Collusion, Corruption, and Extortion:

In that same pamphlet, I argued that the Ukrainian government is a semi-colonial, comprador state, which is to say that its government sells out its own people to foreign imperialists for the personal gain of state officials. To justify this, I pointed to several reforms that were made to facilitate the dispossession of Ukraine’s farmers at the behest of the IMF and against the wishes of the majority of the country. But again — this was prior to the war. How does war itself create opportunity for profit? One way is “disaster capitalism,” where a crisis in a locale causes the price of its resources to drop. Normally, an unstable environment is unattractive to investors, but when a crisis is acute, when there is an expectation that the price will rise after reconstruction, then foreign vultures are apt to jump to the “rescue.” Predatory investors dispossess the locals only to turn around and flip their assets.

And this is precisely what happened earlier this May, when American and British firms leveraged their connections in the Ukrainian government to steal the assets of several Ukrainian firms. According to Julia Kiryanova, the CEO of Smart Holding, one of Ukraine’s largest investment firms, her and other’s businesses have been hit with “dubious criminal charges” and were added to “Ukraine’s list of sanctioned companies by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) on highly vague national security grounds.” Ostensibly, the firms were sanctioned for having ties to Russia, and yet they had not done any business with Russia since 2014. “Coincidentally,” these same firms had been approached by Western businesses who had promised that they could have their sanctions lifted… If they agreed to sell their companies for a pittance of what they were really worth:

“This was followed by a series of police raids at our head office and our subsidiaries,” Kiryanova explained. Ukraine’s security services seized $96 million in assets, and the deeds to 40 companies and 30 natural gas wells… Yet, hours before the raids, the company [Smart Holding] was approached with a fire-sale buyout offer for its natural gas interests from foreign investors — British and American — who have no history in the energy sector. They said they’d face no problems, as “they would be able to resolve any issues with the office of Ukraine’s President.” The offer — a third of what the businesses are worth — was declined.

Sanctions cause rising business fears in Ukraine, May 2023.

Various other companies and investigators have attempted to get an explanation from Ukrainian authorities, and yet no formal communications have been received, suggesting that the government agents responsible are acting with the tacit consent of the state even while it is supposedly waging a struggle against corruption. Even without a formal explanation, the situation is clear: Western imperialists used their connections with Ukrainian compradors to extort the country’s businesses and to plunder their resources. 

Without the ongoing war or some other crisis, this kind of brazen collusion likely could not have happened. In a period of conflict, however, calling attention to corruption can leave one open to retaliation and accusations of “endangering the war effort.” The media and international community have essentially given the Ukrainian state a blank check to repress anyone who gets in their way, whether rival political parties, churches of the wrong denomination, or capitalists who refuse to fall in line with the comprador’s cannibalistic agenda. Even here in America, criticizing the Ukrainian government can get you accused of supporting Russia’s invasion, as if the collusion between Western and Ukrainian oligarchs are not also threatening the lives and wellbeing of Ukrainian citizens!

US Aid: Who Is Benefiting?

Of course, this collusion doesn’t just end with the private sector: Western governments got in on the action directly. For example, where exactly is American tax money going in Ukraine? Weapons of course, but not only weapons: some of it is straight money that goes into Ukraine’s treasury — nearly half of the government’s budget is coming from Western aid — and some of it is investment in “economic recovery.” There is a portion of that money which Ukraine pays back out again to Western firms to help “rebuild.” That amount is a direct transfer from the tax-paying population of the U.S. to the private U.S. firms reaping the benefits. 

According to Holly Williams’s report on 60 Minutes: 

Russia’s invasion shrank Ukraine’s economy by about a third. We were surprised to find that to keep it afloat the U.S. government is subsidizing small businesses… In total, America’s pumped nearly $25 billion of non-military aid into Ukraine’s economy since the invasion began — and you can see it working at the bustling farmers market on John McCain Street in central Kyiv.

What U.S. taxpayers are getting for their money in Ukraine, September 2023

The purpose of this aid is alleged to be supporting Ukraine’s economic self-sufficiency, yet, in truth, it’s only pushing Ukraine further into dependence on Western capital. The agency responsible, USAID, is, after all, run by the Department of Defense and the State Department. It’s not a charity, it is an instrument of the empire.

USAID claims that it is concerned with unemployment and hunger and the ability of the Ukrainian government to become self-sustaining. If we were to take them at their word, they would be one of the most inept international organizations ever to step on the world stage, unless becoming self-sufficient really means continuing to provide cheap commodities to the world market. That is, while the U.S. government arms Ukraine to keep fighting their battles with Russia, the NATO alliance still expects its private firms to profit from Ukraine’s agriculture. This much is said about as explicitly as can be expected in a press release conspicuously titled “The United States Provides Additional $250 Million to Help Ukraine Continue Feeding the World”:

Ukraine’s agricultural products and grain are critical for the world’s food supply and key to the country’s economic recovery and future prosperity. USAID, through AGRI-Ukraine, will continue to help Ukraine’s farmers produce, store, and export agricultural products and grain to the world. To date, USAID has leveraged $250 million in private sector contributions in support of AGRI-Ukraine… USAID is supporting infrastructure investments that will increase the rate of loading and unloading in Danube ports, and enhancing western border checkpoints and rail lines to expedite and facilitate trade, decreasing export costs for farmers (emphasis added).

The United States Provides Additional $250 Million to Help Ukraine Continue Feeding the World. July, 2023

All this is buried in language about “economic recovery” and “prosperity,” but the emphasis on exports makes it quite clear whose prosperity is really under consideration: Western consumers and imperialist profiteers. And these “infrastructure” investments are not even a public service, but the private property of monolithic agribusiness firms. Three in particular have received USAID funding to increase their export capacity: Kernel (363,000 ha), Grain Alliance (57,000 ha), and Nibulon (76,500 ha). If you read the previous pamphlet, Kernel should jump out because it’s the largest holder of Ukrainian land based in Luxembourg, and because it is also indebted to the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), which functions like the IMF but confined to the former Eastern Bloc. It’s also owned by Andriy Verevskyi, an infamous Ukrainian oligarch who is a former member of parliament and current fellow of the Agrarian Policy and Land Relations Committee. These three companies are ranked among the top 100 largest “latifundists” in Ukraine — hardly a “charitable” contribution!

Indebted to Europe

By far, the United States has contributed the largest single share of “aid” to Ukraine, but what about the rest of the Western powers? For one, most of the aid delivered by the European powers has been financial, rather than arms. And unlike the American financial aid, which was delivered in the form of grants, the majority of European capital, about 55 billion Euro in total, are loans.

As stated earlier, the American grants were given to giant agribusiness firms in order to increase their capacity to export their commodities to the world market. The loans provided by the European powers, however, are more straightforwardly about collecting on the debt.

The debt racked up by Ukraine has been a tremendous issue, because, as you’d expect, they’re unable to repay it in the middle of a war — yet they can’t afford to reject the predatory imperialist loans. A year ago, Ukraine, while hoping for their debt to be forgiven, was forced to beg for their debt repayment to be restructured; “magnanimously,” they were given a two-year freeze on paying back $20 billion of their debt. According to Reuters, “BlackRock Inc (BLK.N), Fidelity International, Amia Capital and Gemsstock Ltd are among the biggest holders of Ukraine’s debt… Kyiv had appointed JPMorgan as sole solicitation agent.” Worse still, additional conditions on the debt will make it more difficult — not less — if and when the Ukrainian economy begins to recover. According to Dr. Elliot Dolan-Evans, a professor of political-economy:

Most of Ukraine’s debt is denominated in US dollars (60%) or euros (24%), [so] spiralling Ukrainian inflation ensures that debts are harder to repay. Second, in addition to approximately $25bn (£21bn) in bond commitments, Ukraine has outstanding ‘GDP-linked’ obligations to creditors of $3.2bn (£2.7bn). These instruments ensure that Ukraine will pay investors an increasing amount as post-conflict reconstruction increases GDP, as repayments on these obligations are tied to GDP growth (emphasis added).

Ukraine’s debts to Western banks are destroying its social safety net, November 2022.

Forced into debt servitude to neoliberal creditors, Ukraine has been strong-armed into destroying its social safety net and demolishing labor protections while workers need strong benefits more than ever. Dr. Dolan-Evans continues:

“[The Ukrainian] parliament recently passed legislation that curtails trade union representation, [which] makes it possible to remove Ukrainian workers from national labour law protections, and allows firms to suspend employees arbitrarily. This new law — which… the UK government secretly supported — was originally submitted by the Zelenskyi government in 2021, but only passed under wartime conditions. This is despite about 40% of Ukrainians losing their jobs since the invasion began, and Ukrainian businesses slashing nominal wages.

The government is also planning to merge its social insurance fund with its state pension fund, firing personnel, cutting state expenditure and reducing benefits in the process — even though millions of Ukrainians asked for social assistance when Russia invaded, and the pension fund provides a lifeline for the country’s elderly. Even the government itself estimates that 60% to 80% of Ukrainians may end up below the poverty line.”

Once again, the supposed aid provided to Ukraine is not charity, nor is it building up their self-sustainability. It’s hollowing out their institutions and restructuring their economy to serve the needs of Western consumers while imperialists rake in the profit. With Ukraine understandably preoccupied with their Eastern front, one can’t help but wonder whether  more damage is being done by their Western front.

