Class Enigma

"Why You Should Be a Marxist" is the title of the video I share with you today and very much want you to watch, dear readers. Many people still don't get this, but it is true that 99% of us should all be socialists; anything else is nothing more than irrational and contrary to one's own interests. For me this is one of life's great enigmas; why do the majority of people still believe the lies of capitalism and free markets?

I've said something similar many times before, but in today's video the main speaker gives what in my opinion is a perfect description of what a socialist is: "just someone who is unable to get over his or her astonishment that most people who have lived and died have spent lives of wretched, fruitless unremitting toil." This is so true, and what's astonishing to me is that so many people don't see this undeniable truth. Instead they view themselves as free, even after accepting that second job they desperately need, just to make ends meet. I've described this tragic existence of most men and women as follows: 99% of us work hard all our lives to have literally nothing at the end of it. Or worse: many have nothing but some debts to leave their children, if they even got to have children.

This arrangement, that 1% has it all and 99% has nothing, has been with us since we started organizing our societies in groups larger than the traditional tribe of 50 to 100 individuals. The fact that we were able to do that has one cause and one cause only, being that we were for the first time able to produce more than we need to survive. And since we started doing that, the structure of our societies have always been defined by our relation to the production of material goods. Spirituality, philosophy and religion aside, we are material beings who are wholly dependent on our material surroundings and what we're able to produce from the materials given to us by mother nature. This relationship between the individuals, who together form a society, and the production of material goods has, from the very start, always resulted in a class-society because of one specific feature of the way we produce things; it has always been the case that a small minority owns the means of production, making the majority dependent on them, and necessitating that majority to work for them. Marx and Engels laid this all out in their extensive study and criticism of capitalism, more specifically their theory of historical materialism:

Historical materialism, also known as the materialist conception of history, is a methodology used by some communist and Marxist historiographers that focuses on human societies and their development through history, arguing that history is the result of material conditions rather than ideals.
_{source: Wikipedia}

Marx was no idealist but a philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist and journalist who studied the rise of modern capitalism with scientific scrutiny, and from his ideas the many various forms of socialism and socialist ideologies we know today have been developed. I've said it many times before, but if we review our human history with a scientific and analytical eye, we come to the astonishing conclusion that we've basically been stuck for over 10,000 years in the same sociatal structure of two classes; the ones who own the means of production on one side and everyone else on the other. And it's amazing to me that, even after the introduction of democracy in politics, we still quietly accept this highly unjust state of affairs. Especially in times like these, when capitalism is once again on the verge of collapsing, it should be clear for everyone to see that there can be no true democracy so long as democracy is not also introduced in the economy. That's what socialism is in a nutshell: economic democracy. Not one single owner decides what's done with the fruits of our collective labor, but we all decide.

But we've been so indoctrinated to believe that we deserve no more than what our elites say we deserve, no matter if they're called kings, emperors, popes or CEOs, that most of us will fight to keep intact the system that's slowly killing us. The system that has us working hard all our lives and leaves us with nothing at the end of it. We keep voting for right wing parties and politicians. We keep buying the lie that government should be as small as possible, when in a true democracy government is as big as it can get, for we ALL are the government. Or we should be. And if we demand democracy in every other aspect of our lives, why not also demand democracy at the workplace? Again; that's what socialism is in a nutshell. If Coca Cola was owned by all the people who work there and live around the factory, do you for one second believe Coca Cola would be dumping toxins in the rivers our own children go to swim in? If the iPhone factory was owned by all people who work there, would you for a second believe that factory would move to China? If General Motors was owned by all people who work there, would you for a split second believe that management would get a salary that's 500 times the salary of someone on the work-floor? Never. Management would earn more, no doubt, maybe even 10 times more, but the ridiculous gap between haves and have-nots would vanish like snow before the sun...

So, watch this video, and if you're not convinced that you should be a socialist unless you're one of the "exalted ones" in the 1%, maybe it does a better job than I can. Well, yes it probably can do better than I can ;-)

Thanks so much for visiting my blog and reading my posts dear reader, I appreciate that a lot :-) If you like my content, please consider leaving a comment, upvote or resteem. I'll be back here tomorrow and sincerely hope you'll join me. Until then, keep safe, keep healthy!