The Horrors of Capitalism

A House Resolution You Won’t Be Hearing About Anytime Soon

Eighty-six House Democrats were right to reject the insane United States House of Representatives resolution that denounced the alleged “horrors of socialism” two weeks ago.

The measure was introduced by a far-right Florida representative and backed by the entire Republikaner House caucus.  It is yet another sign that the Republican Party has gone over to fascism, whose calling cards include a virulent hatred of everything really and/or allegedly socialist and a noxious and ridiculous conflation of normal liberal and centrist bourgeois politics with the purported evils of the “radical Left.” Never mind that humanity now desperately needs the radical replacement of capitalism by socialism – a topic I’ll return to at the end of this essay.

Beyond the standard capitalist erasure of the accomplishments of the Russian, Chinese, and Cuban socialist revolutions, the insurrectionist House’s resolution is meant to demonize any and all remotely decent domestic US social programs and policies – from Medicare and Medicaid to public education, progressive taxation, civil rights protections, voting rights laws, and environmental regulation – by linking to them to the real and alleged crimes of Stalin, Brezhnev, Mao, Pol Pot, and Kim Jong-un, etc. If we adopted the basic civilizational program of free and universal health care for all as a human right (as does most of the industrialized capitalist world), the Republi-fascist Party wants US-Americans to think, we’d be on the path to “totalitarian communist dictatorship.”

There’s a not-so hidden warmongering and anti-Chinese subtext to the resolution, reflecting growing right-wing and bipartisan US pressure for a war with Beijing over Taiwan and the false belief that contemporary state-capitalist China is a socialist state.

The biggest goal, though, is to absurdly paint out the neoliberal and bourgeois Democratic Party as “socialist,” “communist,” and “Marxist” so as set up the not-so leftmost of the nation’s two dominant capitalist parties for elimination and clear the path for single party white Christian nationalist (Amerikaner neofascist) rule in coming years.   

Will anyone in the House Progressive Caucus draft a counter-resolution on the horrors of fascism – of the political pathology that runs through the contemporary ex-parliamentary palingenetic- nationalist white-supremacist and patriarchal  party of Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, Tucker Carlson, Michael Flynn, Paul Gosar, Marjorie Taylor-Greene, Steve Bannon, current Florida resident Jair Bolsonaro, and your demented FOX News-watching MAGA aunt? Not likely. There’s a transparent and sick double standard in US media-political culture right now: the Republi-fascists routinely and absurdly call the dismal, dollar-drenched capitalist-imperialist Dems "socialist" but it’s practically taboo for the bourgeois Dems to accurately call the Republikaners fascists.

Partly out of fear and no doubt also out of significant ideological agreement on socialism’s supposed evil, 109 House Democrats signed on with the neo-McCarthyite “Horrors of Socialism” resolution.

How about (even less likely) a resolution that goes deeper and takes on the Horrors of Capitalism – of the system that produces fascism by rendering bourgeois politicians’ pretenses of democracy ever more transparently inauthentic and useless at the same time that it generates multiple and endless crises requiring big government intervention? Yes the horrors of the system whose ruling class will always select big revanchist, reactionary, divisive, and repressive government over big democratic, solidaristic, and liberating big government serving the common good. The system that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has quite properly called “irredeemable.”  The system whose total “overthrow” Greta Thunberg rightly called for last fall – rightly because it is wired to, well destroy life on Earth, as I recently explained for the umpteenth time.

It would be a very appropriate resolution indeed. The horrors inflicted by the capitalist system in the endless quest for investor profit vastly dwarf any and all horrors, real and fake, carried out in the name of socialism.

Where to begin?  

With the enclosure, starvation, displacement, murder, exploitation, poisoning,  sickening and enslavement of untold millions, nay billions since the birth of the world capitalist system in the long Sixteenth Century, a half-millennium’s worth of appalling and astonishing human sacrifice, ecological devastation, imperialism, pestilence, and war driven by the holy and chaotic pursuit of capitalist profit? 

With the soulless alienation of a capitalist ideological superstructure that reduces “human nature” to the selfish pursuit of individual gain and competition, helping drown the common good and human solidarity in “the icy waters of egotistic calculation” (Marx and Engels, 1848)?

With the capture of government, politics, and media by a capitalist class whose system’s tendency towards an ever-greater concentration of wealth translates into an ever-sharper concentration of political power to more closely match the underlying material class dictatorship over the means of production, distribution, finance, and communications?

With the recurrent mass slaughters that result from the anarchy of capital’s translation into the anarchy of interstate conflict, which involves the massive transfer of public money to the manufacture of high-tech war machinery?

