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Title: Capitalism & Coercion Author: Shane Ross Date: 10/12/20 Language: en Topics: capitalism, anti-capitalist, anti-capitalism, commodification, exploitation, alienation, youth, Breadtube Notes: This essay was originally written as a video script, which is why it may appear to be strange or have certain errors, oor even sound like casual spoken speech. This is aimed at a liberal audience, so other anarchists / lefitsts will most likely have critiques of it. We appreciate them, but please keep the audience in mind. Thanks!
A critique of capitalism & coercion
A commodity can be defined as a human need or want that is bought and
sold. Under capitalism, we take things, ranging from necessities like
clothes and food, to airplanes and mansions, and we commodify them. We
“put them up for sale.”
If you’ve seen The Lorax, you’ll know that a massive part of the plot is
the main villain packaging and selling air. Audiences are meant to scoff
at this, at the commodification of something so needed, a natural
resource. But if we look around us, we can see examples of this
happening more than you might think. Water, food, and land are equally
as necessary to human survival as is oxygen, but they are packaged, sold
for money, and kept out of the hands of those who cannot afford them.
But that begs the question: it is your land legally, under a capitalist
system, but can it really be “your land?” People are on this earth
together, but we have decided it is alright to have five hundred
thousand homeless people and seventeen million empty homes in America.
We’ve decided that if you’re born into a good family, you can grow to
own hundreds of acres of land, but if you aren’t, you might not have
land at all.
This is the system we have been raised to accept, we know no other way.
But we can see now that the system is failing. Or rather, succeeding.
The church, the state, and the rich have all worked together throughout
history to lift eachother up. To keep eachother in power. The church
does not condemn those who hoard, only those who steal. The state
mandates fines and bails easily escapable by the wealthy. The rich
spread false information to bust unions in hope of preventing worker
resilience. Every authority, every hierarchy, every coercive force is
working against us at once.
We, you and I, cannot be understood as a class. Under modern capitalism,
the workers are not a single class. This is how it was understood during
the nineteenth century, but for modern reasons, such as status, housing
level and available education, classes are more numerous than two. It is
better, in the opinion of me along with many historical anarchists
message explaining how i’ll touch on this later that the workers, those
who do not exploit, are better understood as a mass. A mass of people
from many backgrounds, many places and cultures, united by one thing. We
have all been blindly coerced and lied to for our entirety.
Commodity establishes things that should not be bought and sold, rather
shared, as objects to be privately owned. The cheapest, quickest and
easiest way to house the homeless is to give them houses, but
capitalists feel this would be unfair. We could have established green
energy, but oil C.E.Os have ties with our state, which protects them.
Medicine is something people need to survive, but instead of society
taking care of it’s sick, people plunge themselves into medical debt
whilst the rich collect horses and beach houses. Commodity is why we sit
around collecting, hoarding, while people starve. We have the material
to feed these people, so something is stopping them from being fed. The
commodification of everything we do, everything we touch, even who we
are as people, is at the root of capital. To abolish capital is to
abolish commodities. To abolish commodities is to enact liberty.
Exploitation is a form of coercive theft. Exploitation takes the work of
the laborer and provides profit for the boss. So how does this relate to
capitalism? Under capitalism we are told that money relates to the
amount of work you put in. This is how the system works, you work hard,
you play hard. You get paid for hard work, and it’s okay that there are
privileged people in society because those people did the work to get
there. There are a couple issues with this however, one of which is the
modern distribution of wealth.
When we see someone like Jeff Bezos, a mega gajillionaire, we are pretty
shocked. It’s not fair. But this is often viewed as an unjust jealousy,
peasant foolery under capitalism. But I must ask, how is one who has
nothing supposed to view someone that has more than everything, and not
have doubts, or angers? Is anger not a just response to this? We are
told that life is not fair, that the way things are is the way things
are. But there is no force keeping the things you need in the hands of
those who don’t need them other than themselves and the state. Nothing
makes them intrinsically theirs, you need it more, what is morally wrong
with you taking it? But instead, the rich offer us something so we don’t
get out the guillotines. They offer us something far more grim.
