The Death of Capitalism and its Priests
How Capitalism Desperately Tries to Retain its Relevance, and How It Shall Ultimately Fail
F. Anton Drozdov
Contents
· Introduction
· Hegemony and the Dying Breaths of McCarthyism
· Financial Insecurity and Wage Crises
· The Environmental Crisis and the Race for Time
· The Breakdown of the Duopolic Image
· Closing Statements
Introduction
Capitalism as we know it arrives to the entrance of Hell, and is not privy to the luxury of judgement. However, the actions of the people shall ultimately determine whether its inevitable fate shall usher in the fate of humanity as well.
The days of McCarthyite fear mongering are dwindling away, as we see the machine of the media desperately clings to its remaining crumbs of power over the minds of the proletariat. No longer shall the murderous machine move. Its oil shall dry up and leave behind a world that violently struggles to be born out of the ashes, the scraps of the machine that perished in the fury of the working class.
The illusion of security can no longer sustain itself. The priests and their church hang by a dangerously thin thread. The faith in the religion of capitalism dies away, and with it the tolerance of a proletariat that has now nothing to lose but its chains. And thus the chains shall be shattered.
The priests may continue to damn the workers to hell, but the notion of a hell following the misery of life is nothing short of ironic and farcical, as the priests themselves have damned us not to an eternity of suffering in the afterlife, but rather to a lifetime of pain and alienation, as the cogs of the machine continued to move along, while the churches maintained the faith.
The faith is gone; let its death bring in the age of the working monsters, the age of the proletariat. Let the death of the capitalist religion bring in the age of the spiritual communism, under which the working people of the world may finally build themselves the free society in which all may prosper.
Hegemony and the Dying Breaths of McCarthyism
Media Consumption
The consumption of media was one of the most necessary conduits for propagandizing and conditioning of the public against communism and liberation politics. The ideas of McCarthyism would be meaningless without the media beasts who began offering their churches to relay the messages of the antichrist to the American public.
The largest news outlets of the United States have some of the most damning histories. In World War II, most media outlets spoke highly of individuals like Mussolini and Hitler, whilst slandering the liberatory movements of the world, like those of Ho Chi Minh and Mao Zedong. How then must the well-functioning independent thinker take such outlets so seriously, when the extent of their media is the lethal crushing of liberation narratives, and the dangerous elevation of fascist ones?
Without the media, there would have been no proper conditioning of the disciples of the nation. Families would need to actively turn to their television set, the source of indispensable knowledge, and consume the identical propagandistic talking points relayed every evening, under a self-pleasuring guise of well-roundedness and awareness, the peddling of the self-aggrandizing idea that the individual is a better member of society thanks to the consumption of such news media.The egoists of the world shall certainly have the time of their lives interpreting such sad souls!¹
The greatest consumers of such media were those who would become believers in their own lies: the media pundits. Common thought is that the priests are not believers in their meaningless phraseology, and yet as they continue to peddle their snake oil, they begin to slowly believe such scams. They become the greatest liars in history, the ones who trust their own lies. And thus, they are beyond salvation, for the creation of trust through self-deceit is more potent, more deadly than the creation of trust through intake of knowledge from a third party. If one is able to convince themselves of their nonsense, they have become nothing more than a manifestation of their lies.
They become the lie.
As such all of this information is relevant, and it then becomes no true mystery that the faith of the capitalist religion has been on violent decline, as the consumption of mass decreases from generation to generation. While the religion may hold itself up for so long under the platitudes of “success” and “meritocracy”, such empty statements eventually crumble under their own falsehood.
The reality of financial struggle, of the alienation of oneself from their labor, surpasses the warm lies fed to the people by the churches. While philosophers may spend their lives engaging in meaningless analyzations of human thought, of the perception of oppression, the material reality of oppression becomes far too real to remain in the idealist world, in the platonic understanding of the the term. The self-pleasuring of idealists, who treat the world merely as a manifestation of the mind, is a practice that shall keep social scum in the position that world is unable to change until we change our perception of it, but only insofar as the individual must simply change their mindset in order to change their appreciation. Truly a patronizing attitude to carry.