Military “Circle Exchange” Schemes

Though most of the European aid is financial, some of it is also arms, albeit through peculiar “Ringtausch” (circle exchange) agreements. In essence, one country provides arms to Ukraine while receiving replacement weapons from a different country. In one exchange, for example, Slovakia provided Ukraine with 30 BMP-1 infantry fighting vehicles, while Germany reimbursed Slovakia with 15 Leopard 2A4 tanks. If, like me, you’re not familiar with military hardware, you should know that the BMP-1 is a piece of Soviet-era hardware. And that’s not unusual for these deals: each participating country is pawning off their outdated, Soviet-era hardware on Ukraine, and then receiving some shiny, new military tech from other Western governments. According to a report from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, “We estimate that the total value of weapons sent to Ukraine as part of German ‘Ringtausch’ is between €82 and €127 million… while the total value of German replacements is estimated at €90 million.”

The exchanges accomplish two things. First, each country is able to dispose of unusable, excess capital that had accumulated in the form of weapons. By wasting resources, they’re able to forestall a crisis of overproduction. Second, the NATO bloc is thereby able to strengthen its peripheral militaries in preparation for a future conflict. From the surface, it appears like they’re donating weapons to Ukraine, when, in reality, they’re foisting their junk on Ukraine.

In some cases, the military hardware probably does do its job, outdated or not. But in at least one high profile case, it likely caused disaster. At the beginning of the year, a “Super Puma” helicopter infamously crashed into a kindergarten in Brovary, Ukraine, killing 14 and injuring 25. Horrifying footage released on social media showed fires spreading from the crash site. Investigations into the incident never confirmed the cause, though this particular model of helicopter, the EC225/H255, had previously been grounded after a design flaw was found to cause the rotor to completely detach from the craft. According to Airbus Group chief executive Tom Enders, the problem was so extensive that around 80% of the entire fleet had been grounded. So why, then, did France sell 55 of these helicopters to Ukraine in 2018? By then, the helicopter’s design flaws had been common knowledge for two years, so they must’ve known the risk, yet they chose to sell them to Ukraine all the same.

Conclusion

The ruling class of Ukraine and the United States have colluded to squeeze out all the blood, sweat, and tears that they can from Ukraine’s working class. Lives lost to war, livelihoods lost to neoliberal austerity, corporate espionage, unpayable debts — none of these things matter to those who claim to be acting in the defense of Ukraine. And perhaps this would be obvious if we stopped to consider the staggering difference in scale between American aid to Ukraine compared to other war-torn countries: what sets Ukraine apart is not that this war is especially heinous, or that Russia is a uniquely violent or dangerous power.

What set’s this war apart is the jackals in blue suits prowling Wall Street and executive suites of corporate towers throughout the U.S. looking greedily at the ruined Ukrainian economy for a time when they can swoop in and restore profitability. But that’s not all: Ukraine also occupies a particular strategic position in the world amidst the West’s pivot to the East. The American Empire is increasingly preoccupied with the People’s Republic of China and its growing bloc of oppositionists. This horrific war, NATO war planners have admitted, is a “cheap” way to ensure Russia ceases to grow on the world scale to prevent it from threatening U.S.-NATO interests.

Perhaps most importantly, from the eyes of the U.S. capitalist class, Europe is forced to align more and more closely with the U.S. at a time when the NATO alliance had begun to drift away from Washington’s orbit. As a result of the war, NATO countries have turned to U.S. liquid natural gas to meet demands that were previously met with Russian gas; the U.S. sabotage of pipelines and the sanctions on GAZPROM and other Russian state agencies have placed the Eurozone in a new position of subservience to their old masters in the White House.

This confluence of overlapping interests — from geopolitical strategy, to corporate profits, to tightening the reins on Washington’s satellites — is what really sets this war apart.

This tragedy was caused by deforestation, the introduction of invasive grasses, and water usage policies. Its scale was further exacerbated by the corruption of local politicians, who failed to prepare for and respond to the fires, and that great engine of destruction that capitalists have built and fueled for so long, climate change, which has contributed to rising temperatures and prolonged droughts.

Forests — the native Sandalwood trees in particular — are integral to maintaining the natural rain cycle across Hawai’i by providing shade and by collecting water from the soil, filtering it, and then releasing it back into streams and rivers. But sandalwood isn’t just integral to Hawaiian ecology, it’s also a hot, hot commodity. After Captain James Cook arrived in Hawai’i in 1779, the island became integrated into the global market. Unsurprisingly,  the country found itself in debt. At the same time, a market for sandalwood coincidentally opened in China, prompting disastrous logging. Soon thereafter, trade brought grazing animals, pests, and invasive plant species, which all contributed to the destruction of the local ecosystem. Then, with the support of the United States government, businessmen interested in land primarily for the sugar industry overthrew Queen Liliuokalani in 1893. Just five years later, Hawai’i was annexed as a US territory. Today, sandalwood logging remains a major commercial industry, contributing to the loss of more than 90% of Hawai’i’s dry forest coverage. But because the industry brings money into the coffers of statesmen who don’t represent the interests of the native Hawai’ians, conservationists have been unsuccessful in promoting change. 

The opportunity for the state of Hawaii and the federal government to act keeps surfacing, but sadly there appears to be no political will to act. Hawaii, in general, is in an extinction crisis due to terrible land-use choices… In 2012, Hawaii Senate Resolution 93 (HI SR93) was passed to form a sandalwood task force to study the possible conservation and regulation of harvesting, but sadly no study or assessment has taken place due to lack of appropriated funds.

Big Island, Small Planet: Challenges and Failures in Conserving Hawaiian Sandalwood Trees

Wherever land opened due to deforestation, and wherever livestock were introduced, invasive grasses were imported to support the new grazing industry. According to a 1915 bulletin by the US Department of Agriculture:

The grazing industry is one of the important and profitable enterprises of Hawaii… Although in recent years there has arisen the problem of supplying feed during periods of long-continued drought… The development of the sugar industry has created a great demand for domestic animals for draft purposes and for food for the employees… It has been observed by many ranchmen that when animals graze on [native] Hilo grass there is a tendency toward this reduction in size and bone.

Big Island, Small Planet: Challenges and Failures in Conserving Hawaiian Sandalwood Trees

The settlement of capitalists, the raising of population thereby, the development of a market for sugar cane and meat, all these factors compelled the development of a system of production that took only one characteristic into consideration: the maximization of profit. The effect on the ecosystem? The effect on the local population? These were of no consequence. Damn the ecology, this was an economic wonder — the exploitation of the peripheral economies of the world. The immediate effects were two-fold. Escaped livestock further raised hell on the local ecosystem by trampling and consumption of native plants, uprooting the soil, and transporting non-native seeds. The bulletin continues: 

Many domestic animals escaped, ran wild in the mountains, and there greatly increased in numbers. These wild animals became so destructive to the forests as seriously to threaten [sic] other industries which had developed… The question what [sic] feeds are consumed by cattle in the forests is of little importance… We are more interested in what cattle find to eat upon strictly grazing lands and as to what will form the bulk of the feed there in the future.

These researchers understood the risks and consequences of the developing grazing industry, and yet their only concern with the livestock was their impact on other industries. They were singularly interested in improving the methods of management on the ranch, since this is what they were paid to study. And it wasn’t even as though the native grasses were unsuitable for raising livestock per se, merely insufficient for maximizing yields. The invasive grasses themselves spread far beyond the confines of the ranches, where they were left completely unmanaged. These aggressive habitat-invaders destroyed soil quality and killed off the local flora which were far less flammable. Some of these invasive grasses, rather than decomposing when they die, leave behind dry twigs and shrubs, creating a tinderbox environment. Others, like fountain grass, are fire-adapted, meaning they’re specialized to provoke fires in order to clear underbrush, open forest floors to sunlight, and to spread their seeds. These seeds are fire-resistant and grow back quickly in the ash-covered soil — much more quickly than the native plants — creating a feed-back loop benefiting the invasive species at the expense of the ecosystem.

It was not enough to deform the natural ecological landscape. Colonizers have also monopolized the water on the islands.  Natural sources of freshwater have been diverted toward the production of goods and services for the benefit of a market of global consumers — and to the detriment of the local population. This is theft! Directly from the people of Hawai’i, to the colonizers, the tourists, and the markets of the U.S. Empire. 

Colonial apologists, like colonial apologists everywhere, claim that this benefits the native Hawai’ians, that it “provides jobs” and “investment.” Who can turn down an offer so generous as “investment”? But investment — by and for an exploiting class — only means the magnanimous “opportunity” to be dispossessed of one’s land, to have one’s labor exploited in return for a fraction of the stolen stolen resources, to serve the very people destroying one’s ancestral homeland, and to become indebted to them in the process. In return, these corporations then end up draining the water table, further drying up the land. Worse still, these corporations retain priority usage of Hawai’i’s water even in the midst of crisis. According to a petition created by the Hawaiʻi Alliance for Progressive Action:

“West Maui Land Company [is a] a real estate developer who sucked public streams dry in order to build hotels, golf courses, luxury homes, and colonial-style subdivisions. Their subsidiary is Launuipoko Irrigation Company, which takes all of the water from Kaua‘ula Stream to provide water for exotic landscaping, pools, golf courses, and decorative fountains.

