Politics & Economy

I’m thinking about contradictions within contradictions. This is how I view what is unfolding:
Within capitalism’s fundamental contradiction (capital vs labor), capital is the dominant force — it possesses the power to force the whole society to serve it. To become that powerful, capitalists had to become a self-conscious unified class (a “class for itself”). Working people are not currently unified enough to exercise collective class power — though that power is always inherent as potential, constantly emerging from the dynamic of capitalism.  It takes a lot of energy for the capitalists to keep suppressing and smashing it. As the working class-in-itself coalesces and strengthens into a class-for-itself, at the right moment it can rise and prevail. 

This capital-vs-labor contradiction is considered “fundamental” because the ongoing clash between these two interlocked opposing forces determines the way of life for the whole society. The constant battle between classes determines the course of history. Within the dynamic of this contradiction there are many others, including those internal to each main side. For example, competition generates conflict between concentrations of capital centered in different nations, and/or centered in different forms of investment. 

Conflicts within the capitalist class have been growing ever more acute since the last time they readjusted their system by redividing realms of control through inter-imperialist war, and are now coming to a head once again, filling the political arenas of various centers of capital with loud messy drama sometimes to the point of absurdities that would be laughable if they didn’t reflect such a dangerous situation.

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– Instead of the small class of capitalists controlling society, we can make our own decisions about work and social life.

– Instead of some of us being forced to work too many hours while others are unable to find a job at all, the work can be divided so everyone works a reasonable amount.

– Instead of competing against one another for scarce jobs, everyone can do meaningful and useful work that contributes to society.

– Instead of capitalists pitting us against each other by fostering racism, sexism, nationalism and other forms of oppressive ideologies, we can unite for the common good.

– Instead of the fruits of our labor enriching the few while the majority is kept in poverty, it can be distributed to provide food, shelter, medical care, household goods, education and recreation for everyone.

– Instead of destroying the environment for higher profits, we can implement sustainable ways to meet the needs of humanity and the planet.

– Instead of sacrificing our safety and health to cut costs, our well-being will be prioritized.

– Instead of half of the world’s food being wasted because it’s not profitable to sell it, we can eliminate hunger.

– Instead of being forced to wage wars of conquest for capitalists, the workers of the world can cooperate in peace.

Workers already provide all the goods and services for society. The global working class can decide together what we need, and how it is produced and distributed. Power is in our hands – if we organize, rise up and take it!

[Originally appeared at http://workers-power.org/2016/11/29/if-workers-take-power/]

Capitalism is a mode of production – a totality of social relations that shapes how the society as a whole reproduces itself, how we all meet our needs, how we get from one day to the next. There are different modes of production, distinguished from one another by what drives the economy. This economic foundation generates, and is in turn supported by, a corresponding political system (which keeps one class in power over everyone else), plus prevailing ways of thinking that make it all seem natural and inevitable (such as the idea that “poverty we shall always have with us.”)

Other contemporary and recent modes of production besides capitalism are slavery and feudalism. All of these have one thing in common: class divisions that facilitate the accumulation of wealth by a small parasitical minority on the backs of the producing majority.

For slavery and feudalism, the new wealth taken possession of by the ruling class is the product itself. Under feudalism, a landlord takes half or a third of a peasant’s grain, whatever the quantity is and however much work the peasant put into it. But capitalist accumulation runs on a different formula. For capitalists, the product itself is not the point—the wealth they accumulate is the labor power extracted from workers in the production process. Labor power is wealth crystalized in commodities, in the form of surplus value (a form of profit). The particular kinds of commodities we produce don’t really matter; the money is made in the production of them.

In order not to starve, workers, who possesses or control no means of production, must sell our labor power, or ability to work, to the capitalist, for wages. (Our predicament is no accident, but has been engineered through systematic historical dispossession of formerly self-sufficient, land-based people.)

The big scam of capitalism is that wages are supposedly a fair trade of money for the amount of time that we work. Wages are generally based on what capitalists decide that we need for our survival—to pay our rent and feed our families. But in reality, capitalists are not buying our time—they are buying our labor power, which they use to produce commodities for them, that they later sell at a price higher than what they paid us. This profit is reinvested as new capital, which causes businesses (and the economy as a whole) to constantly grow larger.

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9/20/16

An old comrade of mine died last spring. Around 25 years ago we were part of a team distributing “Revolutionary Worker” newspapers in Miami neighborhoods. After I left the RCP a few years later, we ceased working together but remained friends.

