NO COMPROMISE WITH CAPITALISM

March 1, 2002  by Floyce White


You are facing north.  East is to your right?  True.  You turn to face
south.  East is to your right?  False.  Any idea, such as "east is to your
right," is only temporarily and conditionally true.

A woman is facing north.  East is to her right?  Maybe.  She could be
standing at the South Pole, where north is in every direction of travel.
Every rule has exceptions.

The concept of "absolute truth" is easily defeated by examples such as
these.  True or false depends on the position of the observer.  What is
true to one person is false to another.  Even these statements are only
partially true, and may in time be superceded by better theory.  For
communists, ideas come from practice and are tested in practice.  Communist
theory changes with every new experience of struggle.  But to those who
defend class society, truth is whatever authority figures say.  Dogmatism,
supernaturalism, and chicanery become "true" as dishonest methods serve
dishonest goals.  East or west, "all roads lead to Rome" for the elitist.
When a theory has no apparent flaws and cannot be beaten, the purveyors
of "absolute truth" resort to logical fallacies and other cheap debaters'
tricks.  No method is too low to defend "absolute truth" from those who
expose its falsehoods.  This is the class struggle in the world of ideas.

"Communism" is the dirtiest word in any language; there is an external
taboo against calling oneself a "communist" or discussing the struggle of
the poor against the rich.  Within the communist movement coexists an
internal taboo against discussing the unwanted presence of the rich.  As
with all taboos, it originates from class society and serves to support
class society.

What role do capitalists have in the self-organization of the working
class?  None.  How can it be the self-organization of the working class if
capitalists are involved?  It cannot be.  This simple logic has no apparent
flaws and is confronted by roundabout contortions.  Some argue that
communism does not come from the self-organization of the working class.
In this series of articles, I show that the movement of the poor is
undermined by the intervention of the rich.  Without self-organization,
capitalist-led dual-class alliances use liberalism to divide and conquer
working-class activists.  Capitalist-led workers' revolts help small
capitalists replace big capitalists as the ruling exploiters.  Any
compromise on the principle of workers' self-organization condemns humanity
to another generation of class warfare.

Another way to attack the self-organization of the working class is to
define classes as something other than property classes.  In this way,
capitalists can pretend to be working-class people and can continue to
infiltrate workers' groups and prevent self-organization.  For example,
classes could be defined by occupation.  Butcher, baker, candlestick maker--
all are forms of work, so all doers of work are supposedly working class.
Managers, executives, and "the bosses" are seen as "real" capitalists.  If
the butcher also owns a rent house, we are told to ignore it.  Of course,
the butcher's tenants are still exploited.  They continue to rent according
to the conditions dictated by property owners.  The tenants pay off the
mortgage and the landlord gets the deed.  The landlord then takes out
another mortgage and uses it to buy yet another rent house.  The family of
the butcher inherits the property and continues the cycle of capital
circulation and accumulation.  The tenants are exploited in exactly the
same way regardless of whether the rent house is sold to a bank, a
management company, a government agency, a co-op, or a family.  The
relation of landlord-to-tenant is a social relation of violence.  It is a
form of capitalist rule.  To tell tenants that some landlords are their
friends and allies is to betray the struggles of hundreds of millions of
working-class families who have small landlords, small employers, or buy
from small merchants.  The kicker is that this method also looks at
ownership to determine whether a "real" (big) capitalist is "really"
exploiting tenants.  Defining classes by occupation has such glaring flaws
as to be a way to disguise capitalist relations rather than exposing them.
As long as the landlord, employer, merchant, or investor can successfully
hide the extent of his family's business activity, he can use definition of
classes by what-little-you-know-about-his-occupation to suppress your
struggle against his capitalism.

Since occupation is usually a source of income, defining classes by
occupation is a subset of defining classes by amount of income.  Small
capitalists generally do not take high incomes from their business activity-
-capital is circulated rather than being consumed.  The income from rental
properties is zero, so the occupation of being a landlord seems
insignificant compared to the income from any day job.  Defining classes by
income intentionally overlooks the accumulation of assets.  This dishonest
method further disunites the working class by profiling and stereotyping
people with very little income as a "lumpenproletariat" or "underclass"
of "bums," "criminals," and "welfare mothers."  These loathsome and vile
labels go hand-in-hand with the racism, anti-foreigner bigotry, and
superiority trips that increased their unemployment and lowered their wages
in the first place.  Besides the long-term underemployed, other non-income-
earning occupations such as "student" or "retired" are posers for this
method, which cultivates the mystique of individual "classlessness" or
nihilistically slams all human relations as "exploitation."

The false method of defining classes by known occupation puts blinders on
any analysis of socialist countries such as the former Soviet Union.
Socialist countries have money, wage labor, commodity exchange, and all the
other forms of capitalism--so they must have the substance of capitalism.
Who are the capitalists?  The lot of hired bureaucrats are arbitrarily
labeled "capitalists" because their jobs have well-known perquisites and
involve known managerial tasks.  Tens of millions of family-owned small
businesses circulate and accumulate capital in petty-capitalist
agriculture, and in the "free," parallel, underground, or black markets of
the little-monitored "informal economy."  This actual class of capitalist
families is ignored because their reported business activity seems so small
compared to the gross exaggerations of production in state-owned business.
The massive corruption, theft, wastage, and spoilage in state-owned
industry is the wink-and-nod subsidy to family-owned business, whose
members get into management jobs so that they too can steal raw materials
to resell as finished consumer goods.  It is putting the cart before the
horse to say that employment as government or state-business bureaucrats is
the cause of being capitalists, and once they become capitalists, some
start little businesses on the side.  The Soviet system was not a
degeneration, feudalism, or a troubled new system as many socialists
suggest.  The Soviet economy was the finest example of the normal
functioning of socialism:  to assist capital accumulation while hiding the
extent of family-owned business under the guise of "workers' rule."
Nationalized property in any country is owned by the state on behalf of
whatever capitalists there are.  Nationalizations of heavy industry are
especially useful when capitalists are tiny and scattered.  The petty-
bourgeois socialist movement predictably and chronically fails to develop a
logically-true analysis of the Soviet Union due to foggy definitions of
classes.

The discussion keeps returning to what you know as the basis for
determining facts.  Truth is relative to what you know and what you want to
do about it.  Petty capitalists don't want you to recognize them as
capitalists.  They say whatever is needed to advance their property
interests.  To you it is dishonesty--to them it is "Marxism" or some other
dogma of "absolute truth."  They ask you to compromise on the principle of
self-organization.  They ask you to compromise on the definition of
classes.  Previous generations of working-class activists compromised and
compromised until there were no principles left to concede.  Then workers
slaughtered each other in world wars and wars for the "liberation" of local
small capitalists.  To avoid the inevitable consequences of compromise, we
must compromise no more.  Big or small, all capitalists are the enemy.

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