Why I am a Marxist

What is it that makes me a Marxist? What underlying principle guides my mindset in that direction? Those are the questions I have been asking myself, and I have come to a very basic conclusion. I am not an activist, I like to think, and to try to understand and to articulate the conclusions I come to. So, what conclusions have I come to on this specific area of my min? What is it that makes me a Marxist?

It isn’t about waiting for the “revolution” to come. It isn’t about nurturing an insane idea about a conspiracy in which global power and wealth is controlled by the Bilderbergs. It isn’t about praying every night for the state to control the means of production. It isn’t about ironically displaying a Che t-shirt everywhere I go, or trying to put myself into the exact same camp as Trotsky, or Lenin, or putting a little cross on a political spectrum. It isn’t about wishful rhetoric on stalls across England, handing out Socialist Worker leaflets and declaring that Capitalism is about to fall. It isn’t about turning a blind eye to the fact that thousands of people live off state handouts, purely because they do not wish to work. It isn’t about stooping to the absurdity that the Right Wing often stoops to when it points out the Soviet Union as the failure of Marxism or points to Cuba as the evil of Socialism, because if it were, I could point to Reagan an Thatcher’s support for Pinochet and right winged murderous thugs throughout Central America as proof of the brutality of Capitalism; but i’d be wrong to do so. What makes me a Marxist in the most basic terms, is the necessity to distrust authority that bases itself purely on abstractions, in this case; wealth. Capitalism in this sense, is like religion; we are expected to submit to a higher authority, an authority that actually doesn’t really exist and is purely a construction of the time period that we inhabit. If we look at that constructed power structure from “outside” of the confines of the context of our historical position, we must laugh at the absurdity of our apparent necessity to hand our lives over to people who pay the lowest possible fee for our labour, whilst extracting and squeezing as much out of us. It is degrading, and it certainly isn’t “freedom”.

To expand a little on that, it is the sense that the very foundation of Capitalism – the owner of a business is entitled to the largest piece of the profits, because he invested capital in the first place – is a man made ideal that is loaded with flaws. I will attempt to articulate a couple of the flaws I see.

Firstly, capital by itself is pointless. Capital must fuse with labour to be worth anything. Labour without capital is not pointless. Labour can build, create, innovate, feed and save lives. Capital by itself can do nothing. Capital is a seed in a dark room on a table. Labour is the soil, the sun, and the water. Therefore, the guiding force and the most important aspect of the deal between capital and labour, is labour. If my boss leaves the workplace for a week, the place still runs just fine. If the entire workforce leaves for a week, the company will be in financial peril. That is the practical example of the notion that labour is the most important force in the productive World. Profit on the initial investment, is simply interest, created by someone else. It is not productive in itself. Buying a road and charging people to use it, or buying a house and renting it out, is not productive. Capital is not productive. The fact that it is then passed down to the children of the Capitalists – which makes the claim that Capitalism is based on individual merit, seem laughably hypocritical – suggests a class consciousness within the Capitalist classes; a desire to perpetuate their class attacking meritocratic principles in a sort of Capitalist paradox in which inter-family socialism is desirable, as long as it doesn’t spread beyond their own class.

We talk of productivity of the workforce, not of the capitalists. The labour of the man with the capital is irrelevant. He will usually monopolise some sort of administration work within the company, which need not be monopolised. Apart from that initial injection of capital, he is largely pointless. Stock market speculation and gambling is also not a productive use of capital. The inherent flaws in this system, Marx believed would eventually lead to its downfall.

It is easy for a working public to take shots at people on benefits, as it is all the media tends to talk about. We seem though to turn a blind eye to Corporate tax cuts. It is odd, because people at the top of the Corporate ladder will have used a thriving public sector – education, health service, roads – at some time in their lives which provided the framework necessary to climb the ladder to great wealth. By announcing Corporate tax cuts, the Tory Government is effectively burning the ladder up which their donors climbed to make it difficult for others to follow, destroying opportunity for the next generation, whilst at the same time ensuring that those who used the system previously, now pay as little back into it as possible. Corporate tax cuts represent a huge piece of the Welfare pie, going to the people who need it least. That, is wrong.

