“…within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productiveness of labour are brought about at the cost of the individual labourer; all means for the development of production transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation of, the producers; they mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they distort the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labour process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of capital. But all methods for the production of surplus-value are at the same time methods of accumulation; and every extension of accumulation becomes again a means for the development of those methods. It follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the labourer, be his payment high or low, must grow worse. The law, finally, that always equilibrates the relative surplus population, or industrial reserve army, to the extent and energy of accumulation, this law rivets the labourer to capital more firmly than the wedges of Vulcan did Prometheus to the rock. It establishes an accumulation of misery, corresponding with accumulation of capital. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital.”
-Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol 1
I post this because I assume everyone here reading this is or was (retired or disabled, etc.) a worker. A member of the working class. Those of us who must sell out labor power in order to buy the goods we need to live, opposed to capitalists who simply use their stolen wealth, money and covert it to capital to churn and churn and churn into more capital to convert into money to spend on mansions valued higher than an entire life’s work of a lowly wage-slave.
I post this because I know that especially in America in the past and even today online we have people who deny the truths of Marx. Did he get everything right? How could he. Of course not. But for his time, being one of the first of his thought style, man he was fucking on point. He flounders a bit, imo, in Vol 2 and 3 but then again he fucking died before he could publish… Famously asking his lifetime friend and colleague Engles to cobble the volumes together as best he could. They’re not bad, but Vol 1. My god. chef’s kiss he just gets it so right. Which is, of course, why capitalists then and no defame him in every single way they can. They’re afraid of his words. But who can deny the truth in front of their face? Everyone has ever spent their own labor to enrich another person without their “real” consent knows what I mean. They know what Marx meant. How we live day to day under this system of wage-slavery while our capitalist masters and their class-traitor dogs the mangers is a wonder to behold. How they’ve taught us to hate the person Iran or Ecuador or France and to love our friend Bezos and Elon. To thank our capitalist boss for the pleasure and honor of enriching him after his family or he stole the wealth to turn into capital to begin with…
Capitalism is like taking the entire world and turning it upside down. And I like to think of like an hour glass. The sand is trickling, slowly, from the top to the bottom. Maybe that’s what Reagan meant? That the shit and the pain will trickle down, not wealth of course, and it will gather slowly into a mountain as time runs out for people like him who use politics to shape the state apparatus to defend those like Elon who would enslave us. They are the same in the end. They see themselves as our masters. We are the meek slaves. They removed the physical shackles and they let us have TVs to propagandize our minds and soften our bodies. A happy slave is a good slave. I’m sure Thomas Jefferson or Washington would’ve felt the same towards such a statement as Elon or Bezos. Hmm.
Worth a thought.