If we don't choose socialism it won't matter what we choose instead

The rich do not care if you live or die and they will kill you if they need to

Photo by Samuel Regan-Asante on Unsplash

The commentary of “experts” tries so hard to sooth us. The Reserve Bank is cutting the OCR again, that should help with inflation. The economy is still sluggish but showing signs of improvement. The government is “laser-focused” on growth. They had to make some tough choices but we are so lucky they did it for us. I would hate to be in their position. We’ve got to pay down that debt. Are we getting good value for money? This tax cut will put money back in the pockets of hardworking people. The government is like a household. We’ve all got to tighten our belts.

The din of self-help gurus offering to show us how to be our best selves—for a price—is deafening. Advertisements show us food, clothes, movies. Big lipped and breasted women and gym bros display who we can be if we work hard enough. We gawk at movie stars and celebrities on the red carpet, commenting about whether their dresses, which cost more than most people make in a year, are too daring, or not daring enough. Our personalized algorithms feed us an unending line of consumables. You’re almost out of toilet paper, Amazon Prime reminds us. Alexa, add toilet paper to grocery list. That person from work, what is her name, wants to be friends on social media. Add, follow. Video clips of children blown apart, of babies with their intestines hanging out, of mothers crying over dead children, of people being burned to death, of soldiers nonchalantly forcing captives to run into a mass grave, of heads severed by bombs staring back at us mingle with advertisements for skincare regimes and wellness rituals and self-care products. We are working tirelessly on a ceasefire agreement.

Focus on yourself first and foremost, we are told. Be your best self or you won’t be able to help others. Of course, being our best selves involves doubling down on consuming products and even more self-help content. Why, yes, I would like to know the secret to living a happy life. Who wouldn’t want to make $12,000 a month from home? Should I try that supplement? Look at how great her skin is. Even personal meditation is commodified and commercialized. How do I look when I’m doing yoga? Or weightlifting? How can I improve my pre-gym routine? What about my post-gym routine? Maybe I have ADHD. Am I getting the most out of my shower in the morning? Is my hair thinning? I wonder if there’s an app for that. My battery life is pretty bad. I should probably get another phone.

This is the surreal experience of living in modern society. A society in which we are merely spectators of our own lives, given the illusion of choice in a million banal and inconsequential actions but having no real agency. This is the capitalist illusion. The idea that this is all there is, and this is all there can be. And that we should not want any more. We can no longer believe in anything else. Our imagination of a different society is foreclosed by the conveniences and distractions we drown in, the mundanity of our jobs, the promises of substantive benefits of capitalism never quite realized, boarded up and condemned like the industrial ghost towns abandoned to cheap labor and profits. We go through the actions of our lives without living.

Capitalism is what is left when beliefs have collapsed at the level of ritual or symbolic elaboration, and all that is left is the consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and the relics. -Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism

Living like this, day in and day out, it’s difficult to see our late-stage capitalist society for the absurdity and evil that it truly is. It’s likely that if our society was described in detail to anyone, they wouldn’t voluntarily choose to live in it. Even Marx’s canonical definitions of capitalism have been made so rote and memorized it’s difficult to understand the weight they convey.

Capitalist society is a society in which the means of production are privately owned. Let’s just stop there for a second. We’ve all probably heard this definition a thousand times. But what does it mean, really? It means that all of the things that are necessary to support life and livelihood are privately owned. Subsistence is not given freely. It is available only for a price. In modern capitalist society, characterized by a ever-increasing privatization of the world, the things we need to independently sustain our own lives are privately owned. And not by us. And so we have to work for wages to buy the things we need to live. And because everything we need to live, from housing to food to water to clothes to heating and cooling is privately produced, we have to pay for it. This is known colloquially as the “cost of living”. This term is bandied about by economists and politicians without regard to what it really means in the lives of working people. They speak of the increasing cost of living, or policies targeting the cost of living, or working people struggling with the cost of living. They discuss this as if it’s an immutable fact. That people should pay to live, as if that is not appalling.

While the majority of us are busy trying to make ends meet, the capitalist vice squeezes ever tighter, especially around those who are most precarious. The wealthy are getting more and more brazen in their plunder. It used to be that politicians at least tried to pretend that their transparent agendas for the wealthy would benefit the poor or working class. Not anymore. Now even their own analyses show that their policies benefit their wealthy donors and corporations. Well, what are you going to do about it? The wealthy have so fully captured the levers of government that they can unapologetically govern for themselves and the rest of the ruling class without any fear of consequence. Billions in tax cuts for billionaires. Cuts to public services for everyone else. Billions in subsidies and contracts for corporations, cuts to public subsidies and supports for everyone else. This is just the norm now. We have had to make tough decisions. We just don’t have the money for that, they lie as they stare into the camera while making backroom deals and taking economic advice from business thinktanks.

