Book Review: "Mastering the Universe: The Obscene Wealth of the Ruling Class”

The following book review by Michael Hillard originally appeared in the Scontras Center newsletter:
 

This year’s elections expressed widespread frustration with an economy that working people experience as punishing. Recent high inflation traumatized workers who have suffered decades of stagnant wages, a proliferation of low-wage, dead-end jobs, a lack of affordable health care for many, and now skyrocketing rents and housing prices. Many workers across the nation tuned in to political messaging suggesting that our rich nation’s resources are being diverted from working people by those in power to undeserving causes like foreign wars, immigrant asylum seekers, or even allegedly undeserving college graduates getting billions of dollars in loan relief.  

However, whatever tax dollars may go to these causes, those in the labor movement need to continue to refocus on where the real diversion of wealth is happening – from working people, who are pushed to work ever harder for ever less to an egregiously wealthy financial and corporate class mustering billions from workers’ sweat into their own bulging pockets. The U.S. now has 800 billionaires and some 10,000 “centi-millionaires” (those with wealth over $100 million) – but few really see the scale or uses of these amassed fortunes.

Rob Larson’s new book, Mastering the Universe, is a clear-eyed expose of the vulgar riches possessed by a new era of robber barons. He describes how American capitalism is now better than ever at exploiting the working class to shower riches on the few rather than producing a shared prosperity. All capitalisms, from 19th century British to 21st century US or Chinese capitalism, produce wealth and income inequality.

What Larsen specifically documents, however, are the current extremes of American capital and American capitalism. Unlike any other nation, Larsen reveals the astonishing degree to which contemporary bosses have amassed absurd wealth in a country that still has tens of millions of workers whose paychecks come nowhere close to providing an adequate living.

Particularly vulgar is the mind–boggling conspicuous consumption the very rich indulge; the ability of the rich to ensure our political system protects and reproduces this system of extreme wealth concentration; and how they and the corporations they run still put us on a course to destroy the planet while beggaring much of our working class in the world history’s richest economy ever.  

Larsen reveals what this all looks like: the vast accumulation of massive, naval–ship sized yachts, private islands, and mansions so colossal they would make a Vanderbilt blush; vast fleets of private jets supercharging carbon into the atmosphere; the many ways in which being so rich creates perverse and obtuse personalities (witness billionaires who self–fund presidential candidacies); and the ease with which billionaires insert themselves into politics and government, e.g. Elon Musk’s bro trip with Trump in the 2024 presidential campaign and transition.

Larsen contends that this ever–increasing inequality comes from the bosses’ extraction of workers’s labor. He offers a radical solution, one that builds upon current bottom-up movements and sentiments: particularly the emergence of a left and a resurgent labor movement since the 2008 financial crisis. He reiterates the astonishing degree to which Americans now support unions, universal health care, much higher minimum wages, and profound solutions to problems like the crisis of health care.  

He then argues for a democratized economic system that would redistribute the massive wealth of the very few to fund a US that eliminates poverty and provides prosperity to our vast working class. Some may embrace, and others may be put off by, his most radical proposals. But along the way he provides a vivid picture of wealth run amok at the expense of the working class, offering much to the important question of “what’s the matter with American capitalism.”  

Michael Hillard is a recently retired as Professor of Economics at the University of Southern Maine of Southern Maine. He has published widely in the fields of labor relations, labor and working–-class history, and the political economy of labor and capitalism, and taught US labor history and labor economics throughout his 36 years at the University of Southern Maine. He is author of Shredding Paper: Labor and The Rise and Fall of Maine’s Mighty Paper Industry.