Reply To: The Elizabeth Warren Thread
I think you should have published the whole extract:
Item 26 Manchester Branch “The party is against capitalism, not individual particular capitalists”
In response to a promotional suggestion, one forum post commented ‘Amazon is the last company in the world we should contemplate having any truck with’. This seems to imply there are particular capitalists who we treat differently, some with more rancour than others. Perhaps some members think the party view is that surplus value can be extracted from workers more ethically by some capitalists than others? Perhaps some members think our case against capitalism is that some capitalists are extracting surplus value from workers not as ethically as they could be.
Aside from the practicalities of agreeing what an ethical extraction of surplus value under capitalism looks like, this has the potential to be a serious impediment to the party doing necessary business (or business judged beneficial for us) with capitalists for goods and services, to carry out the party’s job of making socialists. This isn’t an objection to singling out individual capitalists for propaganda purposes (in the Standard etc.). But in using it as an objection to doing necessary or beneficial party business with individual capitalists, this puts a non-systemic case against capitalism that is not Marxian and more akin to the Green Party.