"No Compromise with Capitalism"

Floyce White, March 1, 2002

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partially true, and may in time be superceded by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.

Please post comments for discussion at
anti property
or mail letters to this address:

PO Box 191341,

San
Diego, CA 92159-1341