"In actual history, it is notorious that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, and force, play the great part." - Karl Marx
Arguments against socialist ideas and principles are taught in the classrooms or disseminated by the mass media, are nothing more than the mythological construction of, and obsession with, equating socialism to government authority. Mainstream education and journalists continue to falsely associate capitalism with freedom, private property with liberty, and socialism with dictatorship and theft. There simply is no substance because there has been literally no scholarship on these topics. It is done without any learning, any thought, any investigation, or any historical analysis. It is simply propaganda, designed for one purpose and one purpose only: to justify and maintain a system of exploitation, oppression, and mass inequality. Victims of the capitalist system are made to believe our victimization is not only justifiable but necessary – there is no alternative. This one-liner has been used ad nauseam by proponents of capitalism. It is, after all, a perfect sound bite for those who do not want to take the time to read and learn or to critically think. The notion of private property is lauded by right-wing theories of "libertarianism" as the basis of liberty and freedom. In reality, private property accomplishes the opposite and makes any semblance of human liberty obsolete and impossible. Legalistically, under capitalism and the state's enforcement of property law, the illegitimate ownership of land creates a scenario where land is monopolized by an extremely small and privileged group of people for the sole purpose of extracting wealth (essentially through force and coercion) from both natural and human resources. The essence of capitalism is to turn nature into commodities and commodities into capital.
Anti-socialist propaganda is based upon four basic presuppositions:
(1) that capitalism equals freedom; or, at the very least, is the only alternative,
(2) that capitalism naturally produces "winners" and "losers,"
(3) that capitalism is as meritocratic as possible, and thus everyone has an equal opportunity to become a "winner" or "loser," and your individual outcome is based solely on your "hard work" or lack thereof, and
(4) that "winners" have earned their wealth through their own exceptionalism, and thus deserve it; while, in contrast, "losers" have earned their impoverishment through their own shortcomings, and thus deserve it.
These ideas are ahistorical, they rely on a theory - that human beings, as we exist today, have just appeared in our current state, and that this state and was not shaped by history, as history does not exist. With this blank-slate approach, investigation is not necessary and inquiry is not necessary. Because finding the roots of these ills is a painstaking and overwhelming process that would rather be deemed unnecessary. For the world is as it is, the systems we live in are the best we can do, and emotion and instinct are all we need when reacting to the problems placed before us. In reality, there are historical causes and effects that have created modern conditions. Wealth, land, and power are accumulated in only one fundamental way: through the murdering, maiming, coercing, stealing, robbing, or exploiting of others. There simply is no other way to amass the obscene amounts of personal wealth as have been amassed on earth. Certainly not by hard work or abstinence. The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer has been the case throughout history. It's no secret that capitalism has run amok over the past centuries
Capitalism is a system of property owners and property-less workers and respective governmental systems have always used their power to keep that division intact, literally for the sake of keeping wealth with wealth, and thus, power with the powerful. The founding fathers of the United States, as wealthy landowners and aristocrats, had no intentions of swaying from this model. When constructing a unique federal system in the colonies, John Jay captured the consensus thought of the Constitutional convention in Philadelphia, proclaiming that "those who own the country ought to govern it." And, in the influential Federalist Papers, James Madison echoed this sentiment, urging that a priority for any governmental system should be to "protect the minority of the opulent (the wealthy, land-owning slave-owners) against the majority (the workers, servants, and slaves)."
No new social class came to power through the door of the American Revolution. The men who engineered the revolt were largely members of the colonial ruling class. There was nothing egalitarian about this experiment. Roughly 10 percent of the American settlers, consisting of large landholders (the landed aristocracy) and merchants (the commercial aristocracy), owned nearly half the wealth of the entire country, and held as slaves one-seventh of the country's people. The founding fathers and settlers sought to create a political and governmental system that avoided handing any meaningful sense of power or influence to the people, while also establishing a rule of law capable of protecting the extreme unequal distribution of land and wealth. A general insecurity and fear of the masses, or "the mob," was a primary motivation in the birth of the nation. The makers of the constitution had direct economic interests in establishing a strong federal government: The manufacturers needed protective tariffs; the money-lenders wanted to stop the use of paper money to pay off debts; the land speculators wanted protection as they invaded Indian lands; slave owners needed federal security against slave revolts and runaways; bondholders wanted a government able to raise money by nationwide taxation, to pay off those bonds.
Whether speaking of caste systems, nobility, aristocracy, feudalism, indentured servitude, chattel slavery, or capitalism, all modern socioeconomic systems have carried one common trait: they all amount to a minority using the majority (through exploitation or displacement) as a source of wealth, and thus have enforced and maintained this causal relationship by the threat and use of physical force and coercion in order to protect their minority interests. An economic system that relies on structural unemployment (a "reserve army of labour"), mass labor exploitation, the concentration of private property via the displacement of the majority, the forced extraction of natural resources, and constant production for the sake of conspicuous consumption needs a coercive, powerful, and forceful apparatus to protect and maintain it. The capitalist state serves this need,
In 1937, investigative journalist Ferdinand Lundberg obtained tax records and other historical documents in order to expose this perpetual chain of concentrated wealth. His findings, duly titled "America's 60 Families," concluded that:
"The United States is owned and dominated today by a hierarchy of its sixty richest families, buttressed by no more than ninety families of lesser wealth. These families are the living center of the modern industrial oligarchy which dominates the United States, functioning discreetly under a de jure democratic form of government behind which a de facto government, absolutist and plutocratic in its lineaments, has gradually taken form. This de facto government is actually the government of the United States - informal, invisible, shadowy. It is the government of money in a dollar democracy."