According to salary.com, the median salary of a C.E.O in America is
about 800 thousand dollars annually. We cannot be accused of using Jeff
Bezos, an outlier, if we are to use median. So, why is this? You work
for your boss at Work.Co and make, say, 50,000 dollars a year. Your boss
comes to work later than you, goes home earlier than you, and bosses
people around for a living. Yet he makes sixteen times what you do. The
point is, he is not working sixteen times harder. If we take a single
mother with two full time jobs trying to provide for her children, it’s
pretty clear that she works very hard for herself and her family.
Curiously, she makes but 40,000 dollars a year, while both of her bosses
make over twenty times that.
This is a pretty simplistic critique of the private ownership of the
means of production, but there is something more to this. But before we
get to this, what are the means of production? Means are a way of
getting goals accomplished, and production is the process in which items
are made. The means of production are the way, the vehicle we use to
create commodities under capitalist rule. The means of production are
traditionally ideas like factories, but in a modern world, the means of
production are everywhere. Workshops, offices, warehouses and bedrooms.
The means of production are no longer places, but people. The laborers
produce, not in a single place, but rather everywhere. We are tools of
commodity, we have become slaves to labor, slaves to wage, and these are
shackles we cannot escape if we are to remain under capitalism. The
private ownership of the means of production puts the power of the
laborers into the hands of the rich. The power produced by the laborers
is no longer in the hands of the laborer.
Leftists often discuss ideas like private ownership, specifically of the
means of production. So, when one person has a right to be in charge of,
to own and to have, the place where goals are completed, and by
extension, the laborers within those places, the laborers are inevitably
exploited. When your boss makes twenty times what you do, they don’t
work twenty times as hard, they are not getting the money from their
labor. They are getting the money from yours. Leftists insist that the
people, the workers, the masses are entitled to the fruits of their own
labor. But of course, when your boss makes your money, when your boss is
profiting off of your work, you are not being given the fruits of the
labor you do. If a man has one hundred employees, and he makes more than
all of them combined, he is robbing them. If his workers all quit, he
would make no money, which means his money is coming directly from them.
His workers carry his business on their backs, but he makes more. He
does not work harder, but he is entitled, by our system, to the money
produced by other’s labor.
When there are people without clothes and empty looms, one should be
allowed to make clothes. But of course, the owner of these specific
looms, the exploiter that maintains control over the textile industry,
does not allow you to do so. Not out of concern for the worker, but out
of concern of the wallet, those who own the private means of production
are not only allowed, but encouraged to disregard the needs of others in
the name of greed.
Returning to the idea that private ownership of the means of production
goes hand in hand with exploitation of the workers for profit, we must
view how other forces interact and examine this idea. Theft is a concept
used to describe the taking of one’s objects, privately owned by the
individual. But this is a very capitalist definition, and even using it,
the capitalists are still guilty of robbing the laborers. Of the fruits
of their labors, of the money stolen from them, of the means to live.
But this is a theft, once again that the state won’t punish, and that
the church won’t condemn. Even legally recognized theft is lied about,
over 90% of theft in 2018 was wage theft, and not robbery, burglary or
any theft of an individual’s assets. Yet the state, the church and the
boss all teach us to view theft as something that is dangerous to us,
not via the company, but via other workers.
But how does capitalism make us view other workers? How does our society
interact with bosses, and how do bosses justify bigotry between workers?
Are other workers the enemy?
fair warning, lots of philosophy ahead, so if you don’t understand it at
first, or are uncomfortable with concepts like nihilism and loneliness,
please skip
Sign value is an important concept if we attempt to understand late
stage, or modern capitalism. The common understanding of leftists is
that the value of a commodity is decided by the labor input into the
commodity, but a new form of value has emerged since the nineteenth
century. Sign value, first described by Jean Baudrillard, is a new way
of looking at value through a philosophical lens. Essentially, life is
meaningless, and capitalism attempts to fill our subjective voids with
pointless commodities. The capitalist injects commodities with
artificial purpose, or meaning, and the consumer hopes to be marked by
that meaning when they consume or brand themself with said commodity.