Secondly, Marxists recognise the key element of Capitalism is the accumulation of capital. You set out in the market place with capital, you buy labour, you sell your product or service, and you make your capital back with more in profit. All well and good, until you hit what Marx termed as a limit to capital. Capitalism doesn’t deal too well with limits. Limits can include competition, and to get around that limit, capital will buy up competition until there is very little left. It is the reason why large coffee producers can flood African markets, buy up the small family run coffee producers, and put the staff to work for pittance in factories in poor conditions, working extremely long hours. Capital needs to consolidate power. Democracy used to be a limit. Capital bought democracy when it became the norm for multinationals and the super rich to fun political parties and candidates. It is the reason why 81% of the $19,000,000 that was spent on the 2006 election from the big oil lobby, went to the Republican Party in 2006. That money was well spent it seems, given that in the run up to the Bush Administrations refusal to sign up to Kyoto – the climate change UN protocol – briefing emails were leaked from US under-secretary of state, Paula Dobriansky office before meetings which thank ExxonMobil executives “active involvement” in framing climate change policy. Which is odd, because in 2003, Exxon’s head of public affairs, Nick Thomas told a House of Lords Science Committee:

“I think we can say categorically we have not campaigned with the United States government or any other government to take any sort of position over Kyoto.”

He lied. The Bush Administrations climate policy, was dictated to them, by the most powerful and wealthiest oil companies in the US.

Democracy isn’t the only limit to be overcome. The limit in 2007/08 was 25 years worth of stagnating wages for everyone apart from the very wealthy, whose wages increased year on year in Western democracies, most notably in the UK and US. To ensure demand across the marketplace continued to thrive despite wages stagnating, Capitalism blew down this limit, by introducing a market for very very easy credit. The problem with this is that money is now entirely backed by debt and nothing else. The mortgage markets didn’t fail; Capitalism failed. This means that subprime mortgages and the securities that backed them were just products of a system that has crises after crises built into it. Don’t be fooled by the right winged rhetoric that instantly blamed and attacked the public sector and the welfare state. This sovereign debt crises is a crises of Capitalism that has been cleverly shifted away from the people who caused it (people who started off with vast amounts of capital, destroyed the system that allowed them the opportunity to make that fortune, and then left quietly with vast amounts of capital, whilst the rest of us are told we must suffer austerity) an onto the most vulnerable – those who do no have vast amounts of capital or political influence. Capitalism is amoral. Morality is not a part of Capitalism. That is why regulation is necessary.

And lastly, I am deeply suspicious of the very concept of Capitalism in regard to the individual worker. The idea being that the Capitalist advertises a job vacancy because he needs labour to fertilise his capital and gain the profit. The worker needs a job. The Capitalist buys the labour of the worker. The worker consents to allow the Capitalist to live comfortably off the back of his labour, for a very small amount of money – the lowest possible amount actually because the supply of workers is far greater than the demand for production. The worker consents to this rather odd deal, because if he doesn’t, he will starve to death. An example of this can be seen with “Family Dollar”, a chain of US discount stores. The CEO Howard Levine took home base salary of $948,654, a cash bonus of $1,894,615, stocks granted of $1,338,224, and options granted of $1,308,528. So you’d think, with wealth like that, Levine would have the human decency to pay his staff a decent wage, especially given that they are expected to work such long hours? Well, no, unsurprisingly he doesn’t treat his staff all that well. Most of the staff who are expected to work over time, are designated as “managers” at “Family Dollar“. This means that the company can get around the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, by designating the “managers” (who weren’t paid any more) as “exempt“, which meant they do not have to pay them over time. As employees struggle to cope with the horribly low pay and extremely long hours, “Family Dollar” managed to pay out $58 million in dividends in 2010. When workers have to take such awful jobs, working for horrendous bosses, simply to make ends meet, the scales are tipped firmly in the balance of the employer. The deal therefore, is not equal to start with. The Capitalist is driven by the desire to increase profits and buy a lovely new car, by using someone elses labour, to attach to his capital, and them claim some universal right over the product of that labour. The worker on the other hand is driven by survival, despite the fact that he is far more productive than the capitalist. If the business goes bust, it is more than likely that the Capitalist will have money saved, he will certainly have the experience needed to get a job in which he wont have to go long without a regular income. His workers on the other hand, having provided their old boss with the money he saved and now lives on, through their labour rather than his, will now have to either spend whatever little savings they’re likely to have on getting through a period of unemployment without starving, which could be twice as difficult if he lives in the USA and doesn’t have health insurance, and finds himself with a terrible illness.
One of the fathers of Capitalism, Turgot summed up it here:

“In all types of labour, it necessarily follows that the salary of the worker is limited to what is necessary for survival.”