On the day of the Lahaina fires, West Maui Land Company wrote a series of letters to the Governor and the Hawai‘i Department of Land and Natural Resources requesting more stream water be diverted than allowed under state law in order to fill their water reservoirs for firefighting. The truth and reality is that the water reservoirs that West Maui Land Co. asked to fill up could NOT have been used to fight the Lahaina fires. This is because these reservoirs only serve the luxury estates above Lahaina, and are not connected to the county water system or any fire hydrants…

West Maui Land Co. is exploiting the tragedy in Lahaina to further justify increasing water diversions under their corporate control.”

STOP STEALING MAUI’S WATER PETITION

The request to divert additional water in the middle of a fire was, luckily, denied. On the other hand, 100% of the water going towards luxury services — water that, as the petition says, could not have been used to fight the fires — should have been diverted towards the fires instead, but there was no capacity to do this. The infrastructure literally does not exist, thanks to the control the big colonizer corporations have over the Hawai’ian government. Because the state chose not to completely prioritize their assets, West Maui Land Company went on a rampage, blaming stream protections for the fire. Subsequently, defamatory articles were printed about Kaleo Manuel, the longest serving Water Commission Deputy Director and the first Native Hawai’ian to serve in this position, causing him to be fired. The petition adds, “Kaleo helped to advance stream restoration throughout the state and served nearly four years on the Water Commission.” Typical of capital to turn every tragedy into an opportunity, this corporation manipulated public opinion to punish one of the few members of local government dutifully serving their community.

One of the few members indeed: another detail too infrequently emphasized is the failure of the local government, filled with corrupt bureaucrats, in responding effectively to the fires. Take, for example, Herman Andaya, who was hired to lead the Maui Emergency Management Agency in 2017, despite having neither education in, nor experience with, disaster preparedness. Apparently, his main qualification was being chief of staff to then-mayor Alan Arakawa, beating out over 40 other applicants. At the outbreak of the fire, the Maui Emergency Management Agency failed to sound warning sirens, which could have saved lives; survivors reported they only became aware of the fire when they actually saw and smelled smoke. Andaya’s excuse for this negligence? Sounding the sirens wasn’t an option officials considered because they’re “mainly used for tsunamis.” The state’s own website says the sirens are useful for many kinds of emergencies. 

For the residents of Lahaina, finding out about the fire was only the first of several obstacles to survival. As the flames began tearing down this West Maui town, cars fled down the only paved road, toward safety. Instead of escaping from the inferno, they discovered that the highway was blocked off by a police barricade. According to an MSN report:

One family swerved around the barricade and was safe in a nearby town 48 minutes later, another drove their four-wheel-drive car down a dirt road to escape. One man took a dirt road uphill, climbing above the fire and watching as Lahaina burned. He later picked his way through the flames, smoke and rubble to pull survivors to safety.

In deadly Maui fires, many had no warning and no way out. Those who dodged a barricade survived

Others were not so lucky. Some died stuck in their vehicles, leaving behind charred, metal shells, like a grim parade of abandoned cicada husks. Others died trying to flee on foot or by swimming away. According to Maui Police Chief John Pelletier, the road was blocked due to power lines which had been knocked down by the wind. But given that an electrical shock is not a risk to those inside a vehicle, and that letting people burn to death is a gruesome and cruel alternative, one can’t help but wonder: is this criminal negligence or malicious intent? The MSN article adds, “Hawaiian Electric had no procedure in place for turning off the grid — a common practice in other fire-prone states.” 

As if the conjunction of all these factors and failures were not enough, real-estate firms have already begun working to steal land from those whose homes have burned down, salting the wounds by offering low-ball cash offers. And why wouldn’t they? Capitalists can smell fresh blood, the promise of profit, from miles away; when a disaster strikes, prices plummet, attracting a feeding frenzy of the most vicious predators in the economic ocean. Naturally, helping people to rebuild and recover would only ruin this chance opportunity to shake them down; such is the infallible wisdom of the market system.

The fallout of this terrible tragedy underscores the conflicting interests between classes — in this case, the working people of Hawai’i and the colonizers — and the catastrophic consequences of prioritizing profit over life. Capitalist agricultural practices eschew sustainability; political appointees put the needs of capital over their supposed constituents, blocking progress; fascist pig cops take lives to protect property. And all this further entrenches the subjugation of the native Hawai’ians to the people occupying and destroying their homeland. Preventing further devastation will inevitably entail, at a minimum, the expropriation of the capitalists and the return of national sovereignty to the Hawai’ians.

In the famous last words of John Brown, “I am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away, but with blood.”

The great merit of the book is its faithful defense of economic planning against the resilient mold of free-market ideology — a defense that is so greatly needed as neoliberalism has, for decades, corroded what little “opposition” “left” intellectuals ever managed to muster. Unfortunately, however, the authors are not Marxists, so the book  is simultaneously undermined by their infantile politics — not to mention their occasionally cringeworthy prose. Especially in the first couple of chapters, I was left with the impression that the authors are insecure about their subject matter, remarking with belabored “self-awareness” in various places that it is “old,” “musty,” “not sexy,” and as interesting as “an airport business book.” Their self-deprecating tone, meant to ingratiate the authors with an audience they assume will be hostile to, or uninterested in, what they have to say, only insults the reader’s intelligence. Wherever they constrain themselves to discussing the operation of capitalist firms or advancements in information technology, it is my opinion that the authors achieve grace, wit, and humor. Wherever they attempt to interject their own sophomoric social and political commentary, however, the book becomes an unrewarding chore to read. Ultimately, the book’s central thesis — that economic planning not only could work, but, in many ways, is already at work, and working well — can be salvaged from this smoldering wreckage, but it must be coupled with a correct analysis of democracy and social revolution. For developing Marxists with an interest in economic planning, you are in luck. While I provide here a criticism of the text, a mysterious, sexy rogue has uploaded an abridged version of the book freed from its liberal tumors – though you should only download it if you’ve already purchased a copy of the book

The political collapse and economic liberalization of the Eastern Bloc in the late 80s and early 90s, coupled with the rise of neoliberalism throughout the West and its colonies, effectively destroyed the public’s faith in the possibility of economic planning. Left and right opportunists alike continue to join hands with bourgeois economics professors and other ideologists in denouncing Soviet central planning as a failure on the grounds that economies are too complex to plan, and that market prices are indispensable for efficient resource allocation. “New Left” academics like Richard Wolff and Slavoj Žižek, armed with the anti-Soviet intellectual tradition they’ve inherited from their fascist professors, set out on ill-fated quests to discover new “mixed economy” and “market socialist” models, yearning after these impossible “syntheses,” like the alchemists’ misguided search for the philosopher’s stone. It is in this light that People’s Republic of Walmart is so refreshing. With highly accessible style, the authors gracefully defend their thesis that the market system is building the conditions for its own replacement by a system of social planning — by socialism.

One of the book’s more novel contributions is the idea that, contrary to that commonly held cliche, planning works in practice even if it doesn’t work in theory. Setting aside hypothetical and scholastic debates about the “economic calculation problem,” the authors plant their case firmly in reality by asserting that, actually, our advanced capitalist economy has been making use of planning for almost a century. It’s true that the capitalist economy at large isn’t planned, nor could it be — the only way for separate, competing firms to engage with each other is, of course, through market mechanisms. But, within the firm itself (that economic unit so often treated as a black box by bourgeois economists), planning dominates production. Furthermore, two critical developments have come about in the era of finance-capital. The first is that monopolization reigns supreme. Wherever monopolization reaches its highest pitch, whole industries effectively begin to be internally planned, even while externally subservient to the demands of the market. Secondly, finance-capital — capital controlled by banks but employed by industrialists — becomes a mechanism for rational planning of production on the part of the financial–industrial cartels. As Lenin correctly observed over a century ago, the methods of accounting and management developed by the big capitalist banks could be converted to manage production under socialism. Hence, the socialist planned economy is already in embryo within the shell of the modern world; the technology and methods of economic planning have already been developed within the market economy — and eventually this shell must crack, and give way to the more advanced social form growing within it.

The authors provide several compelling and concrete examples of their thesis in action. First, they mention that planning is not new, and that, in fact, certain ancient economies utilized primitive forms of economic planning to great effect. Second, they refer to the public sector, primarily the military, which utilizes planned production for all sorts of things — penicillin, satellites, radios, the internet, cellphones, rockets — all these and more were products of “planned capitalist production.” Most compelling, however, is the book’s comparisons of three unequivocally private firms: Walmart, Amazon, and Sears. 

On the question of what made Soviet central planning inefficient — that is, inefficient with regards to delivering consumer goods — the authors identify data throughput as the essential bottleneck. “Old school” central planning relied on manual reporting by managers and advanced calculations had to be done, and redone, by hand. Besides requiring a small team of highly skilled bureaucrats to form plans in batches based on months or even years old information, this system was also susceptible to inaccurate reporting by managers who were frequently unwilling to report failures to meet quotas. By the time distributed communications networks arrived on the scene, the bureaucratic rot of the post-Stalin Soviet system prevented adoption of these new technologies that could have streamlined planning. Cybernetic planning, by contrast, could have distributed the collection and production of data related to supply and demand while allowing real-time coordination of production and distribution. Unfortunately, the first experiment in cybernetic planning, Chile’s revolutionary Cybersyn system, was quickly dismantled by the fascist Pinochet regime. The great irony is that the closest any efforts have come to replicating Cybersyn since then have come from that infamous capitalist super-giant: Walmart.

