The Pyramid was first published in 1911. It was issued by Industrial Workers Nedeljkovich, Brashich & Kumarich at Cleveland, USA.
Much of the outrage around the $US700bn bailout has been aimed at the golden parachutes handed to CEOs tarred with the sub-prime crisis. This moralising is as predictable as it is dangerous. It regurgitates the defence that stockbrokers and police always throw up: the miscreants are one or two rotten apples in a barrel of sound fruit.
In addition, anti-Semitism taints the anti-banker rhetoric against The Kingdom of Shylock. Excoriating Jews, such as Soros or Lehman Brothers, for the evils of capitalism remains fool’s socialism.
So let’s be clear: all capitalists are parasites, most are swindlers, and, if financiers seem to be the worst that is because they pass around the filthy lucre.
For example, who is the biggest parasite - George Soros, Warren Buffett, or Bill Gates? Soros speculates in currencies. Buffett invests in everything from the Washington Post and Coca-Cola to insurance houses. Gates sits atop a firm that makes computer software. They represent the spectrum of capitalism. Soros ruined the lives of millions by trading monies accumulated from the exploitation conducted by firms like those presided over by Buffett and Gates.
To call capitalists parasites is not to speak pejoratively. Indeed, it is a statement of fact. As the personification of capital, capitalists contribute nothing to the expansion of values. Of course, if a boss gets down and dirty in the trench with a shovel, as Loui Grollo used to do, he supplies a mite to his profits. But, in doing so, he has ceased to be the personification of capital and become, for a couple of hours, the embodiment of labour-time, alongside his employees.
The question of what capitalists-qua-capitalists do for their money is so embarrassing for the academic apologists of capitalism that the subject has fallen out of sight. The English writer, Nassau Senior (1790-1864), offered a once popular defence for profit as the reward for abstinence. He contended that, instead of spending their money on champagne, the capitalists deprived themselves of such pleasures to invest in the expansion of values. Hence, they deserved to be rewarded for a negative capability. Senior weakened his case for a contribution from the owners by opposing any reduction in the working-day on the grounds that their profits came from the “last hour”.
Property is not all theft. Capitalists, as a class, do not steal from their workers. On the contrary, as Marx revealed, they pay for the full value for the commodity – labour power – which the wage-slaves are compelled to sell to them. The expropriation of surplus value begins after that fair and equal exchange. Only then do bankers, lawyers and accountants enter the equation. Some of the services they sell to the other capitalists are essential to their survival. But every cent of their bonuses and packages comes from the expropriated surplus value.
No matter how much cash sticks to the fingers of financiers, that sum has already been expropriated from wage-slaves by other capitalists. The bankers would have nothing to cream off had other capitalists not taken away the surplus value.
Next: How to lose a trillion