In other words, when more people exist then wages are higher because the pool of labour is smaller, when less labour is needed, wages will slowly fall not because a worker is working less hard, but because a Capitalist can use the threat of starvation to insist on paying his staff less money. Capitalism posits that people are commodities.

To conclude and answer my original question; I am a Marxist because I do not believe the initial investment of capital into a business venture, provides a God-given right to claim the highest wage or the power of the business. The fact that we see this profit making right, as God-given, leads to dangerous games played by a very small amount of people who have accumulated great wealth, an it affects us all. When I sit back and really think about the current Euro zone crises, and the panic in the US over the raising of the debt ceiling, I wonder how humanity is so close to crumbling. We invented money. We invented the concepts of wealth and sovereign debt and price and wage and individual debt and stocks and we seem to think of it all as divine; untouchable; something beyond our grasp, when in actuality, it is all just one big illusion, an abstract concept, a web that we spun and eventually got stuck in. Productive people are still as numerous as they were in the 1990s, there is still the same amount of land, but there is an abundance of debt-backed money rather than savings. The difference is, productive people and land actually exist in reality, debt-backed money and capital on its own doesn’t.

That is why I am a Marxist.

The Enlightenment of the Devil

Dwindling aimlessly in the realm of unbelief, as I am doing recently, I am reading “God and the State” by Bakunin, along with a plethora of other books. A passage from God and the State stood out for me, because it sums up exactly how I feel about Christianity, and it’s obvious contradictions.

The quote:

“The Bible, which is a very interesting and here and there very profound book when considered as one of the oldest surviving manifestations of human wisdom and fancy, expresses this truth very naively in its myth of original sin. Jehovah, who of all the good gods adored by men was certainly the most jealous, the most vain, the most ferocious, the most unjust, the most bloodthirsty, the most despotic, and the most hostile to human dignity and liberty-Jehovah had just created Adam and Eve, to satisfy we know not what caprice; no doubt to while away his time, which must weigh heavy on his hands in his eternal egoistic solitude, or that he might have some new slaves.

He generously placed at their disposal the whole earth, with all its fruits and animals, and set but a single limit to this complete enjoyment. He expressly forbade them from touching the fruit of the tree of knowledge. He wished, therefore, that man, destitute of all understanding of himself, should remain an eternal beast, ever on all-fours before the eternal God, his creator and his master. But here steps in Satan, the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and the emancipator of worlds. He makes man ashamed of his bestial ignorance and obedience; he emancipates him, stamps upon his brow the seal of liberty and humanity, in urging him to disobey and eat of the fruit of knowledge.”

I wanted to expand on this quote.
What Bakunin is getting at, is the idea that the God of the Bible is a ruthless, heartless, crazed dictator. He wants His subjects to understand that they should not question Him. He holds the ultimate knowledge and they shouldn’t. If anyone disobeys him, as Adam and Eve did, they shall be punished. The Catholic Church similarly seemed to punish anyone throughout the centuries, who fell across ideas and discoveries that ran contrary to their teaching. The Church’s treatment of Galileo is a famous example of the brutality of the Church when its authority is challenged. God had the same superiority complex, and tantrum when humanity demanded educating, in the garden of Eden. He created the concept of sin, He punishes a concept that he created, and then a few thousand years later He sends His one begotten son, to die an horrific death in order to absorb the concept that He created in the first place.

God placed a restriction on knowledge. He demanded obedient slaves, and if they wanted to improve their knowledge, they would be punished. Alongside complete obedience, he demands worship. This seem like a game. It serves no overriding purpose. Pawns are played with. And to make matters worse, those pawns are given curiosity and a yearning for knowledge and self improvement, built into their mentality. This wretched little game played by God, is both pointless, and torturous.

