Howie Hawkins on Corporations Green Challenger

Capitalists exploit workers and thwart democracy

ECONOMIC HARDSHIP: We will never reverse extreme and growing economic inequality as long as capitalists exploit workers for profit and extract more unearned income from the economy as rent and interest. Capitalists pay workers a fixed wage and take the rest of the value workers' labor creates as profit. Capitalists take more unearned income as rent and interest in excess of the costs of production due to their exclusive ownership of access to resources, such as land sites, natural resources, intellectual property, and monopolies.

CAPITALIST OLIGARCHY: The central problem of American democracy is that public preferences do not become public policy. The people are way ahead of the politicians, who represent their corporate paymasters more than their voters. We can't have political democracy without economic democracy.