I said earlier that separate competing firms can only interact with one another through market mechanisms — and until quite recently, this has (mostly) been true. Essential information about production, supply, and demand has been treated as invaluable proprietary data, locked up deep within each individual firm, creating a “fog of war.” But every firm is reliant on another for its supplies. Without the means to see through this fog, each firm must do its best to predict and prepare for deviations in supply and demand, requiring storage buffers. For each link in the supply chain between raw resource extraction and retailers, the storage needed to compensate for these deviations grows exponentially larger, such that small changes to demand at the end of the supply chain create huge shocks at the front. This phenomenon is known as the bull-whip effect. Walmart, the authors explain, has devised a novel way of compensating for it: complete data transparency with its partners and cross-supply chain coordination. As the authors state: “While there are indeed financial transactions within the supply chain, resource allocation among Walmart’s vast network of global suppliers, warehouses, and retail stores… [behaves] like a single firm.” Walmart was thus able to beat its competitors in the market with superior cooperation and superior planning. Amazon, another titan of modern retailing, followed suit with its “Vendor Flex” program, which allows Amazon to co-manage production of the items it stocks and to set its own quotas based on data it collects on consumers — data which would have otherwise been unavailable to Amazon’s suppliers. This horizontal integration between production and distribution cuts out the uncertainty that normally accumulates between suppliers in the market, minimizing inventory, transportation, and logistics costs. Not altogether unlike Cybersyn, the free distribution of information along sectors of production, combined with the monumental collection of consumer data, allows for efficient planning without relying on price signals to coordinate supply and demand. The authors go into much greater detail, but the bottom line is that economic planning is already here — and it works!

The unfortunate irony, and the source of many of my criticisms, is that these authors are heirs of the same “New Left” tendency that is guilty for perpetuating this free-market revival. Consequently, the book suffers whenever it veers off course from its central topic, crashing head first like Wile E. Coyote into a painted tunnel depicting an illusory “anti-Marxist socialism.” It would be difficult to completely enumerate every error the authors make without writing a book at least as long. As far as the historical sections are concerned, the problem primarily consists in a one sided screed against “Stalinism,” in which the authors desperately beg their imagined audience not to associate them — or the concept of economic planning in general — with any of the 20th century experiments in Communism. If I had to summarize the authors’ biggest theoretical failures, two particular areas come to mind: their horrendously distorted understanding of democracy and distribution.

In the first place, they make the same mistake as the 20th century socialist Karl Kautsky, who Lenin once described as a “renegade” for taking a one-sided view of democracy, never bothering to ask, “democracy, but for which class?” That is to say, they see representational institutions in capitalist society and take for granted that the working class therefore has real, representational power within the bourgeois state. Phillips and Rozworski never seem to notice that all substantive policy decisions are made behind closed doors by the personified avatars of Capital. They therefore repudiate the necessity of revolution in establishing the proletarian democracy that would be necessary for the working class to have real power over the planning of production: “In such volatile times, it cannot be ruled out that a socialist candidate or party might soon form a government in the capitalist heartlands.” It cannot be “ruled out” (despite any positive precedent to the contrary) that a socialist candidate “might” form “a government” — what grand strategic vision! Again, the problem the authors identify is that planning already exists, but it isn’t run democratically; yet they never approach the question of proletarian democracy, and therefore the necessity of dictatorship over, and liquidation of, the exploiting class. They take for granted that the existing bourgeois constitutional republic is a suitable form so long as “our guy” is at its head. The last century unequivocally proved what happens when any socialist gets close to being elected into power in a bourgeois democracy: they are assassinated, or their new government is violently couped, or they do nothing to abolish capitalism, or the bourgeoisie side with fascists to burn the precious republic to the ground, just to keep it out of the hands of the socialists. The vision of a gradual, reformist road to socialism is a facile, utopian fantasy which can only end in failure and greater bloodshed. The successful revolutions of the last century demonstrated that we cannot suffice to take hold of the ready made state machinery. We must smash it, and make our own that will serve as the basis of power for the proletariat in its mission to end class society.

Secondly, the authors follow in the footsteps of another great colossus of revisionism, Ferdinand Lassalle. Lassalle attempted to abstract the question of distribution from production, as though these two were separable, independent things. That is to say, Phillips and Rozworski seem to mistake socialism itself for merely a different kind of distribution: “Inequality is, in the end, a question of unfair allocation… When we ask whether another world is possible, we are also asking: Is there an alternative method to allocate things?” They begin with the question of distribution, from which every other piece of their analysis flows downstream, as if distribution were a software plugin that could be swapped in and out of the same kind of economic hardware. To be fair, the authors pay some lip service to the question of production, but they don’t really seem to understand it. For example, they further refer to nationalization as synonymous with decommodification (“Nationalization decommodifies, but does it democratize?”), as though wage laborers producing goods for the market are not producing commodities if the industry is owned by the national bourgeoisie collectively. If only they could understand the class character of the state! Most egregiously, the authors maintain that the source of inequality under capitalism is not the extraction of surplus value from the wage laborer, but rather “disparities in the distribution of income” caused by “the market,” which is only “a method of allocation.” The solution to inequality, therefore, is only a matter of a different method of distribution. They are correct that competition in the market causes concentration of wealth by ruining other capitalists, by proletarianising their competition, but this is not the source of disparity between the workers and the capitalists.  Marx proved two urgent facts that these gentlemen miss: firstly, surplus value does not come from the circulation of commodities, nor from exchanges within the market (which are, after all, equal exchanges), it comes from production. That is to say, inequality is decidedly not a question of unfair distribution, but a question of exploitation by those with power over the means of production and subsistence. Once again, the authors pay some minor lip service to this very point, but they don’t actually understand it — it is not reflected within their thesis or analysis. Secondly, the domination of the market is contingent on the dominance of commodity production, which, in turn, is contingent on the social division of labor. The social division of labor, therefore, is the basis for generalized commodity (capitalist) production. For the authors, distribution is the whole problem, the primary issue with capitalism, and hence they are unable to really explain how socialism would be established or how income inequality would be overcome.The consequence of all these errors is a vision of socialism which is, in reality, little more than a utopian vision of a more completely, “democratically” planned capitalism. Like some kind of conservative’s parody of a socialist, these daring radicals and dissidents dare to ask, “what if the entire economy was like the NHS?” By correctly educating against these grave mistakes, we can successfully rescue economic planning from revision and reaction. This book at least demonstrates that capitalists have already prepared for us the technology to plan the economy. Once the workers have seized power and overthrown the exploiters, we need “only” to expand the domain of planning to the entire economy. Of course, we should be clear: proletarian democracy and planned production are not the only two factors necessary for socialist construction. Simultaneously, we must also abolish wage labor, the social division of labor, and commodity production, replacing production for exchange with production for use. We will not merely use computers to slightly improve distribution, calculate “shadow prices,” or replace the money-form of value with the “labor-time” form of value; we seek the abolition of value.

Two particularly powerful forces are shaping the landscape of the negotiations: streaming technology and artificial intelligence (AI). In recent years, streaming services have grown to dominate the entertainment industry, and the new model for intellectual property monetization no longer conforms to the terms of the writer’s contracts. The WGA says that the changing landscape has effectively transformed the industry into a gig economy, leaving its members to fend for themselves between contracts.

After weeks of negotiations, the AMPTP ultimately refused to budge, causing the writers’ contracts to expire and leaving them with no choice but to go on strike. Recently, the writers have been joined on strike by the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), motivated both by solidarity and by similar grievances with the studios. 

The Cutting Edge in Strikebreaking: Artificial Scabs

Just as a torturer must skillfully select the right implement to extract a confession from his victim, so too do the Hollywood producers have at their disposal brutal strikebreaking tools — the classic, of course, being the infamous “scab.” Sure enough, the AMPTP has already attempted to replace the striking workers with scabs. Alongside this tool, the producers are employing a fundamental tactic of siege warfare: cut off the enemy’s supply lines, and slowly but surely starve them out. Because the bosses can withhold the workers’ means of subsistence, that is, in the form of wages, and because they have a greater horde of wealth, the producers are betting that they can outlast the workers. One anonymous producer infamously stated as much with unusual honesty: “The endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses.” In a now-deleted instagram reel, actor Ron Perlman said that he knows which “motherfucker” (sic.) producer said this, “and where he fucking lives,” suggestively adding, “There’s a lot of ways to lose your house. You wish that on people? You wish that families starve while you’re making $27 million a year for creating nothing? Be careful motherfucker. Be really careful.”

Mr. Perlman is right to call out the producers for living in extravagant luxury while the workers who actually create the value, who pay for the producers’ lifestyles, struggle to keep a roof over their head and food on their table. Perhaps most insidiously, these ungrateful parasites are attempting to entirely replace these very same workers, not just with scabs, but with machines. One need not cross the picket line to get a fill of their dystopian cyberpunk fantasies: artificial intelligence is already here! Only, the kind of “intelligence” in demand by the market is a very limited and mundane sort of intelligence: intelligent scabbing.

The final counter offers turned down by WGA and SAG included two critical “compromises.” In the first case, AMPTP maintained the right to replace writers with AI text generation. If you doubt the efficacy of existing AI technology, its capacity to replace writers, and whether this is an idle bluff by the studios, then I encourage you to re-read the first two paragraphs of this article, which have been co-authored by Chat GPT.