Along comes Satan. A symbol of evil, simply, it seems, because he tempts humanity away from God. I’m not entirely sure why this is considered a great evil. We must first accept that we wish to be next to God, to be tempted from him. And that requires our faculties of reason. Perhaps then, Satan is getting a bit of a bad press. Why is the questioning of authority a bad thing? It seems to me that questioning authority, is the basis of liberty. God wants complete obedience as revealed through scripture. This means any progressive free thinking is entirely forbidden. It means if our conscience tells us that a cute old lesbian couple, deeply in love, are not evil people destined for hell, we are to ignore it and instead choose prejudice as sanctioned by the Bible. If we follow our conscience (a conscience given to us by God in the first place), we are simply being tested by the evil of Satan. It means, Galileo should have been imprisoned for questioning Christian dogma, dogma that plunged Europe into a devastating Dark Age, ruthlessly suppressing all advancement, and discarding advances made by the Greeks. Free thought and curiosity, according to God, is a sin. That is the way of God. Satan, if anything, tells you to think for yourself.

If I am to think that the the systematic murder of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of first born children, sanctioned and executed by God in the book of Exodus, is wrong, I am being tempted by the Devil away from God. I should be condemning those first born children. That is the reality of being close to God.

Further in Exodus, we see God demanding the deaths of anyone who dances around the golden calf. This includes family, children and friends of the group. Exodus 32:28 suggests 3000 people were slaughtered for dancing around a calf. I’d say this God is evil.

In Numbers 31, God commands the total annihilation of the Midianite people (The Midianites were a tribe of Abraham’s descendants through the line of Keturah. This story always struck me as particularly cruel, whenever I read the Bible. I have my copy of the Bible sat on my lap as I write this, and I cannot for the life of me workout how anyone can read it, and not despise this God as we despise people like Hitler and Pol Pot. He seems no different. After the annihilation of the Midianite people, Moses, working on the command of God, says:

“……. kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known man intimately. But all the girls who have not known man intimately, spare for yourselves.”

Kill all the male children, but keep the female children, as long as they’re virgins, for themselves. Nice. 32,000 virgins in all. I am not sure how Christians or Jews can suggest that any children deserve that treatment. The Midianites inhabited a large area. Much of Northern Arabia was Midianite territory at one stage. They were a diverse people.

An authoritarian God, cannot also promote truly ethical values and behaviour. An authoritarian God necessarily negates free will. We must be good because we’re commanded to be good, by the standard of Holy Texts that most of us find the majority of, to be abhorrent to our sense of right and wrong. Morality is not morality, if it is forced and threatened.

“The Catechism of the Catholic Church”, a book of defined Catholicism suggests that Satan exists only because God allows him too. In paragraph 395, it states:

Although Satan may act in the world out of hatred for God and his kingdom in Christ Jesus, and although his action may cause grave injuries – of a spiritual nature and, indirectly, even of a physical nature- to each man and to society, the action is permitted by divine providence.

You may be mistaken into thinking that the above is the ramblings of an insane person. You’d be wrong. But only slightly. It is the ramblings of an insane institution; the Church. God allows Satan to exist. God therefore allows what he considers evil to exist. He is not at war with evil, he will never be at war with evil, because he is in complete control at all times. Which suggests, he isn’t all that loving afterall. But we knew that, given that he’s already wiped out a few million people, whilst condemning young virgins to a life of abuse at the hands of his followers (Catholic Priests are carrying on the tradition recently, it would seem).

Paragraph 397 states:

Man, tempted by the devil, let his trust in his Creator die in his heart and, abusing his freedom, disobeyed God’s command. This is what man’s first sin consisted of. All subsequent sin would be disobedience toward God and lack of trust in his goodness.

- Interesting use of the word ‘freedom‘. You are ‘free‘ to decide whether or not to believe in God’s word, but if you choose not to, you will be punished. That’s like saying to your child “You are free to play with the skateboard indoors, but if you do, I will put your head in the oven.” Freedom isn’t freedom if one of the two available chooses includes awful punishment.

In fact, there are virtually millions upon millions of people condemned to death, and violent deaths at that, by God. I cannot for the life of me find one death ordered by Satan. All he tends to do, is tempt people to question everything this maniac in the sky tells them. Satan, although portrayed in Christian literature (although not so much in the Bible) as the fallen angel turned demon, sent to tempt humanity into evil, seems actually to be the voice of reason. If we were to take the Bible as metaphor, perhaps one could infer that Satan represents reason, and enlightenment, whereas God represents Christian/Islamic dogma and slavery.