The media has carried out these idealist practices to an unnatural degree, pushing stories of dysfunction through the lens of “inspiration”. We are shown images of children selling possessions to afford their parents reasonable treatment, and told to admire the child, rather than face the religion. The child has simply changed their mindset, and as a result their world view has improved. To consider the idealist position as anything other than nonsensical jargon is to deny the oppressed people of the world the reality of their servitude.
Previously, these oppressed peoples could not understand their position in society. They were propagandized by the media outlets, which had up until then told them their poverty was a result of their own ineptitude. Of their inability to simply “change their mindset”. Once again, the material realities, combined with the decrease in media consumption by newer generations, has begun to overtake the thin veil that protects the clergy.
The church struggles to legitimize the religion.
The Loss of Meaning of Academia
Capitalism had previously relied on the storing of academia and knowledge behind the gilded gates of bourgeois institutions, available only to petty bourgeois “anti-capitalists”, who utilized ideology greatly as an aesthetic to sell their classroom material, rather than to properly educate individuals on dialectical process and human liberation pedagogy.
Rather, the educational practices of aesthetic anti-capitalists are simply those of the bourgeois institutions, and do not step beyond the limits of petty work to be completed in given spans of time. Thus, the educational practices of these “intellectuals” serve the same task of preparing the newer generations for empty labor that operates relative to the artificial scale of time developed by capitalist minds.
As we shall observe below, one of the greatest technological advancements of human history presented with it one of the greatest blows to capitalist narrative hegemony, ultimately rendering the loss of rigidity and confidence in academic institutions and their material. Students could now traverse an endless supply of texts (documents, books, articles, letters etc.) which they would begin reading en masse, creating a wave of opposition to bourgeois education, which had up until then only served as a minor media outlet, spreading the seeds of propaganda and McCarthyism onto an impressionable youth.²
The Internet
The internet served perhaps as one of the greatest double-edged sword for the capitalists and their priests. Whereas before the religion of capitalism could only be funneled through a small space to the people, one that was limited to state-mandated sources, the internet brought in perhaps the fastest decline in faith of the capitalist church.
As previously mentioned, the decrease in mass media consumption among the new generations was not uncorrelated with the rise in consumption of independent media. Whilst the old generations had relied on their television sets to absorb their state-sanctioned, well-tailored propaganda, the newer generations found themselves with the internet, which opened the portal to independent thought.
The breaking away from dialectical thought has perhaps been the greatest achievement of the media apparatus giants of the 20th century. These outlets had effectively created a population that was unable of critically deciphering truths through conflict of ideology and belief. Instead, they had broken down all opposition and replaced it with meandering nonsense; mindless corporate “news” media, which put on a show every night, to continuously pleasure the viewer into believing their fictional reality. Critical thought through dissonance and refinery had become a thing of the past. All naysayers were ousted as political kooks, slandered by the public and shamed out of the public. The state carried on its shoulders the greatest weapons of history.
Federal bills like the Communist Control Act of 1954, which are seemingly forgotten by the mindless worshippers of capitalism today, were put into place to terrorize the independent thinkers, even if not necessarily to criminalize them, but to intimidate them, force them to keep their beliefs hidden. Sacco and Vanzetti, anarchists put to death for their ideology, proved to the general public that deviation from publicly accepted political and economic religion was punishable by the most creative of executions by the state, however it deemed fit. Where the women of Salem were burned for their “witchcraft”, their devotion to science and ironically non-spiritual practices , the political deviants of the present and recent past were put to death for their “political perversions”, their free thought that did not conform to the state mandated religion of capitalism.
What the internet had managed to do was break down the already unsteady minds of many hostages of the capitalist state. They now had the ability to explore thought that had before not been available to them. The people of today have the simplest of access to Marxist texts; they may simply lay in bed and scroll for ages, opening themselves to the revolutionary texts of the past two centuries, exploring a plethora of available resources which lay outside the mainstream media that had up until then been the accepted source of information.³
There came a time in which free text/sources on the internet became a greater source of information for the general population. The outdated practices of the churches, the media giants had become unappealing to the newer generations, who have grown up only knowing the anything if not frequent economic crises and the rising threat of environmental disaster, which shall briefly be observed below. The inaction of the bourgeoisie has become evident in these crises, and thus this material reality violently opposes the religious narratives peddled by the priests.
