Dear extraterrestrials, on the off chance in a zillion of this story being true, please disavow whatever hogwash the self-appointed authorities overseeing humanity from among our most prideful oligarchies would have predictably trickled down and out, and consider this other reality tunnel instead. Because when you do not know who you’re getting into bed with, it ain’t love that will be made.
Communism is supposed to be where the workers own the means of production for all goods and services. This means that there are no Chief Executive Officers, no Chief Operating Officers and sure as shit no Chief Financial Officers, no corporate boards or boards of directors whatsoever. So that the millions claimed by a Bezos, Gates, Koch, Soros, Musk, Thiel or Zuckerberg every hour would instead be split among the workers. Though no longer underpaid this would not make the workers rich, as they would have the power to elect not to overcharge their family, friends and neighbors for the goods and services produced. Low costs allows for fewer dollars to be stretched that much farther, without any reason to raise debt ceilings for existing beyond their means. Price-gouging rendered null and void guarantees none would possess cause to work more than what’s necessary to meet basic needs, permitting a life beyond work and sleep, work and sleep, work and sleep. In practice however, Communism invariably ends with egocentrics asserting their personal desires before the measurable needs of everybody else.
Socialism is not where workers own means of production, but rather where the government owns means of production, which is a starkly different matter altogether in spite of the embarrassing western numbers of pundits and commentators believing the two terms are interchangeable. Governmental funding would come first, with anything extra theoretically to get divided among the workers responsible. Which would indeed be nominal, but then, they would no longer be paying taxes, rents or utilities or for healthcare of any sort, as these things would be factored into government expenses. In practice however, Socialism invariably ends with egocentrics asserting their personal desires before the measurable needs of everybody else. As long as any form of capital is utilized, it’s simply a different method for looters of entitlements to still eventually rob the working producers blind.
Natural calamity awaits anything being declared more valuable than life itself, no matter the life and no matter what that particular thing is, regardless if it’s an ambition, a place or a currency; the set, setting or dosage. This applies universally to societies and to interpersonal relationships, to all matters great and small outside the boxes of our lone gourds. But most especially to the fundamentally selfish concept of profit, and all the more while the prices to be paid are readily overlooked for the sake of ego appeasement, whether for yourself or whoever you wish to vicariously be, wish to befriend or wish to fuck. Because society does not exist without the many persons omitted, and staying fed proves problematic without those many persons which ego thoughtlessly wishes to do without. Even were you to actually work hard for your money, nobody forces you to spend ten bucks on a lousy comic book instead of baby food for the single mother up the way. By all means, blame the millionaires, billionaires and trillionaires for societal problems, but you cannot also blame them for your own selfish decisions to assist those who flatter you as opposed to those who need assistance far more disconcerting than flattery. What do such people think contributing to society means?
Capitalism is where self-entitled private interests declare ownership of all means for production and everything else under the sun. It jumps straight to openly and proudly enabling disenfranchisement by allowing, by rewarding, egocentrics to assert their personal desires before the measurable needs of everybody else. Uncapped maximum wages hand in hand with unregulated avarice, there is no good form of Capitalism no matter which hyphen is sexy these 15 minutes, just as there is no good form of exploitation, no good form of extortion, and no good form of entrapment. It leads to hoarders of inherited wealth declaring themselves leaders of men and captains of industry, when abject failure to exist without extravagant expenditures is the definitive opposite of self-dependence. It has led to the most inconsiderate among us overseeing the anti-life pillage of the world at large, with crippling the democratic self-determination of all peoples foreign and domestic not observed for the oppression which it intrinsically is, but rather insanely mistaken as somehow defending liberty anywhere. Being a culture reliant on marketing carrying more water than the thing itself, there is no moralistic way to support the troops, for what they defend is marketing and nothing else. Any insistence that the largest seller of arms on the planet is a peacekeeping nation is no less ridiculous than insisting that the biggest drug-dealer in the sketchiest part of your hometown is working to sober you up. Americans cannot even view their own inordinate prison labor as a gulag, simply because private interests rather than government are what finds profit in the endeavor, and only marketing might possibly discern the two. Unlike wealth, freedom is by no definition a finite thing, yet what is commonly regarded runs contrary, that obstruction of the freedoms of another is somehow a defense of one’s own. As citizens of a capitalist nation our only begotten right is to drop the fuck dead the moment we prove ourselves unable and/or unwilling to further the riches of egos bigger than our own. All else constituting this society is marketing to deflect from that one root element.
The box stores are open in the pandemic not because they are by any stretch safer than public spaces, but because in the eyes of the law the notion of corporations making more and more money is prioritized over rights of citizens to life and liberty, workers and customers be damned. And I feel if someone is not boycotting that process, then they are not an innocent bystander. In the same sense of fear originating from comfort, true desperation is created from such servitude, and not versa vice. Anybody disagreeing with that is guilty themselves of poltroonery, and the worst part about that is how I am not in the wrong by saying so. If members of a Capitalist society were capable of being better themselves as individuals or as a collective, they would find no solace in obsessing over simply feeling better about themselves, when inane obfuscations exampled by the ego-stroking nature of social media, sycophantic entertainment and identity politics promise them mere packaging magically and erroneously holds all the context of mettle and merit. The wish-fulfillment of our most ideal costuming forever lacks the power of that which we say and do.
But what each of these -isms pointedly misses is that the workers, the people themselves, are the one true means of production. While Communism and Socialism mischaracterize this every bit as much as does Capitalism, capitalists go steps beyond through the manufacture of automation, advancing technologies to omit workers from the equation altogether despite the obvious irony of the people then made deprived of the chance to earn means necessary for affording goods and services. This is most notable through proponents of Universal Basic Income, the hypocritical apologists for Capitalism, awaiting the same wealth to have sequestered their own livelihoods to abruptly pull a 180 and generously fund the very same masses they have pillaged, exploited, extorted and entrapped to obtain their holdings to begin with. The experience your grandma underwent from a mugger breaking her hip is not suddenly made worthwhile should the mugger share a cut with you. The three big -isms each ends by way of enfeeblement on behalf of ego. Lacking susceptibility to the marketing for any of the -isms is taken as childish by respective followers possessing no sense of self-awareness, yet Capitalism is ultimately a matter of self-destruction, from workers working themselves unnecessarily into an early grave to a population whose health and safety are readily denied so that egos might face that much less competition, or consequence.
Having no time for ego of any measure, I oppose all of it to my dying night. No fantasy weighs more than the reality of human life, and preferring the illusions of masquerade to this abounding real world we share is manifestly what causes all concerns. Fantasies are intangible, as are their symbols no matter the appeal of the almighty dollar or of god and country, and while humanity can certainly exist without symbolism, symbolism cannot exist without humanity. By their nature of being intangible constructs, they are instilled with definition by whatever passing fancy the most self-serving deem desirable, no matter the festering boils allowed to grow in their wake. The fervor of clashing political personality cults vying for supremacy or the neglectful pathologies bred purposefully from the overabundance of pop culture escapism or the abject resistance to accountability sold without value by orthodox religions, this world is made to burn by these indistinguishable wet-dreamers living only to get themselves off.