The studios also insist that they have the right to digitally scan background actors; the actors would be paid for a single day of labor, and the studio would walk away with full ownership of that actor’s likeness, to use as they please, forever, without even a single cent of compensation. This grotesque move has spurred the SAG to join their fellow workers in the WGA in protest.

Perhaps the AMPTP is bluffing. We can surmise that their plot to replace writers and background actors with AI was an empty threat, never intended to leave the negotiating table. Of course the studios knew this would be unreasonable and offensive to the workers before they proposed it — but that’s exactly the point! In both cases, the studios are challenging the power of labor by threatening to automate and thereby replace it with an unlimited supply of robotic “scabs.” They’re saying: “if you don’t step back in line, we will eliminate you, and you will starve.” The entertainment industry bosses have clearly signaled their unwillingness to negotiate in good faith. They’re confident that, one way or another, they will win — the workers be damned.

Indeed, it’s as the old saying goes: not all that glitters is gold. Nowhere is this truer than the entertainment business. As the bourgeois propagandists in the capitalist news media rally behind the corrupt studio executives and attempt to sow division between the workers, it is paramount that we not get beguiled or misled. Unconditional solidarity to the writers and actors in their fight against the producers is the only policy for the class-conscious proletariat. All power to the workers! Down with the producers and the executives! Down with the bosses! Down with all the parasites who feast upon labor!

This (un)Holy Crusade is spearheaded by the so-called Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), which has acted as the vanguard of Christofascism across the country since its founding in 1993; this non-profit legal advocacy group has had its nefarious tendrils creeping through courts across the country, such as funding litigation against the ACLU in its early years. Since 2012, the ADF has shifted to a direct litigation approach in order to promote its agenda of outlawing abortion, same-sex marriage and adoption, and trans-inclusive bathroom policies, while supporting Christian practices in schools and government. In the 2018 Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission case, Kristen Waggoner, CEO of the ADF and a licensed minister of the pentecostal Assemblies of God denomination, defended the bakery’s right to discriminate. To her dismay, however, the Supreme Court had declined to set a precedent about the “constitutionality” of the Commission’s anti-discrimination laws.

But now, thanks to the present Supreme Court, stacked with extreme-right fascist Trump appointees set on promoting a reactionary, business-first agenda, this (un)Holy Alliance has finally gotten its way. In June, the Supreme Court ruled in its 6–3 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis decision, that any “creative” business has the right to discriminate against potential clients — refusing service on the basis of bigotry. All the owner needs to do is claim that the Commission has violated their first amendment right to “free speech” by compelling them to “say” something they disagree with. Specifically, the court ruled that Colorado-based Web Designer Lorie Smith could discriminate against same-sex couple patrons on the mere pretense that she might, one day, be asked to make a website for a gay wedding.

At first glance, the narrative appears to be that of a plucky, upstart, arch-reactionary web design firm. But 303 Creative LLC isn’t just a small business owned by Lorie Smith. To untangle the web of Christofascist intrigue, we have merely to see who argued her case before the Supreme Court and who has funded the litigation, and we will find our old enemy, Kirsten Waggoner, and her vehicle, the ADF. Smith has put her business at the beck and call of a Christofascist cult and, with the court’s complicitly, used a false controversy to establish a legal precedent that is disastrous for marginalized people throughout the U.S. Empire.

According to Smith’s (really, Waggoner’s) request for an injunction, she wanted to include the following message on her website: “I will not be able to create websites for same-sex marriages or any other marriage that is not between one man and one woman. Doing that would compromise my Christian witness,” whereas the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act specifically prohibits “all ‘public accommodations’ from denying ‘the full and equal enjoyment’ of its goods and services to any customer based on his race, creed, disability, sexual orientation, or other [protected] trait[s].” Smith’s ludicrous claim was that by not allowing her to create a business where she can discriminate, the state was implicitly “compelling her speech.” Moreover, despite the fact that the court filings included a falsified request for a gay wedding website — in other words, despite the fact that Smith lied about having received such a request — the court nevertheless ruled in her favor. The Supreme Court thereby waived its own “standing” requirement, purportedly the very basis of the legitimacy of its rulings.

The precedent gives the Christofascists exactly the lever they need. According to the Supreme Court’s ruling, a business owner has the right to discriminate against any protected group — mixed-race couples, non-Christian couples, etc. — so long as they can invent a “religious” justification for their bigotry. This effectively negates the “Equal Protection” clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ensuring “equal protection under the law” to all citizens. It negates decades of civil rights victories, going back to the 1960’s Civil Rights Movement, and earlier, to Reconstruction. The court is paving the way for the return of the Green Book South, in which Black and Jewish people had to keep directories of hotels that would accept their patronage when they traveled through the former Confederate slave-states of the South. 

What of the qualification that the discriminatory business must be “creative” or “expressive”? Supposedly this stipulation should prevent a business like transportation or supermarkets, which provide generic commodities, from discriminating. Actually, the court agrees that this qualification is meaningless. When addressing a prior Supreme Court case concerning the right of the Boy Scouts to expel James Dale, a gay scout leader, the present court agreed that: 

Mr. Dale argued that New Jersey’s public accommodations law required the Scouts to reinstate him… The decision to exclude Mr. Dale may not have implicated pure speech, but this Court held that the Boy Scouts “is an expressive association” entitled to First Amendment protection… And, the Court found, forcing the Scouts to include Mr. Dale would “interfere with [its] choice not to propound a point of view contrary to its beliefs.” [Emphasis added.]

Furthermore, not every service or commodity which is essentially non-generic constitutes an expression of speech. A floral arrangement is a customized artistic expression, but one could hardly argue that it can communicate an idea as complex as whether or not homosexual marriage is acceptable (unless, perhaps, one arranges the flowers into letters).

The most troubling aspect of the 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis ruling, however, is the Supreme Court’s tacit suggestion that prohibiting businesses from utilizing certain kinds of speech is the same as compelling speech. Ms. Smith did not have to start a business, let alone a wedding-themed one; if she wanted to retain her right to privately hold bigoted views, she should not have started a business that serves the public. We are expected to believe that someone with a degree of social power over others, someone with capital, is a victim of oppression for being ordered not to discriminate against the oppressed. Ridiculous! In its pretense of impartiality, the rule of law purportedly establishes equal standards for all people, regardless of differences in social power. But in an nonegalitarian society, the law cannot be egalitarian. A worker can be compelled to communicate ideas with which they disagree at their job, but a business offering public services cannot, according to the court, be prohibited from discriminating in accordance with its owners’ prejudices. A business is a kind of power over others; the business owner is not truly a public servant, lorded over by the mob, but a petty tyrant over their means of production, which is only theirs by the virtue that it isn’t yours.

We cannot understate the importance of the fact that Ms. Smith had no standing to bring her case before the court, and, furthermore, that the court made the unprecedented decision to waive its own standing requirement. Ms. Smith chose to put her business at the disposal of a fascist conspiracy so that this case could be brought to trial for the sole purpose of allowing a fascist-captured court to preemptively abrogate anti-discrimination laws. Why now? Why are the representatives of the capitalist class in the courts so desperate to approve this measure despite its transparently tenuous foundation? One might be tempted to believe, as the recently deceased “Unabomber” Theodore Kaczsynsky did, that the circuit of capital accumulation is not only compatible with, but positively dependent on the proliferation of democratic rights. After all, the expansion of the available market and consumer base is certainly positively correlated with total profits — why should businesses want to self-impose limits on who it can serve? But the fact is that they do, in fact, desire exactly that. The history of settler apartheid regimes has repeatedly proven how dividing the working class into different strata, and setting them against each other by encouraging settler chauvinism and settler class collaboration, facilitates capital accumulation by the fact that it converts the settler workers into reactionary agents in the class struggle. By privileging one stratum with increased social status, rights, and quality of life — by creating parallel but disparate circuits of capital accumulation within the populations — the long-term interests of capital are ensured. Thus, chauvinism is not some inefficient aberration of the capitalist class’s interests, as Mr. University Bomber claims, but an authentic expression of the bourgeoisie’s need to forestall the revolution. 

Capital is not merely a cold and rational mechanism for meeting the needs of the proprietor, but also a social power over others. The individual capitalist is like a dragon lording over his hoard. To him, the bed of gold on which he reposes is not merely some inert fortune. It is the very stuff of his might. He therefore regards any restrictions on how he wields this power as an unjust imposition on his own freedom, as an attack on his very being. The capitalist has wrung his wealth by violence and theft, just as the dragon has devoured men and scorched villages. He knows that each coin was bought with blood, precious beyond measure, and, in our corrupt republic, is his to do with what he will. The freedom of the people means, to the U.S. government, nothing; the freedom of Capital, the freedom of the expropriators of the people, everything.

The Supreme Court’s ruling is by no means a win for “free speech,” but rather a concession to the most reactionary elements of the capitalist class. The Christofascist (un)Holy Alliance will not stop until it has, through the power of the court, eliminated every last democratic right, every last legal protection of the civil rights of the working class and the oppressed sections of the population, and until it has eliminated every last restriction on its own “right” to purchase, exploit, and dispose of labor at will, while enforcing its own Christofascist morality on the public.

