Introspection of Capitalism (by Kelvin “Khaysi” Canada, NABPP-PC)

The parasitic and predatory system of capitalism has been debated and argued over by plutocrats and other elitist bourgeois advocates of exploitation since modern capitalism was birthed into existence from the demise of the mercantilist system in the 18^th century: claiming that capitalism is a democratic system that provides liberty and economic opportunities to all people equally, regardless of race, class, nationality or gender, and communism is an authoritarian system that suppresses liberty and these economic opportunities and the social progress of all peoples. What makes this contention so comical (and sad) is that so many of the oppressed people actually believe it is true.

But capitalism is no “white knight in shining armor” that is going to rescue us from poverty, class oppression, and environmental destruction. Capitalism is responsible for all these problems. People got to get over their denial and snap out of their hypnotized trance. The “rags to riches” dream they sell on TV and in the movies and magazines is intended to keep us working hard and making the rich richer. Dreamers spend their whole lives chasing this “carrot-on-a-stick” chimera with the hope of being the next Tyler Perry success story.

Because they are transfixed on “making it” via capitalism, they are oblivious to the reality that less than 1% of the poor and oppressed will ever experience this “rags-to-riches” transformation because the 1% of rich people already own all the wealth, and the super-rich .001% suck up most of the wealth society produces. This leads me to my next point, that if only 1% of the world’s population are benefiting from a system that purports to offer equal opportunity to everyone, don’t we have to call this a failed system?

In order for capitalism to even exist, it has to suck and exploit the blood, sweat and labor out of somebody, and that somebody is always the working class, known politically as the proletariat, who can only survive by selling their labor power to a capitalist (for less than it is worth). The labor of the proletarians makes commodities (i.e. cars, clothes, TV’s, toothpaste and so on) that the capitalist sells on the (so-called) “Free Market,” for a profit. Those who produce the wealth, the workers, get mere crumbs, just enough to keep them working, while the capitalist pockets (privatizes) immense wealth for him/herself.

Let’s say a capitalist owns a computer company in which he pays the workers $10 an hour for 8 hours a day, five days a week. Collectively, the workers produce an average of $2,400 a day each in value, but they only get paid $80 a day in wages. After paying off the operating expenses, like rent, materials, machinery and shipping, the rest of the profit belongs to the capitalist. He/she can put it in the bank to earn interest or invest it somewhere else to make more profit. The workers have to spend their wages on food, rent and utility bills and live paycheck to paycheck.

So you can see why Brother Malcolm X said: “SHOW ME A CAPITALIST AND I’LL SHOW YOU A BLOODSUCKER!”

Capitalism is historically proven to be parasitic and predatory. All around the world it has killed, tortured, robbed and enslaved masses of people in its pity-less pursuit of profits. The founding of Amerikkka was the blood-soaked birth of capitalism. For the indigenous people of this continent and the Afrikan masses kidnapped, enslaved and transported here against their will, the whole history of this country is abominable. The “Founding Fathers” were oppressors, rapists and murderers.

So, when you hear elected puppets like Obama make statements like: “I’M ON A MISSION TO SAVE CAPITALISM,” you know who is pulling his strings.

Many people falsely believe that slavery derived from racism, but it did not. It derived from capitalism, and racism was used as justification and to keep the oppressed from uniting, and it is still used for that by capitalism today. Capitalism initiated genocide against the indigenous peoples and slavery and racism. And it perpetuates racism and class oppression to this day. Likewise, it is destroying our eco-system in its greed and irresponsibility to make quick profits.

It is irrefutable that capitalism is to blame for 1. Slavery, 2. Ecological destruction, 3. Genocidal wars, 4. Mass poverty, 5. Racism, 6. Sexism, 7. Hunger and mass starvation, 8. Fratricidal gang wars, 9. Mass incarceration, 10. Homelessness. So it takes pro-capitalist puppets like Barack Obama who said, “I’M ON A MISSION TO SAVE CAPITALISM,” to try to “white wash” this system that has been responsible for so much social injustice.

