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Capitalism. It’s what keeps the world turning. Without its advent there'd be no internet, no iPhone, no hover boards, and certainly no Starbucks Cold Brew. As undeniably tragic as this world may be to conceive, what’s equally undeniable is the premise that Capitalism is really just slavery with a few extra steps.
Perhaps this premise is gaining more traction because of references in popular culture like the show Rick and Morty, or perhaps it has more to do with the sheer amount of politicians who are using it as they’re rallying cry (RIP Feel the Bern). Whatever the reason, it seems to be a prevailing opinion, especially among lower class workers.
So let’s break it down. Capitalism has existed for a long time. Historians usually describe the infant forms of Capitalism as “Mercantile Capitalism”, generally prevalent in the Islamic World from around the 9th century and finding its way to Europe by the 12th.
Before that, nobles owned slaves and forced them to do whatever they wanted them to do. With the advent of mercantile capitalism, nobles became Lords and slaves became serfs. The change was in the compensation the serfs got for their toiling. Serfs began to get tithes from their Lords in exchange for their labor as well as protection from danger.
With the age of industrialization, beginning in Britain around the beginning of the 17th century, the classes were once again renamed by Capitalism’s greatest friend, Karl Marx. Marx lived in the 19th century, a time when industrial workers generally had it pretty bad. Hours were long, conditions were poor, and compensation was abysmal. Some workers even lived in little shanty villages surrounding the factory called “factory towns” and were paid with money that could only be used in the factory’s general store.
Marx saw the brutality of early capitalism and was determined to find a viable alternative. What he came up with was the idea and economic model of Communism. Now “Communism” as it relates to Marx, is different from the connotation we have of it today. In fact, by the time Communism was adopted by the brand new USSR (Russia), Marx had already given up hope that his vision would be realized and was even quoted saying “I myself am not a Marxist these days.”
The basis of his whole theory was that two classes that have existed forever were simply shuffled around with the advent of industrialized capitalism. He referred to them as the Bourgeoisie and the Proletariat. Essentially the bourgeoisie own everything and the proletariat are the labor force, just like the Lords owned the land and castles and the serfs farmed it in exchange for compensation.
Marx claims the only difference is now we call “tithes’ wages. His theory of “class struggle” emphasizes the idea that Capitalist societies will weaken themselves the more successful they become. Capitalist economies are run by consumerism. If suddenly we all decided to stop buying things, the economy would literally collapse. But since we continue to buy things, such as coffee to deal with those early mornings or beer to reward yourself after the grind, the system keeps chugging along.
However, according to Marx, this can’t go on forever. His theory claims that with each passing year, the bourgeoisie gets smaller and smaller whereas the proletariat gets larger and larger. Eventually, you have an income inequality issue that is so glaring, even the most undereducated proletariat can’t help but notice. You get to a point where 1% of the population controls more wealth than the bottom 90%. (Sound familiar?)
And eventually, you get to a point where the bottom 95% realizes how badly they are getting screwed and has what’s called “an epiphany of class consciousness” and essentially revolts against the system at which point Capitalism will be defeated and utopian socialism will take its place. Hooray.
Unfortunately, while this theory looks great on paper, the transition from Capitalism to Socialism gets exceptionally messy. There are quite a few stipulations Marx laid out in order for this theory to work and every time it’s been tried, it's usually by some dictator who won’t be bound by the ideas of centuries dead German.
So now we live in a world where there is no viable alternative to Capitalism. There is no economic model we can turn to since the near eradication of Communism after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Yet we are left with all the same problems that exacerbate with each year.
Today in the United States we face runaway income inequality, worse than it’s ever been, a majority of politicians who have to cater to whoever holds the purse strings in order to have campaign funds for reelection, and a financial district that continues to make decisions that will make them rich, even while bankrupting investors and average joes who trusted them to represent their interests.
The bottom 10% of the labor market is what economists would affectionately refer to as “wage slaves”. These are your cashiers at Wal-Mart, your middle aged servers at restaurants and your janitorial state employees. These workers generally suffer crippling debt, live paycheck to paycheck, and have little to no chance for upward social mobility. Why? The cost of living continues to rise at an alarming rate while the spending power of the dollar has barely risen at all if compared with inflation rates and spending power during the 1970s.
All of these issues seem to be coming to a head in this year’s Presidential election. The reason why Donald Trump has made it this far is simple, at least to me. He represents change. Regardless of any of his flaws or opinions, he is the wildcard. He’s what political theorists would describe as a “radical”. He wants immediate change and so does what’s called “the silent majority.”
The silent majority is a voting cohort that includes middle-class workers who work more than 40 hours a week, the lower middle class, and the working poor. These are your coal miners, your landscapers, your subcontractors and so on. They usually don’t have a voice in the legislature unless their union is particularly strong and this is the group who Clinton generalized in her “basket of deplorable” debacle.
Everyone knows what they’ll get with Hillary. It will be Obama 2.0, which to be honest, should be expected and wouldn’t be that bad. She’s a democrat. Democrats want slow, gradual change. Conservatives want as little change as possible. It’s just the way it works.
But the question I posed was not “Is capitalism slavery?” That all depends on the semantics of the word slavery and so on. The question is “does it matter?”
In America, we don’t really want for anything. If you work, you will have all the comforts you could want. Depending on how hard, how smart, or how unethical you are, depends on what kinds of comfort you can enjoy.
Capitalism is a good system. It’s allowed for the advent of amazing things: self-driving cars, the mini pocket T.V.s we still call phones, even the internet for Christ’s sake. I think this election is not about right and left, woman vs man , or even Hillary vs. Trump. I think it’s about the question “is capitalism slavery, and if so, does it matter to me that it is?”