The only way we “know” that Satan is evil, is because it is alluded to in the Bible and subsequent Christian texts. Forgive me for saying, but I am not going to rely on the writings of the single most violent and corrupt institution that has existed over the past two thousand years, to lecture me on what is good and what is evil. How hypocritical of them. It also suggests that Satan is far more powerful than God. The entire history of humanity and its suffering, according to Biblical principles, was caused by Satan. The triumph of free thought over mind-dictatorship.

Bakunin points out that Satan is the first great rebel against great an evil authoritative figure. He encourages disobedience and questioning. He is the founder of the enlightenment, millennia before the enlightenment takes place. Satan is the Christian version of Prometheus. A champion of mankind. It would appear that Christianity has taught us, that an entity that gave us the courage to investigate for ourselves, and expand our understanding, and to question everything; is evil. Genocide on a scale that would make Stalin fall to his knees in awe, gets twisted and presented as “good”, whereas educating people away from this nonsense, is presented as “evil”. Christianity is therefore a very regressive force within society. The Catholic Church embodies this regressive nature perfectly.

The Enlightenment, and all the advances it brought with it. The scientific method, political and social rights, evolutionary theory, separation of Church and State….. This is what the Biblical God forbids, and attributes entirely to Satan.

We should perhaps be a little more critical of the Theocratic dictator God whom punishes you for loving the ‘wrong’ person, requires constant worship, and demands complete obedience, and a little less critical of the free thinking, enlightened Devil.

Is Obama a Marxist?

No.
That is the short answer to the question.
Whenever a politician deeply angers the American right wing, I start to really like that particular politician. They must be doing something right.
Plenty of Glenn Beck addicts, and right winged Americans who seemingly have no idea what Marxism actually is, keep throwing the word MARXIST at Obama. I take great offence at this, because I quite like Marx. I also quite like Che Guevara.
I quite like Marxism, I quite like Bakunin too. And Obama is quite the opposite. And here’s why.

He isn’t forcing business to meet production quotas.

Those same businesses that aren’t forced to meet production quotas are also not run by the workers.

He has never called for a mass workers revolution.

Nor are the above three points ever going to happen.

Left wing, does not mean Marxist.

Government interference in some aspects of the economy, in order to prop up demand during capitalist busts, are not Marxist. In fact, they are Keynesian. Which again, is not Marxism. The World is not as black and white as the right wing likes to make out. The choice isn’t Reagan, or Marx.

A Marxist would not put ex-bankers in his Treasury.

Actually, A Marxist wouldn’t have a treasury, because a Marxist wouldn’t be in power, because power wouldn’t exist.

Regulation on amoral industry to stop it becoming immoral industry, is not Marxist.

Keynes was not a Marxist.

Safety nets like Social Security, are not Marxist.

There is no democratic control of the means of production.

Wages exist.

Your State and National borders exist.

Government programs paid for by taxpayers are not Marxist because A) Money would be abolished under true Marxism, and B) Government wouldn’t exist under true Marxism, because Marxism is pretty close to what Bakunin and Kroptkin advocated.

Being black, and friends with Muslims, does not make him a Marxist terrorist who hates White people.

Nor does it make it so, if Glenn Beck says it.

Obama is President. Head of a Government. A Nation State. The very concept of a President, Government and State is anti-Marxist.

In fact, any kind of government regulation set by the State from Minimum wage to Medicare, runs contrary to Marxism, because it legitimises the State.

No industry is Nationalised (unless you count the police force and fire department as industries, by most Right Winged Americans tend to over look those).

And before you say it, Healthcare in the U.S is not Nationalised.

Ask your local supermarket chain if they’re making a profit. If they are, then Marxism has not come to America.

Being Atheist, does not make one a Marxist. (Obama’s religious beliefs are irrelevant).

Obama has never tried to suggest that private property be abolished, that division caused by the free flow of capital is the root of all evil, and all means of productions be taken over by a workers revolution. Until he does, he in no way can be considered Marxist.

