I mentioned a few weeks ago that I’m currently teaching a class on Communism & Socialism. That crazy left-wing teacher that the Republican right seems so afraid of? Yeah, that’s me. I literally spend my days teaching high-school-age students about the ins and outs of communism (as best as I understand them).
But I’m not sure if I’m a communist. I definitely have communist sympathies, which is to say, I try to sympathize with those who are oppressed, and through my daily teaching, strive to prevent the next several generations from being as oppressive as the previous ones.
I don’t do this to make money. It’s true, I make money doing it, but like most Americans, I struggle to make the money I need to keep my creditors at bay (among whom are my employers: everyday, I owe them my lunch money, and even that debt is creeping up).
This is why I am not a capitalist: I don’t have enough money to be. In order to be a capitalist, one must spend money in order to make money. In other words, your goal must be to make money.
It’s true that money is only a method of exchange, so if one wants to engage in a specific kind of exchange with another person, one must somehow acquire money. But I’m not talking about that. What a capitalist does is engage in an exchange where the goal of the exchange is for the capitalist to end up with more money — not more goods, not more services, but more money.
The economic purpose of the capitalist, then, is to make money; unfortunately, in an economy based entirely on debt, money is always in demand. Where the economic purpose of a clockmaker is to make just as many clocks as the market demands, when it comes to money, the market only demands.
Think of the economic crisis of 2008. When all that money disappeared, where did it go? It’s not like it existed in the real world (money no longer equals gold, remember); it literally must have went poof! and disappeared, like an icon you delete off your laptop. When virtually all the capitalists say they lost their money, they were not being metaphorical: they lost it — they literally could no longer find it; their wealth on the screen kept going down, and there was nothing they could do to stop it.
So what did they do? They convinced our government to give them money for free. The government reduced the interest rate on money to zero, and let anyone who understood how to ask for it, receive it. I’m not talking about the loans Pres. Obama executed to the motor industry; roughly 90% of the money loaned out through that program has been paid back.
I’m talking about the banks who “bought money” from the government when it was being offered at zero cost, but who then turned around to the rest of the economy and sold it at significant interest and with a robberbarons’ wealth of fees attached; and when they didn’t do that, they hoarded it to themselves. As Matt Taibbi explained for Rolling Stone:
“Banks used their hundreds of billions for almost every purpose under the sun – everything, that is, but lending to the homeowners and small businesses and cities they had destroyed. And one of the most disgusting uses they found for all their billions in free government money was to help them earn even more free government money [through interest on their reserves].”
In other words, during the economic crisis of 2008, the government of the people, for the people, and by the people voluntarily, through their elected representatives, chose to power our entire economy through an increase in the weight of our debt to the banks.
Debt is a struggle, a weight on our backs. We all of us crawl hunched over, moving from experience to experience with the weight of all our bad decisions as a country on our back, our economic dependence on slavery being foremost among them, but also our continued decision to channel the majority of our energy into an aggressively postured and aggressively acting military, itself the equivalent of a scared and angry child stealing the oxygen out of a seemingly held-hostage classroom, crying out for all the world to “Look at me! Look at me! Look at me!”
We see it everywhere: the economic cost of our “independence.” We see it in the size of our student loan debt. We see it in the size of our credit card debt. We see it in our past due notices and in our healthcare debt. We see it in the increase in our incarceration rates.
Someone has to carry all of our debt. It started with slavery. While it’s true you had to be rich to own a slave, everyone who wanted to get rich had to, sooner or later, become dependent on a slave. The economic engine that drove everything was and still is slavery, oppression, and exploitation.
It’s just now, we slave for something called wages. As David Graeber explains:
“Throughout most of recorded history, the only people who actually did wage labor were slaves. It was a way of renting your slave to someone else; they got half the money, and the rest of the money went to the master. Even in the South, a lot of slaves actually worked in jobs and they just had to pay the profits to the guy who owned them. It’s only now that we think of wage labor and slavery as opposite to one another. For a lot of history, they were considered kind of variations of the same thing.”