In previous decades, the consumption of media had been through funnelled sources, and had now opened up, causing the funnel of information to leak, opening individuals to a reality that had not been explored. The inhabitants of the cave had essentially begun to realize their reality was a shadow, a projection of fictitious reality, fabricated by the ruling class to maintain pacifism and consent of the public, to keep the fabric of hegemony tightly bound.
The internet had begun interfering with the shadows on the wall, and with it came the population’s push to stray beyond the projections. They were met with a shocking reality.
The people had finally understood that their God had not only abandoned them, but that he had never been there to begin with.
Financial Insecurity and Wage Crises
The New Generation
A capitalist conception of the ages, the wage has become the most observed trend in economic spheres. However mathematical the pseudo-intellectual capitalists may paint themselves as, the private dictation of wages in exchange for the private control of labor is beyond human justification. The capitalist’s control over the individual’s labor is untenable, and any attempted defense of such a centerpiece of capitalism is akin to the defense of serfdom of the feudal ages.
As with other revelations of capitalism’s failures, the newest generation of proletarians has experienced, among other things, the devastating stagnation of wages, in which the compensation for the labor they sell to the capitalist is, to put it mildly, horrifically low.
Observe the trend below, which models the rise in labor productivity, in comparison with the wages. A Marxist shall rightly argue that if the wage is to exist, the only true just level of compensation is one which the rise in wages is identical to the rise in productivity. However, the existence of the wage in itself is antithetical to human rights.
Principled Marxists must not argue for the end goal of higher wages, but the abolition of wages altogether. The privatization of value assignment to the capitalist class is not conducive nor logical to the achievement of a just society. The increase of wages can be overcome by the capitalist’s increased speculation on market goods, driving prices of all items up. And thus is the farce of the “free market”.
Trends like such are treated by liberal analysts as “anomaly”. Commonly, such individuals use meaningless phraseology, the likes of “the failure of the system”, or perhaps “the broken system”. This can only be described as either willful ignorance or malicious intent, as claiming that capitalism is failing is to discredit the destruction it intentionally reaps.
In contrast, Marxist analysts shall treat such trends as “the expected vector of capitalism”. Capitalism is not failing, but rather progressing as intended. To claim it is broken is to claim the noose is broken for properly hanging the individual. The noose is completing what it was set out to do, and capitalism is progressing as intended.
For that reason, liberal analysts⁴ shall only present the arguments in favor of the reform of capitalism, rather than the complete overhaul of the oppressive system. The refusal to implement dialectical analysis into the observation of capitalist crisis shall only allow for fruitless, platitudinal “solutions” that shall reroute humanity back to the course of capitalism.
The newest generations are discovering financial crisis, unparalleled with the generations of the past. The artificial poverty and material desperation forced onto the younger proletariat has become perhaps one of the most powerful ignition sources of capitalist dissent, fueling stronger opposition to the system that has single-handedly denied an entire generation of a comfortable life.
With this discovery, the desire to engage in non-capitalist discussion shall inevitably rise, bringing with it a new age of class-conscious laborers who desire not to participate in the grotesque circus of capitalism and its optics of freedom. Wage protests have become more common worldwide, in liberal bourgeois nations like France, in which violent marches have risen from the disenfranchised workers, who are ultimately responsible for the proper functioning of the capitalist economy.
The COVID-19 Pandemic
As theorized and detailed by Rosa Luxemburg, times of crisis are periods in which the faults of capitalism become undeniably visible. As with financial crises, there also comes the crises that directly affect basic human rights denied under capitalism, like those of healthcare.
In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic ravaged the world, and with that came a great realization for many: the bourgeois state had never had the intention of aiding the struggling proletariat. Those who maintain their faith in the petty liberal parties and their subordinates are grotesquely misled, as they refuse to ideologically counteract their world view to better refine the image of truth they grip onto.
