Chapter 1: Capitalism and Other Cults

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Not very classy of me to slander capitalism as a cult, is it? How unsophisticated and philistine of me to denounce something without explaining it, how brutish and uncultured we socialists must be if these sorts of common insults are what pass for discourse among us.

But cults are said to brainwash their adherents, and every single adjective in that last paragraph is a sort of brainwashing that makes its point by valorizing the rich and demonizing the poor. Moreover, it's normalized language we all use everyday. Nobody considers "common" to be a swear word. Nobody wonders what class the "classy" are, or why it's better to be that class, or why we must have classes at all when they say that word. These terms are natural to us, but they are loaded with implications a liberal might call "problematic" if they cared about class warfare like they pretend to care about the other forms of oppression. But we go about our days unconsciously paying tribute in our speech to the class that rules society.

We are not enslaved by words alone, of course, and there are all manner of anachronisms in the English language. Atheists still tell each other "bless you" when they sneeze. But this is no anachronism; the atheists have forsaken divinity but our liberal society has not forsaken classes.

What we just performed together by examining the first paragraph of this section is a very simple example of a technique called "class analysis." It is the basis of all socialist argument and reasoning, and can be done by anyone who can read this sentence. Socialism in a nutshell is democracy in both the political and economic spheres; the purest democracy will have citizens who can exercise power directly because they can think for themselves and vote with wisdom. So it is my earnest hope that everyone who reads this will become skilled in class analysis, because they will be better able to hold power to account, be it in our present system or after a socialist transformation.

The essence of class analysis is to see what any phenomenon has to do with class. What class benefits from it, and how? How might that influence the behavior of other classes?

Lenin, in his seminal work What Is To Be Done, class analyzed the capitalist Russian society before the Bolshevik Revolution. There is theoretical work being undertaken by comrades analyzing whether one minor group or another might deserve reclassification as the world changes, but for the most part Lenin's analysis holds up just fine one hundred years later on the other side of the planet. In any case, Lenin's class analysis of capitalist society is a good place to begin, for his ideas on this topic remain nearly universal among socialists and even those who disagree with one classification or another uphold the bulk of the rest.

According to Lenin (and Marx before him), society can be divided up according to its relations to the "means of production," or such factories and companies and tools as are necessary to produce goods and services for the economy. To paraphrase Lenin and Marx, there are three basic political ideologies: liberalism, fascism, and socialism; and they correspond to three basic classes: the bougies, the petties, and the proles.

So it is that those who control those means of production also control society; we call them the "capitalist class" or the "bourgeoisie" if we are feeling formal, "bougies" or "bosses" or "owners" or "the 1%" if we are not, and more colorful words besides if we are a mite peeved. "Bougie" and "the rich" is short, sweet, and accurate, so I'll use those in this work.

This is the first basic class of society, and as the rulers of society the bougies' tastes and attitudes and feelings are imposed on the rest of society through the media (which they also own), which is why people talk approvingly of "classy" things. This is also why the conservatives speak of the "liberal media" - the conservative working classes correctly do not feel the media represents them so they blame the slightly-different capitalist politics of the liberal media rather than the vastly-different class politics of the people who own it and work for it.

Continue reading Chapter 1, Part II