Chapter 2: What's "Left"? Part II

Who can afford to not care about such basic things like food, clothing and shelter, which are allocated directly or indirectly through the political process? Who can afford to lose an election because their interests will always be represented by whichever party wins? Why, the rich, of course! Dedicated liberals are usually bougies and dedicated bougies are usually liberals. Any workers in either libertarian quadrant are misled by liberalism and its false consciousness; on the left by the half-liberal half-socialist anarchism, on the center by the full-individualist radical liberalism, and on the right by that capitalist unicorn ranch called libertarianism.

So a more accurate, more real political compass would not be a square with four quadrants, or a line with "left" and "right," but more of a triangle:

Each corner of the triangle compass is a combination of the two sides that make it, and a contradiction of the side opposed to it. Ergo, "socialism" is just the combination of "democracy" and "the will to power," just like in the libertarian compass "socialism" was the combination of the "economic restrictiveness" and "authoritarian" sides. And as "socialism" is directly across from the side of the triangle labelled "capitalism," they are in direct contradiction, as is fascism with democracy, and liberalism with the will to power.

Of the three sides, two of them should be quite familiar to Americans. Because liberalism is more pervasive here than the rest of the world, and because a corner's opposite negates it, that means the will to power will have to be explained in greater detail. But for completeness' sake, all three will be explained.

Capitalism is why you're reading this. You're exploited because you don't own your company, the value of your labor is alienated from you, this alienation is pissing you off, and so you're apparently open to hearing what the commies have to say about it.

The definition of socialism is, again, the worker control of the means of production. That means that everyone involved in production has a say over that production. Socialism is another way of saying "economic democracy." The socialist movement can be understood as one long quest for more democracy. So naturally democracy is a socialist value.

This is a value the socialist shares with the liberal. The bourgeois revolutions brought us liberal democracy. But capitalism is economic command of the many by the few, and thus in contradiction to democracy. These contradictions are fundamental, but in the depth of false consciousness it's remarkable just how papered over they appear from the inside. The depth of this contradiction is unsustainable and why liberal democracy always decays into warring camps of socialism and fascism over time.

We do share political democracy as a value with the liberals. We want political democracy, and the collective rights it affords, but the way this manifests in practice is a little different. Bougie notions of "individual rights" and "due process" would allow far too many guilty CEOs and cops off the hook after the revolution. So instead of sitting in the courtrooms and waiting for the mafia don to be let off for a fifth time on some technicality, which serves the demands of individual rights, we Marxist-Leninists insist on the recognition of our collective rights to be free of such predators, and to reform them into people who can live among us peacefully and constructively instead. We all know the mafia don is guilty, we all know the cop shot blacks for fun before the revolution, we all know that guy was running that company when it did those shockingly evil things. We do not need due process to tell us that all our collective eyes are functioning; real evil that harms us every day lurks in those liberal individual rights.

Continue reading Part III