The animating principle of capitalism is pursuit of profit, the value added to the costs of production to benefit the owners of capital.
Costs include worker’s earnings, expenditures to enhance workforce health and safety, mitigation of environmental damage, and many other vital social values. To maximize profit, corporations must keep costs as far below revenues as possible.
The core ethic of corporate capitalism is absence of liability. Investors risk nothing but money in the pursuit of nothing but as much more money as can be made.
The potential for environmental degradation, exploitation of workers, and dangerous depletion of resources with disregard for requirements of sustainability is inherent in the system. We rely upon the consciences of corporate managers to blunt these perils as well as laws that control what corporations can and cannot do in pursuit of profit.
ExxonMobil’s Rex Tillerson, now nominated for secretary of state, tells it like it is. “My philosophy is to make money. If I can drill and make money, then that’s what I want to do.”
No equivocation here, no allowance for consideration of danger to the environment that drilling might cause, no recognition of the significant contribution to burgeoning ruinous climate change caused by fossil fuels, nor for any other mitigating concern. Folks that lack conscience can be highly valued as CEOs.
The struggle between capital and labor, also called “class struggle,” is a fundamental dynamic in society, although we seldom are willing to name it any more. It is the elephant in the room this political season, and for that matter, the donkey too.
Capital has become instantaneously, internationally mobile. Money moves around the world at the speed of light impelled by the flick of a finger. Labor is location bound. This is the great conundrum of contemporary class struggle.
There are counterbalances to corporate power. Labor unions are one of these. Their power, in the manufacturing sector particularly, diminished precipitously as capital became internationalized.
When a factory had to stay put, the bosses could sometimes be forced to negotiate. When it could be vaporized and reestablished where folks must work for a dollar a day or starve, localized labor power was done for.
The only collective enterprise that is under some measure of democratic control is the government. How do we make sure that workers are not abused in the pursuit of maximum profit? We mandate minimum wages and maximum work hours, outlaw child labor, and have an Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
How do we ensure that the food and drugs produced by corporations in the singular pursuit of profit are safe? We have a Food and Drug Administration.
How do we police treatment of the environment by mining companies in their extractive pursuit of profit on public lands and under the seas? We have an Environmental Protection Agency.
How do we make sure that banks with assets insured by the government manage their depositor’s money responsibly even while seeking to maximally profit themselves? We have a Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., a Federal Reserve Board, an Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and laws such as the repealed Glass–Steagall Act.
This is why those who believe that profit is more important than the people or the planet hate government regulations.
So, a campaign is mounted to persuade the people that it is the government that is the enemy. Ronald Reagan famously quipped that the nine scariest words in the English language are, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”
Next time your aquifer is flooded with unneeded filthy oil, or an earthquake wrecks your city, or the plant you worked in for 30 years closes and the distant parent corporation voids your pension, or the highway bridge collapses underneath you, or your Medicaid is eviscerated, or you need food stamps, let me know how scary those words sound. How’s this for scary: “I’m from ExxonMobil and I’m here to help.”
What would happen if there was no government oversight of corporate abuse in pursuit of profit regarding environmental protection, workers’ rights, occupational health and safety, product safety, animal husbandry, depletion of resources for future generations, catastrophic climate change, extractive mining rather than renewable resource power generation, safety of the food supply, emergency management for protection, rescue, and restoration of property for their own sake rather than as sources of profit extraction?
We’re going to find out. A coup occurred on Nov. 8. Now, the government is pretty much a wholly owned subsidiary of corporate interests controlling the departments that regulate and monitor their own activity to ensure that the relentless pursuit of profit does not fail utterly to consider the human and environmental costs of those enterprises.
Remember child labor, verminous tenements, epidemic hunger, no free public education for all, killing smog, poll taxes, the Bechtel strike, the Monogah coal mine disaster, Three Mile Island, Love Canal? Make America great again!
If the government no longer has the back of children, workers, minorities, or the environment, we had better have each other’s.
Jonathan Klate lives in Amherst and writes an occasional column.
