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Steve is joined by EJ, host of the NonCompete YouTube channel, editor-in-chief at Banyan House Publishing and producer for Luna Oi [Nguyen]. EJ is an American expat in Vietnam, and this conversation grows out of his article, Why Won't They Just Say Capitalism? The Progressive Fixation on Oligarchy is a Diversion from Class Struggle. Steve admits he uses the word "oligarchy" himself, as a carrot to pull people into conversation. But is oligarchy a handy on-ramp or a diversion? "Fight oligarchy" and "No Kings" get people fired up, but they don't really collide with capital. It's bad man vs good man politics. It's band-aids on heart attacks.
EJ starts with method. Historical materialism defines things by their relationships, so the political and the economic are one system. It's dialectically intertwined. The oligarchy is the capitalist class and its agents in the state; and the state is there to enforce class relations. Who owns the means of production? That's the property question, and the ruling class wants workers to stop asking it.
Then they take on a familiar objection: words like capitalism and socialism scare people off. EJ points to Graham Platner and to Bernie Sanders, who rarely says capitalism without an adjective stuck on the front. But they'll call us communists no matter what language we pick. After years in marketing, he'll tell you people can smell deception a mile away. And the truth is on our side.
From there it's reformism. EJ walks through Lenin's Marxism and Reformism, Marx's Critique of the Gotha Program and the long fight against economism. Reforms won under capitalism get snatched back if they don't feed a class-conscious movement. Steve brings the MMT lens. A currency-issuing government faces no financial barrier to universal healthcare, free college or a Green New Deal. So why are workers begging for concessions? This all tells you who the state serves.
The last stretch is about what to build. EJ turns to the Vietnamese revolution and its red unions, including the 1945 uprising in Hanoi and the role of power plant workers. He looks at the strengths and failures of the IWW and at how US unions got captured, and he's blunt in stating nobody can hand us a finished plan. We learn strategy through practice and mistakes. He and Steve get into the balance between tailism and commandism, and Lenin's highway bandit analogy. When is compromise about survival and when is it selling out.
The takeaway: naming the system is the first step toward organizing against it. Theory and practice must be connected.
EJ is the host of the NonCompete YouTube channel, editor-in-chief at Banyan House Publishing, and producer for Luna Oi. A former marketing professional, he writes on dialectical and historical materialism from Vietnam. Find his work on his Substack, substack.com/@noncompetemedia and the NonCompete YouTube channel, youtube.com/@NonCompete
