COVID-19 makes the case for Communism
This gets so close to the point and somehow misses it completely. What this pandemic has shown us is that a person’s life and livelihood should not be attached to having a job or money. The praise of American capitalism in the middle of this article is, ironically, gaslighting. The “economy” that has supposedly lifted so many people out of poverty has not in fact done that at all. Do you know how a handful of men came to have more wealth than the bottom half of America? Capitalism.
Capitalism is not the “free market” and the freedom to open a business — it is the way businesses are owned and operated, and how profits are distributed. In capitalism, he who starts the company owns the company completely and privately, and that means he gets to decide what to do with every thing and person used for its operation and every dollar generated thereby. Hypothetical (ish) time:
Let’s say I’m hired to design simple websites. I, and the rest of the designers, have a quota of one full site design per workday. At that rate, the company is plenty profitable — everyone is getting paid a good wage and the CEO has a $50,000 truck. Now, let’s say I figure out a way to streamline my process and can now make a website design of the same quality in half the time. What should happen then? Since I’m able to do double the work in the same amount of time or the same work in half the time, my pay should be doubled or my workday should be cut in half, with no decrease in pay. But in American capitalism, what happens (if my supervisor and/or the CEO find out) is that all the other designers will be forced to implement my streamlined process, our quota will be raised to two site designs per day and anyone who doesn’t meet it will be reprimanded or fired, productivity will double, one or two of the designers might even be laid off, and here’s the kicker — the CEO just gets to decide what to do with the increase in profit! The person who came up with the streamlined process might get a little bonus if the CEO is generous, but more likely just a giftcard and even more likely nothing at all. Even the coolest, hippest, most “forward-thinking” companies basically operate this way. Because capitalism is about increasing profit for the capitalist, that’s it.
Were it not for capitalism and its perverted rules of ownership and reward, technological advancements and productivity innovations should have meant we all got to work a fraction of the time for the same or greater rewards. Does that sound like modern America to you? Nope. We now work twice as hard for a fraction of the reward.
A decent home can now be 3D-printed for like $5,000. Empty houses already outnumber homeless people 5 to 1 in the US. Restaurants and grocery stores and farms throw away unfathomable amounts of food every day. Drug companies sell the same drug for $5 in Australia and $500 in the US. We could very likely provide everyone with their basic needs and more with very little human labor, and eventually without any at all, and yet, because of capitalism, our lives and livelihoods will still be tied to money and work because capitalism says that the man (not to be sexist, but it’s usually a man, because men are tend to be more evil) who owns the robots gets to charge whatever he wants for the output of the robots. Despite the fact that the robots and their code were developed by dozens or hundreds of workers, and the CEO paid for it all with fake money he borrowed from a bank that derives fake money from the value of real money of hundreds of thousands of regular people, that the people earned by working their lives away for the benefit of the CEO. It’s a diabolical clusterfuck of injustice and absurdity.
Were it not for capitalism, the worst part of this pandemic — aside from people dying, of course — would be the disruption to our social lives. There might be economic disruption in the luxury, hospitality, and travel industries — but nobody would have to be worried about losing their home our having food on the table. Capitalism, the system of private ownership of all production and resources, is the cause of a majority of the world’s suffering, and particularly America’s.
I have full confidence that the gaslighting will work and things will return to normal. But change is still coming. We must create a society that puts people before profit and puts working people in charge of the places they work and the value they create.
