Defense in Depth

Why Capitalists Support Left Leaning Socialists

I watched Jimmy Dore interview Chris Hedges. Both men go hard against the Democrats and the Republicans. Dore described himself as basically a liberal capitalist and asked Hedges if he was a communist. Both men, as I heard them, buy the fallacy that voting in elections can fix the problem. I think that belief is either misguided or disingenuous. The central question of communism is who owns things. Someone owns the factories, the land, the housing, the banks, the media and the water. That owner decides what the property does. Wages, prices, working hours, health care and war all follow from those decisions. Communism asks that ownership pass from a small class to the people who do the work. Every reform short of that leaves the owners where they are.

Owners understand this question better than most of the left does. Military planners have a name for how owners act on it. They call it defense in depth. A commander who expects to lose ground does not hold every line to the last soldier. He builds layers. He gives up the outer positions in order and makes each loss cost the attacker time. He keeps his strongest force around the one position that decides the war. For the owning class that position is ownership itself. The outer layers are tax rates, regulation, union recognition, a minimum wage, health coverage…