With the alienating, oppressive, and exploitative division and nature of work under this sick system, where masses cannot obtain the money required for sustenance without renting out the critical human essence of their commodified labor power to accumulation-mad exploiters who hire people only so long as there is profit in doing so – profit wrung from the difference between the price of that labor power and the full value produced by those workers? Like in “socialist” China, where, as the World Socialist Website reported years ago.

“Thirteen suicide attempts since January, half of them during May, inside Foxconn’s huge plant at Shenzhen, a major manufacturing hub in southern China, underscore the brutal exploitation of Chinese workers by the world’s largest corporations. Ten workers have died, most of them just 18 to 24 years old. In the latest tragedy, a young man slashed his wrists in one of the factory’s dormitory last week. Taiwanese-owned Foxconn is the world’s biggest electronics outsourcing manufacturer, operating 20 plants and employing more than 800,000 workers in China. The Shenzhen plant in Guangdong province houses 400,000 workers, making products from iPhones and iPads to PlayStations for international brands like Apple, Sony, Hewlett-Packard and Dell. Analysts estimate that about 70 percent of Apple’s products are manufactured there…Most of the 13 workers who tried to kill themselves jumped from buildings because they were unable to bear the stress, alienation and humiliation they experience daily. They come from a second generation of migrant workers who, unlike their rural parents, have much higher expectations of urban life. They have access to the Internet and mobile phones and constantly see the vast new wealth that they help to create, but do not own.”

“Like other exporting companies, Foxconn’s basic monthly wage of 950 yuan ($US140) is in line with Shenzhen’s official minimum wage. Employees must work hours of overtime each day to make about 2,000 yuan to meet basic needs. Their harsh experiences go well beyond low wages. Foxconn recruits must undergo a course of ‘military training’ to prepare them for the company’s industrial discipline…Foxconn’s military-style regime, which is typical of export factories in China, requires workers to live in dormitories with up to 10 people a room. A single dormitory houses 5,000 workers, and there are many dozens of them. Workers are only allowed to enter their own rooms with electronic badges and are not allowed to cook or have visitors or sexual relations. The dorms have no air conditioning in order to pressure workers to do extra overtime during the summer, as there is air conditioning on the factory floor.”

“On production lines there are restrictions on how often workers may go to the toilet. They are under multiple security surveillance and can barely communicate with each other. During shift changes, they are often organized in ‘platoons’ for briefings, much like soldiers…The resulting psychological impact can be seen in the comments of a Foxconn mobile phone assembly-line worker who told Bloomberg after his 12-hour overnight shift: ‘Life is meaningless.’ He said workers were yelled at constantly. Another college-educated worker in the product development department complained: ‘I do the same thing every day; I feel empty inside. I have no future’….Foxconn has promised to hire psychologists to conduct check-ups on workers, and nets have been hung around factory buildings to try to prevent further suicide jumps. The management last month ordered all workers to sign letters saying that the company was not liable for suicide deaths.”

Oh, the horrors of “Chinese socialism”….no, wait, of global capitalism, to which “communist” China abjectly surrendered under the rule of Den “To Get Rich is Glorious” Xiaoping, who granted the eco-cidal world capitalist system a giant windfall by opening up China’s vast labor force to global exploitation and who violently crushed Chinese worker and student protesters who sang the Socialist International as they were gunned down in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.  The Foxconn horrors related above – common across the vast industrial heartland of the Chinese capitalist police state – are consistent with terrible tales from capitalism’s sweatshops, factories, mills, mines, and slave plantations past and present. From the not-so distant past, read Charles Dickens’ Hard Times, Emile Zola’s Germinal, or, better, young Frederick Engels’s masterful study The Condition of the Working Class and the factory inspection and district reports cited at length in Marx’s Das Kapital, where “the Moor” wrote eloquently about the many-sided material and spiritual death imposed by “capitalistic exploitation,” including “the intellectual desolation artificially produced by converting immature human beings into mere machines for the fabrication of surplus value, a state of mind clearly distinguished from that natural ignorance which keeps the mind fallow without denying its capacity for development, its natural fertility.”  