The oppressed masses will not be able to transcend these social ills without overcoming capitalism. Robert Carson of C.O.R.E. was correct when he said: “There cannot be any negotiation with industry and capital. Since capitalism is the reason U.S. Black people are in our current predicament, we feel capitalism should be destroyed.” (cited in Black Awakening in Capitalist America, by Robert Allen). What Robert Carson is emphasizing is that given that capitalism is the creator of slavery, racism, sexism, poverty, oppression and class inequality, why should the oppressed be expected to adhere to the principles of capitalism when struggling against the ills which capitalism has caused and is still perpetrating upon us?

More and more capitalism is relying on its “bought and paid for” mouthpieces to promote a reactionary world view because the number of people – including white middle class people – who still believe in capitalism’s “American Dream” has greatly dissipated. This is what ignited the Occupy Wall Street protests of the 99% in which both middle class and working class people – and particularly youth – jointly directed their anger at the growing disparity in wealth, corruption and high-handed dictatorship of the billionaire bankers. Even though Occupy Wall Street grew into a global movement, it didn’t evolve into a global revolutionary movement to address and redress the problems it pointed to.

Today’s phony “Make America Great Again!” rhetoric is not only being propagated by the “Fat Cat” industrial, agricultural, political and entertainment capitalists but by religious capitalists as well. You have religious evangelists like; T.D. Jake, Jake Van Impe, John Hagee and Pat Robertson, etc. on TV, radio and from the pulpits. They are preaching capitalism to their followers and congregations which totally contradicts the teachings of Christianity. There was nothing about the life of Jesus Christ, which Christianity is supposed to be based on, that justifies lynching, raping, murdering, plundering, letting poor people die of hunger and preventable and curable diseases, causing people to become homeless, instigating wars to plunder natural resources and all of the many crimes of capitalist exploitation.

The Bible says: “One thing thou lackest; go thou way, sell whatsoever thou hast and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasury in heaven; and come, take up the cross and follow me ….” (Mark, chapt. 10, verse 21). This clearly implies that God as well as Christianity was intended to inspire helping the poor. Jesus was supposed to be so sympathetic to the poor that he fed 5,000 from just two fishes and five loaves of bread.

So to have evangelists on TV and on the pulpits glorifying a system that contradicts the principles Christianity was founded on is simply blasphemous. Jesus didn’t starve the poor he fed them. II Corinthians, Chapt. 8, Verse 9 says: “You know that our Lord Jesus Christ was kind enough to give up his riches and become poor, so you could become rich.” He did this to show his rich Christian adherents how to use their wealth by example, as an instrument to help the poor even if it makes you poor too. Which is why he said: “Those who gathered too much had nothing left. Those who gathered only a little had all they needed ….” (II Corinthians, Chapt. 8, Verse 15).

Jesus emphatically made it clear throughout that rich people will not enter into God’s Kingdom and being rich is not within the laws of Christianity. Read James, Chapt. 1, Verse 9 through 11: “Any of God’s people who are poor should be glad that he thinks so highly of them. But anyone who are rich should be glad when God makes them humble. Rich people will disappear like wild flowers scorched by the burning heat of the Sun, and their beauty is destroyed. That’s how the rich will be destroyed as they go about their business…”  Now of course you have many rich Christians who try to justify ignoring this by saying there is nothing in the Ten Commandments that says it is a sin to be rich, but it doesn’t say it’s a sin to sell drugs either.

Jesus’ condemnation of the rich continues in James, Chapt. 5, Verses 1 through 3: “You rich people should cry and weep! Terrible things are going to happen to you. Your treasures have already rotted, and moths have eaten your clothes. Your money has rusted, and the rust will be evidence against you, as it burns your body like fire. Yet you keep on storing up wealth in these last days ….” Jesus knew even in the Biblical epoch that privatizing wealth was destructive towards the poor and opposed anyone who stored/privatized their wealth. These same Christian principles should still be applicable in today’s epoch and applied to condemn capitalism, because it is a system that is totally predicated upon victimizing the poor, exploiting the masses and privatizing the wealth the workers create.