He left behind a box of pamphlets from the mid- to late-1970s issued by various New Left groups in the Bay Area, where much of his political development took place. I put them out on the porch and have been slowly going through them, curious about how the Left conceptualized revolutionary activity back then, and looking for clues as to why it largely abandoned class struggle in favor of social justice activism.

Judging by these pamphs, which were issued by at least half a dozen different communist organizations, it seems like the political scene in the Bay Area was pretty lively. Most of the texts are long, highly detailed polemics against rival communist groups, on questions ranging from the socialist character (or not) of China and Albania, to whether all forms of nationalism are reactionary (or not).

Personally, I’m interested in their attempts at participating in workers’ struggles and spreading revolutionary class consciousness among workers. Most, if not all, of them claimed to recognize the need for the working class (or some “most oppressed” section of it) to lead the struggle against capitalism/imperialism, but they seemed to have spent much of their energy attempting to be the leaders themselves, and going for each other’s throats in competitive attempts to become “The” Party.

I looked up the pamphlets online and in case you’re interested, many of them can actually be found in this vast archive of “anti-revisionist” struggle: https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/erol.htm

For someone unfamiliar with this history, these arguments between highly specialized groups can seem mind-boggling, with demarcations of line being pared down to what might seem an almost obsessive and insane narrowness. But keep in mind that it was a different time: social and political struggles were flaring up globally, including in the US, and as any movement matures, political differences translate into differences in approach and strategy that really do matter. So I’m not ridiculing the need for demarcations and polemics, which are always present whenever people try to do anything together (“Let’s watch Mistresses.” “Hell no, the acting has really gone downhill.”)

But it must be asked: where are they now? Did all that passionate quarreling make any difference at all, did it help advance working class power in the struggle against capitalism, or was it just a “tempest in a teapot”? Did it reflect an appropriate assessment of and response to the actual conditions that existed at the time?

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Since class divisions formed among humans thousands of years ago, class struggle has been the driving force of all major social change. While in any given society there may be a variety of different classes, the central struggle, the one that shapes all the others, is that between a class that produces the bulk of what the whole society needs, and a non-productive, parasitical class that controls production and steals the social product.

To defend their ruling position and assert their interests, a class must dominate the entire society: by claiming ownership and taking possession of the means of subsistence and production (land, waters, resources, factories, etc), holding political power to facilitate the running of their affairs and to repress dissent, and directing the flow of information and development of knowledge, persuading people through culture and education into understanding the arrangement as natural and desirable.

Owners and producers are the two fundamental classes of any class-divided society, because the struggle between them determines its mode of production, the parameters of how things are produced and distributed, as well as everything else that can go on in that society. Slave owners and slaves struggle for and against slavery. Landlords and serfs or peasants struggle for and against feudalism. Capitalists and workers struggle for and against capitalism.

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Capitalism, even in deep crisis, will never cease struggling to adapt and grow. It will not collapse or dismantle itself, until it destroys the planet and everyone on it. So it falls on us to destroy it. In destroying capitalism, we construct something new. Revolution is the total transformation of the way everything is produced, the social relations of domination that go along with it, and the ways of thinking that keep us trapped.

We need to understand our roles in the revolutionary process so that we may direct our energies to contribute the most we possibly can. The more intentional we are, the more effective we can be as consciously active agents for emancipation and social transformation.

There is no formula or plan to tell us what to do. We learn what we can from the millions of revolutionaries who have existed everywhere in the world throughout history, but each place and time is different, so whatever worked for them can’t automatically be applied to our circumstances. While relayed experiences, theories and observations are extremely useful, the revolution can’t be simply handed to us by others; we have to figure it out for ourselves.

We learn by doing. We can only master something if we practice it. This is true for playing a musical instrument, making furniture, or organizing for revolution and building a new society. Knowledge doesn’t come from the sky or from inside our heads; it comes from the real world and our experience of it. We make decisions about what to do, based on our interpretations of reality.

Many people call themselves revolutionaries because they possess and express “correct” beliefs, or write up the perfect programme or position paper. But no amount of study of theory, no amount of discussion, no collection of brilliant insights can ever change things — unless they are based in reality and are in turn implemented in reality. Theories that don’t come from practice can’t connect to reality. And they’re useless until they are actually USED. Knowledge is not an end in itself, but a guide to action, a tool to affect the material world. It is in use that it becomes embodied, and real.