Historian Edward Baptist’s prizewinning study The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism is another must read. It shows that the United States’ rose to wealth and power in the world system primarily on the backs of Black workers enduring ruthless torture and exploitation under the capitalist and highly profitable system of chattel slavery. The “military capitalist” (Sven Beckett) ethnic cleansing of the southern states and the violent importation of African slaves to tend and pick cotton across an expanding US forced labor fronter was a boon also for early industrial capitalism in England and Europe. The mass murder, maiming, and rape and ruthless exploitation of Black slaves in the US South brought the cheap raw material that fueled the “dark satanic [textile] mills” that poisoned the air and water of the Manchester cotton district and stunted and shortened the lives of child and adult wage-earners from Silesia to New England and Pennsylvania. The new wage slavery that spread across the Western world, rooted in the brutality of enclosure, forced removal, genocide, war, and chattel bondage brought forth multiple versions of the literal Hell on Earth that was Chicago’s meatpacking industry as described on Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle: a place of freezing cold and sweltering heat, where workers fell almost unnoticed into boiling vats, lost fingers, cut themselves and got blood poisoning, saw their skin shredded by acid, and were  "processed" for every last bit of energy – like the animals they killed and handled in ever more reduced form – and then discarded when they were no longer useful.  Listen to the following passage from the great U.S. Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs’ statement to a federal judge readying to sentence him for violating the Sedition Act in 1918:

“At fourteen I went to work in a railroad shop; at sixteen I was firing a freight engine on a railroad. I remember all the hardships and privations of that earlier day…I am thinking this morning of the men in the mills and the factories, of the men in the mines and on the railroads. I am thinking of the women who for a paltry wage are compelled to work out their barren lives; of the little children who in this system are robbed of their childhood and in their tender years are seized in the remorseless grasp of Mammon and forced into the industrial dungeons, there to feed the monster machines while they themselves are being starved and stunted, body and soul. I see them dwarfed and diseased and their little lives broken and blasted because in this high noon of Christian civilization money is still so much more important than the flesh and blood of childhood. In very truth gold is god today and rules with pitiless sway in the affairs of men.”

I could go on about the continuation of these same basic dehumanizing indignities and oppressions under altered circumstances around the world today but I am out of time and space for that here.

Long after the many changes that have occurred in the profit system’s structure, organization, political-ideological superstructure, and geography (and more) since the times of Marx and Debs, moreover, the ultimate material-historical horror of capitalism is unfolding before our very eyes, reminding us that young Marx and Engels were correct to posit an existential choice: either the “revolutionary [socialist] reconstitution of society at large” or “the common ruin of all.” That horror, the biggest issue of our or any time, is capitalogenic Ecocide. It is capital and capitalism. not socialists and socialism (or for that matter humanity in general), that is accelerating a process that would have horrified even Hitler: turning the entire planet into a giant Greenhouse Gas chamber. What drives capital to destroy livable ecology is not some sadistic character flaw on the part of individual capitalists and managers – some mean-spirited greed that can be cured ala Dickens by a visit from Christmas ghosts past, present, and future  – but rather the underlying dynamics of the profits system.  It’s not just capital or capitalists that have caused this mess.  It is capitalism the system,  with its endless pursuit of surplus value and “cheap nature” – cheap raw materials, cheap energy sources, and cheap labor power  – to buoy up its holy rate of profit, that does the ugly deed. This system is far too invested in fossil fuels and far too anarchic to permit humanity to undertake an existentially necessary species-wide transition to renewable energy. 

Competition between capitals compels investors to constantly seek new profitable markets, raw materials, energy sources, labor supplies,  transport routes, political environments, and technologies in every corner of the world. Livable ecology, social justice, and the common good be damned: gas and oil must be extracted; forests must be razed; pipelines must be built; exploitable workers must be found (and created); other employees must be displaced and let go; new forms of wasteful built-in-obsolescence must be designed; lakes and rivers must be poisoned; barriers between humans and zoonotic viruses must be collapsed; sustainable local agriculture must be trumped by mass chemical farming to feed animals for slaughter; fertile soil must be torn off way for carbon-spewing trucks, cars, and airports and soulless real estate developments; Indigenous people must be removed and cheated; species must be eliminated en masse;  politicians and NGO leaders must be purchased to prevent government and social movement interference with the endless capitalist rape and soulless commodification of the planet; melting polar icecaps are seen as an opportunity for new lucrative (cost-cutting) shipping lanes instead of an existential warning to cease and desist from the relentless profit-mad war on a livable future.

The oppressive anarchy of capital in the material base undermines any effort by those in the political and state superstructure to impose adequate environmental rules. The state and its regulatory agencies and the overall politico-ideological and media culture are captured by capitalists whose superior wealth translates into superior political and ideological power. The needs and demands of workers and the broader populace subjected to class rule and exploitation compel constant quantitative expansion – “growth” – for capital and its political operatives to provide the supposed “solution” to structural unemployment and poverty (both of which are built into the capitalist system). Environmentally toxic “growth,” the holy expansion of GDP, is capitalism’s timeworn deadly answer to mass complaints over the economic insecurity that is built into its chaotic regime. Politicians take up the cry, citing silently lethal statistics of job growth, income growth, stock market growth — as the basis for their legitimacy and power even as commodified quantity leads to poisoned quality and Mother Earth is compelled to burn the human race off her once beautiful surface.

