ABCs of Capitalism A - Understanding Capitalism

Political organizing is hard — political education shouldn’t have to be. In the best tradition of socialist pedagogy, Catalyst and Jacobin are partnering up for a new series of pamphlets, called The ABCs of Capitalism. Each one is self-contained, and can be read on its own. But the series as a whole will be internally coherent and later pamphlets will build on the earlier ones: Pamphlet one: “Understanding Capitalism.” A forty-page text explaining clearly why capitalism isn’t just a collection of individuals, but individuals grouped in social classes with very different interests. Capitalists aren’t necessarily “greedy,” but motivated by market pressures and those pressures create enormous wealth but also great misery for the majority. Because of the nature of the system workers can only advance if they act collectively. Pamphlet two: “Capitalism and the State.” We are living in a new Gilded Age, in which an immense concentration of wealth has grown together with the concentration of political power. This pamphlet analyzes the sources of state bias. We need to understand why, far from counteracting the power of capital, states tend to reinforce it. We need to recognize the structural forces that bind it to capitalist interests, even though capitalists’ small numbers should be a disadvantage in a democratic system. Pamphlet three: “Capitalism and Class Struggle.” The reason working-class struggles are central to Left politics is that they are the enabling condition for everything else. They create the power and the political leverage that enables us to act on our morals and ideological beliefs — whereas the morals and values without the leverage remain little more than pipedreams. In this third pamphlet, we develop the classic rationale for a class-based political strategy. 001......Page 1 002......Page 2 003......Page 3 004......Page 4 005......Page 5 006......Page 6 007......Page 7 008......Page 8 009......Page 9 010......Page 10 011......Page 11 012......Page 12 013......Page 13 014......Page 14 015......Page 15 016......Page 16 017......Page 17 018......Page 18 019......Page 19 020......Page 20 021......Page 21 022......Page 22 023......Page 23 024......Page 24 025......Page 25 026......Page 26 027......Page 27 028......Page 28 029......Page 29 030......Page 30 031......Page 31 032......Page 32 033......Page 33 034......Page 34 035......Page 35 036......Page 36 037......Page 37 038......Page 38 039......Page 39 040......Page 40