Article first printed in our sister publication, People’s Tribune.
Since the advent of the Occupy Wall Street movement, our readers have been asking us, “What does it mean to take over the corporations?” In any far-reaching political struggle, slogans anticipate or precede political demands. They are meant to point the way towards an indispensable goal or step along the way. In this case the slogan is meant to indicate the need to convert the economic power these corporations wield to the interest of the American people.
Today, corporations and the capitalists who own them have more economic power and political influence than the people of the United States. Through their domination of government they are insuring their profits and position at our expense, thus rendering the saying “government of, by, and for the people”—a lie.
The propagandistic task of revolutionaries today is to overcome the sense of sacredness of private property and overcome the disconnect between economic and political power in the thinking of the American people. We raise the slogan of “Take over the Corporations” to illustrate the reality that those who economically own the country will run it politically.
So today, as we are confronted by the polarization of wealth and poverty—the tendency is to deal with the effects of having the socially necessary means of production in private hands rather than the real cause. This leads to attempts to reform the system or simply attack the greed of the capitalist. The real cause of the problem is that electronic produc-tion is cheaper than mechanical. Under capitalism this means the robot is used and the worker is laid off. The problem is production for profit rather than for use. The entire system of distribution is disrupted since the system of production has been changed. The worker cannot buy what is produced, and the capitalist won’t give it to him since he can’t make a profit.
In the struggle to unite the revolutionary movement that Occupy Wall Street and the numerous other strands of struggle represent, and to strengthen their political direction, we must learn to work with what is actually happening — with what is inevitable. The current economic crisis shows us that nationalization of key centers of production and finance is inevitable to save the capitalist class as a whole. The stock market crash of 2008 and the bank and corporate bailouts which followed clearly showed this. So the question is posed, “Nationalization in whose interest?” The government, since it belongs to the corporations, is going to want to nationalize in the interest of the corporations. But who says nationalization shouldn’t be done in the public interest?
We don’t need private corporate ownership in order to have production. That is why we call for taking over the corporations. This slogan is a call to action for revolutionaries to step forward and instill a vision of a world of plenty in the American people that the new technology provides if it is in their hands. It is a challenge to inspire them to do the right thing by championing human rights over property rights, as the legacy of the Civil War showed us. It places the responsibility on revolutionaries to educate the masses of the American people to see the connection between political power and economic power so that “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” can become a reality.
