What is True Alienation in Capitalism?

One of the hardest things to deal with when one first realizes the harm, the damage, the evil that capitalism embodies, promotes and waves away, is the social alienation. It is alienating to be a socialist, and this shouldn't be the case. Because the people we love, the liberals, centrists, and right wingers among our friends and families, whether they know it or not, there is a disconnect that goes on between us and them. And that disconnect comes from their inability or unwillingness to understand that capitalism is killing all of us. It's lonely sometimes to be a socialist, because it feels like being awake when everyone else is asleep.

They say, "Oh, capitalism is human nature! It's fine, there's nothing wrong with it, you're overreacting! No, human nature is compatible with capitalism, because people will always be greedy! Yep, nothing wrong here, just good ol' human nature! Well, there just HAVE to always be poor people in the world, right? I mean, haven't we ALWAYS had rich and poor? I don't get it, the world has always been this way, hasn't it? Why do you SUDDENLY want people to not have iPhones, I mean, don't you like having stuff?!" The conversation just devolves from there.

You know, it's really simple. I don't want to live in a world where thousands, if not millions die daily across the world from poverty, homelessness, and hunger. I want those things, the concepts themselves, to stop existing. No, I don't think these are just facts about humanity, I don't think that suffering is just the cost of having a "good economy". I don't want America to keep blowing shit up across the world, and calling it "my freedom", calling that "protecting me". That's a freedom, a protection I didn't ask for, and it's not worth the cost.

I talk to you a lot about things such as the "forever war" economy, about American imperialism, about the inhumanity of an economic system which is built to mobilize wealth upward, not downward. A system which proliferates the private ownership, control, and operation of industrial means of production into the hands of the people who already have power and money. But today I’m talking to you about capitalism’s power of alienation.

Marx and Engels wrote in Das Kapital about how capitalism steals the value of your labor, gives you a fraction of the wealth you generated, and calls the stolen labor value "profit for the company". Marx and Engels wrote about the alienation of the worker from the fruit of his labor, but also the alienation of the worker from the other workers. We are pitted against each other.

Imagine you bake a dozen cookies, and then a capitalist walks into your kitchen, steals the entire pan, gives you one cookie, and says, "Now, you better hurry up and eat this, or else that filthy foreign immigrant non-person over there is gonna take your one cookie. He's brown, make sure to hate him for that by the way, that would be best for my interests."

You know, I feel bad for right wingers. I know many of them, unfortunately, in my family and friends. In my city, in my county where just over in Thurmont there are literally hood-wearing klansmen. I feel bad for them, because I know that they possess humanity inside of them. But their humanity is twisted up in this horrible, disgusting hatred of their fellow man. The racist has taken the advice of the capitalist to heart, he hates the Other, and this blinds him to who and what is actually fucking him over.

I wish I could take the anger of the right winger, and point it at the real enemy that is capitalism, private interests, war profiteers, intelligence agencies, and more. I wish I could eliminate the apathy and the ignorance of your average liberal or centrist voter, and instead mobilize their guilt to make them act against this system that is designed to hide so much of its daily cost of innocent human lives. Real, honest, actual everyday human beings with consciences somehow can't see the lives that get ground up every day in the meat grinder that is capitalism.

I wish I knew how to get the message through to liberals, "Wake the fuck up, it's time to rally, protest, and labor strike. It's time to shut down our cities, it's time to fight back. You're actually going to have to fight, liberals, I'm sorry. I know you don't want to, but we have actual, literal concentration camps in America. You can't just share a hashtag, you're going to have to get arrested, you're going to have to get in a real fight."

I can’t say it any more clearly. But liberals look at us like we’re crazy when we say that these concentration camps are not new to Trump, they happened under Obama, they happened under FDR. They look at us like we’re crazy when we say that America shouldn’t spend 3/4 of a trillion dollars annually on perpetual war. The United States has spent something like 20 years total of its entire history at peace. 20 years total in 243 years of existence.

We tell them that everything that we were taught: this stupid flag, this meaningless pledge of allegiance, nationalism, patriotism, "I'm proud to be an American", 4th of July apple pies, baseball games and hot dogs...everything we were taught was designed to lead to this. To the American Gilead, to fascism wrapped in a flag and carrying the bible. Everything that we believe in, hold dear, own, and consume was designed to numb us to the day when the United States became a fascist oligarchy.

We as Americans are the enemies of freedom, we as Americans are a threat to world security and peace. We are the bad guys. So how do we fix it, make it right? Not with a hashtag, but with a bonfire. And in that bonfire we will have to put our patriotism, our complacency, our "good white people" sense of not wanting to rock the boat, our laziness, our inhumanity to our fellow man, the economic system we live under, the modern American security state. We need a cultural revolution.

I'm sick and tired of feeling helpless, watching over 1700 people get deported from my county, only to be thrown into concentration camps to die. I'm sick of wondering when people will fight back. I'm sick of centrists and neoliberals wringing their hands and saying, "There's nothing we can do! If we break the law, then we'll become the evil bad guys, and everything we've built will mean nothing!"

No. Standing by while a racist monster with an ICE badge brutalizes families and rapes children miles away from your home is evil. Watching and saying, "We've just gotta hold on until the nazis develop a conscience, then they'll stop the holocaust" is evil. Complacency is evil. The indifference of good men is evil. Until we stop the American holocaust, we are evil.

Knowing this while everyone around you chooses to stay ignorant of it is one of the worst feelings I've ever felt. Their indifference is agony to my soul. Their apathy makes me weep in loneliness. If you do nothing while people die, you could be standing right next to me, but I'd still feel alone because I can't feel you there next to me. The true horror of capitalism, its true alienation, is the alienation of good people from their conscience. Capitalism alienates you from your better nature. It destroys you from within.

We are alienated from the fruit of our labor, we are alienated from each other, and worst of all, we are slowly alienated from the best parts of ourselves, alienated from who we are and could become. Capitalism is cancer, and we are less than 10 years from total annihilation. This is not sustainable. This nightmare needs to end, or there will be no future.

There will be no future.