THE NEW COMMUNISM: The science, the strategy, the leadership for an actual revolution, and a radically new society on the road to real emancipation

It’s all these different capitalists, in far-flung parts of the world—and that’s all the more so today: in far-flung parts of the world—it’s all these capitalists in competition with each other, forcing each other to find ways to more efficiently produce, and more effectively exploit people, even if that means throwing a bunch of people out of work, or off the land, or whatever.

As a sharp illustration of this, there was a very good article20 on the revcom.us site about this capitalist who had investments in Bangladesh but who wanted to be a socially-conscious capitalist. This article ran down all the ways in which he tried to do things differently, do them in a way that would not so viciously exploit the women working in the plants that he owned—not have them in such horrific conditions, give them more social benefits—and how he was forced to give that up by this very driving force of anarchy, by the competition from other capitalists doing things in more efficient, more ruthless ways. So even though he was a good-hearted capitalist—and that may sound like an oxymoron (a contradiction in terms), but he was actually a good-hearted capitalist—still, he couldn’t keep up his “kind capitalism” because of the basic dynamics of what drives capitalism.

Of course, in a larger sense, all this was taking place within the overall framework of the capitalist system, and that is why, although there were major changes—and specifically major changes in the situation of Black people—this did not bring about the end of oppression, even as it did bring about significant changes in the forms of that oppression.

if you’re a capitalist, you don’t buy people—you buy their ability to work.

So, it’s private appropriation on the basis of socialized production. That’s the fundamental contradiction at the heart of capitalism.