There are fairly obvious economic demands that US socialists can raise as part of a Socialist Campaign for the US elections, which would comprise a Minimum Programme.
Positive trades union legislation, giving every worker the right to join a trades union, and to engage with other workers in collective bargaining; laws enshrining the right to strike, and to take solidarity action with other workers free from the threat of legal action by employers; legally enforceable rights to paid time for union official to undertake trades union activity, including recruitment; the right to create committees of workers' inspection, and to appoint Health and Safety representatives, able to close down work, where health and safety standards threaten workers' lives. That is particularly important in the age of COVID.
- A legally enforced Minimum Wage set at 75% of the average wage.
- A legal entitlement to unemployment and sickness benefit for all workers, and to a state pension of 50% of the average wage.
- A legal right to a home complying to minimum standards, compatible with an economically developed, civilised society. In the world's richest country there is no excuse for anyone living on the streets.
- Legally enforceable equal pay and opportunities for women workers. There is no justification for the continued discrimination against women workers, which sees their pay on average at only 80% that of male workers. Nor can the continued domination of better jobs by male workers be defended.
- Similar legally enforceable equal pay and opportunities for LGBTQ people, and for ethic minorities.
- The best way to achieve such equality is the increased organisation of all workers in strong trades unions.
Of course, Marxists have to point out the limited nature of such reforms within the continuation of the capitalist system. Inequality of income and opportunity is integral to the capitalist system. The main cause of inequality, is the fact that some in society own capital, whereas others do not. Someone like Trump can be a lazy moron, but if they inherit $1 billion of capital from their parents, then even a 1% return on it will bring them an income of $10 million a year, more than even the most hard-working, intelligent worker would obtain in wages in their entire lifetime. These inequalities cannot be changed simply by tinkering with the distribution of income, which itself is solely the product of labour, but only by addressing the property question, i.e. the question of the ownership and control of capital.
In the US, today, as in every other developed economy, the form in which the dominant section of the ruling class, the top 0.01%, own their wealth, in in the form of fictitious-capital, that is, in the shape of shares, bonds and other financial assets and their derivatives. Current laws, created by that ruling class, give them the right, on the basis of the ownership of shares, to also exercise control over real capital, i.e. over the industrial capital, which is the basis for all wealth creation. But, they do not own that capital, which today is not privately owned capital, as it was in the first half of the 19th century, but is socialised capital, in other words capital which belongs legally to the firm itself, and logically, the firm can be nothing other than the associated producers within it. Shareholders, like bondholders, or like a bank that lends money to the firm, or like a landlord that lends land and buildings to the firm are not owners of the firm, but merely its creditors.
As even bourgeois theorists admit, there is no more reason why shareholders should exercise this control over firms than any of these other creditors.
A fundamental reform that would change all of these relations, therefore, would be to simply abolish this anomaly, whereby shareholders exercise control over capital they do not own. That is nothing more than bourgeois property law itself requires, i.e. that no one should exercise control over property they do not own, and those that do own that property – in this case it is the collective property of the associated producers within the firm – should be able to exercise such control without constraint. Even progressive social-democracy recognises this point. Germany enshrined the right of workers to appoint half the members of company boards long ago, the EU proposed similarly company laws for the EU back in the 1970's, and the Bullock Report in Britain in 1975, made a similar recommendation. In the US, auto workers employed by VW have been engaged in a struggle for the same right to appoint workers to the board, as are already enjoyed by VW workers in Germany. Workers on VW's board, in Germany, also came out to support US workers in Tennessee, who were demanding representation and collective bargaining by the UAW.
Socialists should demand that social-democratic governments, at the very least, act as consistent bourgeois democrats, by committing to abolishing the right of shareholders to determine company boards, and to exercise control over the firm's capital. That right should be held exclusively by the workers and managers within the firm, and even a social-democratic government should commit to enshrining that in law.
If workers and managers exercised that control over industrial capital, they could ensure that the profits made by those businesses went to finance capital accumulation, limiting the amount going in interest payments to share and bondholders to only a low market rate of interest. That would end the situation seen over the last thirty years, whereby profits were used to pay out an increasing proportion of dividends, to buy back shares to inflate share prices, as well as other means of transferring capital to shareholders. As workers used the profits created by their labour to undertake capital accumulation, the share of output going to wages would rise, and proportion going to interest/dividends and rents would fall, far more effectively than any tinkering with taxes and benefits could bring about.
But, also, if workers exercised this democratic control over their socialised capital, they could ensure that the discrimination against women, or on the basis of sexual preference, ethnicity etc., was removed. They would immediately ensure that production took place in ways that did not threaten their health and safety, or the environment in which they live. They would look to longer term interests than just the quarterly capitalism, fuelled by the need to inflate share prices, and boost dividend payments that afflicts capitalism currently, and which has diverted resources into this damaging speculation rather than into real capital accumulation, let alone socially useful production.
If workers exercised such control, then all the questions in relation to healthcare and so on fall away. If workers controlled the insurance companies that are their collective property, for example, they could create a national insurance scheme to provide for all of the social insurance requirements of workers in the US. They could provide cover for healthcare, for social care, for sickness and unemployment, and retirement, for example.
If workers controlled the capital of the hospitals, and care homes they own collectively then they would be able to coordinate with such insurance provision to ensure that all workers obtained the best health and social care, free at the point of need. Moreover, they would ensure that the health and social care provided was designed for the needs of workers not of capital. They would place the greatest emphasis on primary care and ensuring that workers are healthy and do not become sick in the first place, something that becomes easier when workplaces and communities are themselves, under the control of workers.
But, where workers do become ill, workers control over the pharmaceutical companies they own collectively, would ensure that research was directed to producing all of the medicines required to ensure that workers health needs are met, irrespective of whether any particular drug produces more or less profit. Workers would, of course, have an incentive to ensure that such medicines were provided to their hospitals and healthcare system at the lowest possible prices, rather than seeking to profiteer from their operations.
In the US, as in other developed economies, workers have vast amounts of capital tied up in pension funds. In the UK, there is approximately £6 trillion in pension funds. In the US the figure is approximately $22 trillion. Yet, workers have no control over this their money, in just the same way they have been deprived of control over their collectively owned industrial capital. Instead, control over these pension funds is exercised by banks and insurance companies, and who controls the banks and insurance companies, the shareholders.
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