups and classes in America. It is the reason for the serial murder of blacks by the American police without any qualm of conscience and the activities of those that Schumer qualified as “…nasty, racist bigoted insurrectionists” who yelled, “There’s the big Jew. Let’s get him.”

Rex is right in his observation to the effect that “…the exploitation of clearly marked groups in a variety of different ways is integral to capitalism and that ethnic groups unite and act together because they have been subjected to distinct and differentiated types of exploitation.”

While there is a noticeable effort by liberal and progressive American elite to stamp out what is now systemic racism, it is so concrete a matter that if not properly handled can lead to implosion warranting the intervention of the men on the horseback, and in the worst-case scenario, a civil war. The need to prevent the latter could equally be a trigger.

To be continued tomorrow.

Akhaine, former General Secretary of the Campaign for Democracy in Nigeria in the 1990s, is a Professor of Political Science at the Lagos State University, Nigeria.