Since none of us can destroy capitalism alone; we need to act collectively. The reason we need theory is to construct a shared frame of reference with which to share knowledge and experiences, so we can overcome what divides us, and organize our disparate spontaneous acts of resistance into a unified and powerful social force.

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This first appeared in Skewed News.

Capitalism is an ever-expanding, extremely destructive mode of production that has come to dominate the world; pretty much all social production has been integrated into its framework.

The ways capitalism presents itself to most of us is through its many wretched effects: ecocide, oppression, imperialism, poverty and so on. Any or all of these may motivate us to oppose it. When we decide to organize against capitalism, we often tend to go after these effects. We protest and resist them. And they absolutely must be protested and resisted.

But I’m going to argue that if that’s all we do, we may be able to mitigate some of these miserable conditions that way, but we aren’t going to be able to get rid of capitalism, the system that causes and maintains them. We won’t even harm it. We not even touching it.

To destroy capitalism, we need to understand exactly what it is and what drives it.

Capitalism is a mode of production, that is, it is an ensemble of social relations that shape how the society as a whole reproduces itself, how we meet our needs, how we get from one day to the next. Every mode of production includes an economic foundation or base, which generates and is in turn supported by a political and ideological superstructure.

While we must attack capitalism politically and ideologically, these alone will not destroy it. Our strategy needs to go beyond addressing the superstructure and gets at the economic core of how capital reproduces itself. We need to destroy the production and accumulation of capital.

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This first appeared in Skewed News.

What does ending the oppression of women look like? How will we know when we’ve achieved it? When we’re allowed to get free abortions whenever we want? When we no longer have to fear or experience rape? When we stop sex trafficking? When we all feel positive about our bodies and minds? When all girls in the world are educated? When we achieve equal pay?

We want all these things, of course. We need them. They’re essential. But are they enough? Don’t we need more than that? I’m going to suggest that if we focus our energy only on these specific issues, then we’re setting our sights too low.

If we fight around them directly, we may get some victories. But these victories will be temporary, partial, and incomplete. Because as long as we live under capitalism, we will never get the whole package. We will never be truly free.

If we achieve equal pay, we’re still wage slaves. If we’re taught to read, the material we have access to is still determined by others. All our relationships—every kind of relationship—are still distorted and deformed by market forces. We’re still caught in the nightmare, still under the domination of the capitalist class, those few bloated parasites living off the blood and sweat of the vast majority of humanity.

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Stephanie McMillan, 11/23/14
(Presented at Earth at Risk conference, San Francisco)

[also posted by Burnpile Press: http://burnpilepress.org/uncategorized/the-deadly-reign-of-the-animate-object-capitalism-and-sociopathy/

We all know that capitalism is killing the world. In order to stop it, we can’t just keep resisting its effects. Capitalism doesn’t care if we protest on street corners a thousand times; that just proves how tolerant and democratic it is. The solutions are not to be found within its framework. They are even less to be found at the individual level. We don’t actually have power as consumers – they would like us to think we do, but we can’t buy, or not buy, our way out of it. It is a social system, a class system, and can only be addressed at the level of collective, organized class struggle. We need to understand capital, how it works, the mechanisms that keep it in place, and the core of its functioning.

Capitalism is a mode of production based on the exploitation of labor in the generation of surplus value. This means that workers are paid a certain amount of wages for a day’s work, but what they produce is worth more than that. The extra value is called surplus value, and the capitalist just steals it. This is what all profit is based on. This is what private property is all about – its considered normal for the social means of production, the factories and land that produce the things we all use, to be privately owned, and for those owners to simply take whatever is produced with them.

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We really need to understand the methods used by NGOs* to undermine radical political organizing efforts and divert us into political dead ends. The People’s Climate March is a good case study because it’s so blatant.

In South Florida, we saw the exact same process after the BP oil spill. Once the NGOs came in to the organizing meetings and were given the floor, all potential resistance was blocked, strangled, and left for dead. NGOs will descend on any organizing effort and try to take it over, dilute it, and bring it eventually to the Democratic Party. We can also see an identical set-up with the established labor unions and many other organizations.