The wages we earn today don’t release us from our debts to our masters. If we work hard enough on whatever it is they tell us to work on, we might be able to postpone our deaths for at least another week, and maybe even a few months if we’re lucky. But it’s still the same thing as slavery. We work for our masters in order to, literally, survive.
When I say “the masters,” I’m not talking about the small business owners. Those motherfuckers work as hard or harder than everyone else, and they earn every penny. Most of them carry even more debt than the rest of us, but they’re able to carry it in a different way — small business owners are not only hard workers, but they’re pretty damn good at managing a balancing act.
No, when I say “the masters,” what I’m talking about are the financial investors. The capitalists. The ones to whom the small business owners are also indebted.
This group is the bourgeoisie that the communists keep talking about, the ones who literally have no economic masters above them. These are the fuckers who make the rest of us carry them around on our backs so that their goddamned golden feet don’t have to touch the dirty, dirty ground. They are a class of human beings who just seem to be getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and who just keep stuffing themselves with more and more food, and more and more oxygen, and more and more clean water, and more, and more, and more, until finally, the weight of them is so goddamned heavy that the rest of us have no choice but to have our knees buckle with each and every step we struggle to take, knowing that at any moment, and through no real fault of our own, it could all come crashing down on us — the entire system just too fucking big for anyone living under it to survive.
That’s what the communists are talking about. They’re trying to get everyone to realize that all of that weight — all of it, the entire weight of our history — has found its apotheosis in the capitalist.
Apotheosis literally means the turning into of a god, as in, the process of deification, the making of a deity.
The communists are trying to show us that all of human history — all of the wealth that has ever been created from the time before we were cave men until now — has been created through an act of oppression; our history begins — and it will end — on the question of oppression: who oppresses who, how long will the oppressed be able to take it, and what will be the manner of its revolution (how and when will all of those oppressed people turn the tables on their oppressors).
The communists imagine that there must be a better way to survive. They mean this on both an individual and an international level.
There must be a better way to survive the daily struggles of human experience, a way where the struggle at least seems more worthwhile, a way where all of us can be as creative as we’re able without worrying about whether we can put food on our plates or roofs over our heads.
And goodness knows that there has to be a better way to survive internationally than simply waving our nuclear-missile dicks in everyone’s faces, telling them that if they don’t contribute to an International Monetary Fund that only our best friends have access to, then there’s a damn good chance we’re gonna shove our bullets and bombs down their throats.
From what I’ve been able to gather in my limited readings, Marx wasn’t a communist in the sense that he gave us a clear vision of what communism would look like; he was a communist in the sense that he wanted something better for humanity than what he had found.
He saw the system for what it actually was (and what it continues to be). He didn’t blame anything on God. He looked at what humanity had wrought over its time on Earth, and he judged it not worthy of us. He saw in us something better, something grander, something worth more than the relentless pursuit of money, driven by a minority of masters riding on the backs of a majority of slaves, every clean dollar acquired at the top spit out brown and nasty from below, leaving in our wake a cesspool of dirty money.
When humanity is gone, Marx asked us, what will we have left behind? What will be materially different thanks to us?
Where capitalists have made an idol of money, communists make humanity their golden god. They don’t want humanity’s story to be dictated by the production of money; they want it to be dictated by the goal of improving humanity, both in a material and in a moral sense.
Communists look at the problems facing the Earth right now and acknowledge that humanity is overcrowding the rest of the Earth’s population, and they see in that a form of oppression: humanity’s oppression of the rest of Earth’s creatures. This is what leads them to the legalization of birth control, and eventually, to strict regulations on the possible number of births. This is not radical; it’s the basic reality of whatever future humanity wishes to exist in. The only question is, what is the acceptable limit? Unfortunately, if we go over a certain point, the Earth will no longer negotiate with us, and it will rain down a hellfire the likes of which we can only read about in our Bibles.