Cancerous though it may be for the environment and humanity, economic growth is an imperative for the majority of the population, which relies on it for jobs and more. Welcome to what the Marxist ecologist John Bellamy Foster has called “the global treadmill of production.” As he explained nearly three decades ago, while global capitalism’s neoliberal orgy was at high post-Soviet tide:

“The logic of this treadmill can be broken down into six elements. First, built into this global system, and constituting its central rationale, is the increasing accumulation of wealth by a relatively small section of the population at the top of the social pyramid. Second, there is a long-term movement of workers away from self-employment and into wage jobs that are contingent on the continual expansion of production. Third, the competitive struggle between businesses necessitates on pain of extinction of the allocation of accumulated wealth to new, revolutionary technologies that serve to expand production. Fourth, wants are manufactured in a manner that creates an insatiable hunger for more. Fifth, government becomes increasingly responsible for promoting national economic development, while ensuring some degree of ‘social security’ for a least a portion of its citizens. Sixth, the dominant means of communication and education are part of the treadmill, serving to reinforce its priorities and values…A defining trait of the system is that it is a kind of giant squirrel cage. Everyone, or nearly everyone, is part of this treadmill and is unable or unwilling to get off. Investors and managers are driven by the need to accumulate wealth and to expand the scale of their operations in order to prosper within a globally competitive milieu. For the vast majority the commitment to the treadmill is more limited and indirect: they simply need to obtain jobs at livable wages. But to retain those jobs and to maintain a given standard of living in these circumstances it is necessary, like the Red Queen in Through the Looking Glass, to run faster and faster in order to stay in the same place.” (Monthly Review, no. 9, 1995).

There is also the anarchy and conflict of competing nations. The disorderly multiplicity of nation states in the world capitalist system militates against the establishment of the central, species-wide coordination and action required to overcome the planet-wide collapse of  a livable future. At the top state level, with vast nuclear weapons stockades in place, inter-imperialist conflicts threaten to solve capitalogenic global warming with planetary Nuclear Winter.

The “horrors of socialism” under Stalin and Mao were largely inflicted by capitalist-imperialist encirclement and related internal counterrevolution. Without capitalist encirclement and aggression, with revolutionary success in other and especially leading imperialist nations, the very real accomplishments of the Russian and Chinese revolutions would of course have been immeasurably greater, and the crimes committed in the name of socialism in Russia and China would have much slighter. Soviet and Chinese socialism might have not only survived but even thrived in ways that would have inspired people’s socialist revolutions in other countries, putting humanity on the path to a world beyond the soulless and eco-cidal anarchy and oppression of capitalist class dictatorship.

(And, as few Western academics will tell you, the genocidal Pol Pot madness and the insane North Korean state cannot be remotely understood without factoring in the devastating impact of mass-murderous US carpet bombing.)

But let’s pretend for a moment that Soviet Russia and Maoist China were every bit as bad as US American propaganda has always said. Okay, fine, guess what: their (alleged) material, cultural, and spiritual death toll is nothing compared to that of capitalism-imperialism, making socialism the Lesser Evil (if that’s how we want to frame it) by far and away. But socialism – necessarily now eco-socialism given the environmental crisis produced by excessively tolerated bourgeois rule – is not at present merely a lesser evil.  It’s an existential necessity to escape from four apocalyptic horsemen produced by capitalism: war (now potentially nuclear), pandemicide, fascism, and (last but not least since there’s no common good, social justice, and popular sovereignty on a dead planet) ecocide.  It’s what’s required to put humanity on the path to liberation from all oppression and material ecological and epidemiological collapse. It’s the bridge to a world beyond class rule, oppression, and environmental ruin. 

We’d better figure out how to build and cross it. It’s now 90 seconds to more than one kind of Midnight, courtesy of the insane exterminist  profits system that is jointly upheld by Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Hakeem Jeffries, Charles Schumer, Mitch McConnell, John Roberts, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Donald Trump, Kevin McCarthy, Ron DeSantis, Marjorie Taylor-Greene, Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, Elon Musk, Vladimir Putin, Mellody Hobson, Joseph Tsai, George Lucas, Richard Uihlein, Xi Jinping, Dianne Feinstein, Judy Woodruff, Bono, Jay Z (who “compares being call a ‘capitalist’ to the N-word”), Volodymyr Zelensky, Emanuel Macron, Recyp Erdogan, and a broader cast of many thousands across the perverted and parasitic ruling classes of our deadly capital- and commodity-poisoned world.