This past Valentine’s Day, I shared to social media the following poem I wrote:
Roses are red
Kisses have suction
Workers should own
the means of production
I started observing Lent a few days later, and one of the things I gave up for Lent was social media. As a result, I missed my post going kind of viral on Tumblr, with hundreds of reblogs.
In addition to all those reblogs, it received a singled comment:
Communism will never succeed as long as Man is Man.
I thought that was interesting, given that I said nothing about communism. I am intrigued by the fact that this person equates workers having more power as being communist. And while they never explicitly stated it in this comment, I am further intrigued by the idea that they seem to rather have the owning class hold more power than the working class.
Anyhow, I responded with the following sarcastic reply:
Yeah, capitalism sure seems to be doing a bang up job right now.
Their subsequent reply peeled back their objecvity even more:
Communism: Policies so great you have to force people to accept them or send them to a gulag for the rest of their lives.
And it is that idea of forced ideology that I want to discuss here.
I have been discussing leftist politics online for over a decade. A common argument I get from people is something along the lines of what this person said: communism (or socialism more broadly) forces itself on the population. In contrast, they argue, capitalism brings with it freedom and choice.
The thing is, however, is that the freedom and choice that capitalism supposedly brings are an illusion.
Capitalism is at its very core an ideology of forcing the will of the few onto the backs of the many.
Take the erosion of the commons, for example.
Leading up to the advent of capitalism, a portion of the land in England was categorized as common. These commons were under the control of the lords of the respective manors, but certain rights on the land—such as pasture, pannage, or estovers—were held variously by certain nearby properties, or (occasionally) in gross by all tenants of those manors.
As well, some manors had so-called waste land, which had no value as a farm strip, often because it was very narrow (typically less than a yard wide) and in awkward locations (such as cliff edges, or inconveniently shaped manorial borders). This waste land was not officially used by anyone, so it was often farmed by landless peasants.
Starting with the Inclosure Act (also called the Enclosure Act) of 1773 (and arguably even prior to it), the British government began to enclose these commons. This made it more difficult for tenants to farm effectively, and eventually, many of them were forced into the city to make a living, no longer able to sustain themselves and their families as they had done for centuries prior.
Once in the city, they were forced to sell their labour in order to pay for the necessities of life, things they did not have to pay for previously.
Where they used to grow their own food on the land they inhabited, now they had to pay for that food. Where they used to build their own home on the land they inhabited, now they had to pay rent to live in a home someone else owned. Where they used to weave their own clothes, they now had to pay for clothes someone else made.
Prior to the forced migration of rural folks into urban communities, a person’s material needs were met directly through their own labour. Now their material needs were dependent on a growing owning class that determined how much they were paid for their labour.
Two hundred years later, our situations has changed very little. We are forced to sell our labour to pay for housing, for food, for clothing, for transportation. And the money we have to pay for those things is up to the whims of the owning class. If the owning class decides to not pay us a wage high enough to afford to live, then we are forced to accept it.
This forcefulness is so intense that we willingly (if not reluctantly) accept being forced into unsafe working conditions, unrealistic work hours, multiple jobs, or even working until we die, all in an effort to avoid losing the job that we need to pay for the necessities of life we used to be able to provide for ourselves.
Capitalism, at its very heart, is forced upon us.