Branding, political campaigns, even art, these are all “signs” that one
projects on to themselves, hoping to essentially commodify themselves
with a false narrative.
When I say life is meaningless, I do not mean it in a negative sense. It
is hard to find objective, universal truths. Humans have argued for
millenia over what is inherently right, inherently wrong. But I argue
that nothing is “inherently wrong.” Trying to find objective purpose in
life is pointless, because humans are not united in cause. We are here
for reasons we do not understand, and never will. Instead of debating
it, we may as well move on. Objective meaning is a lie, but that is not
a curse. The lack of one truth just means our subjective interpretations
of life are all the more meaningful. (I promise I have a point.) This
lack of purpose is bothersome to many, so the forces of coercion seek to
fill a void, essentially keeping people under control. When capitalists
do it, it’s through a false sense of status through sign value.
Capitalism is essentially attempting to fill a void, that it itself is
causing. That is why we feel off. Systemic coercion through church,
state or capital, attempts to give life purpose, whilst simultaneously
subtracting subjective meaning from the hands of the individual and
using the emptiness left in the heart of the mass to manipulate said
mass into exploitation. What the hell does that mean? Essentially, there
is nothing, and that’s okay. People should have the right to live how
they please, live for whatever purpose they choose, and do whatever they
like. They should follow a subjective moral code. And when capitalism
tells us that instead of a blessing, this lack of “truth” is a curse, we
are forced to listen. So now we have a void in the hearts and the minds
of the masses, and capitalism proposes a solution, but it is also the
problem itself. This void that we have, the state, church and boss all
try to mend it. But this mending is also advancing their own goals. The
church restricts your freedom and dullens your life, and tells you
without it’s rules you would be meaningless. The state commands you to
serve and love it, and without that love you are a burden to society.
The boss tells you to work hard and clock out, and that without a job
you are but a leech. But isn’t he a leech?
So now you have no purpose. So now you have a false sense of security,
but as we wake up to the troubles around us, we lose it. So now, we as
youth, see that we’ve been lied to. But we still must stand for the
flag, kneel for the cross and work for the boss. We are waking up to the
fact that we are being lied to, and that is dangerous for them. You see,
when capitalism rules the world, alienation is bound to happen. Rather
than helping those around him, his community, doing things out of
generosity, man is encouraged to isolate and hoard. You are left alone
with nothing but nationalistic fetishism, commodity and the remains of
your own freedom crushed by the church.
We are alienated by our boss from the fruits of our labor. We are
alienated by the church from the freedom of our thought. We are
alienated by the state from the nature of man. We are alone on a journey
to a life of exploitation and pain. Alone on a life of coercion and
oppression. So we sit alone on a throne of collectible playing cards, we
wear gowns dressed up in logos, and we take pictures of ourselves doing
fun things to commodify our own experience, to reduce our own life as a
mere aesthetic to be observed and judged. Commodity culture, empty
meaning and coercive force. We are being held back, and nobody but us
can help push us forward.
It is the fetishization, by the masses, of things that hold us back such
as nationalism, property, hoarding and the self. But of course, not all
hope is lost. Life is meaningless, which means you give your own life
meaning. What meaningless lives can you change in a meaningful way?
Everybody is on this earth. Isn’t making someone’s day a little better
just enough to keep you going? We can dedicate our time to helping each
other even under capitalism. Mutual aid is an anarchist principal that
focuses on community support systems and education. There are mutual aid
chapters all over the world. We probably won’t escape capital, at least
in our lifetimes, but we can resist it. We can fuel ourselves for future
uprisings, we can be educated about the dangers of capitalism, we can
hope to improve conditions in our society by any means necessary.