Fortunately, even with all these methods of ideological control, the state and the media can never completely forestall the struggle between the dispossessed mass of workers and the capitalists. The workers and the poor instinctively sense that their interests are opposed to those of the rich, and, before long, the most class conscious, in pursuit of a scientific understanding of their oppression, are drawn to socialism; the best learn Marxism — the sole scientific ideology of Communism — and become revolutionaries, dedicated to serving the people. If you are reading this now, then perhaps you are among them, searching for answers.

At this critical historical junction, where Communism is still widely vilified, it is my honor to have compiled rebuttals to ten of the most commonly held misconceptions for those readers who will take the time to read them. For those who would consider themselves “free thinkers” or “truth seekers,” I encourage you to read on in a courageous and good-faith spirit. After all, as Comrade Assata Shakur once said, “We’re taught at such an early age to be against the Communists, yet most of us don’t have the faintest idea what Communism is. Only a fool lets somebody else tell him who his enemy is.”

10. Compared To Capitalism, Socialism Is Despotic And Undemocratic

If someone claimed that all countries on earth, even the most democratic of republics, are, at the same time, dictatorships, would that surprise you? In every-day speech, “democracy” and “dictatorship” are understood as antonyms, and a “democratic dictatorship” sounds like an oxymoron. But Marxists have a different understanding of the state. Marxists understand the state as a product of the irreconcilable conflict between social classes, as a means by which the ruling class keeps the working class from revolting and ending their exploitation. For instance, during the Roman republic, the state served the interests of the slaveholding nobility by repressing the struggle of the slaves and free laborers for emancipation. Similarly, in the antebellum American South, the state served the interests of the big and medium slaveholding planters, and all others who profited from the Atlantic slave trade, by deploying the military and militias alike to crush slave revolts. Today, the American state serves the interests of the capitalists and the other propertied colonizer classes, and represses the struggles of the oppressed classes and nationalities for emancipation.

If all we mean by ‘democratic’ is that the government consists of elected representatives, then of course the United States, like all republics, is democratic. But if by “democratic” we mean that politics and policy are directed by the will of the people, or in the interest of the people generally, then we could not possibly call the United States a “true” democracy. America is a bourgeois republic, a republic under the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. That is to say, even though we have mass suffrage and vote in elections, the representatives we elect do not actually represent our interests, but rather the narrow interests of the ruling capitalist class, or bourgeoisie. It is the bourgeoisie who control policy, and not merely by casting a ballot in an election, but by “voting with their wallet.” Most people come to understand this pretty intuitively just by participating in electoral politics, but it’s worth pointing out that this has actually been proven empirically: “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.” Just as the ancient Greek city-states, the Roman Republic, and the antebellum American South were “democracies,” but only for the slim minority classes of slaveholders and profiteers, and dictatorships over the slaves, the propertyless free laborers, the smallholders, etc., so, too, is America today only a “democracy” for the capitalists, and a capitalist dictatorship over the dispossessed classes.

The primary difference between the political systems of socialism and capitalism, then, is not an absence of representative democracy, but rather, which class is politically empowered — the “class character” of the state. Under capitalism, workers only have the right to vote for whichever representative of the ruling class is going to oppress them next. The only choice we have is, “Shall we ‘elect’ to be oppressed by the Republicans or the Democrats this year?” But the development of socialism commences with the overthrow of the capitalist dictatorship and the institution of a new class dictatorship: the dictatorship of the oppressed classes, led by the proletariat. In a developing socialist society, the state is an instrument of working class power, where the workers and the poor have, for the first time in history, true political representation. And since the working class comprises the vast majority of society, socialism is actually far more democratic than capitalism. Of course, in any representative system, there will be deviations between the interests of some individual workers and those of the working class as a collective, but this “defect” is inherent to all democracies, regardless of class character, and the proletarian democracy will carry on until classes disappear, until the hydra of class society has finally been slain.

Some people object that a class can not be accurately represented by a single party, that multiple parties ensure effective representation. This is what we are taught in every liberal political “science” (sic) class, and what is echoed by every bourgeois politician. But whether we look at the United States, where only two parties have parliamentary representation, or England or Canada where a handful do, nowhere do we find the interests of the workers represented. True, there are factions of the bourgeoisie with competing political programs: high spending or low spending, laissez faire or Keynesianism, isolationism or interventionism, and so on. But the socialist class interests of the proletariat will never be up for election in a capitalist regime. “Our” representatives serve the ruling bourgeoisie alone — perhaps different “sides” of the bourgeoisie, but always one side or the other. The “choice” between bourgeois parties is about as meaningful as that between different brands of snacks owned by the same monopoly. For Lockhead Martin, it makes no difference if Democrats or Republicans occupy the Oval Office; its shareholders will get their pockets lined by ever-increasing defense spending either way.

As for the proletariat in power, we understand that truth is not a compromise between two contrasting views, and that factions have no need for independent representation. Political competition in capitalist society is a facade at best; in socialist society it is a vehicle of counterrevolution, allowing interests contrary to that of the proletariat to express itself. Hence, fighting bureaucratization and capitalist restoration is not a matter solved by party pluralism, but rather by continued class struggle, fierce adherence to criticism and self-criticism, and by mass political education and participation.

9. Socialists Want to Take Away Your Belongings

When Communists advocate for the abolition of private property, this is often a source of confusion. People worry that this means Communists want to take their property, to force them to share what they have fairly earned. But in the existing system of bourgeois private property and capitalist production, the “fruit of one’s labor” is already taken from the vast majority of the population — the workers — by their capitalist employers. In our current society, every commodity is a social product, because every commodity must pass through many different hands, through a worldwide chain of fields, factories, ports, warehouses, and so on, and through a whole series of labor-processes, to finish it — even the bourgeois ideologues do not deny this. What they do continue to deny and quibble about, is that only those who own the means of production, who employ labor, are able to privately appropriate the products of labor. This kind of private property, capital, is already the means by which the many are forced to give up what they have worked to produce, in exchange for a price (a wage) which is, with only some exception in the imperialist metropoles, far less than the value they produce.

So when the imperialists of the World Economic Forum speak of a “great reset” in which “you’ll own nothing and be happy,” some people mistakenly think this is communism. In fact, for the working people, this is capitalism! Under communism, the products of social labor are socially owned, and hence each person is entitled to personally appropriate those articles of consumption they need and desire from the social product. Under capitalism, not only is one’s subsistence not guaranteed, but even that which is commonly understood as their property — one’s home or car, for example — is constantly under threat of seizure, foreclosure, forfeiture, and so on. It is, in fact, the capitalists who want us bereft of the right to this kind of personal property, so that they can extract ever more profit out of single-use items, debts, leases, and so on. Such a wasteful and inhumane reality can only be avoided through socialist revolution!

8. Socialism Is When The Government “Does Stuff”

The idea that socialism simply means “bigger government,” “more welfare,” or “state ownership” is commonly advanced both by self-described “democratic socialists” like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who would have us believe that Norway and Finland, for instance, are model socialist countries, and equally by conservatives, who would have us believe that socialism is a metric of state bureaucracy, so that “more socialism” means little more than “more of the DMV.”

The idea that different modes of production can be placed along a one dimensional axis from libertarianism on the one side to Communism on the other confuses people by making it seem like the difference between socialists and liberals is merely a matter of quantity, that socialists are just “more liberal” than liberals. While this state intervention or “government size” spectrum might be helpful for comparing bourgeois ideologies like neoliberalism and Keynesianism, socialism is qualitatively distinct from capitalism, so they can not be meaningfully compared this way. Imagine trying to explain the difference between capitalism and feudalism by appealing to “the scale of the monarchy” or “the degree of clerical state power” — wouldn’t that be absurd? No, socialists are not liberals, and trying to fit socialist positions into the bourgeois political spectrum only results in spurious ideas like the so-called “horseshoe theory,” which claims that “far-right” and “far-left” politics share fundamental similarities with each other but not with the liberal “center.”

So if that’s what socialism isn’t, then what actually is it? Socialism is the period of revolutionary transformation from class society to communist society. This transformation of society is carried on under the aforementioned “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat,” which, according to a scientific plan, builds the conditions which will enable the abolition of classes and state power: the abolition of private property, exploited labor, and poverty, and their replacement with communist property, equality in production and distribution, and universal abundance.

Crucially, to say that all state ownership is socialist is firstly to confuse ownership by the workers as a class and ownership by the bourgeoisie as a class. We are not advocating handing more power to the existing government of today, but rather a completely new government, with completely different institutions — one that truly lives up to the slogan “of, by, and for the people.” But there is another difference too: under capitalist state ownership, wage labor is maintained, the market and profit motive are maintained, the system of commodity production is maintained. A collection of workers might own their own workplace in a local co-op, for example, but as long as they remain wage-laborers producing goods and services for the market, they remain exploited by the system even without a specific member of the bourgeoisie employing them. Even in a nationalized industry in a capitalist economy, a worker may no longer be employed by a particular member of the bourgeoisie, but the economic relationship between the workers and the owners as classes is maintained, the alienation of the worker from the product of their labor is maintained, the divisions of labor and industry are maintained, and so on.