The Founding Fathers were neither Socialist nor neoliberalist proponents, because they did not know what Socialism and Neoliberalism were. Are you a proponent or exponent of Chrositographicness? You’re neither, because you don’t know what it is, neither do I, I just made it up. Similarly, the words Neoliberalism and Socialism would have made no sense to the Founders. Stop trying to manipulate their words to suit your agenda.

Higher taxes on the rich, does not mean Marxism. In fact, Marx never mentions the concept.

Just because Obama hung around with members of Socialist and Communist parties in his college days, does not mean he wishes to turn America into the USSA. It’s like saying, he was friends with a few posh British people, and so that clearly means he wishes to revoke independence and become a colony of the British again.

A society that uses welfare to further perpetuate the division between employer and employee, is not Marxist.

Obama is further to the right than Britain’s Liberal Democrats, who are centre-left. He is further right than the Swedes. Both the Lib Dems and the Swedes are not Marxists. The entire World other than crazed right winged Americans understand this. In fact, Swedish healthcare, EVIL MARXIST healthcare, ranks close to the top of the World rankings. America’s system, well, let’s just say it’s fucking appalling. Swedish education, including higher education is free for all, and they still have a higher rate of social mobility than the U.S. EVIL MARXISTS!!!

If we were to look at the politics of, say, Conservative hero Disraeli, we see that actually, by todays standards, Disraeli is more ‘Socialist’ than Obama could ever hope to be. Obama is a one nation conservative of old.

The ‘hike’ in the top rate of tax by the Obama administration for 2013 to 36.9% is not at all a tax hike, and just a rise from the Bush era. Between 1993, and 2000 (also known as the boom years), the top rate of tax was …. 39.6%… exactly as the President has proposed for 2013. By mad Republican standards, every President has been a mad Socialist. Except for Bush. Reagan would certainly fall into the category of ‘Marxist’ by 21st Century Republican standards.

George Orwell’s 1984 does not represent a Marxist style of government. It was a critique on the misuse of Marxism for totalitarian gain. It is an Authoritarian government; Stalinist, if you will. The whole point was to critique Stalin. Orwell was a Marxist. 1984 was not Marxism. Saying “it’s like 1984!!” when speaking of Obama is nonsense and then saying he’s a Marxist, is incompatible. You do not have a telescreen in your house. You do not have a number assigned to you by the single ruling party. You do not have to work changing history for the government owned media, and your kids do not report you to the thoughtpolice who then do not go on to torture you into submission. Therefore, stop using the phrase “big brother society”, your scare tactics wont work.

Obama is not, never has been, and never will be a Marxist.

Viva La Revolucion!

I wonder, just how safe is the Capitalist structure (assuming we’ve actually ever lived in a Capitalist structured society….. because, well, we haven’t), when you get right down to a fundamental level?

Imagine a very rude boss, that you and I have. He talks to us like dirt. He does not know our names. He points when he wants our attention. He once told us, whilst the staff were working pretty damn hard, sweating, to make him money, that he was “losing faith in you lot tonight”. We’re also lugubriously aware constantly, that if the law allowed for it, he would pay us as small as possible whilst keeping as much as possible for himself. It is the reason we’re on minimum wage. That’s the nature of Capitalism.

At that point, I wondered, what is actually stopping me from replying to his “losing faith” comment, with “Okay, you fucking do it yourself” and walking out? Surely it would only take one great orator of the working man to say to a boss like that:

“It may seem to the controlled masses that we rely on people like you to pay our wages and to fund our rather feeble existence. But that isn’t the case. It is the opposite. You rely on people like us. The automatic assumption is that you own the place, and so you’re entitled to the highest share of the revenue. This is quite obviously a social creation of the propertied classes, and I have no idea why that social creation would be protected by law, as if it’s an objective truth. It isn’t. Because without us, making the money in the first place, you’d have nothing. The very reason you and your luxurious lifestyle is continuously funded, is because we work hard for a small chunk of money whilst you’re ‘losing faith’ in us, but driving home in your expensive car, that we’ve financed. Without the surplus value that we create, you’re nothing. We make you what you are. If you were to leave the building now, nothing would change. But if we were all to leave the building now, this place would be economically destroyed. So who is more important, right this moment?
So you either treat us with respect, and understand that we all rely on each other, or we can quickly become your worst fucking nightmare.”

