Stephanie McMillan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This first appeared in Skewed News.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Continue reading “What is Surplus Value, and Why Should Anti-Capitalists Care?”

This first appeared in Skewed News.

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

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

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

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

Continue reading “Beyond Feminism and Other Defensive Battles: To End All Oppression, We Must Destroy Capitalism!”

This originally appeared in Skewed News.

About 20 years ago, in a conversation with a Bangladeshi organizer, the topic of NGOs* came up. He spat in disgust: “I hate NGOs.” At the time, I didn’t really get why he was so vehement about it. I knew NGOs had negative aspects, like siphoning off some revolutionary energy from the masses, but I also still half-believed their claims that their work was more helpful than not. Didn’t you have to be kind of a dogmatic asshole to denounce free health care and anti-poverty programs? But I didn’t yet fully appreciate how terrible they really are.

Since that conversation, NGOs have proliferated like mushrooms all over the world. First deployed in social formations dominated by imperialism, they’ve now taken over the political scene in capital’s base countries as well. They’ve become the hot new form of capital accumulation, with global reach and billions in revenue. So while ostensibly “non-profit,” they serve as a pretty sweet income stream for those at the top, while fattening up large layers of the petite bourgeoisie and draping them like a warm wet blanket over the working class, muffling their demands.

After much observation and experience both direct and indirect, I now understand and share that long-ago organizer’s hatred of NGOs. Just how terrible are they? Let us count the ways:

1) NGOs are one of many weapons of imperialist domination.

Along with military invasions and missionaries, NGOs help crack countries open like ripe nuts, paving the way for intensifying waves of exploitation and extraction such as agribusiness for export, sweatshops, resource mines, and tourist playgrounds.

Continue reading “Why NGOs and Leftish Nonprofits Suck (4 Reasons)”

This first appeared in Skewed News.

1) How we love one another is determined by our ideology, our view of how the world works. This is historically determined and based in our material conditions. If we are to emancipate love from its current generally strangled and damaged state, it will be in the process of the transformation of society overall.

2) In any class-divided society, each class has its own ideology, and thus its own theory of love, with its corresponding practice. Under capitalism, there is capitalist love and working class love, corresponding to the two fundamentally antagonistic classes that exist in that mode of production.

3) When working class love is practiced by communists (militants striving toward proletarian-led revolution with the ultimate aim of breaking down all class divisions), it can be considered communist love. At the same time, it must be acknowledged that we can’t know what love will look like or what forms it will take under communism, until we get there.

Continue reading “A Communist Theory of Love”

[This first appeared in Skewed News]

[Note: This is written after several people have recently asked me to explain why I always say that capitalism can’t be fixed. One specified: say it in a way that isn’t boring or difficult to understand, and even a little bit funny.]

More people lately are identifying capitalism as the underlying cause of our current global troubles and crises. That’s certainly positive: the first step toward cure is a proper diagnosis. But most of the approaches being offered to treat the problem are placebos, an endless supply of ineffective remedies to “fix” or reform it, to make it “less greedy.”

Getting the greed out of capitalism is impossible, and we’ll just waste precious time by trying. All capitalism’s problems are baked in, integral to the way it works. Capital must expand, buy up or destroy competitors, reach into every corner of society to try to squeeze money out of it. It naturally accumulates, concentrating wealth in the hands of the few at the expense of the many. That’s not a mistake. That’s what it does. There’s no other way it works. The problem isn’t extreme capitalism, corporate capitalism, or greedy capitalism. It’s just capitalism.

Let’s try a thought experiment to make this more concrete. Let’s take you through the process of becoming a capitalist. But because you’re a nice person and not a greedy motherfucker like other capitalists, you’re going to be different.

Continue reading “A Little Story About You, the Capitalist (Capitalism Can’t Be “Less Greedy” – The Greed is Baked In)”

This first appeared in Skewed News.

It’s apparently not enough that you consume all our hours and energy, squeezing us so hard that we turn into miserable wrecks just so you can stuff your face with gourmet food and pay your golf club membership. It’s not enough that we that we work so hard at your crappy jobs that we become dry exhausted husks at the end of a working day, barely alive enough to pop a microwave burrito and zone out to “Mr. Robot” before bed.

After being exploited all day by your greedy ass, did we think we could have at least a few hours or a couple days to call our own, to recover and get our own shit done? Did we plan to catch up on all the errands and housework we’re too tired to do during the workweek? Or even try to squeeze in something fun, relaxing, and social, perhaps take our kids to the movies? Ha ha, joke’s on us—you want that too. You want it all.

Continue reading “Dear Capitalist, Leave Me the Hell Alone on My Day Off”

This originally appeared in Skewed News.

Last week an alcoholic stood up in a sweltering meeting hall and promised his fellow workers that he’d stop drinking, so he could participate more effectively in the class struggle. He asked them to hold him to account, and they agreed to do so.

The pain of living under capitalism is bad. The eviction notice, the shocking price of food, the backstabbing among so-called friends, the humiliation at work, the pavement-melting heat, sadistic badge-wearers, torn screaming bodies, and so much blood.

For those who take on the battle against it, it can get worse. Revolutionaries always know they’re on borrowed time. Every moment not dead or in prison is to be used wisely, for these may be limited.

