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?
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.
The point I’m making isn’t incompatible with the point you’re making.
Engels was never an owner of his father’s factory, but if he was then you are correct he should use his position to advance the cause of the working class in whatever way is most effective.
Engels never inherited the mill - when his father died, his family feared he would squander the legacy “on his communist friends”, and he was unable to withdraw any capital from the firm for 20 years. He left the mill in 1869 but retained shares and invested in the stockmarket, to provide an income that allowed him to continue supporting Marx and to write and work for the cause of socialism.
The problem is the ills of capitalism are systematic. Capitalism doesn’t suck because of individual actions, it sucks because of the inevitable consequences of its organizing principles.
Small scale feel good actions on an individual level don’t challenge the underlying structure of capitalism. Our movement must be scientific in its tactics and strategy if we are going to accomplish a goal as lofty as moving all of humanity past the predatory stage of human development.
So what harm are you actually minimizing if you don’t end up challenging the structure of capitalism at a fundamental level? The system is still going to produce the same evils.
