We are ill-equipped to defeat an enemy we do not fully understand. From this basic premise, it follows that there are few errors more fatal than the underestimation of our enemies, for not only have we misunderstood them, but we have done so in such a way that will tend to disarm us and leave us underprepared to engage with them. As socialists, our primary enemy is the capitalist class, the class of property-owners and exploiters, a class sworn to defend the unjust, unsustainable capitalist system from our efforts to overthrow it. To ensure that we do not underestimate it, we must appreciate that the capitalist class is not a monolithic entity, but a dangerously complex one. It is a two-headed class. The two heads appear different, they behave differently at the surface level, but they both rely on the same social relation to exist, namely, the exploitation of the labor of the working-class majority.

The serpent of capitalism rears both its heads in our daily lives, but every now and then we have the good fortune to bear witness to a particularly transparent demonstration of each one in action. This past Thursday, the twenty-fourth of February, Furman YDSA was at the Greenville Women’s Clinic for an urgent session of abortion clinic defense against Operation Save America, a far-right organization described by clinic defenders on the scene as “Christian nationalist” and “white supremacist.” The label “fascist” will suffice for our purposes. These fascists were cruel, they were violent, they were stupendously reactionary. They threatened both us and the clinic’s patients with “eternal torment in Hell” and used their megaphones to broadcast tirades about how all humans are born wicked and deserve “death and Hell” until we accept OSA’s preferred variety of Christian dogma. They were quick to share their thoughts about queer people (best left to the imagination) and displayed appalling levels of antisemitism utterly unprompted. There is no mystery as to what class they hailed from. All of the principal actors, by their own admission or per our comrades who volunteer at the clinic full-time, are property-owners of one kind or another. Some own construction or landscaping companies. Others are landlords. One, without seeing the irony as someone ostensibly there to defend the sanctity of human life, admitted to working in the Department of Defense—not a bourgeois position per se but one inextricably bound up in the bourgeoisie’s apparatus of control. One of the landlords mystified us by boasting that he charges his tenants only $950 a month, a price for housing out of reach for the one-third of American workers, more than fifty million people, who make less than fifteen dollars an hour. Of course, this entire posse of parasites and petty tyrants worked in close coordination with the multimillion-dollar fake clinic across the street, whose mere existence, I noted last week, suggests the reactionaries enjoy the financial support of even larger business interests.

This is the first head of the capitalist serpent: vicious, reactionary, fascist. It does little to conceal its aims. A century ago, it donned a white hood and demanded “one hundred percent Americanism.” Today, it dons a red cap and demands that America be made great again. Bigotry and religious fundamentalism are the crude instruments with which it hopes to bludgeon the working class into submission.

After standing our ground at the clinic for five hours, we returned to campus and went about our day as students. I had a lab period for my sustainability class that afternoon, during which we took a tour of the inner workings of the dining hall. Our guide extolled the virtues of Bon Appetit, the company Furman contracts to manage dining on campus. We were all pleased to learn that Bon Appetit cares deeply about sustainability (hence the effort to source their ingredients locally) and workers’ welfare (take, for example, their boycott of Heinz for its labor abuses). On the way out of the dining hall, I ran into a worker who told me he was in the middle of a thirteen-hour shift. Workers’ welfare indeed. As we will all hear from the labor subcommittee at the next general meeting on March 17th, Bon Appetit and its multinational parent company are anything but ethical employers, if such a thing even exists. Behind the rosy picture they paint for us at Furman lies something rotten. 

This is the other head of the serpent: deceptive, cynically humanitarian, “progressive.” It goes to great lengths to launder its image with philanthropy, support for liberal social causes, even faux concern for the condition of the working class. It wants capitalism to be humane, a “fair deal” for worker and capitalist alike. But “humane capitalism” does not exist. The second head’s progressive face hides the fact that it subsists on the same basic social relation as the first—domination of the majority by the minority through the exploitation of labor. A society founded on that principle can only ever crush and oppress the human spirit; it could no more be a “fair deal” for the worker than slavery was a “fair deal” for the slave or feudalism a “fair deal” for the serf. 

A socialist movement that underappreciates the two-headed nature of the capitalist enemy is liable to fail to grasp what history demands of it. After all, is the Democratic Party—a political vehicle for the second head of capitalism—not a “progressive” force? Do Democrats not stand for civil rights, climate action, and social welfare, at least relative to the reactionary assaults mounted by the Republicans? It is easy to fall into the mindset that socialists should resign ourselves to the role of accomplices for liberal Democrats until an unspecified point in the future when the far right has been defeated. But we cannot rely on one faction of the capitalist class to protect us from another any more than we can rely on a serpent to wound itself by biting off one of its own heads. The Democrats largely take up progressive causes as a means of mobilizing sections of the working class as pawns in their dispute with the faction of capitalists represented by the Republicans, a mere “family feud” secondary to the life-and-death struggle between the owning and laboring classes. If we hope to revolutionize society, we cannot bloc with forces that will defend the ruling order to the hilt. If we want to liberate uniquely oppressed sections of the working class, we cannot bloc with forces that see issues like abortion rights, freedom from police terror, and the dignity of queer people as mere slogans for fundraising, never to be structurally resolved lest they cease to convince people to reach for their checkbooks in election season. No, the path to revolution and liberation is a path the working class must walk alone. The socialist movement must stand on its own two feet, learn to endure the open attacks of one face of the enemy while rejecting the sinister sweet-talking of the other, and lead a mass struggle at the ballot box, in the workplace, and in the streets. It is only then that we may slay the two-headed serpent of capitalism.