On iPhones

We announce the dissolution of this project. A great person has informed us that communists use iPhones, something Marx said not to do; if we can’t get rid of them, we can’t have communism. Long live capitalism!

The claim that communists should simply stop using products made in capitalist society since we oppose the exploitation that occurs in making them is both an ad hominem attack and a red herring. It attacks communist claims by attacking our personal actions, which have nothing to do with the correctness of what we say, and it it distracts from the topics in discussion. The “argument” is very much a logical fallacy, or rather it is two fallacies in one.

The idea also can’t be taken seriously since it is wrong to think that one can simply be free from society, especially capitalist society. Even if I was to put away all my personal belongings (created under capitalism), find some unclaimed forest and use it for my life, I would be living in air polluted by capitalist production, and the rain that would fall would likely have pollutants that capitalist production created. On top of this, whenever capitalists find unclaimed land, they claim it and commodify it; that is why they have colonized the world, and that is why they have pressured socialist countries with economic, political, and military attacks designed to force them to restore capitalism and have comprador capitalists control their governments. Any unclaimed forest I’d be in, should one even exist, would not be so for long.

Lastly, it is labor that creates the products we use. The ways this labor is organized, expended, and paid for are capitalist modes, yes, but that labor could be organized in a socialist mode of production and could still produce smartphones. If anything, socialist production would encourage innovation and invention by eliminating common capitalist hindrances to it; access to education, means of production, etc. would be great for the working people, letting scientists improve themselves and their society with their work as they don’t worry about its profitability. In contrast, capitalism in the USSR hindered innovation.

Socialism has invented and innovated much more than capitalists would like to admit; satellites were made in the USSR—in the revisionist, capitalist era, but only with the help of socialist technology and socialist-educated labor—, and now we use them for the internet. Nobody in their right mind says Ayn Rand should have went to the Siberian woods, stripped of all her products made in socialism and forced to make her own “capitalist” ones (as if “capitalist” use-values that are not commodified could exist). Nobody says we should end the use of satellites because the USSR made them. Nobody opposes the use of mobile phones, which were made in the USSR (again, the revisionist era, but with the benefits from the socialist era). Nobody opposes the use of socialist China’s treatment for chloroquine-resistant malaria.

So no, we are not ending our project because we use products from capitalism. We are only working harder on it because we fight for our class, the working class, which produces all those goods and which can produce and own those goods under socialism and communism!