Once again, the liberal analysts treat wage crises that arise from the mass dismissal of labor positions in major corporations as anomaly, insinuating once again that capitalism is not properly functioning. But of course it, competent thinkers understand this, and as such leaving analysis to the liberal priests of capitalism carries with it the legitimacy of leaving a mouse to navigate a sea vessel. The mouse neither understands, nor evidently seeks to understand, the functioning of the vessel, and liberal neither understands, nor evidently seeks to understand, the oppressive power structures in place that operate exactly as they intend to⁵.
The crises that have become evident thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic have not arisen due to the health crisis, but rather have always existed, and only recently have become magnified, the power structures revealed, due to the imbalance in health care and wage distribution under a market system. The liberals are shocked by these developments.
The Marxists are not surprised, they are proven right. Painting these crises as the exasperation of already existing crises has become essential in properly imparting realistic analysis onto the oppressed. This has become more common, as the workers begin to realize the pre-existence of dysfunctions that have come to the forefront of society.
The Environmental Crisis and the Race for Time
The Link Between Endless Growth and Extinction Events
Commonly, the classroom economist tells their students that economics is the study of “unlimited wants with limited resources”. Perhaps this may serve better as a definition of “capitalist economics”, as the desire for endless material possessions is trademark of a society that has been viciously deprived of basic humanity, and thus must desperately seek to replace said humanity with meaningless toys, shiny objects that make sounds and have no true utility.
Capitalism itself, in baptizing students with the falsehoods of “unlimited wants with limited resources”, simultaneously turns a blind eye to the unlimited growth that it requires to exist and function. Truly a versatile religion; perhaps the basis of the capitalist’s teachings is for the disciple to “do as [the capitalist] says, not as [he does]”.
This endless growth has, in only the last 150 to 200 years, fueled a dangerous rise in global temperatures, threatening life on Earth as we know it. The newest generation of the proletariat has, as previously mentioned, come into the world knowing only economic crisis and climate disaster. The reality has never been different for them. As such, disdain for the capitalist plague has grown, as the connections have become more and more evident through inaction of bourgeois institutions and the bourgeois politicians.
With this rise in climatological crises shall come the inevitable rise in opposition to the economic structure of society that has fueled the disasters that have only been on the rise. The correlation shall be direct, and shall accelerate in the coming years. Food and housing insecurity shall violently fuel staunch opposition, and perhaps tighten the grip of solidarity within the proletariat. Only then can survival become tangible.
The Breakdown of the Duopolic Image
Loss of Faith in Electoralism and Reform
There exists a great deal of relevant trends in electoral politics that reveal a deterioration in faith in the duopolic image. Once again, the following are not anomalies, but rather are results of the previously mentioned factors of deviation from the norm coming into effect, which have affected how the individuals of the nation behave with regards to electoral politics.
First, below we may observe the decrease in voter turnout in American presidential elections over the years. As the proletariat becomes less enamored with the fantastical idea of a red or blue team at the helm of the cursed Flying Dutchman, they shall inevitably participate in fewer numbers in the horse racing tournaments that are held every four years to maintain the image of free will in the “free-world”.
While the decline is not necessarily sharp, it is consistent, and particularly more drastic in only the last 12 years. To further cement this trend, let us now observe more interesting and revealing evidence that serves to highlight a reduction in the general faith of the population in electoral politics. Consider the following from Gallup.
The level of questioning and uncertainty involved in election integrity in the most capitalistic dysfunctional states of the world reveal a larger trend of electoral deterioration. The farce of bourgeois democracy has begun its glorious descent into oblivion.
Whilst participation appears not to waver all too much (though decrease nonetheless), the blind participation in voting rituals for the appointment of the newest Pope to represent the church is nothing but an act of habit, particularly as the participation rate appears higher than the level of confidence in the process. It is simply exercise.
This is not particularly damning. The United States, the most capitalistic nation in the history of the world, has prided itself on its democracy (go on, laugh, I shall do so with you). As such, one of its most perplexing rituals has been the social slander of those who refuse to participate in the electoral process. Those who do not vote are considered “complicit” in the process of “bringing to power” the tyrants of the present. Yet, the four year cycle of seemingly spawning and displacing tyrants seems comically opposed to the historical rise of tyrants in the past.