7. Everyone Gets Paid The Same, So There’s No Incentive To Work Hard

This one’s a myth from the Cold War era — and as such has no connection with reality whatsoever. This myth asks us, “Why would anyone become a doctor if they’d be paid the same as a janitor or a McDonald’s fry cook?” All one has to know to refute this misconception is that the slogan of Communism has always been “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need.” Hence, where people have different needs, people will receive different  incomes. What Marx did advocate, particularly during the early phase of socialist construction, is a meritocratic basis for income, where what you give in terms of labor-time is however much you are owed back from the social product — or, in short, “from each according to their ability, to each according to their contribution.” Lenin used the biblical slogan, “He who does not work, neither shall he eat,” to describe this early stage. There will be no room for exploiters and blood suckers. However, all socialist states have provided for people who are unable to work — persons with disabilities, the infirm, the elderly, children, pregnant persons, and so on. Marx also recognized distinctions between skilled and unskilled labor — labor requiring differing amounts of specialized training and education — and explained how skilled labor can be counted as  “simple labor” multiplied or intensified. So in no sense did Marx ever advocate for a uniform income.

Comrade Stalin once succinctly rebuked this view:

Leveling in the context of necessities and personal life is a reactionary and petty-bourgeois absurdity, worthy of any primitive ascetic sect, but not for a socialist society organized in the Marxist spirit, because one can’t demand everyone have the same needs and tastes, that everyone live their personal lives according to a single and universal model […]. In terms of equality, Marxism no longer understands it as leveling in the context of personal necessities and living standards, but as the elimination of classes.

Quoted in Domenico Losurdo, Stalin: The History and Critique of a Black Legend

6. Private Entrepreneurship Is Better And Faster At Development Than Socialized Production

While it cannot be denied that capitalism is superior at providing a greater variety of useless garbage — funko pops, pet rocks, unregulated vitamin tinctures, etc — and luxuries that can only be afforded and enjoyed by the extremely rich — private jets, sports cars, $12,000 watermelons, etc — the idea that capitalism can develop the productive forces of society faster than socialism is a theoretical and historical lie. The pace of industrial development in socialist countries has repeatedly oustripped any precedent set by the capitalist world — and they did so while besieged by the imperialist countries. The USSR, for instance, converted the lands of the former Russian Empire from a backwards, primarily agrarian and peasant country, in which the vast majority of people lived in abject poverty and periodic famines were unavoidable, to an industrial superpower within three decades, despite the immense losses suffered by the Soviet peoples in the First World War, the Russian Civil War, and the Second World War.

One of the essential contradictions of capitalism is that its system of exchange and ownership can no longer maintain and grow the productive forces that were birthed by them. The division of industry, the anarchy of production, the insatiable greed for profits, compels all the competing capitalist firms to continually increase productivity, which requires them to invest in greater machinery and reduce the labor required, which only has the effect of lowering the value of their commodities. Inevitably, the supply of commodities becomes too great for the available market, causing prices plummet and a general crisis to set in. The result of this crisis of overproduction is inevitably the destruction of the excess commodities or the destruction of the means of production. In the stage of advanced imperialist decay, where monopolization has reached an incredible degree, even during periods of relative stability we see mountains of unsellable goods buried in landfills and locks on dumpsters filled with edible but unsold goods. The fetter of capitalist production which produces such chaos and absurdity is only solved through the socialization of production, hence casting off the supreme power of the market in directing production. It is socialism, and only socialism, that frees the development of production from such crisis!

5. Communism Is Utopian

The first people to call themselves “communists” were indeed utopians. They believed that they could colonize “empty” land and establish self-sufficient, primarily agricultural, primitivist, egalitarian communes. Their experiments inevitably ended in failure; some amounted to cults, and some cults today are similarly utopian. But the starting point of modern Communism was exactly the criticism of utopianism by Marx and Engels, which led to their development of scientific socialism. Today, “Communism” is synonymous with Marxist scientific socialism. Marx and Engels proved that socialism is not a utopia, nor can it spring from a dream in any great philosopher’s head; they proved that socialism is, instead, an inevitability of human history. They proved that the instability, or “contradictions,” inherent to capitalist society, and the emergence of the modern proletariat, would inevitably lead and yield to socialist revolution. As Marx himself wrote,

Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.

It’s certainly true that there are “leftist” tendencies which even today seek to impose their ideal models onto a resistant world rather than investigating how the existing contradictions in society must be resolved — the social democrats, the democratic socialists, the anarchists, the market “socialists” (sic!), etc. But these are not Marxists and are therefore not to be properly understood as Communists.

Furthermore, if Marxism is utopian, then what is liberalism? In its modern day incarnation, the trend of liberal “progressivism” is little more than what Marx and Engels derided as “bourgeois socialism,” a failed political ideology which espouses that the fundamental contradictions of capitalism can be peacefully reconciled through gradual reforms but without fundamentally altering the economic structure of society. The effects are to be changed but the causes left in-tact! And all this is to be done ostensibly in the interests of the working class — how generous! And even in its former revolutionary glory, that wonderful political philosophy that toppled monarchies — well that too was utopian! In Engel’s Words:

The new order of things, rational enough as compared with earlier conditions, turned out to be by no means absolutely rational. The state based upon reason completely collapsed. Rousseau’s Contrat Social had found its realization in the Reign of Terror… The promised eternal peace was turned into an endless war of conquest… The antagonism between rich and poor, instead of dissolving into general prosperity, had become intensified… In a word, compared with the splendid promises of the philosophers, the social and political institutions born of the “triumph of reason” were bitterly disappointing caricatures.

Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

The principles on which bourgeois society had constituted itself, those grand revolutionary ideals, turned out in the course of history to be absolutely at odds with capitalist economics and bourgeois society generally — and yet the defenders of this legacy would accuse us of being the utopians! Such hypocrisy, is it not?

4. Abolition Of The Family

Marx and Engels infamously defended “abolition of the family” in the political program of the Communist Manifesto. Nearly 200 years later, this remains one of the most misunderstood and contentious positions of the Communists, even among those who claim to profess Marxism. When speaking of “the” family, we should be clear that we are referring to a particular historical form of the family, not the concept of kinship bonds and communities “in the abstract.” In contrast to what the bourgeois ideologues — and in particular the fascists — would have us believe, the modern “nuclear” family is not the only kind of family that has ever existed; in fact, it is a very recent development, appearing only with the development of the modern bourgeoisie in the last few centuries. Originally, in primeval hunter-gatherer societies, families did not exist, and there was no division of the community into smaller kinship units. The family first developed with the advent of agriculture, the expansion of the community into larger settlements of agriculturalists, and the earliest emergence of private property in discrete household units in the Neolithic. Since that time, the family has transformed in tandem with the transformation of class society in each subsequent epoch: the capitalist family is distinct from that of the feudal family, and the feudal family from that of the ancient family. Moreover, the family takes a different form among the different classes in a society: a family of slaves will not look like a family of slaveholders, nor will a proletarian family look like a bourgeois family.

When Communists speak of “the abolition of the family” they do not mean there will no longer be personal bonds between parents and children, or that people will not be able to find lifelong partners, etc.; what they mean is that the economic basis of the contemporary family will be abolished, and that a new community and kinship structure will organically arise from these new economic conditions. Furthermore, the abolition of the family was never an immediate programmatic demand; Marx identified capitalism as having already functionally abolished the working class family, and then suggested that the absence of the working class family would vanish with the vanishing of capital. The double negative in this construction is confusing: Marx suggested that Communism would promote the re-development of a working class family, a new family form where the bonds of its members are purely sentimental rather than coerced by economic necessity. The exact, concrete form in which this new family will appear is not for us to decide for our progenitors; all we can say definitively is what features will disappear. Lineal inheritance, which in its development enabled accumulation of wealth in one family by the accumulation of destitution in many others, is one such economic condition that will be done away with. In our contemporary society, those individual families without the means to raise their children will have them abducted by the state, which then pays for strangers to raise them in their stead; this too is one of the economic conditions which belies the current form of the family. The uncompensated labor of women in social reproduction, her status in capitalist society as a tool of reproduction, is another. With these conditions done away with, partners will no longer be mutually dependent on each other for their subsistence, and families will cease to compete against each other for the subsistence of their children; hence, the antagonism between individual families will wane, and communal child rearing will once again become not only possible, but preferable. It takes a village, after all!

3. Real Communism Has Never Been Tried Before

The truth that must be reckoned with, the truth that all tried and true Communists today will readily acknowledge, is that real communism was tried! And it was good! It is, of course, true that no socialist society has successfully developed into a “mature” or “late stage” communist society — one where classes have been abolished and the state has withered away — but this is not for any lack of doing “real socialism.” Class society first emerged thousands of years ago, with the earliest development of private property and the division of the population into distinct classes — the propertied and the propertyless. The transformation of class society into communist society will, therefore, not happen overnight, but will be a centuries-long historical epoch. The first large-scale socialist revolution, the October Revolution of 1917 that led to the formation of the USSR, happened just over a century ago. We still stand at the very dawn of the transition from capitalism to socialism; people alive today have witnessed, and are witnessing, only the first of many socialist revolutions to come.

“But Communism lost in the Cold War!” Yes, the USSR lost. It was vanquished by the reactionary forces of global capitalism, or capitalist-imperialism, led by the United States, and by internal counterrevolutionaries. As Lenin rightly noted, even once the bourgeoisie is overthrown, it remains the economically dominant class, and will desperately seek to overthrow the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat in order to restore its own class dictatorship. That is to say, if we can speak at all of the “failures” of 20th century Communism, it is by and large only to the extent that it was defeated. Sometimes externally by imperialism, sometimes internally by counterrevolutionaries — usually some combination of the two. 

