Chapter 8: Settling the Dries By Building Heavy Agriculture, or How We Outcompete the Capitalists: Part III

A collective cannot count on bank loans, because we have nothing to offer up as collateral. If we offer the collective up as collateral and the loan is called in, then we are no longer a collective but a capitalist enterprise, defeating the whole point. Moreover, no bank would offer us loans on any terms that wouldn't guarantee the above happening in the first place. So all of this must be financed not by debt, but by saving. My collective will eventually pay people, once it has the resources to do so; right now it's only a labor of love by yours truly. But when it has other workers who need payment, it will do so as little as possible with money, and as much as possible in kind.

Controlling the means of distribution means finding ways to absorb excess production. Trump does it with tariffs; we can do it with a guaranteed internal market. Instead of giving the workers $15 an hour, we could give them $5 an hour, but also room and board, a few pieces of furniture and a few articles of clothing every year, and this and that and the other thing that we produce more of than we can sell. Add it all up and the workers will be coming out vastly ahead, absorbing the excess production that allowed more of them to stay employed in the first place while letting the collective save as many dollars as possible for capital upgrades and, eventually, research and development, so that the worker standard of living can keep on increasing and more workers can be employed than the year before.

The Soviets had a supposed conundrum between spending their money on guns or butter; in other words, on the military to keep them safe or the consumer goods to keep the workers loyal. It was forced by American aggression to spend so much on the guns that they didn't have enough butter to not get overthrown in the long term. Our collective will not have this problem, as our standard of living will rise at the same time as the standard of living in the capitalist economy falls. We will produce so much butter that we'll sell the extra to buy guns, until we eventually have our own gun foundries.

By providing for the material needs of the working class better than the corporations or their state, we will enter a period of de-facto dual power, where both a capitalist and a socialist institution possesses governing legitimacy in a society. Lenin's soviets versus the provisional government of Russia is the classic example. We won't be claiming or assuming state power at this stage, but growing the mechanisms that one day will. The Black Panthers once tried to do this, and to slap them down Richard Nixon gave us WIC. The capitalists today are far more utopian than Nixon, and won't see the danger in their workers being fed by us. They'll rejoice at first, because it'll save them the money! Only when they see what workers who have no need of them are like will they realize the danger.

This is what I mean when I say we will "outcompete the capitalists:" they have become so decadent and idealistic that we can just outcompete them on the free market at this point. A competent workers' collective can pay itself better while selling higher-quality goods for lower cost than the capitalists do at this point. Their greed has advanced to the point of finally being their undoing. And this praxis is fully legal! Nothing is more American than outcompeting the other guy out of business. In the free market of the hearts and minds of the American working class, this is precisely what we'll do.

We will need the money raised by our collective to wage cold class war in these material conditions, because our guns won't mostly be actual guns until the civil war comes. Defending the economic rights of our working-class collective will require meaningful political participation in bourgeois democracy. Again, because their hatred of the regulatory state and gun control lets us move faster, we would need to align ourselves with the Republicans on a local level to defend our interests even if theory didn't already say that was a good idea for other reasons. It's simple. If bourgeois democracy is bought and sold by the special interests, we must become a special interest. Big Collective will have to buy off every Republican officeholder who could potentially put a spanner in our works: show up to their fundraisers with meaningful amounts of money in hand, and serve as activists for their reelection. But the upside of helping out the Grand Opportunist Party is the quid-pro-quo: not only will we be left alone, but any regulatory changes that might positively impact us will be considered, at the very least. There are several that even lightly-regulated Nevada could pass that would make this collectivization process so much easier.

And at the same time as we walk into the GOP with money to spend and activism to push, we can form this Radical Republican caucus that I was talking about. The collective will provide us with an economic base to make our participation meaningful, and will eventually allow us to take it over. And once we take it over, we will eventually win an election in the most powerful country of the world, confirm that election in a civil war, and then finally be able to spread socialist values abroad from the very country Marx predicted would be the fount of the final revolution. How we do this will be the focus of Chapter 10.

But before we get there, we must examine a historical phenomenon under-appreciated by the synthetic, middle class left: the class nature of the nazbol ideological position, and how it behaves historically. The praxis I advocate in Chapter 10 gets slurred as "nazbol" and a "red-brown alliance" by these Maoist and Third Worldist culture reductionists. Unlike them, I don't simply laugh off theory that contradicts mine; I address it head-on and refute it thoroughly and patiently. So the next chapter will be an in-depth exploration of the nazbol position, and how its institutions have shaped and guided the two most advanced countries that will make the final socialist revolution, Britain and America.

Onwards to Chapter 9!