Meanwhile there is trouble, heartache, loneliness. We get fired. Our spouses leave us. Our kids go without. Our mothers fret.

We know that numbing our pain is self-destructive, but sometimes the choice feels like self-medication or breakdown. Still, even as we lift the bottle or pop the pill, we can’t help being aware that these temporary escapes help the capitalists disorganize and dominate us. We’re never more thoroughly pacified than when we’re out of our right minds, perceiving reality in a distorted fashion and unable to marshal a coherent response to it.

When we can, we face our fears and sorrows with clarity. Moments of resolve contend with moments of weakness, over and over and over in a constant internal struggle.

Mutual support allows us to make progress, and collective political practice offers transcendence. Like the Coup lyric goes, “power is the most effective anti-drug.”

That’s how it gets better.

A few days ago after discussing the recent decades of setbacks, the degeneration of the left and the absence of an autonomous workers movement, someone asked me: “What keeps you going?” The answer is simple: It’s the hand of a comrade from the distant past, still reaching toward a classless future. It’s the millions of us who are everywhere, getting ready. It’s Fred Hampton saying he’s not going to die by slipping on a piece of ice. It’s the stubborn refusal to submit. It’s that one worker in that meeting hall, suffering dependency, making the decision to emancipate himself in order to better serve the interests of his class as a whole.

Tensions are tightening between what is and what needs to be. Many of us sense it: a period of intense battles is at hand. We need to gather our strength, set aside distractions, wean ourselves from addictions, make ourselves fit to face the coming firestorm.

The worker who cast off his liquid crutch last week doesn’t know me, but perhaps he will read this: Comrade, your example strengthens us all. May we help keep you strong in turn. Our hands are joined in common cause.

This first appeared on Skewed News.

When they’re not terrifyingly militarized Terminator-style, robots are marketed as amazing and cool, even cute and cuddly. The prevailing myth was that they’d perform tasks and chores we don’t enjoy while we’d sit by the pool sipping margaritas. But what no one told us was that our lives of leisure would be spent without any money to pay the rent, and a pronounced absence of fancy frozen drinks.

First they came for the factory workers. Then they came for grocery cashiers. Now airline pilots and even sports writers are looking nervously over their shoulders, spotting LCD screens looming in the rearview mirror, flashing pixelated hearts from their creepy fake eyes as they come to steal our jobs.

RT America discussed a new report by Forrester Research called “The Future of Jobs, 2025: Working Side-By-Side with Robots” (which I didn’t read, since the thing costs $499, damn!) that says 16% of US jobs could be automated by 2025. The RT article includes videos of robots making and serving food, and assisting retail customers.

A 2013 Oxford University report by was even more dire, predicting that 47% of US jobs may be lost to automation within ten or twenty years. Advances are being made to automate even work generally resistant to automation, like garment manufacturing.

Many leftists (who nowadays are usually not workers themselves) are citing automation and other global shifts in production to construct theories of the disappearance of the working class and the denial of workers’ historical role as capitalism’s destroyers. There has been a widespread shift of the locus of struggle away from the working class to cross-class social issues, and a dangerous populist insistence on “the people vs. the rich” or “the 99% vs. the 1%” to displace the fundamental contradiction specific to capitalism: labor vs. capital.

The working class may indeed be on the ropes—dispersed, atomized, ideologically led astray, difficult to organize. But spite of all projections, predictions, and exaggerated reports of our death, WE ARE STILL HERE.

Continue reading “Robots, Step Aside: The Gravediggers of Capitalism are Still Flesh and Blood Workers”

This first appeared on Skewed News.

“There should be a law…to keep all them I-talians from comin’ in and takin’ the bread out of the mouths of honest people.”
– Irish woman in the US, 1892.

“we just don’t like you illegal bitches coming to our home trying to fuck it up like you did Mexico.”
– Facebook comment by a scaffold builder in Texas, 2015.

Same shit, different day.

A construction worker in the Midwest remarked to me that white workers at his jobsite often express hatred for Mexican workers. When he hears it, he pipes up: “They need to make a living just like you,” but hesitates to take it further for fear of isolation and losing his job.

Nationally, political candidates are whipping up a social base for fascism, unifying potential voters on the basis of xenophobia.

The anti-immigrant sentiment is grounded in the fear of unemployment. We’re told that jobs are scarce and that we have to compete for them, viciously if necessary. We’re set against one another in every way we can be divided: white against Black, American-born vs. immigrant, unionized vs. non-unionized, men against women, younger vs. older.

This is not by accident. Capitalists always want one thing above all else: to pay lower wages. When an Iowa fertilizer plant fired 1,480 local workers and turned around to advertise those same jobs in Texas, one commenter noted the reason: “you can all be replaced … for half the price.”

For capitalists, it’s a pain in the ass (and expensive) to force workers to accept lower pay through overt violence. They figured out a long time ago that it’s easier if they can get us to undercut each other and blame other workers (instead of them) for our misery. So while exploiting everyone, they’ll allow one group to receive some minor extra privilege or benefit that’s denied to another, in a method of “divide and rule” that’s as old as oppression itself.
Continue reading “U.S. Workers: Don’t Be Anti-Immigrant Chumps for Capitalists”