The first dictatorship of the proletariat, the Paris Commune, was also defeated, but this did not preclude the Bolshevik revolutionaries from carrying the next great revolutionary project forward. Yes, it’s true: the collapse of the Communist bloc has certainly been a tragedy for humanity, but history isn’t over yet! It’s well worth recognizing that it took the ascendant bourgeoisie several centuries and numerous revolutions, some successful and some failed, before the final victory of the capitalist revolution over feudalism was achieved. Wherever the young bourgeoisie successfully seized state power, they remained in conflict against the surviving remnants of the old aristocracy and nobility for a long time. As recently as 2022 there was even a failed monarchist putsch in Germany! The class struggle is not a straight line; it advances in fits and starts, with progress as well as regress. So fret not: as long as we learn from the successes and failures of our predecessors, our time will come again!

2. Socialism Causes Famine

Far from causing famines, socialism ended them! Nearly every country so far that has produced a socialist revolution has had the misfortune of inheriting semi-feudal, underdeveloped economies in which periodic famines have always been unavoidable and catastrophic. It goes without saying that uplifting a country from these conditions is a herculean task that cannot be accomplished with a snap of a finger; to even establish a socialist economy first requires the industrialization of the economy, including agriculture. And while it is certainly true that rapid industrialization came with grave costs and sacrifices, it cannot be denied that by the end of this process, each socialist revolution in history succeeded in eliminating the famines which had plagued their countries for millennia prior.

By contrast, let’s look at the track record of capitalist economies in the world today. Every country today faced with acute food insecurity and malnutrition crises are capitalist countries, mostly in the global south. According to the World Food Programme, a capitalist-funded NGO, there are “more than 345 million people facing high levels of food insecurity in 2023.” How can this be? The world’s productive forces have the capacity to feed the world’s entire population several times over. Food insecurity today is caused by a number of fundamentally capitalist problems: economic exploitation of the Global South by the imperial center, wars by and between imperialist nations, the effects of the climate crisis, the devastating effects of profit-first agricultural practices (eg. monocropping), the anarchy of capitalist production, and by the wealth inequality inherent to capitalist economies. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the adoption of a neoliberal market economy in the Russian Federation, food insecurity and malnutrition increased rather than decreasing. A 1993 survey conducted by CARE “classified 70% of households, 77% of women, and 32% of children as hungry” in the former USSR. In part this was because of decreased agricultural and livestock production, increased income inequality and decreased purchasing power, and increased unemployment. Even in the wealthiest parts of the wealthiest empires, starvation, food insecurity, and malnutrition continue to rear their heads in impoverished communities and homeless encampments. Sky rocketing market prices, food deserts, supply chain failures, overlapping economic crises — aren’t these endemic to even the most “wealthy” capitalist countries?

1. “Everyone will be equally poor” 

The bourgeois ideologues have claimed for centuries that ending inequality, rather than eliminating poverty, would actually make it general, universal. The claim comes in two parts: the first is that poverty is a product of humanity’s unchanging nature to reproduce at a faster rate than production can keep pace with, and second that the wealthiest few in capitalist society earned their wealth by contributing more to society (and hence, redistribution privileges the laziest, dumbest, or weakest members of society). The pseudoscientific theory of “overpopulation,” first systematically expounded by the English clergyman and economist Thomas Malthus in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, has long been debunked, and anyone without their head buried in the sand can clearly see that the wealthiest members of society are not producing millions of times more value than your average laborer — in fact, they produce little to no value at all!

What conditions the distribution of resources is neither human nature nor the supposed superiority of the wealthy; what conditions the distribution of resources are the relations of production in our society, in which those who own the means of production hold the means of subsistence hostage in exchange for the propertyless laborer’s ability to work. The more the proletarian works, the less he works for himself, and the more his surplus value is exploited, for the magnitude of his wage bears no relationship to the product of his own labor. It is this system of exploitation that polarizes wealth, and anyone who would deny this, as, for instance, the arch-neoliberal propagandist Milton Friedman did, must believe that the wealth in our society has, or could have, an infinite magnitude. But this is an absurdity: our planet has finite material resources and its human population has a finite sum of labor-power to expend on converting those resources into wealth. Opulent wealth at one pole of society must therefore be balanced by destitution at the other pole. Hence, by overthrowing the capitalist class and reforging the economic system, the average and median distribution of wealth will not only rise, but rise substantially! And where some inequality might remain, it ceases to be a social power over others.

The supposed “outstanding warrant” on Xodiak was apparently filed two months earlier, in the wake of community defense for a drag storytime event at West Hollywood library, which had been targeted by fascists. During that action, Jairo the Hitlerite, a notorious fascist propagandist in Los Angeles County, showed up to film and antagonize the crowd. While attempting to disrupt the library event, he had his ass kicked by anonymous “black bloc” crews standing in the entrance to the library. The pigs stood nearby, no doubt fearful of starting a riot, as Jairo called for their help. As he turned tail and left, he continued to vlog from the very cellphone he would later claim was stolen by Xodiak. And while Xodiak was indeed present at the action, leading the crowd in chants and cheers, Lavender Press journalists who were on scene have confirmed that Xodiak never once laid a finger on Jairo, let alone stole any property. Yet the police report posted after Xodiak’s arrest accuse them of exactly that:

After Xodiak was arrested, they were placed in jail at the West Hollywood Sheriff’s Station with a ludicrously trumped up bail of $100,000. Speaking incredible volumes about the love and solidarity shared by the LGBT community, the necessary 10% of that sum — $10,000 — was quickly raised to have Xodiak released. Yet, immediately after submitting the bail funds, the Sheriffs moved Xodiak to a different detention center and added a second charge, which as of writing this article has not been publicly specified. Clearly the pigs must share Jairo’s disdain for Xodiak, who has tirelessly advocated for police abolition and for cops to stay away from Pride; clearly the pigs are doing everything in their power to prevent Xodiak from being released, despite having committed no crime! As Jordan later identified in his Twitter thread detailing the arrests, Xodiak is a political prisoner — that is to say, guilty of no crime other than challenging ruling class hegemony.

West Hollywood mayor Sepi Shyne, a bourgeois identity-opportunist who is quick to fall back on her lesbian identity when criticized, has stated that this incident is “deeply disconcerting,” but nevertheless maintained that “these arrests … conform to policies and protocol.” She further promised “conversation” and “dialog,” which might have held some weight if this were the first incident where she’s been called upon to actually represent the interests of her supposed queer peers and to reduce, defund, and dismantle the police. Earlier this year, another trans activist living in West Hollywood, Annie Jump, was brutalized by LASD in her own apartment while defending her Fourth Amendment rights. Annie confronted Mayor Shyne in a variety of forms and repeatedly received idle talk about reform. Despite promising to help, Mayor Shyne has repeatedly supported and defended the institution of the police, offering only symbolic gestures, such as declaring West Hollywood a “sanctuary city for transgender people.” Of course, it’s difficult to feel safe in this “sanctuary” when the police who, ostensibly, are supposed to protect us, are part and parcel to the campaign of fascist violence against us.

In the age of “rainbow-capitalism,” where corporations routinely tout “queer-friendly” marketing, where the Pride movement has been overtaken by shady nonprofits and corporate sponsored Pride marches, where politicians make feeble denunciations of chauvinism and flaccid appeals to “equality,” it has been easy for many of us to forget our historical roots. After all, even the most liberal and “queer accommodating” curricula don’t really do justice to the movement for queer liberation, preferring to push our radical history under the rug. But Stonewall (1969, NYC) was a riot against the police who raided a gay bar and brutalized its patrons!

But Compton’s Cafeteria (1966, SF) was a riot against the police who tried to arrest transsexuals for loitering (despite paying for coffee)!

But Black Cat Tavern (1967, Silverlake) was a riot (well, civil protest) against police brutality following a raid by LAPD’s vice squad — undercover police with quotas of homosexuals to catch!

But Cooper’s Donuts (1959, LA) was yet another riot against police brutality!

What the history of our movement shows is that, far from being simply about peace and love, the Pride movement is about the fight against oppression and state violence. We would do well to remember that as the pigs today not only continue to brutalize us, but routinely defend the very fascists who call for our eradication. While our attention is focused on the troubling rise of this “grass-roots” fascism, liberal politicians and propagandists continue their efforts to beguile us, to deceive us into neglecting the institutional fascism that’s been around us all this time, to continue accepting the lie that the fascist cops will protect us from these other fascists. In truth, fighting fascism won’t be accomplished at the ballot box, by voting for liberal oligarchs who continue funneling money into the police, prisons, and military. Fighting fascism means getting involved and organized, it means building a militant mass movement of the people!

Release Xodiak! Release Abby! Release all political prisoners!

Update: June 7, 2023 at 2:00 p.m.

While Xodiak’s arraignment was originally scheduled for the morning of Tuesday, June 6, 2023, their court appointment was repeatedly pushed back throughout the day, and then canceled altogether. After a campaign of public scrutiny, a judge ordered Xodiak’s release. Yet the police have so far refused to comply.

Update: July 7, 2023 at 7:00 p.m.

As of 6:00 p.m. (Pacific Daylight Time), police have complied with the court’s order to release Xodiak.