Inequality Is the Product
A misconception about corporate capitalism, or capitalism of any kind—it will always become corporate, given time—is that inequality is an accidental effect, a sort of exhaust or wake that downstream society fails to adequately deal with. Of course, this is what our ruling class wants us to believe: that our wondrous economy produces mostly good things but a few bad ones that we live with because we didn’t vote hard enough, whether at the polls or in the marketplace (with what scraps we have left.) This, you’ll find if you examine society and its priorities, couldn’t be farther from the truth.
Farmers and teachers and civil engineers and foresters are not especially well paid. Very little of the work that society needs in order to run is well-compensated; if the job is actually important, enough people have looked at its demands and circumstances and found ways to cut costs. This hasn’t happened for corporate executives for a number of reasons, but the foremost is that we don’t need most of those fuckers. Those positions exist for corrupt sociological ones rather than economic function, but you’re smart and you knew that. Or, it should be more precisely said that they are not filled based on skill but on loyalty mechanics. Rich people—the only “shareholders” who actually matter—wouldn’t be able to align executives with the ruling class unless they paid them well enough to bring them into, at least, the outer circle.
Some managers are good people, and some are bad ones, but corporate managers do more harm than good; it is corporate managers who have ensured that the economic gains due to automation not only filter up to the ruling class, but are weaponized against workers. And this particular job, for people who are good at convincing the ruling class of their loyalty to it, is lucrative. Private equity operatives, management consultants, and technology barons who find new ways to use AI, automation, and surveillance to squeeze or fire people… they all do quite well, while the actual working people haven’t had a raise since the 1970s.
I’ve come to the conclusion that our reasoning about the economy is backward. We’ve been inculcated with the idea that capitalism “is productive” and “is innovative”—while it can be all those things, (a) so can socialism, and (b) capitalism can also be inefficient, sluggish, and retrogressive—but inequality is the price we have to pay for all these new products. The people who make the most money, however, aren’t making new products. They’re squeezing workers, fixing reputations, packaging and selling influence, and doing other dirty jobs that rich people want done. Inequality—continuation of advantage for those who can afford their services—is their product. It is the product. That is what our economy makes, and has been built to make.
It is fashionable and not incorrect to say that the United States is an arms dealer. We do, in fact, make a lot of weaponry. One might say that weapons and inequality are our two greatest products. What if I said they were the same thing? Weapons do not care about anything but who has them; they tend to flow into the hands of those who can afford to buy and keep them. That much is obvious. It is inequality in weaponry, not to those nations’ advantages, that has forced so many nations in Latin America, Asia, and Africa to live under US-led capitalism, despite the will of their people. It goes the other way, too. The thing people with money want most is to win first and lose last; the rent eats first. Why do people with $100 million want another $100 million, or a billion? The advantage it gives them in life is not some asset that is occasionally weaponized; weaponization is the point.
Our economic system’s revealed purpose is to produce inequality that serves no social purpose, a product that is sold to those who will pay the most for the newest weapons. It is not an accidental maximizer but a deliberate minimizer.