Campaign finance regulation and policy

Ethics of Campaign Finance

Marxist Response -- Campaign Finance

The Ethics of Campaign Finance: A Marxist Perspective

In January of 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a landmark decision regarding some fundamental aspects of campaign finance law. In doing so, it also raised some serious political, economic, and even ethical questions about the nature of freedom, expression, and representation in our country. The decision, which resulted from arguments about whether or not a film produced by a politically-aligned non-profit could be banned under the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reforms, effectively stated that corporations in general could not be limited in their ability to advertise for or against political candidates with funds from their own treasury. This decision overturned two previous decisions limiting the political influence of corporations, and opened the door to full scale media campaigns from corporations and unions seeking to protect their own interests through the political system. Perhaps more importantly, it upheld the controversial view that corporations are people not just legally but politically as well, and that money is a form of speech and is therefore protected under the 1st Amendment. This view has ethical implications as well as political and legal implications, because it for all intents and purposes neutralizes the political power of the individual -- the very thing the Bill of Rights was designed to protect. By allowing corporations to use money as political expression in amounts far beyond the reach of the average individual, the Court's decision perpetuates and aggravates the oppression of the weak by the powerful and in the long run undermines the freedom it apparently seeks to protect.

In order to understand the ethical problems underlying the Supreme Court's decision, and campaign financing in general, we must first consider the political and economic rights at stake and in danger in the process of campaign financing. The Founding Fathers were deeply concerned with ensuring political expression for all citizens (though their definition of citizen was far more limited than it is today). But they were also deeply concerned with ensuring economic freedom as well -- in fact, it was economic oppression from the British government that led to most of the revolutionary sentiments among the colonies. In devising the Constitution and its accompanying Bill of Rights, they attempted to forge a government that would be extensive in representing the wishes of the populace and providing for the common good, but also limited in its scope over an individual's personal, political, and economic freedoms.

The 1st Amendment of the Bill of Rights, protecting free practice of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the right to assemble, and the right to petition the Government, was a key component of this endeavor. While it seems simple and straightforward, the practical application of the 1st Amendment has been problematic, especially as regards freedom of speech. In a key Supreme Court decision in 1976, the Court ruled that money is a form of speech and that limiting the quantity of money spent on political expression is the same thing as limiting the quantity of expression -- in other words, it is a violation of the 1st Amendment (Kairys 2010). This is a troubling viewpoint if one reads the 1st Amendment as ensuring that all citizens have an equal right to voice their political opinions. Assuming that most citizens, barring medical issues, generally have an equal ability to speak, this would mean that all citizens generally have equal political voices. But this is not so if "speech" is extended to mean "money." In a capitalist economic system, people do NOT have equal amounts of money, and therefore do NOT have equal access to political expression if money is a form of speech. Those with more money obviously have a bigger -- potentially much bigger -- "voice."

Not only are there questions about what the 1st Amendment protects, there are also questions about who it protects. There is no doubt that the drafters of the Bill of Rights had individuals in mind when crafting the amendments, but since then another political entity has come into being -- the corporation. The idea of corporate "personhood" came into being in the 19th century, as it became clear that corporations required a legal presence in order to enter into contracts, pay taxes, and protect workers from liability (Mayer 1990). This legal presence was extended in the late 19th century to include a concept of the corporation as a constitutionally protected "person" with rights to equal protection and due process under the 14th Amendment. In the 20th century, courts continued to favor corporations as Constitutionally-protected people, and it was this view of corporations being protected by the Bill of Rights that the Supreme Court affirmed in its 2010 decision regarding campaign finance.

While there may be obvious rational arguments for and against the idea of corporations as people, the ethical arguments are more subtle. The most significant ethical issue underlying the treatment of corporations as Constitutionally-protected citizens involves the tension of values between corporations and individuals in a capitalist system. In his famous 19th century work, Das Kapital (1867), Karl Marx analyzed the fundamental value structure underlying a capitalist economy. In Marx's analysis, commodities have two measures of value: use value, which is determined by its usefulness to the consumer, and exchange value, which relates the value of one commodity against the value of another based on the "congealed labor" involved in its production (Marx 1996, p. 24). The goal of any capitalist is to accumulate surplus value -- in other words, to achieve an exchange value that exceeds the labor value. In a money-based system, this is achieved through wage-labor, where individuals sell their labor as a commodity to the capitalist, who in turn sells the product of their labor for more than the labor cost in order accumulate surplus capital (money). The most effective way for the capitalist to increase his capital is to pay the lowest wages for the highest amount of production. This leads to a tension of interests between wage-labor and capitalist: the wage laborer seeks to work to advance his own health and happiness, but the capitalist seeks to exploit the laborer in order to maximize profits.

What does this laborer-capitalist discord have to do with the ethics of campaign finance reform in the U.S. If, as the Founding Fathers seem to have believed, a government has an ethical duty to provide for the common good and to protect the freedoms of all of its citizens equally, then every citizen must have an equal ability to voice political opinions and address the government with his or her grievances. A capitalist system has no such agenda, however -- its sole purpose is to maintain itself through the most efficient exploitation of the worker for the sake of the capitalist, which is now largely embodied by the corporation. If the government decides to give corporations the same Constitutional rights as the worker, and then decides that the very instrument that the corporation uses to oppress the worker (money) is a form of protected speech, then the worker has no recourse or protection from the political system against the oppression of the economic system. The amount of "speech" available to corporations is infinitely more vast than the amount of "speech" available to the worker, and even worse, the corporation has every incentive to use this greater power to the detriment of the worker.