TELL ME AGAIN WHY I SHOULDN’T BE CONCERNED ABOUT RELUCTANCE OF LOCAL, STATE, AND FEDERAL GOVERNMENTS TO RAISE THE MINIMUM WAGE.

The Guardian reports that annual compensation for the top US CEOs (Zuckerberg et al) topped 100 million dollars for the first time in our country’s history.  Mark Zuckerberg’s total compensation topped $2.27 billion, more than $6 million a day for last year.  His base salary was $503,205, but the vast majority of his enormous pay package came from exercising 60 million Facebook share options when the company went public last year.  You do the math.  Richard Kinder, the CEO and chairman of Kinder Morgan, the energy firm, has a base salary of just one dollar and he received no other bonuses… but he made $1.1 billion from selling restricted stock, up from just $60 million profit from stock in 2011.

The minimum wage in Arkansas, the state of my birth, is $6.25 an hour.  In California, where I now live, it is $8.00 an hour.  You understand, of course, that I’m not bragging about California’s minimum wage.  The statistics mean that most domestic workers and workers in the fast food industries in California earn $320 -a-week if they work for forty hours.  Average low monthly apartment rent in San Diego is $1079; average high monthly rent in San Diego is $1568. In Arkansas the weekly minimum wage is $250.  One bedroom Little Rock apartments currently rent for $617 to $861 per month.  

I don’t even want to know the names of family, friends and neighbors who object to adjustment of minimum wage laws because I’d begin to think about which of them go to church and signal by their regular participation in the life of a Christian organization that they have read but have not understood, or if they understood they are ignoring, the teachings of Jesus about virtue and responsibility for the poor… all of the poor, not just the nice, meek, quiet, and clean poor. If I knew for sure by name all the people who object to requiring business owners/managers who hire workers to pay workers an honest living wage, I’d think too much about it, and thinking about it too much would surely cast a pall on my daily activities like my bike ride and and my search for the photo du jour… and my thinking about it too much might make it impossible for me to continue going with any sense of satisfaction to the church I attend regularly… but tucking the knowledge away in my mind and not thinking about it is an unacceptable response to suffering and injustice; so I’m thinking and writing.  

Thinking about what happens to workers in the great economic machine that produces everything… wealth for some, comfortable living for others, and poverty for a great many… has reminded me to rethink some of the labor movements of recent world history.  For much of the Twentieth Century the attention of the world was focused on two political theories, communism and capitalism.  Communism (from Latin communes — “common, universal”) is a revolutionary socialist movement derived from Karl Marx’s theory that advocates class war leading to a society in which everything, all property, is publicly owned and each individual works and is paid according to his or her abilities and needs. Capitalism is an economic and political system in which a country’s trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit. Of course, capitalism had been around in human experience for many thousands of years before Ayn Rand defined it for Americans of the Twentieth Century.   She declared, “When I say ‘capitalism,’ I mean a full, pure, uncontrolled, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism—with a separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church.”  America’s capitalism is not now and never has been what Ayn Rand expressed, although some Tea Party leaders swear allegiance to her vision.

In conversations with a friend who was born and was educated in a Soviet republic, I have found reasons to rethink the life experience of Vladimir Lenin.  Although Lenin was born into a wealthy middle-class family in Simbirsk, Russia, he became involved in the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class in St. Petersburg. Having become radicalized by the execution of his 21-year-old brother Aleksandr who, as a university student, had been accused of being involved in a plot to assassinate Czar Alexander III, Vladimir looked for another way to address the gross inequities in Russia’s class system.  I am not qualified academically to attempt anything but the most casual and superficial evaluation of Lenin’s part in the development of the world power known as The Soviet Union.  “Soviet” is derived from a Russian word used to refer to a council or an assembly.  The word implies advice, harmony, and concord.   Students of history of the Twentieth Century and those of us old enough to remember the long years before the period of perestroika  (Russian: перестро́йка) which occurred under Michail Gorbachev between 1985 and1991 know that harmony and concord are not nouns associated with the old cold war years. My friend Adam is challenging me to rethink Lenin’s place in history.  Rethinking causes me to actively wonder if the terrible, bleak, repressive years of Soviet Union history under Stalin would have been very different if Lenin had lived long enough to do for the working people of Eastern Europe what he declared that he wanted to do. 

I got into this tangent, which has wandered a long way around what I started out to write, by thinking about the term proletariat, which is used by Marxist theory to name “the social class that does not have ownership of the means of production and whose only means of subsistence is to sell their labor power for a wage or salary.”  Proletarians are wage-workers.  I was thinking about those fast-food wage-workers in Arkansas who earn $6.25 an hour and those in California who earn $8.00 an hour; and I wondered what Vladimir Lenin would say about them and to them if he were alive today… and what he would say about the salary packages of the ten richest individual Americans whose individual compensation topped the hundred million dollar mark for the first time in American history. 

Something else prompted this particular tangent.  My family and I went through a short, frightening episode in the 1960s when the John Birch Society was alive and well in the Sacramento Valley where I was teaching.  A radio talk show “personality” became convinced that I was a communist.  I was chairman of the English Department of a large public high school, and she didn’t like the reading list which the faculty in my department developed.  She was fond of declaring that writers like John Steinbeck, with Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men on the list of recommended readings in the English Department, was a communist and that American high school students shouldn’t be “exposed” to his stories.

She also didn’t approve of my personal participation in the 1960’s civil rights movement, which she declared was a major American problem that would surely lead the country into communism. The episode was briefly frightening because the radio woman’s daily tirades, think if you can of Rush Limbaugh in drag, persuaded one person to begin making threatening phone calls to our home.  When the caller said, “We know where your children go to school,” I decided it was time to report the incidents to the local police.  The FBI got involved.  Margaret was advised to take the kids to her sister’s home in another town. The guy was caught after his next phone call to our house.  It was over quickly… but it was a unsettling.  I began to cast around for someplace else to teach. I took a job as head of the English Department in Singapore, where I worked for four years.  The woman expressed her satisfaction that she had been right all along.  She told her radio audience that I was moving to China. That was a long time ago, and it’s satisfying to know that few people today, even Tea Party Republicans, believe Singapore is a city in China.