If organizers are being paid, usually they are trapped in this dynamic, whether or not they want to be. While combining a job with organizing to challenge the system sounds very tempting and full of potential, it’s overwhelmingly not possible. They are two fundamentally incompatible aims, and those funding the job definitely do not have the aim of allowing its employees to undermine the system — the very system that allows the funders to exist, that they feed off of. Capitalists aren’t stupid, and they know how to keep their employees chained to a post, even if the leash feels long. With NGOs, capitalism has set up a great mechanism for itself both to generate revenue, and to pacify people who might otherwise be fighting to break the framework. “The unity of the chicken and the roach happens in the belly of the chicken.”

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[This piece appeared, among other places, in Counterpunch: http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/12/18/why-environmentalists-should-support-working-class-struggles/]

This is to specifically address class struggle as it relates to the ecological crisis. It will not address all the other (many!) reasons that working class struggle must be waged and supported.

First, we must recognize the fact that global capitalism is driving ecocide.

The problem reaches much farther back than capitalism itself. The combination of an early gendered division of labor with the adoption of agriculture and corresponding formation of permanent settlements set the stage for class divisions and the private accumulation of surplus wealth. Maintaining this arrangement required the development of states with armies, social oppression and repression to weaken internal opposition, and ideologies to make it all seem normal and pre-ordained. And as land was degraded and resources used up faster than they naturally replenished themselves, expansion became imperative, leading to conquest and forced unequal trade. These intertwined and matured over time into an ever-more complex tangle, culminating in late-stage capitalism: the all-encompassing, all-devouring, spectacular horror that is our current global social living arrangement.

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[Originally appeared at Salty Eggs]

By Stephanie McMillan

Capitalism is a dysfunctional economic system that benefits a few while exploiting and neglecting the majority. But it’s not only that. It’s also a social relationship of domination, where a small class of capitalists exerts power over the whole society through the private ownership of the means of production. Under capitalism, the purpose of all commodity production (including food) is not to meet the needs of the people; but to make a profit. Food production has become a massive profit center, as well as a tool of domination, both domestically and globally.

Nearly all food production on the planet has been industrialized, and is controlled by giant monopolies. The largest include Nestle, PepsiCo, Unilever, and Kraft. Monsanto and DuPont control much of the world’s seeds and other farming inputs. ADM and Cargill control much of agriculture and animal feed. Dole is the world largest fruit company.

Monsanto vice president (and Bill Gates Foundation board member) Rob Horsch said “He who controls food, controls the world.”

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[Appeared in Salty Eggs]

by Stephanie McMillan

Economic systems are in dialectical (mutually interdependent and contradictory) relationship with the political structure and prevailing ideas of each society as a whole, with the economy being the dominant or determining aspect. This is not to say that influence doesn’t go the other way, but economy has a stranglehold on everything else, shaping its nature (both bending all other elements to its needs, while at the same time generating its own opposition). Though we are told (by the ruling class) that science is “neutral,” it is no less a product of class domination than any other set of ideas.

Pre-capitalist conceptions of science were less reductive and acknowledged a living world—the German “Wissenschaft” once referred to a broader notion of scientific knowledge that incorporated philosophy and spirituality. (Not coincidentally, Germany was until relatively recently not a nation, but a fragmented collection of feudal domains, while England had entered its colonial period by the time Francis Bacon declared his intention to extract nature’s secrets through torture.) As capitalism emerged in Europe (concentrated in England and France), science was harnessed to march in step with it, to solidify a mechanistic and utilitarian view of the world.

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http://onestruggle.net/2012/10/15/a-brief-definition-of-imperialism/

By Stephanie McMillan

The historical development of capitalism drives inexorably (though not uniformly) toward the concentration of capital. This is expedited by increasing the scale of production, dominating markets, and improving technology. Concentrations of capital form monopolies that can exert proportional power (control) over the economic and political arrangements of the social formations they dominate.

When capital, ruled by its growth imperative, inevitably reaches limits to the accumulation of surplus value within the territory (nation, or social formation) it already controls, it must expand beyond its borders to conquer other areas. It uses the state(s) of its home base(s) to wage politics (up to and including war, the most extreme form of politics) on other social formations—to subjugate the ones it can, as well as to compete with others over how to carve up the world.

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This is the text of the talk I gave at the Left Forum last weekend in NYC:

* * *

Environmental destruction is the most urgent and immediate problem we face. If we don’t solve it, nothing else will matter. I would argue that it’s the principle contradiction of the current period. Through it, the common ruin of contending classes is becoming increasingly likely, but as the economic and ecological crises converge, the possibility of liberation and social transformation also opens up. But only if we organize to make that happen.