What is there to stop that happening? The “owner” walks a very thin tightrope every time he displays a rude, obnoxious attitude. The worker does not seem to realise the power that he/she actually could yield. He instead, is distracted with promises of consumerist heaven. A brand new 30inch TV that he does not need!!! Or a lovely new car, faster than most, but can only actually stick to 30mph on most roads like every other car. That materialist distraction, that “I may lose my job if I rebel” is the only real reason (political oppression being another reason) that the landed classes have survived for so long.

Why is it a terrible idea that those of us who work the place, couldn’t run the place better than the guy at the top? Why can’t we be in control of the surplus that we have made? Why can’t we be trusted?

And whilst Marx, and Lenin, and Bakunin, and Depestre among others, considered a revolution of the workers to be imminent, i’d suggest that the majority of the workforce, with it’s infinite power, is so distracted with what shit they can own, a revolution of the workers is disastrously unlikely.

By the very fact that workers have such power, that they, collectively, could yield at any moment they so wished (what is stopping us?), it would suggest that Socialism is not dead (nor has it ever actually taken place), merely hidden away, and simply needs one great orator of the working man, to step forward and make the case for the Left, and the deal is done.

Pro-Capitalists saw the problem throughout the 20th Century, that working men could easily be persuaded to stand up for themselves in the face of their rather weak oppressors. It is how battles for Union rights were won; how minimum wage legislation was won (The Conservative Party….. including David Cameron, opposed Minimum wage…… those are the people like our boss, in my scenario); how the NHS was created. Capitalism saw, in the years proceeding the industrial revolution, that workers (both white and black) were sick of their conditions and awful treatment and pay, and so racism was used as a divisive wedge between white and black, so suddenly the rich white capitalist wasn’t the problem for the white working class man, he was angry at the black working class man for “stealing all our jobs”. Despite the fact, and rather ironically, that the white working class man had far more in common with the black working class man, than he ever did with the white rich guy who was fucking them both over.

Then came the Soviets. Capitalism painted the Soviets (and thus, Communism and Socialism) as evil. Despite the fact that the Soviet Union was far from Communist and actually run more as State Capitalism. But fear was used. Evil murderous bastards!!! The population decided it must be true. But conveniently ignored the amount of right winged terror cells the U.S was sponsoring throughout the Cold War period. And suddenly Socialism had the Soviet stigma attached to it, rather pathetically. All of a sudden, you speak like a Socialist, you ask why people are hungry, you question the legitimacy of a system built on desperation by the propertied classes, and you lose all credibility. Well fuck that. This is my reality. It isn’t anyone elses.
Capitalism has done a very good job at masking subjectivity behind a wall of false objectivity.

The Soviet Union died. So now where do we place the wedge? Ah yes. Immigrants. They’re taking all our homes, right? WRONG. The last survey in the UK showed that only 1.8% of social tenants are immigrants of the past five years have been given social housing. Over 85% are UK born. So where are all the houses? White Brits will never accept that their own “kind” are to blame. Like racism of early America, we in the UK should accept that we have far more in common with the Pakistani gentleman living next door to us, than we do with the rich white Brit who owns four or five homes, using only one to live in, whilst the others are used as holiday homes once a year, destroying local economies (Beadnell in Northumberland is a great example). But, that rich white Brit has far more right under the eyes of the law, and Capitalism, than the residents of that small locality have to live in peace and without fear of economic ruin.

Capitalism has took aim at the homeless too. They’re “lazy” so don’t deserve help, apparently. They should “help themselves” (because obviously, we’re all the same). Begging is the “lowest of the low“. And yet, it isn’t considered begging, to see Coca Cola adverts everywhere I go; TV, billboards, sponsoring sporting events, paying abominable sums of money for a sports star to advertise their drink (which actually works, to the shame of us lower classes), whilst trying to save money by dumping toxic waste in a public space in a poor area of India, is fine apparently. That’s perfectly fine. But asking for a few pound change, in order to actually stay alive, is low?

The working man, whether black, white, Asian, British, Spanish, Indian, whatever….. has far more to gain, and far more power, and strikes far more fear into the stone hearts of the propertied class, than they’d ever believe possible. If an insurrection were to occur in my lifetime, i’d fully support the workers.