In one typical attack on this strategy on RevLeft, a commentator called Goalkeeper crystalizes this argument in its most simple
"I mean, what could be more capitalist than insisting on the inclusion of capitalists in the revolution?"
So.... ok... let me break this down.
Communists: their targets and alliances
First, over the last century and more, the capitalists have not been the only (and sometimes not the main) target of revolution. There are other oppressors, and often workers and peasants (and communists) lived in countries where capitalism was not simply the only or dominant form of class oppression.
So, in situations were feudalism or slavery were major forms of oppression, and in situations were sections of the bourgeoisie were in revolutionary opposition to feudalism and slavery -- it was common for communists (starting with Marx and Engels obviously) to envision revolutionary alliances with sections of the early (and often radical) capitalist class.
You don't have to look far for this... but one place to look is Marx's writings on the American Civil War, and the actions of early American communists in that Civil War. And clearly, Marx envisioned the communists and workers fighting in close alliance with the capitalist Union government, and in particularly in alliance with the Radical Republicans, and in general alliance with Lincoln, Grant etc. Early German communists living in the U.S. often joined the Union army and several became prominent officers etc.
Now to use that historic example to answer the rather mechanical argument: When Karl Marx suggests an alliance with the Northern capitalists in the civil war, is he being pro-capitalist and class collaborationist? Is that view of an alliance (against slavery) a reactionary and capitalist idea?
The answer is no.
First, the dynamics of this world are not simple. It is not as if we only have workers (over here) and capitalists (over there). And so we can know (without investigation or thought) what is right and wrong by infantile logical deductions about "collaboration."
Now for Marx, the American Civil War was a great revolutionary project against slavery, which (in his view) would make the possibility of SOCIALIST and COMMUNIST revolution much more likely. He saw events going in stages, with nodal points, and believed that if the early communist movement did not throw itself into the struggle against slavery (meaning into a war that was obviously and perhaps inevitably under the leadership of the northern capitalists) that it was not possible to envision the overthrow of capitalism (including of those northern capitalists themselves). Welcome to the complexity (the dialectics) of actual history and real revolutions.
In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels talk (in an early 1848 kind of way) about how some of those things play out.
First, they point out that lower sections of the capitalists are sometimes (themselves) ruined by the larger dynamics of capitalism:
"Further, as we have already seen, entire sections of the ruling class are, by the advance of industry, precipitated into the proletariat, or are at least threatened in their conditions of existence. These also supply the proletariat with fresh elements of enlightenment and progress.
"Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the progress of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact within the whole range of old society, assumes such a violent, glaring character, that a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands. Just as, therefore, at an earlier period, a section of the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole."
Now this was a very early formulation by Marx, written long before any socialist movement was capable of leading a broad revolutionary movement under its own banners. So it is more in the realm of speculation than summation.
I raise it here not as some schematic formula we should adopt or as a prediction we should assume is prophetic. I raise it merely to point out that communists have, generally and historically, been open to common cause with sections of people with some wealth and privilege who are not visibly oppressed.
And that has to do with the objective objective class interests of such people-- which give them (at times) the political potential and impulse to make common cause with the far more deep-going communist project that has its greatest potential among the most oppressed.
The Syndicalist counter-example
There emerged in the late 19th and early 20th century, a kind of workerist socialism, that saw the socialist revolution in a trade unionist (syndicalist) way -- i.e. that the workers would organize unions, and those unions would take over society, and so the organizations of workers would become the structure of a future political decision-making.
And this kind of syndicalism sought to draw its presentation from a kind of working class identity politics: where the consciousness of being workers, and the desire for a militant defense of working class immediate interests was extended and morphed into the public image of the moment.
Perhaps the most famous U.S. example of that revolutionary current was the Industrial Workers of the World whose preamble starts:
"The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life. Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth."
There are several things to say about this statement (and syndicalist statements like it).
First it is quite radical, and quite sharply opposed to capitalism. It envisions a revolution and it calls for a totally different new order. (And in that sense, communists have always had deep sympathy for the IWW and their ideas -- and many early communists came out of the IWW, as it faded after World War 1 under the pressure of events and under its own contradictions).
Second, this presents an image of the world where there are really only two classes. There is no sense of alliance here. And this was a movement rooted in mill town and western mining camps -- where there often seemed to be only two classes. But in reality (then and now) there are many more classes that need to be factored in. For example, in 1905 when the IWW was on the rise, the U.S. South was a vast region of bitter oppression for African American farmers (forced into the semi-slavery of Jim Crow sharecropping). These farmers were a key potential ally of the struggle -- but were essentially ignored by the narrow politics of syndicalism, and by the complex prejudices and lack of knowledge that many industrial workers and radicals had about Black people.
Third: The idea that the workers and capitalists never have anything in common seems very radical, but as I mentioned above in regard to Marx, it does not understand the more complex contradictions of a world were (for many people) the struggle for liberation includes a massive component of anti-feudal and anti-colonial struggle (where there are potential allies in non-working classes for various historical reasons).
In other words, the syndicalism of the IWW (embodied in their "class against class" assumptions about the revolution) is both ahistorical and non-Marxist. It was the expression of an important working class revolutionary movement -- but their impoverished view of politics and alliance was part of their weakness (that led to their demise).
Lenin, for example, wrote powerfully on these matters -- most famously in regard to supporting the 1916 Easter uprising in Ireland (where the socialist revolution adopted a national coloration, not a simple workerist one).
Lenin wrote:
"To imagine that social revolution is conceivable without revolts by small nations in the colonies and in Europe, without revolutionary outbursts by a section of the petty bourgeoisie with all its prejudices, without a movement of the politically non-conscious proletarian and semi-proletarian masses against oppression by the landowners, the church, and the monarchy, against national oppression, etc. - to imagine all this is to repudiate social revolution.
"So one army lines up in one place and says, "We are for socialism," and another, somewhere else and says, "We are for imperialism," and that will be a social revolution! Only those who hold such a ridiculously pedantic view would vilify the Irish rebellion by calling it a "putsch.""
The ideas expressed here need to be thought through carefully, especially when people raise naive and simplistic notions about what a revolutionary movement looks like, and dismisses in a simplistic way the possibility of all kinds of different allies.