How can it be that the population was simply able to vote out the tyrants of today, without said tyrants putting up a fight? The meaningless bourgeois belief of electoral displacement of fascists is one that is truly only relevant in the spaces of petty suburbanite liberals, in which the process of self-pleasuring continues. The belief that one was individually responsible for the “overthrow” of a tyrant simply through the submission of a ballot is one that feeds into the egotistical nonsense of bourgeois activists, and is entirely undialectical, opposing all the laws of human nature, struggle, and liberation.
Although it may seem that many do not understand this, the general population does possess a great deal of nihilism for the electoral process. They are simply unsure as to why they have these thoughts. As with most ideologies, one does not truly shape their specific beliefs until the texts of theoretical conceptions are consumed. Such a population understands the meaninglessness of the performances staged every four years, however they do not understand the implication of such a show.
Show them⁶. Shatter the image of the world they possess, and present to them an uncertainty they must resolve through the reshaping of their previously help truth. If not now, when?
Closing Statements
The Cycles of Struggle
As with any period of unparalleled contradiction, capitalism nears its inevitable demise. The age of kings shall soon fall, and with it the potential to either eradicate the praying population or bring into existence the new world, one in which man is finally free.
Struggle is simply a dialectical approach to liberation. To suggest that ballot submission shall be the tool of freedom is to deny all past struggles of their legitimacy, to insinuate their fruitless execution. The truth of struggle is its absence implies not a “civilized” people⁷, but of a properly pacified people, one that is enthralled with material bling far too much, in which the population finds no benefit to violent struggle, whilst blindly parroting the quotations of nonviolence from bourgeois historical figures of the likes of Gandhi.
Struggle acts as one of the greatest overshadowed practices of the capitalistic world. The bourgeois news media shall inevitably paint struggle as “barbaric practice” of uncivilized, backwards individuals from third world nations who simply “do not know better than violence”, a narrative that is generously perpetuated by unkempt “civil” bourgeois liberals, a group of individuals who incidentally take great pleasure in ignoring the continuous violence carried out by the state in the form of human rights denials, of privatization of basic liberties, which have been packaged in cellophane by private corporations to be resold to a population that is now grateful to have “access” to them.
Violent struggle is inevitable. It is necessary. To police the reaction of colonized and/or exploited people is to parrot the capitalist state, simply without the military, ultimately positioning oneself as a miserable cheerleader of the state that has not an ounce of care for the labor it exploits beyond its profitability. The oppressed peoples of the world shall continue to struggle, and to deny them that right, to place oneself on the opposing sides of their movement, is to effectively place oneself among the class traitors of the world, among the petty bourgeoisie. Enemies of the movement.
Unprecedented Times
We cannot say we do not live in unprecedented times. The world risks destruction, and yet it offers growth. As with all periods of history, we must not treat liberation with haste. There are no true ways for humanity to enter its greatest phases with ease, but rather, as previously mentioned, with struggle.
Humanity currently exists in the most advanced stage of capitalist society in history, and with that the necessity for the greatest communist movement in history as well. Organization shall be paramount, and anything less than careful execution of worker protection and solidarity shall inevitably, as in the past, lead humanity to the regression backwards into class oppression once again.
The time for blind hatred is not now, and never has been. The meaningless belief of chaotic “anti-statism” shall remain irrelevant, as the movement must push for organized labor against the capitalist state, with the sole aim of weaponizing the state apparatus to suppress the bourgeois entities that have oppressed the proletariat for so long.
To believe the state may simply wither away, whilst the dialectical conditions of capitalism remain, is not only nonsensical, it is dangerous. The revolution shall be permanent, and only in the dictatorship of the proletariat forcefully abolishing the contradictory entities of capitalism can humanity achieve such conditions of revolution. The laborers of the United States and all violent capitalist nations must find power in their numbers. The time is now, victory stands ahead.
Hope
I of course present many potentially devastating arguments that may lead the reader to depressive thoughts. Perhaps the information may appear terrifying, and the task of overthrowing the violent capitalist gods and their priests may appear visibly daunting. However, I intend not to lead the reader to despair, but to vicious optimism, as strange as that may sound.
