Are You Free?

Still most people associate capitalism with democracy and freedom, even in this time of late stage capitalism when it should be abundantly clear that capitalism promotes the very opposite of freedom. Still many people talk about corporatism as if it isn't capitalism functioning as intended. And still many people see "the government" as the only institution capable of infringing on their freedom, when in fact their government has since long been bought and paid for by the oligarchs the capitalist economy is bound to produce.

"I thank the capitalist masters for putting me here. They know where I belong under their criminal and corrupting system. It is the only compliment they could pay me."

Words from Eugene V. Debs, who didn't get to speak on election night on November 2, 1920 because he was imprisoned in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary; he was put there for speaking out against the draft during the Great War. You see, Eugene Debs was opposed to America's involvement in that European war because he rightly believed that this would benefit America's arms manufacturers, business interests and Wall Street only. Debs knew, and experienced first hand, that capitalism is a system of suppression for the 99%, more than a century before Bernie Sanders would campaign for the presidency as a democratic socialist, and he knew that war was and still is a racket decades before Major General Smedley Darlington Butler wrote his famous speech and booklet War is a Racket.

War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is constructed for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.
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By that description I'd say that capitalism itself is a racket as well. Out of capitalism a few people make huge fortunes, and therefore under capitalism a few people are free at the expense of the unfreedom of the very many. I marvel at the ability to be deceived of those who, even in these times, blindly buy in to the idea that capitalist free markets go hand-in-hand with freedom for the masses. I mean, how retarded does one have to be to still buy that oldest of capitalist lies?

"They have always taught and trained you to believe it to be your patriotic duty to go to war and to have yourselves slaughtered at their command. But in all the history of the world you, the people, have never had a voice in declaring war, and strange as it certainly appears, no war by any nation in any age has ever been declared by the people. [...] The working class who freely shed their blood and furnish the corpses, have never yet had a voice in either declaring war or making peace. It is the ruling class that invariably does both. They alone declare war and they alone make peace." - Eugene V. Debs making the speech in Canton, Ohio, on June 16, 1918, that led to his indictment.

The "ruling class" in Debs' truthful statement is the capitalist class of course, and they - the capitalists - soon made his words treasonous under the Sedition Act of 1918, and all this made it so that he ran for the presidency from a prison cell. The capitalist class can not afford true free speech, nor a truly free press; even now Julian Assange is prosecuted as a traitor for letting out the truth. So, don't kid yourself into thinking that capitalism has one iota to do with freedom, or justice for that matter. Here's a short video that explains how capitalism is antithetical to positive as well as negative freedom. And here's a link to the September 22, 2019 Washington Post article on Eugene V. Debs that partly inspired this post: The socialist who ran for president from prison — and won nearly a million votes.

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