Why America Needs Socialism

Below is an excerpt from our latest release, Why America Needs Socialism: The Argument from Martin Luther King, Helen Keller, Albert Einstein, and Other Great Thinkers by G.S. Griffin:

In 1952, Dr. Martin Luther King wrote to Coretta Scott, explaining his political and economic philosophy. “I am much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic,” he said in the letter to his future wife. “Today capitalism has out-lived its usefulness. It has brought about a system that takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes. King was talking about how capitalism transfers wealth away from the workers at the bottom of society to the owners, the capitalists, at the top. Later in his life, King would speak of the “tragic exploitation” of people around the globe, which he believed justified “a more humane and just economic order.”

Dr. King understood that workers create wealth, as it is workers who construct the good or provide the service to be sold by the capitalist. It is the capitalist who needs workers, to make a product or perform a service at a pace and on a scale he cannot do himself. This is true of both heirs to billion-dollar businesses and creative, driven geniuses who start from nothing—Steve Jobs would not have gotten very far without his workers. “Capital is perfectly helpless without labour,” as Gandhi phrased it. Let’s consider this in some detail. Say a woman starts a business by herself. At that stage, she is a worker creating her own wealth, selling something to others and exploiting no one when she decides how much profit she will keep for herself as income, and how much she will invest back into the business. Should this woman take on an equal partner, and they together decide how to run the business and what equitable earnings to subtract from the profits, exploitation is still a non-issue. But when the founding woman assumes a managerial position by hiring people, these employees will not democratically decide earnings or business goals. Instead, it is the owner who will retain total decision-making control, as well as taking a larger income out of the profit pool than she will award to individual employees. In Principles of Political Economy, John Stuart Mill, famous economist and philosopher (who said his ideals put him “under the general designation of Socialists” described the system this way: “a capitalist as chief, and workpeople without a voice in the management,” who had to “work at the bidding and for the profit of another.”

As we can see, the system of exploitation has begun. The workers create the commodity or carry out the service, but the capitalist reaps more of the wealth created by their hands than they do. The capitalist, while perhaps still working hard overseeing, strategizing, investing, and so forth, is no longer doing the basic tasks necessary to directly generate wealth. The owner no longer cooks in the back of a fast food joint, or operates the machines sewing the clothing. Nor must she do an architectural technician’s drafting or a computer programmer’s coding. Instead, she decides what to do with the profits created by others. And by taking more of the wealth created by others as personal income, she steadily builds for herself a much better life than her workers will experience. She’ll also likely keep her worker’s wages down to protect profits, as a means of earning herself a higher income and expanding her business. The workers in turn will not get an equitable portion of the money they have made for the company. Their lives may see little improvement unless they strike to convince the capitalist that more of the profits should go to those who generate the profits. Later, the owner will hire more people, and they too will be exploited, with most of the wealth they create (“the fruits of their collective labor”) being appropriated by her, “not by force,” as Einstein noted, “but on the whole in faithful compliance with legally established rules.” The owner may eventually even hire someone to run the business for her and never work another day. Helen Keller, who argued the labor of the poorly paid made others rich and comfortable, declared that

The foundation of society is laid upon a basis of individualism, conquest and exploitation, with a total disregard of the good of the whole… Crushed, stupefied by terrible poverty, the workers yet demand that they shall have some of the beauty, some of the comforts, some of the luxuries which they have produced.

The writer Jack London looked back with regret at his own exploitation of others, taking a disproportionate slice of the profits from his small enterprise when his employee worked just as hard as he did. George Orwell likewise called capitalism “the right to exploit” other human beings. It’s about unrewarded value. Nelson Mandela said realizing this very fact drew him to socialism.