Meanwhile what’s left of grossly-underfunded social programs and benefits is means-tested via spreadsheet without any consideration or on-the-ground research as to how it will affect normal people. We’re not going to hit any of our childhood poverty goals this year. We’re trying to encourage people to look for work. We’re trying to encourage parents to get tough with their kids. What about the babies that no longer qualify for support? Should they get tough too? I guess you’re never too young to start pulling yourself up by your bootstraps.

Capitalists have so fully captured the legal and political institutions that we daily have Onionesque headlines as a reality. In one of the most recent ones that should beggar belief but just ends up being an obvious headshaking moment, BlackRock, the world’s largest asset holding company, is suing UnitedHealth, the insurance company who recently lost their CEO, due to him being shot at point-blank range in downtown New York. The shooter’s motive was the company’s policy of denying claims for healthcare (ostensibly they had denied his wife’s cancer treatment). In the wake of the shooting, UnitedHealth eased up on their denials, and paid more claims than usual. BlackRock’s investors and shareholders viewed this as unacceptable, as it would cut into the profit margin, thereby diminishing the value of BlackRock’s holdings in the company. So they are suing.

We are at the point in modern society where a corporation can sue an insurance company for decreasing their profits by not allowing more people to die. And they will probably win. It does not get more dystopian than that. This is “it’s not personal, it’s business” taken to a grotesque extreme.

Modern society daily makes it more and more clear that the rich do not care if you live or die, and they will kill you if it increases their profits or if you threaten their system. And they have the backing of the state. Ask Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr, Fred Hampton, Huey Newton, or scores of murdered revolutionaries and leaders globally throughout history.

Fossil fuel companies have known since the 1970s that their emissions constituted an existential threat to the planet. Tobacco companies know that cigarettes cause cancer. And they funded thinktanks to spread lies and denialism, while establishing media empires to spread propaganda and buying politicians to deregulate their industry. These are people that would rather knowingly consign millions of people to death than cut into their short-term profits.

Against this kind of sociopathy we can offer no quarter. Our typical brand of electoral politics cannot win this class war. We can’t analyze politics abstractly or compromise for solutions. There is no “crossing the aisle” that can overcome this level of selfishness and disregard for basic humanity. Showing up every election to vote for the lesser of two evils will not cut it. Reformist agendas by which we try to claw back some workers’ rights or basic dignity will not last. The wealthy and ruling class will not allow these gains for long. They will come for them surely as a bullet from a gun. As long as the capitalist system stands, the wealthy will capture whatever sham of democracy remains, and if they get too spooked, they will just discard the democratic facade altogether and smash resistance like a hammer. Capitalism cannot co-exist with democracy because capitalists will always capture more and more power. The only truly democratic society is a socialist one.

A capitalist society is a class-divided society in which power is monopolised by capitalists and their allies. A socialist society is a classless society in which power is shared and decisions are made collectively. A socialist society is, then, a true democracy. - Grace Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism

Socialism is a society where the people own the means of production. This means that people own the means of life and livelihood for themselves and their families. They are not beholden to capitalists or corporations to make the things they need to live. Their lives do not depend on being able to pay a constantly fluctuating market price to subsist. Decisions are made by society as to what should be produced and how that should be distributed. Gone is the requirement to sell our labor for wages. People enjoy leisure and spend time with their families and loved ones because the ever-present threat of starvation is gone.

Critics of this system or idea call it utopian or unrealistic. But what is more unrealistic, attempting to change our society for the good of all, or blindly continuing down the path of capitalist delusion where more and more people are consigned to lives of misery and death while a fraction of the population continues to capture more and more wealth?

In our society, when people’s beliefs and perception of reality pose a threat to themselves and those around them, we intervene. If need be, these people are removed from society. Should the sociopathic behavior of a fraction of a percentage of the human population not necessitate swift and radical intervention? Why do we not identify the billionaire class for the sociopaths they are? Why do we not intervene to stop them from harming humanity and destroying the ability of our planet to support life? These people will not stop until we stop them. What are we waiting for?

This is the choice we face. It’s far too late to try a polite reformist approach. We cannot buy into the attempts by liberals to channel our outrage and pain back into supporting a centrist politics that compromises on the question of who deserves basic rights and humanity. We have to organize. We have to awaken people to the capitalist hell that they either don’t see or are too comfortable to admit. We have to realize that our material comforts come at the expense of countless other’s lives and livelihoods. We have to fight back against the political narratives that try to atomize and pit us against one another. We have to be laser-focused on class war. Because the wealthy sure as hell are. We have to open peoples’ eyes to the disdain with which they are viewed by the ruling class. We have to recognize our own power to shake the rich fully awake from their uneasy slumber. We have to see past the propaganda and imagine a better world, and fight to make it a reality.

Our choice is to create a socialism that provides and lifts us all, or to resign ourselves to a capitalism that will continue to hollow out society until there is nothing left for any of us, while the rich hole themselves off in their bunkers and gated communities and leave us to kill one another over the scraps. In the end, if we don’t choose socialism, it won’t matter what we choose instead.