The mobilization of the proletariat can only occur under the conditions of desperation and necessity, the conditions which have perpetuated struggle in the past. I ask not that you intake the material realities of capitalism as horrific reminders of nihilism and hopelessness, but that you assess said realities accordingly, and prepare for war.
The power of the proletariat has always existed, but has not been realized. It is your duty to manifest the realization of such potential, to impart onto the proletarians of the world the ability to understand their abilities. Only then shall the capitalists and their priests tremble with fear. Without such interconnectability and solidarity amongst the laborers, there shall always remain the religion of capitalism, plaguing humanity with its scourge.
I only ask that you lift the chains of proletariat, allow them to see them for the first time. Hand the laborer the hammer, and let us begin our long task that lays ahead.
Let us finally be free from our chains. The time is now, let us usher in the victory of the haunting spectre.
¹Such commentary is made, of course, for the sake of irony. It is worth noting that egoism, nihilism, and existentialism are dangerous, for they deprive the oppressed people of the world of the free thought of liberation. They instead reserve the mind for the nihilist view in which altruism and solidarity are merely sources of natural human egoism, rather than side-effects of the dangerous individualistic mindset of social chauvinists, which have been effectively bred and exasperated by capitalist institutions and their priests.
²Phrases like “education is activism” are pushed by petty suburbanite bourgeois liberals who engage in aesthetic politics, and are to be discarded as having any political relevancy. We ourselves, as properly thinking dialecticians, understand that the oppressor shall never provide to the oppressed the tools necessary to overthrow him. So long as the bourgeois structure of academia remains, there shall be no revolution through the classroom and guidelines, only through the violation of said guidelines.
³While the individual has become more independent in their thought, it is not unlikely that they shall turn to any “alternative” media source they may find, which of course is inclusive of right-wing sources that are simply “not in the mainstream”. As such, assuming the individual shall become a well-read dialectician to counteract their previous conditioning is not a conducive conclusion, as it still requires read Marxists to properly impart onto newly excommunicated individuals the knowledge of anti-capitalist thought and analyzation methods.
⁴Liberal analysts, in this context, must include the ideologues of social democracy and democratic socialism, as these ideologies are grotesque revisions of Marxism that, if anything, displace any and all Marxist facets from Marxism itself, leaving behind remnants of perhaps solely charged language of the likes of Marx, and nothing more. The substance has effectively been stripped, and nothing of importance remains in place.
⁵Often I am questioned of my intent in writing with the sole purpose of the exposure of the farce of liberal “humanity”, whilst excluding any visible criticism of the conservative individuals within the state. The conservative has no interest in maintaining a level of humanity, but is solely interested in violent mental contradiction through indefensible beliefs that are intended solely to maintain the economic “health” of the state. The liberal, in the process of maintaining visible support for the economic growth that capitalism requires, feigns humanity through platitudes, absence of meaningful action. As such, the general population finds itself oftentimes labeling itself as “humanitarian” for supporting the liberal entities. It is more fruitful to expose the wolf disguised among the sheep, rather than gesture towards the wolf who cares not that others see him as such.
⁶Important to understand is the necessity of showing to educate. Instructing the common individual to find Marxist texts not only presents a violent dissonance to their “truth”, but is reminiscent of the practice of assigning petty work, which directly models the structures of bourgeois education. It is your sole duty to begin to chip away at their previously held beliefs. The process of opening one to dialectics and Marxist thought and theory of liberation must itself be dialectical, in perhaps the most wise of ways. Rather than presenting a powerful contradiction to their world view, instead begin with a small inconvenience to their equilibrium. Allow them to recalibrate by adjusting those previously held beliefs to a newer, more refined understanding of the world. Repeat this process. This is how Marxists are born. They are grown through individual challenges, not the lazy feeding of bulks of information.
⁷Keeping in mind that the term “civilized” refers here to the Western definition of the term, of a population that overuses in the name of personal image, of a population that refrains from violence in the name of “civility”, rather than the permission, the consent to oppressive entities to carry out their work through the violence of the state.