The problem is accelerating because of capital’s constant need to expand into new areas. They have entered a period of extreme extraction, on a scale never before seen: fracking, oil from tar sands and deep sea drilling, mountaintop removal. Because of the falling rate of profit, capitalism can never economically catch up with itself and must constantly break through its limits in a vain attempt to resolve its own inherent internal contradiction.

Feudalism and all forms of class society have had internal contradictions that drove them to expand. But capitalism has taken this to a new level, because instead of just requiring more resources to continue existing (to feed an expanding agrarian population, for example), it requires constant growth of production to expand for its own sake. The needs of the population aren’t the point, and commodities aren’t even the point — accumulating surplus-value to expand capital itself is the entire point. This is what pushes it to exceed limits on a scale previously unimaginable.

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People coming into political motion often take a look at the field of activity on the Left and shake their heads. “Why are there so many small, disunited groups?” they ask. “Why can’t they get along and work together?”

Line differences within groups have come from practice, or responses to the practice of others. At certain points in history the line differences are worth splitting up over, because they lead to qualitatively different further practice. Sections of groups part ways because each believes their way is correct and the other way is going to lead to failure.

But most of the sects that exist today emerged out of a previous era of struggle, and their differences are rooted in the past. Many of the questions that were once crucial and defining, are irrelevant to people coming into political life today. They don’t want to (and shouldn’t have to) go through a long list of historical verdicts and ideological points that they have to agree with to join a group. It’s too hard – what if they agree on 60% or 80% but can’t come to agreement on the rest? Then they’d either have to suppress their differences and join anyway, or would have to form another sect with that minor difference as the distinction between them.

Instead, now people are seeking to organize new groups from the ground up, with people who generally agree on current issues and basic goals, and are willing to figure out the rest as needed.

This is why, I think, there are so many small collectives starting everywhere. People coming into political life for the first time, or getting back into it after a long break, or coming out of some of these sects, are figuring out what they think about our current conditions. They are putting aside the impulse to form verdicts on historical questions, and starting over.

This doesn’t mean they don’t learn from previous struggles. People are studying — not to just appropriate a finished system of thought in the abstract, but creatively, in order to see how others approached similar problems in different times and places, and to find solutions and methods that can help today. It’s great that they’re starting fresh, because when people define their own theories, ideologies and political lines, then they’re rooted in their own experiences, observations, and emotions. The ideas become an integral part of the people, who then become an integral part of a movement, in a way that can’t happen if they come in and rely solely on the previous work of others. The creative process of articulating beliefs and forming principles, incorporating what makes sense from past lessons, and testing what parts of the new mix works and what doesn’t, is part of the liveliness of an emerging movement.

The people coming into motion today don’t see the need to divide themselves along the same lines, or down to the same level of detail as those who have been around a long time — though divisions are still there based on very broad historical verdicts and deep scars. For example, in recent decades I haven’t noticed anyone refuse to work with someone who has a different opinion on Enver Hoxha’s break with Mao. Most people don’t know or care about it. On the other hand, many anarchists still feel betrayed by communists because of the Spanish Civil War and other blunders and won’t even consider working with them, or will only with extreme wariness and some expression of regret on the part of the reds.

Splits form along new lines: anarchists are splitting over being vegan or omnivore. Deep green environmentalists demarcate themselves from technotopians. Anti-war activists congeal into mutually frosty camps around whether or not to express support for the rulers of countries being attacked by the U.S.

So the splits and divides are more (not always, but much more) based on issues and events that are occurring and relevant today.

It’s like ecological succession. The groups that emerged from the 1960s are mature, solid, complex organisms. They’ve been through a lot and grown into big trees. The new collectives emerging everywhere are pioneer species, like the small plants that spring up on damaged ground, fast-growing and highly adaptive, but fragile and less formed. Some will be short-lived and not very well-defined. They’ll prepare the ground for stronger plants to take root and become established.

A revolutionary situation will require a lot of different kinds of forces working in tandem. Like in an ecosystem, there is strength in diversity, and a particular role for all of these types of groups in relation to the others. We should cooperate as much as possible. The elders of the movement have experience and wisdom. The new people have fresh views and energy. We should appreciate both, and all be learning from one another.