A Systemic Problem

It's Capitalism

Michael Brooks by Novara Media, Creative Commons

"Be ruthless to systems, be kind to people" - Michael Brooks

It is easy to focus on individuals within the system. Biden, Trump, Pelosi, and McConnell are easy targets. There can be no doubt they are all awful, evil people. But it is the system that needs to be changed. If Biden were not president, it would be Harris or Buttigieg or Bloomberg in his place. Engels understood this clearly:

This is where the so-called great men come in for treatment. That such and such a man and precisely that man arises at that particular time in that given country is of course pure accident. But cut him out and there will be a demand for a substitute, and this substitute will be found, good or bad, but in the long run he will be found. That Napoleon, just that particular Corsican, should have been the military dictator whom the French Republic, exhausted by its own war, had rendered necessary, was an accident; but that, if a Napoleon had been lacking, another would have filled the place, is proved by the fact that the man has always been found as soon as he became necessary: Caesar, Augustus, Cromwell, etc.

The problem is not the individuals, but rather the capitalist system.

This is why the lifework of Karl Marx is so important - he wrote the single most comprehensive analysis of the capitalist system. This is why a study done in 2013 by information scientists from Indiana University found that Karl Marx was the single most influential scholar of all time. This is something that the US largely attempts to ignore, but history has proven Marx’s analysis to have been correct. Marxism is not just the product of the laborious study of Marx and Engels, it is reality. Marx and Engels simply put it on paper. They did not conjure it magically. It already existed, they just brought it forth in form.

We make our history ourselves, but, in the first place, under very definite assumptions and conditions. Among these the economic ones are ultimately decisive. But the political ones, etc., and indeed even the traditions which haunt human minds also play a part, although not the decisive one.  - Friedrich Engels

History itself has been coopted by bourgeois interests. The great men theory of history is generally accepted by the establishment. From the earliest age, children are taught myths based around these so called great men such as the founding fathers. The true history is hidden behind this storytelling. The fact that Karl Marx and the International Workingmen’s Association corresponded with Abraham Lincoln is conveniently left out of bourgeois history. The general strike that did so much to end the Civil War was left to the black Marxist WEB DuBois to document and then largely ignored. That Hellen Keller, Albert Einstein, and Martin Luther King Jr. were all socialists is not common knowledge. Stephen Jay Gould used the dialectical materialism of Marxism in his anthropological work. Marxism reclaims history from the bourgeoisie for the people.

At the age of 20, Fred Hampton had a better understanding of Marxism than most could learn in a lifetime. Why? Because in addition to reading it, he lived it. He was of the people and for the people. He would have turned 73 on August 30 if he had not been assassinated by the US government. Every single speech of Fred Hampton speaks to the people.

That you can jail a revolutionary, but you can’t jail the revolution. You can lock up a freedom fighter like Huey P. Newton, but you can’t lock up freedom fighting. You might hire some pork chops like Mamalama to murder Alprentice Bunchy Carter, a liberator, but you can’t murder liberation, because if you do, you come up with answers that don’t answer, explanations that don’t explain, conclusions that don’t conclude. - Fred Hampton, It’s a Class Struggle, Goddammit.

Critics of Marx say that he must have been wrong since we do not yet have a socialist society. Yet Marx’s analysis of capitalism has held up. Capitalism keeps hanging on, but it regularly implodes as Marx predicted. Capitalism is a string of crises with far more bust than boom. The working class ends up underwater every time. The system requires it.

Jesse Hamilton @JesseJHamilton

BREAKING: Chopper 4 is now seeing houses on fire in the middle of flooded neighborhoods in Manville, NJ. No firefighters can reach the homes #nbc4ny @StormTeam4NY @NBCNewYork

This is a look into the future brought about by climate change, but it is not happening 10 or 20 years from now. It is happening now. Dystopia exists. This disaster was not made by the working class. It was created by the bourgeoisie. Although written 140 years ago, the following statement by Engels could have been written yesterday:

The present situation of society — this is now pretty generally conceded — is the creation of the ruling class of today, of the bourgeoisie.

Marx and Engels at the Rheinische Zeitung, oil on canvass by E. Capiro

The ruling class has amassed their wealth on the backs of the working class - both slaves and wage laborers. The working class is dying from a pandemic and climate disasters with no guarantee of healthcare or housing. Meanwhile, the ruling class is attending lavish birthday parties and flying penis shaped rockets to the edge of the atmosphere. Monkeys have better parties and have flown further into space. If we replaced the billionaires with monkeys, we would be far better off.

Capitalism must be dismantled and replaced with scientific socialism. The working class deserves all that they create. Private property and the accumulation of profit is going to be the end of us if we do not stop it. This cannot be done using the tools of the bourgeoisie. Electoral politics have proven to be a dead end. The underclasses will be the fuel that flames the fire of revolution. Once they have thrown off the alien class ideas that the hegemony of the bourgeoisie has instilled in them, the communism is inevitable. But the propaganda is deep and this is no easy task. Keep learning and educating others, each person has their own place in the class struggle. Together we can overcome the capitalist system.