Wetzel - Overcoming Capitalism: Strategy for the Working Class in the 21st Century

There are many reasons why humanity needs to ditch the capitalist regime. The heart of the system is the extraction of wealth from the labor of the working class. Workers dont have their own independent means to a livelihood. A person down the block, Maria, has been out of work for a while. Shes running out of funds, cant pay her rent, and is at risk of being thrown on the street. Finally, she gets a low-wage job offer in food prep. She can honestly say she had no choice, was forced to take the job. This is part of the working-class condition. Workers are forced to seek jobs from employers. Thats how we get money to pay the rent, shop for food, buy medicines, and so on.

Once were hired, we must submit to the autocratic management schemes the firms have set up. Usually, we have close to zero say in the running of the workplace or the labor process. If we think about it, this runs counter to human nature. Working people do, in fact, have the capacity to learn and acquire skills and control our own work, and to cooperate with others to run workplaces in a democratic way. But this potential is trampled by the capitalist labor-control regime. Management power is in fact inherently coercive. That you can be threatened with firingloss of your livelihoodfor trying to build a union or for questioning things, implies that managers have a coercive power over you. And this regime exists so that profits can be pumped out of our labor, to enable firms to expand into new markets, do mergers and acquisitions, pay high salaries to those in management, and invest in new technologies to eliminate jobs. This is a brief summary of a system rooted in class oppression and exploitation.

But the capitalist set-up isnt just the class-control scheme. Capitalist society is layered with various destructive fault lines. American capitalism has always had its tendencies to inequality based on racialized and gendered divisions. The systems top-down bureaucratic state is there to hold it all together and protect elite interests. The worsening environmental crisisfrom pollution of air and water to the imminent threat of global warmingis rooted in the pervasive cost-shifting behavior of companies.

If the oppressed and exploited majority is to liberate itself from this regime, we cant avoid the need for strategic thinking. Most of this book is a discussion of strategystrategies for getting rid of capitalism. A plausible politics for replacing the capitalist regime requires realistic ideas about the methods of action and organization that could build a social movement with the capacity to transform the society.

Strategy for social change is closely linked to what the vision or goal is that we want to achieve. The vision for a replacement for capitalism is going to also influence our strategy since the strategy needs to have a good fit with what our aim is. The society that emerges in a period of heightened struggle and social conflict is likely to reflect the social forces that drove that changetheir organizational practices and aspirations.

Bringing an end to the regime of class oppression and exploitation is going to require doing away with private ownership of the nonhuman means of productionthe various facilities used in all the industries. This is why the movement for a replacement system is called socialism .

But socialism is a contested concept. Since the nineteenth century, socialists have differed in both their conception of the goal and their strategy for getting there. By the 1920s, a number of different grand strategies had been developed by various groups of socialists. Such strategies as (1) cooperativism, (2) a party-oriented strategy based on electoral politics and electing socialists to government office, (3) revolutionary libertarian unionism (also called syndicalism in English-speaking countries), and (4) the communist (or Leninist) movement based on the model of the Bolsheviks in the Russian revolution.