Nothing has changed. The unequal beginnings have remained consistent through history and have been maintained through a governmental system designed to protect them. From chattel slavery to wage slavery each epoch has continued seamlessly by constantly replacing and rebranding forms of human exploitation - peasant, servant, slave, tenant, labourer - as sources of concentrated wealth. Humanity is kept in line with drugs, television, and armed force. The world's problems are the result of capitalism. It is working exactly as it is supposed to work, intensifying as time goes on. Wealth and greed continue to rule the day and the wealthy are unapologetic.
62 individuals have been allowed to amass the same amount of wealth as 3.6 billion people combined. As of 2010, " the top 1% of US households (the upper class) owned 35.4% of all privately held wealth, and the next 19% (the managerial, professional, and small business stratum) had 53.5%, which means that just 20% of the people owned a remarkable 89%, leaving only 11% of the wealth for the bottom 80% (wage and salary workers). In terms of financial wealth (total net worth minus the value of one's home), the top 1% of households had an even greater share: 42.1%."
“In virtue of this monstrous system, the children of the worker, on entering life, find no fields which they may till, no machine which they may tend, no mine in which they may dig, without accepting to leave a great part of what they will produce to a master. They must sell their labour for a scant and uncertain wage." - Kropotkin in ‘The Conquest of Bread’
The basic mechanisms of capitalism is the relationship between capital and labor. No matter what argument one may make in support of capitalism, this fundamental relationship can never be denied. Everything from entrepreneurship to small, family-owned businesses to corporate conglomerates must rely on this foundational interaction inherent to this economic system. Whether branded as "crony-capitalism," "corporate-capitalism," "unfettered-capitalism" or any one of the many monikers used to distract from its inherent flaws and contradictions, proponents can't deny its lifeblood - its need to exploit labor. And they can't deny the fundamental way in which it exploits labor - by utilizing property as a social relationship. It is in this relationship where masses of human beings are commodified, essentially transformed into machines, and forced to work so they may create wealth for those who employ them. This fundamental aspect of capitalism is not debatable. It is explained by Marx in Capital, Volume One:
The use of private property as a way to exploit others is unique to capitalism. For example, in contrast to feudalism, capitalists only allow workers access to their property during times when said workers are laboring to create wealth for said owners. In feudal times peasants were allowed to live on this land, and even use it as a means to sustain themselves and their families, as long as this personal activity was done after the lord's work had been completed. Now, with capitalism, workers "clock in," proceed to labor for a specified amount of time in exchange for a fraction of the wealth they create, "clock off," and then are left to find their own means of housing, food, clothing, and basic sustenance with only the wage they receive. This latter task has proven to be difficult for a majority of the world's population for the past number of centuries, even in so-called industrialized nations, which is why welfare states have become prominent as a means to facilitate the mass exploitation of the working class. Capitalists, and their governments learned long ago that workers must be able to survive, if only barely so that they may continue to labor and consume.
The unnatural and unequal distribution of power among humanity can be understood by simply imagining the start of any such society, where all would have equal footing, equal rights, equitable futures, and the basic will to satisfy needs (without taking that will away from others). However, if and when a member of that community decides to take more than they need, they immediately create a scenario where others will inevitably go without, be subjected to an exploitative social relationship, and/or rely on the illegitimate landowner for basic needs (in the form of some sort of exchange). Those who own property exploit those who do not. This is because those who do not own have to pay or sell their labor to those who do own in order to get access to the resources they need to live and work (such as workplaces, machinery, land, credit, housing, and products under patents).
And because of this inherently exploitative and dehumanizing labor process found under capitalism, the state has been needed to act on behalf of those who accumulate the illegitimate wealth from this process. Without the state, this unequal social arrangement - where the majority is essentially born into bondage - would not survive. In every system of class exploitation, a ruling class controls access to the means of production in order to extract tribute from labor. Capitalism is no exception.
Jean-Jacque Rousseau, in his 1755 ‘Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men,’ wrote:
"The first man who, having fenced off a plot of land, thought of saying, 'This is mine' and found people simple enough to believe him was the real founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars, murders, how many miseries and horrors might the human race had been spared by the one who, upon pulling up the stakes or filling in the ditch, had shouted to his fellow men: 'Beware of listening to this impostor; you are lost if you forget the fruits of the earth belong to all and that the earth belongs to no one.' "
The wealthy few have stolen from the world; and have enslaved, impoverished, and indebted the rest of us (over 7 billion people) in the process. They have no right to their wealth. It belongs to us - it belongs to global society, not so we can all live extravagant luxury lifestyles, but rather so we can satisfy the most basic of human rights and needs - food, clothing, shelter, healthcare, education - and thus carry on our lives as productive and creative human beings. Imposing new forms of taxation is a pathetic compromise. Reforms and regulations have tried and failed. Expecting representatives from the ruling class (who are directly employed and controlled by the owning class) with hopes of them voting away their own wealth has been proven to be a perpetual act in futility. The only just solution is to re-appropriate the stolen wealth; to end the capitalist system; to allow human beings the dignity and self-determination they deserve and to expropriate the expropriators once and for all. Righting centuries of wrongs is not "theft," it's social justice.
Adapted and abridged from an article by Colin Jenkins of the Hampton Institution. Full article can be found here.
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