I’m a VP with a biggish company. Every year, the first week of the year the senior managers from across the US fly somewhere warm, play golf, shoot guns, sit by a beach or a pool, get wasted, ham handedly try to cheat on their spouses and have meetings about how to take more of your labor value. Obviously due to covid that won’t be a thing this year, and instead the conferences are virtual, so me, and a couple hundred other ghouls who already make six figures + got shipped huge snack boxes, boxes of booze and received $500 credits at door dash. The CEO just gave his kickoff presentation and, with all the money they saved from not paying for travel they’re giving away ten k worth of Amazon gift cards and a brand new Tesla. So just who is eligible for this windfall, you ask. The hundreds of warehouse workers who couldn’t work from home, the truck drivers out on the road, installers and sales people exposing themselves to covid every day? Nah, us couple hundred ghouls already making incomes in the top 5%. Can I just guillotine myself and be done with this already?
I mean, Engels was a factory owner. Lenin’s family was fairly wealthy, etc etc. Bourgeois class traitors are absolutely our allies, so long as they are actually class traitors.
Edit: but it is op’s duty to support and further communist causes and orgs. If they’re living in luxury and not helping people then fuck em
It is one of the great ironies of Marxism. Marx was only able to write Das Kapital because Engels was financing him with profits from his factory.
if engels used that factory to exploit people by extracting their labour while class conscious, that’s pretty indefensible. democratise your workplace if you are in the position to do so. being wealthy doesnt mean you are being actively exploitative
Marxism is a materialist framework, not a moralist one.
The purpose of class analysis in this framework is not to categorize good guys and bad guys, it’s to answer the difficult question of how do you change the world. We are all guilty of great evil, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. Our job is not to count sins and flagellate ourselves and others based on the sins we count. The goal is to completely and utterly destroy this system as we know it.
The only viable strategy for upsetting this status quo is form a united plan of mass action organized along the lines of our common interests. Our only strength comes from solidarity. The purpose of class analysis is to develop a consciousness about what our shared interests are. It is theory which sharpens our tactics and organizing work.
What we learn from class analysis is that the capitalist, the bourgeois, the petit bourgeois, ect, have interests that are directly opposed to the interests of the vast toiling masses that all of society depends on. This informs our tactics and strategy, such that when you are forming plans of agitation and organization, it would be a waste of effort to devote resources to recruiting from these classes, and that we can not rely on support for our cause from these classes. Any support is likely to be wavering, because any forward progression in the realization of the proletariat’s class interest is going to work against their interests.
All of that being said, there is nothing preventing a member of these classes from being a class traitor. We need all of the help we can get in this tremendous undertaking. We don’t hate the capitalist because they are evil. We hate the capitalist because we have a world to win, and they are in the way. If some of them want to step out of the way and aid our cause, more power to them.
Should I act morally and perform direct actions to minimise harm? No, I don’t have to according to Marxism nevermind.
