by Azad
Capitalism to some seems like a utopia. From the steam engine to the railroads, radio and television, the automobile and the airplane, it would appear a magical elixir full of technological innovation. Who would dare question the utility of the smartphone? It has changed our lives completely. But unfortunately all these shiny things came at a heavy cost. Northern industrial development in the 19th century depended on chattel slavery in the South. The Westward expansion enabled by the railroads necessitated the genocide of the indigenous peoples of this land. Electricity requires burning coal, which has led us to the brink of planetary destruction. The atomic age brought us close to nuclear war, a threat that lives with us even today. The pathetic attempt to solve the problem of climate change by transitioning to electric vehicles requires destructive mining practices. For every so-called innovation, there was a heavy price.
The essence of the capitalist system remains the same as when Marx analyzed its internal dynamics. Capitalism for its very existence requires the exploitation of labor. For without the existence of wage labor, great fortunes would disappear overnight. Wage labor produces the surplus on which the capitalist class feeds. The worker cannot live without the payment of a wage, and such payment requires obedience on the job to capitalist discipline. There is no democracy at work. For without their wage, the worker will starve or be sent to prison, thus obedience to the ruling class becomes a necessity. The worker submits to every instruction of the boss: work faster, work harder, work longer. And we cannot refuse these orders on pain of starvation. It is true that there is a hierarchy to the working class. The college professor is better off than the worker on the assembly line in a poultry factory. But both are subject to the same discipline. The Polish economist Michal Kalecki understood the power of the sack quite well and the essence of the system remains the same.
Marx believed that the workers would take cognizance of their situation and overthrow the system for something vastly better. But even he was acutely aware of the difficulties involved. The workers themselves dream of becoming capitalists, and the small business class fans those dreams. Why can’t I work hard, save some money, start my own company, and make it big like Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk? Isn’t that the American Dream? As Malcolm X noted, for most there is no American Dream, only a nightmare. Moreover, workers are kept distracted by all manner of spectacle like sports and nationalism. (Indeed, Trumpism is an extreme form of American nationalism.) The possibility of climbing the economic ladder into the capitalist class is foreclosed for the vast majority. Others simply live in a state of constant desperation, where their earnings are insufficient to satisfy the basic requirements of living. They have no hope, and the only thing on their mind is daily survival. These are the conditions of the working class in the United States today. It should surprise no one that a tremendous amount of class anger exists, but absent a sound organization, it is manifest in all manner of lashing out.
In response to this general situation, several ideologies have come to exist and disseminate themselves among the workers themselves. These ideologies tend to promote the idea that capitalism is the best of all possible worlds. Here the words of Marx and Engels must be emphasized. In the Communist Manifesto, they identified the following ideologies that hold sway among the people: Feudal Socialism, Petty Bourgeois Socialism, German Socialism, Bourgeois Socialism, and Critical-Utopian Socialism. We should recount their words and see to what extent, if any, these ideologies appear in America today.
In the context of the Manifesto, and 19th century Europe, feudalism was still important. The feudal system existed only in Europe and was the womb from which capitalism sprang. I will not go into details here other than to note feudalism never existed in the United States, and therefore these specific outdated modes of thinking identified by Marx and Engels were never really a phenomenon here. However, slavery was of crucial importance and its effects remain to this day. Indeed, chattel slavery in the South provided the basis for racial capitalism, a political economic system that exists down to the present day. This is a major impediment to working class unity, and a key element of the American ideology. The other American trait relevant to our discussion here is the settler-colonial mentality. The entirety of the United States is a colony based on indigenous genocide. Can there be anything more genocidal than the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, which lingers in the American psyche?
Petty Bourgeois Socialism, on the other hand, is not only alive, but thrives in the United States. As noted in the Manifesto, in countries capitalism has become fully developed, a new class of petit bourgeois has been formed, fluctuating between proletariat and bourgeoisie. The individual members of this class are being constantly hurled down into the proletariat by the action of competition and as capitalism develops, they become an ever smaller proportion of society. The predictions of Marx and Engels on this score did not come to pass, as noted above. This small business class, to use the American terminology, is an ideological cornerstone of the capitalist system. Political elites sing the praises of small business, and are at pains to ensure that their policies do not hurt these “enterprises”. While this school of socialism did make many contributions to socialist thought, in its positive aims, however, it aspires either to restoring the old property relations and the old society, or “to cramping the modern means of production and of exchange within the framework of the old property relations that have been, and were bound to be, exploded by those means. In either case, it is both reactionary and Utopian.” Our anarchist comrades are often smitten with this ideology it must be said.
It behooves us to discuss Democratic Socialism as this is one of the most powerful and articulate trends in contemporary America. This ideology has its foundations in the writings of Michael Harrington, who was very active in the 1970s. It blossomed on the heels of Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns, and became associated with names such as Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Jamal Bowman. This tendency has produced a rich media ecosystem, ranging from Jacobin Magazine to podcasts like The Dig and many others. The basic premise of this tendency is that political power must be won in the electoral domain, and, once that is done, socialist reforms will be implemented. It is not actually socialism per se but more social democracy in the European sense. This trend, however, fails to cope with the problems of actually existing capitalism in the United States and merely offers palliatives. It fails to understand the deep misery of the people and how the conditions for social democracy existed for a brief moment post-WW2 and have now disappeared. Social democracy died with the assassination of Olaf Palme; even in the US context, the New Deal institutions were always very weak.
Another trend that we must deal with is trade unionism. There can be little doubt that trade unionism in general leads to great improvements in the conditions of the working class. The statistical evidence alone is adequate to demonstrate this as fact. For example, average wages and benefits of union members are considerably greater than their non-union counterparts. And of course, therefore, organizing the unorganized remains of critical importance. But trade unionism has serious limitations. As Lenin noted long ago, trade unions are basically defensive organizations. They accept capitalism as a given, an immutable fact, and try to negotiate a better deal for their members within that framework. In other words, the commercial contract between capital and labor is not challenged but merely the terms of the bargain are sought to be improved. There is no vision towards a road of surpassing capitalism and moving onto socialism or even communism. And for this fundamental reason, we cannot look to trade unionism to guide us to a post-capitalist future.
What is to be done, therefore, in the present conjuncture?
The only path forward is the development of a mass political organization that can lead the revolutionary struggle in the United States. All existing organizations are not up to this challenge. Having said that, creating such an organization is no easy matter. The ruling class would never allow the emergence of a serious communist party in the same way that the CPUSA existed during the Great Depression. While we live in a period of mass unrest, mass unrest without organization degenerates into pointless riots. Even worse, the mass energy unleashed is directed into NGOs and charities.Our task is to adapt communist theory to American conditions, in the same way that Mao adapted Marxism to Chinese conditions; Lenin adapted Marxism to Russian conditions, or Ho Chi Minh adapted Marxism to Vietnamese conditions. We need a revolutionary people that will not only destroy the capitalist system, but will replace it with socialism. In addition to the question of organization, we must confront the issue of Americanism, which is related to both the issue of settler-colonialism and race. The ideology of Americanism runs deep in the country and is extremely reactionary. There is a great temptation to try to salvage Americanism with progressive elements. But there is nothing salvageable about the ideology. Indeed, the American ideology tends to suppress mass movements and revolution, and support endless wars overseas. We must discard Americanism for communist internationalism to pave the road to socialism.