The U.S census Bureau just released a publication on the income and poverty levels in the United States for the prior year. Incomes rose to $59,032 which is a 3.2% increase over the prior year. However, the truth has less to do with the data presented, and more to do with what was omitted. Adjusted for inflation in the prices that workers pay to buy commodities, median incomes are at lower levels than they were in 2000. This reaction of the media in the United States reveals the inherent class bias of the capitalist class. Any increase in economic indicators is a cause for celebration and a chance to give praise to the economic system that serves their interests.
Unfortunately, it gets worse for workers than just having no increase in their real wages at all. According to data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, labor productivity increased at an annual rate of 1.26% since 2007. This means that every year people produced 1.26% more output on average than the previous year. However, their ability to purchase these goods has actually declined over the same period when adjusted for the prices consumers pay. The wage increases have not been going to the workers so that increase in value must be going somewhere else.
The increasing income inequality in the U.S reflects the fact that for the majority of people wages are going nowhere while CEO’s, major shareholders, and the rentier class reap enormous benefits. The strategy of the mainstream press is trying to boast about any single positive aspect of capitalism that happens to be available, even if that includes looking at changes over a 1 year timeframe. An objective, rational, Marxist-Leninst analysis easily identifies the holes in bourgeois “logic”. The fact of the matter is that American wage workers are going nowhere under capitalism and the logical answer is socialism.