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Mary Bell

War Helped $ Billion Corporations
Tighten Grip on Nation’s Economy

(7 October 1946)

From Labor Action, Vol. 10 No. 40, 7 October 1946, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).

We are indebted to the CIO News of September 4 for dramatizing a UP dispatch on the 43 billion dollar corporations which account for more than one-fourth of the total assets of all industrial concerns, banks and insurance companies in the United States!

These 43 “billion dollar babies,” as the CIO News labels them, have total combined assets of more than 101 billion dollars! Actually, in the field of American corporate wealth, a million-do liar corporation is a babe, while these billion dollar businesses are behemoths. Given tremendous nourishment from war orders, by December 31, 1944, their assets totaled 97 billion dollars. But they didn’t stop growing with the war’s end. One year later they were worth more than 101 billion dollars.

These giants mirror the process of profit accumulation characteristic of all business during and after the war. In 1939, total assets of all industrial concerns, banks and insurance companies were 319 billion. By 1942 they were 371 billion. Government officials estimate today that the total assets of all are about 400 billion dollars. This is after cutbacks and cancellation of military contracts.
 

How the Octopus Looks

Let’s take a look at the giants in the appended table. In 1932, with a paltry 3.8 billion dollars in assets Metropolitan Life, the insurance gouger which heads the list, was even then the largest financial organization in the entire capitalist world.

Six of these corporations were accused by the Senate Subcommittee on Education and Labor of belonging to the “Special Conference Committee” which was set up to coordinate the fight against labor unions. American Tel. and Tel., duPont, General Motors, Irving Trust, Standard Oil and U.S. Steel met in secret with representatives of Bethlehem Steel, General Electric, Goodyear Rubber, Intl. Harvester, U.S. Rubber and Westinghouse Electric to conspire against progressive labor legislation and labor’s fight for higher wages.

Now, some people may argue, “So what? A corporation is not an individual. These aggregates of wealth are shared by the stockholders, who own the corporations.” This is typical big business propaganda. It creates a picture of tens of millions of people owning stock. Yet out of a population of 140,000,000, only nine to ten million own stock. But. even this figure is meaningless for it. does not paint the real picture. Actually, the scale of ownership of stock is graduated in the same disproportionate manner as the size of the corporations. The studies of the Temporary National Economic Committee showed long before the war that a mere ten thousand persons owned one-fourth, and 75 thousand persons owned one-half, of all the corporate stock in the country. Ten thousand persons is a small fraction of one per cent of the total population, and 15 thousand is not much greater.

Counterpose to these figures on corporate wealth those on the income of the “common” people of the United States; Recently the New York Times inconspicuously published the calculations of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics and the Federal Reserve Board that even in this era of full employment ALMOST HALF OF AMERICA’S FAMILIES HAVE INCOMES UNDER $2,000 A YEAR! In this group are included many Negro and poor white families of the South WHO EXIST ON $500 A YEAR!

According to the same figures, in this wealthiest country on the globe, ONLY ONE FAMILY IN EVERY THIRTY-THREE OR THIRTY-FOUR HAS AN INCOME TOTALING MORE THAN $7,500.
 

Polarization of Wealth and Poverty

All of these figures are merely by way of underscoring the tendency to monopoly that exists in capitalist society, polarizing more and more wealth at one end into the hands of fewer and fewer persons, and at the other, misery, oppression, poverty and degradation as the lot of more and more. This tendency of capitalism was discovered long ago by Karl Marx, the founder of scientific socialism, and, however it has been attacked by the apologists for capitalism, it still remains an inescapable fact.

It is these wealthy monopolists, bankers and industrialists who, with their rival counterparts in other countries, had to go to war to protect the wealth they already had and to acquire new sources of revenue. True, the president urged war, the big business press prepared the minds of the people for war and Congress declared it, but all of these agencies acted as the servants of the wealthy ruling class. This class won the war and thereby increased its profits, property, privileges and revenues.

It is the existence of these privately owned corporations which causes the recurrent breakdowns in capitalist society. For under private ownership, production is undertaken to satisfy not the needs of the people as a whole, but to satisfy the lust, for private profit. If profit cannot be obtained, if the working population does not have sufficient purchasing power to buy the products of any concern, production shuts down. Businesses compete against each other, not out of a desire to satisfy the needs of the people for clothing, cars or refrigerators but in order to capture the market and outsell their competitors to make more profits. From time to time the market becomes glutted. A depression ensues. Alternating boom and depression are the only too well known characteristics of capitalist society.

Socialists propose that these monopolies and all big business be taken over and managed in the interests of the people as a whole. Production would then be planned. The sole determining factor in what is to be produced would be the needs of the people. With profits and the profit motive eliminated, production would expand, the standard of living of the masses of wars of plunder would disappear The cycle of prosperity and the people would be immensely increased and the motive for depression would be replaced by an upward spiral of increased production, shorter hours of work and a higher income for all. The concentration of wealth at one pole, and poverty at another, would be eliminated.
 

The Growth of Monopolist Combines

A New Political Strategy Needed

The propagandists of the CIO do not understand the full significance of the figures on monopoly which they quote. Or, better, they do not understand the relationship between big business and its political servants in Congress. An editorial in the CIO News states:

“The extent of big business’ influence in politics was clearly demonstrated by the 79th Congress, which speedily granted its demands for increased prices, profits and privileges, while blocking or defeating all progressive social legislation which big business opposed.... The American people face lower living standards, depression, unemployment and possibly another war unless they curb the power and greed of the big-business monopolists.”

The solution which the CIO leaders propose is “progressive political activity, to which the CIO is trying to arouse all Americans.” But the politics of the CIO continues to be horse-and-buggy politics, choice of the “lesser evil,” the attempt to put in a “good” capitalist politician instead of a “bad” one. But all of these politicians, even the most liberal of them, are pledged to uphold the system of private property, that is, the system which breeds these monopolistic giants which the CIO battles on the picket lines every day.

Organized labor in this country will continue to battle windmills until it rids itself of its illusions in capitalist politics and forms its own political party, independent of capitalist parties, pledged to eliminate private ownership and introduce social ownership of the monopolies. These monsters of monopoly must be challenged politically as they are economically, by the organized might of the working class. The nemesis of big business is the working class itself.

 
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