Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2001 19:12:49 -0800 (PST) From: Floyce White <anti_property-AT-yahoo.com> Subject: AUT: ALPHABET SOUP SPELLS CAPITALISM ALPHABET SOUP SPELLS CAPITALISM January 1, 2002 by Floyce White A few weeks ago, I attended a public meeting sponsored by a local peace group. A known speaker was introduced who identified himself as a member of one of the many US-based socialist organizations. He talked about the war, about US corporations, about the "Afghan people," and about the "Arab people." Not once in his hour-long speech did he use the term "working class." This is how he is preparing the working class for revolution? With this sort of preparation, it is no wonder that socialists assert that workers "can't" reach communism--that workers need a prolonged post-revolutionary period of extreme exploitation to learn how to be communists. Nonsense! The reverse is true. Socialist "leaders" are interested only in mystifying politics to make themselves seem brilliant to potential "followers." Socialist "leaders" don't know what communism is, nor do they know how to achieve it--and they don't care. "Leaders" are well educated and well traveled; relevant discussion for "followers" can wait till the undetermined future. After reading the first article in this series, "Against Socialism--For Communism," several people commented that I am unfair to write that capitalists must not be members of workers' organizations. No. The reverse is true. I would be unfair to you if I called your landlord my "comrade." You would be unfair to me if you called my employer your "comrade." Just as management employees tend to act as agents of their employers and are not allowed to join unions, individual members of capitalist families tend to protect the system of property classes and must not be allowed to join any workers' organization. What does it mean if, in a so-called "workers' party," capitalists are present roughly equal to their proportion in society? It means that a dual-class alliance is being built--not a workers' alliance. Dual-class political organization is a method to advance the goal of dual-class society. Without a doubt, in every capitalist-worker alliance, the capitalists dominate the workers. Indeed, there is a veritable "alphabet soup" of self-proclaimed "workers' parties" and pre-party formations that recruit capitalists to be members, as their 19th Century models did. They openly advocate socialism as a form of class society. They lump together labor issues with divisive bourgeois causes: feminism, national liberationism, "race" quotas, and so on. They busy themselves in labeling every niche as an "oppressed minority" and then creating a majority out of these "minorities"--in every way, the bourgeois parliamentarians. Virtually indistinguishable from one another, a new micro-party is formed as one clique of "leaders" discovers a new disagreement and splinters off. Working-class people who participate in these groups are thus divided. These dual-class hybrids of bourgeois patronage alternately mushroom and rot with every change in the political climate. This "alphabet soup" is the true face of bourgeois consciousness: awareness of their existence as individual blocs in competition with other capitals, and of their needs to isolate and command over groups of laborers. Their betrayals look good only in the absence of a genuine workers' party that practices solidarity against all capitalists. A workers' party is indispensable--it transcends the divisions of competing countries and companies. Labor unions, neighborhood committees, and school associations are also indispensable--they build upon the existing organization of society. These groups cannot be declared into being--they are created by masses in struggle. Every struggle that has working-class participation has the potential to bring forth workers' demands, but as we see in the petty-bourgeois socialist movement, this potential can be effectively dampened by pro-capitalist theory and practice. Election campaigns, petitions, and lawsuits are among the sorry tools that derail working-class activism. These methods greatly reinforce the liberal belief that social change occurs only when government policy changes. They foster reliance on government functionaries rather than on the united action of working-class people. Is the purpose of working-class organization to get state power? No. The reverse is true. Governments are the armed thugs who defend the right of the propertied to exploit the dispossessed. The working class has every reason to smash all governments and to prevent their return. Socialists claim that a "dictatorship of the proletariat" is a necessary transition from capitalism to communism. They assert that a "workers' state" is an essential part of a "lower stage" when ever-smaller businesses gradually get nationalized. Eventually the state should "wither away" when "everybody owns everything." Hah! Why not "nobody owns anything," which is already a fact of life for the vast working-class majority? All that is needed is to immediately dispossess the rich through a revolution that abolishes all forms of property, public and private. Yet socialists insist on a slow process of repossession. Petty-capitalist "leaders" lust to seize the property of the big capitalists and make it "ours," as the Russian October Revolution accomplished for them. Frustrated in their desire to get control of the immense Russian Empire, factions of that small and weak capitalist class created one after another populist movement of multi-class alliances. Immediately after a workers' uprising won power for it, the Bolshevik government used capitalist commissioners as "leaders" to disrupt, co-opt, and pacify the Soviets before the growing working-class movement could use the councils as organs of communist revolution. Pre-existing capitalists created the Bolshevik regime. Propertied classes create states--not the other way around. Communists must abandon and criticize the "Marxist-Leninist" concept that the dispossessed laboring class could, should, or did create a state to defend its property interests. In doing so, we must also abandon and criticize its evil twin brother: the idea that a class of "state capitalists" was created by the government in the USSR. Socialism is a desperate attempt to save capitalism by maximizing state ownership and calling it "workers' rule." "State capitalism" is a sales pitch for those who didn't buy it the first time around. Socialist groups claim to be "workers' parties" because they advocate workers' revolts. Do politics determine class content? No. The reverse is true. The content of the "alphabet soup" as a dual-class alliance determines its liberal, pro-capitalist politics--with "Marxist" dogma mixed throughout as the recipe for attracting workers. The intervention of capitalists into the working-class movement, and its debasement as self-dividing radical-liberal sects, is capitalist resolve to prevent even the possibility that anti-property demands could ever be raised. Comrades from capitalist family origins are the living counterrevolution within revolutionary organizations. They don't know starvation amid plenty, lingering sickness without the money to pay for treatment, homelessness surrounded by empty buildings--and they don't care. For rich comrades, no need is urgent; smashing the property system can wait till the undetermined future. Should working-class communists participate in the petty-bourgeois socialist movement? Yes of course! We must be involved wherever working-class people raise their demands. We should form local study-and-action groups of all working-class activists regardless of other memberships. In these groups we can exclude our oppressors and build unity toward the establishment of the party of the working class. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Send your FREE holiday greetings online! http://greetings.yahoo.com --- from list aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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