But regulating the number of births does not mean abolishing them altogether. It means respecting life in all its forms, and only wishing for it to continue (the question as to where life begins, of course, being among the most tricky of the ones still facing us).
This is not harsh ideology. It’s basic math. We can quibble over the methods we use to get from the problem to the solution, but the solution will always remain the same: we have to control the rate of our births. The Earth is a finite resource, measured in soil, water, and oxygen, so we have to limit the number of people putting pressure on that resource.
Okay, the communists say, so we reduce and/or abolish the ways in which we oppress the other creatures on planet Earth. Then what?
The answer is to reduce the incarceration rate. Those who finds themselves inside of a prison are often there through no real fault of their own. Something within the existing system failed them. Because they do not actually belong in a prison, we ought to re-imagine the system that placed them there.
I’m not talking about jails right now. While we absolutely have to reduce the incarceration rates of our people — jails are the toilet bowls of our current economic system, filled with dark bodies that just spin around and around and around until they finally disappear — I’m not talking about that right now.
What I’m talking about is an entire system that depends on the oppression of a majority by the strength and weight of an ever-increasing and ever-more oppressive minority, where the majority is made up of those of us struggle to survive on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, and the minority are the rich men who just won’t ever seem to go away and who are constantly poking at us through the tiny little holes we leave open in our front doors, and who are calling us up at all times of the day and night to harrass us, and who sing to us on the stage of our living rooms about the lives we could be leading if we were only someone else, somewhere else, with someone else, a dream they’re willing to sell us a simulacrum of for the low, low price of a never-ending series of easy monthly installments, a simulacrum that can only be created through a series of exchanges that ultimately end in someone else’s oppression (e.g.), someone other than, but no different from, you.
How do you reduce the incarceration rates? It’s simple. You provide adequate education and healthcare, and you treat every social ill as a disease that can only be cured with better education and better healthcare. You ensure healthcare includes concepts for both birth control and mental health, and you ensure that educators act as an early warning defense system, giving them the training they actually need to do their jobs well and the microphone to sound the alarm whenever it seems an individual’s humanity is at risk. You create a nimble and effective task force that is both large enough and supported enough to address each individual case as it arises, and you address it with wraparound measures that work to support the individual at home, in school, and eventually into whatever style of meanginful life they are capable of both creating and enjoying on their own. You look at abuse as a systemic issue and not as a moral one. You stop it when it happens, and you offer to help everyone involved, including the abuser, who (after all) is almost always a victim of abuse, the prevelance of which is symptomatic of the system, which is itself based entirely on the ever-present and ever-growing weight of the rich men’s continuous abuse of the rest of us.
If the vast majority of incarcerated individuals are victims of a systematic abuse that stretches back in their family tree for generations and generations, where every person’s father and/or mother and/or guardian was not only an abuser but also the victim of abuse, an individual who received from a very young age the historic blows of whatever representative of humanity happened to be in charge of them and who had pounded into them from the start a low sense of human worth, often by a family member but always, at the end of the chain, by their economic master — if such a vast majority of those people end up incarcerated in the prison of their own sociopathic ignorance, then wouldn’t it make sense to invest our energy in eradicating the channels through which abuse continues to be generated, the ultimate source of which can be traced back to the minority’s oppressive need for the majority to live in debt, usury being the world’s most lucrative form of abuse?
I don’t know if I am communist, but it seems to me that Marx’s interpretation of all the ills of society finding their ultimate origin in humanity’s economic dependence on slavery and oppression is correct. It’s the origin of our healthcare crisis, our education crisis, the crises within our families, and the crises that effect us on an international level.
The entire system requires us to live our lives with our backs broken by the weight of humanity’s debts, but until we recognize that those debts are held not by a God or by ancestor, but by a living and active class of capitalists whose desire to rape and pillage the Earth and all of its inhabitants seems to know no bounds, until we recognize that they are the actual, material cause of all of our troubles, then we will never be able to find the solution.