Richard Wolff — Nothing’s changed: Both political parties aim to protect and reinforce the capitalist system

The economic aim of both major US political parties is, in the end, the same: to protect and reinforce the capitalist system.

The Republican party does so chiefly by means of a systematic, unremitting demonization of the government. They blame it for whatever ails the capitalist economy. If unemployment grows, they point to government policies and actions, and attack particular politicians for what they did or did not do to stimulate the economy, directing criticism away from the employers who actually deprive workers of their jobs.

Republican solutions for capitalism’s ills always involve reducing the government’s demands on private capitalists – lower their taxes, deregulate their activities, and privatize government production of goods and services. Their program for the future is always: free the private capitalist system from government intervention, and you will get “prosperity” and growth.

The Democrats protect and reproduce the system by assigning to the government the task of minimizing the problems that beset capitalism. So, for example, they want the business cycles that are an inherent affliction of capitalism to be foreseen, planned for, minimized and overcome by government intervention. This is the underlying purpose of Keynesian economics and the monetary and fiscal policies it generates.

Beyond cycles, capitalism’s more long-term problems, such as tendencies to produce greatinequalities of income and accumulated wealth, lead Democrats to propose very modest government redistribution programs. Minimum wages, progressive tax structures, food, housing and other subsidies, and freely-distributed public services exemplify Democrats’ Bandaids meant to protect capitalism from its own potentially self-destructive tendencies...

The Raw Story
Nothing’s changed: Both political parties aim to protect and reinforce the capitalist system
Richard Wolff, The Guardian

When capital is institutionally favored over other key factors, labor and the environment, then a power structure and a privileged class results whose objective is not efficiency of capital but rather expansion of class privilege evinced as power and wealth. This results in social, political and economic distortion and systemic dysfunction at the expense of the other factors, labor and the environment.