By Richard Mellor in California
Editorial note: Richard Mellor’s comments here refer to the short video below on ‘socialism’, the first part of which is an interview of Abdul El Sayed, on Fox News.
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The comments I am responding to are at the very beginning of the video, although Fox is not a news channel and the woman interviewing is not a journalist. I do not support the Democratic Party, and I’m certainly not a Republican Party supporter. I feel the utmost sympathy for Abdul El Sayed having to suffer the racism and religious bigotry being thrown at him in this country, with the ‘orange thing’ in the White House leading the charge.
If I lived in Michigan [where the Democrat defeated by El Sayed in the primaries has now endorsed the Republican candidate] I’d vote for him just to stick it to these racist, nationalist market-loving ideologues.
Anyway, I am responding here to Abdul El Sayed’s response to this Fox propagandist on whether he is concerned as a capitalist, about the rise of Democratic Socialism in the US. The interviewer means the DSA, and social democratic political views. He answers it with dignity, but there is more that should be said.
This is how poor the political discourse is in the US, not to mention class consciousness. It’s quite staggering. As far as I know, Abdul El Sayed is not a capitalist, he is a worker. He gets paid a wage for his labour power and he gets paid quite well for it. It costs a lot to produce a doctor. I think he is a public servant.
Given that he earns a good living, he may well put some of that capital to work and have some sort of side business, therefore acting as a capitalist in some way. I don’t know. But I worked with guys (I had a good union civil service job) who owned a couple of properties, some of them it was what their parents left to them when they died. So, they were landlords.
The basis of survival was their jobs
But their basis for survival was their jobs. We had good pay, the opportunity to work a lot of overtime and we had very good benefits by American standards, especially health care. These essentials were covered by the jobs we had and that we were public sector workers and we had a union. So, they could play capitalists for a bit, having a certain amount of security.
But landlordism, a section of the capitalist class whose means of subsistence is based solely on owning shelter (homes), is different to a worker who has some spare capital, having a decent job, and earns enough to borrow money and buy a place they can rent out.
Some workers might earn enough that the moneylenders will lend them money to buy two or three properties, maybe enough to quit their regular job. Then they join (albeit at the lower rungs), of that section of the capitalist class we call landlordism. But as soon as hard times hit, small capitalists like that can quite easily end up back among the ranks of the working class or the unemployed or indigent.
So, what my co-workers meant when they said they were capitalists, was they support capitalism. And generally, they meant as opposed to socialism or particularly ‘communism’ which they believed was the system in the Soviet Union or China. Though neither of these states are or were communist. Of course, they support capitalism and the right of the boss to lay off workers until it was their jobs that were on the chopping block.
I don’t fault Abdul El Sayed for responding the way he does; he is a doctor not a political person to my knowledge. I don’t know if he knows much about Eugene Debs or Karl Marx, but it is important to point out the lack of clarity in the US that has come about due to the failure of the heads of organised labour on the one hand, coupled with the absence of a national working class party and the power of the mass media on the other.
Just because you vote for a capitalist party (we only have two options here and they are both capitalist parties) doesn’t mean you’re a capitalist. But, let’s be honest, workers refer to themselves a ‘middle class’ here, well-paid union workers anyway. That reflects the power of the capitalist class and their media in this country in the post-World War Two era, that we can call ourselves what we are not.
Adapted from the post on the US socialist website, Facts for Working People, here.
Feature photograph is a screen shot from the interview on Fox News
