File spoon-archives/aut-op-sy.archive/aut-op-sy_2001/aut-op-sy.0112, message 180


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.

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