In Mark, Chapt. 10, Verse 25 it says: “It is easier for a camel to go through an eye of a needle, thencefore a rich-man to enter into the Kingdom of God.” You can’t call yourself a Christian and practice capitalism. Jesus did not preach one thing and practice something else.

“The Lord said: If any of your people become poor and unable to support themselves, you must help them, just as you are supposed to help foreigners who live among you. Don’t take advantage of them by charging any kind of interest or selling them food for profit …” (Leviticus, Chapt. 25, Verse 35 through 37). Capitalism is strictly about making profit, especially from the poor, so to have these Christian evangelists trying to convince the oppressed Christian masses that capitalism is good and socialism and communism are bad is ludicrous.

These liars even make statements such as: “What Hitler did to the Jews during the Holocaust was based on a communistic and/or socialistic ideology.” Hitler was not a communist or socialist but a capitalist serving the interests of the big monopoly capitalists. He hated Communists as much as he did Jews.  In a 1922 speech he said, “My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter […] who […] recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them…” In a 1928 speech, he said: “We tolerate no one in our ranks who attacks the ideas of Christianity … in fact our movement is Christian.”

He called his party the National Socialist Workers’ Party to appeal to “blue collar” voters and hide his connections to the big bankers and industrialists. Like many of today’s Republican Party presidential hopefuls, he claimed to be “chosen by providence” to “make Germany great again.” Elected Chancellor in 1933, he became president a year later when Hindenburg died. Once his power was secure, he showed his true motivations by rounding up millions of Jews, Communists, Socialists, Gays, Atheists and others into concentration camps and ultimately mass executions. He rebuilt the German military-industrial complex and aggressively promoted imperialist ambitions. Every German soldier had “Got Mit Uns” (God With Us) on his uniform belt buckle and the churches all displayed Nazi flags.

Socialism is a political-economic system where the resources and productive capabilities of a society are socially owned (as opposed to private capitalist ownership), where the people and the state consciously plan and coordinate production to meet the people’s needs and overcome the inequalities of capitalist society. The goal of socialism is to revolutionize every aspect of society so that society can evolve into communism, or stateless, classless, egalitarian global society. Communism is the culmination of socialist reconstruction on a global scale.

Communism is people working and struggling together for the common good of all of society, where everyone contributes what they can to society and gets back what they need to live worthwhile lives, where there are no upper or lower classes. So you can see why the upper classes go to extremes to vilify communism and demonize communists.

Putting the interests of the people ahead of profits and socializing rather than privatizing socially produced wealth to eliminate poverty, hunger and homelessness, to properly care for the sick and the elderly, to give everyone free access to higher education and everything socialist revolution is about is just common sense from the perspective of the common people. But the capitalist mouthpieces like Sen. Joe McCarthy, who terrorized Amerika in the 1950’s by labeling his political opponents as “socialists” or “communists,” still have some people intimidated.

Back in the 50’s and 60’s, during the “Cold War,” the ruling capitalist class went all out to propagandize the Amerikan people not only portraying socialism and communism as slavery for the masses of people but also to convince them that their lives would keep getting better and better under capitalism – the “American Dream.”  Real concessions were made to raise wages and benefits for the workers, and the GI Bill enabled WWII vets to go to college tuition free and buy new homes with low-interest loans, while factories ran three shifts around the clock. “Cold War Liberalism” combined with rabid anti-communist propaganda and fear mongering shaped public opinion among masses of people in Amerika.

The Communist Party in this country had sold out back in the “New Deal” era, and during the “Cold War” period they were hard to find, so the McCarthyites had to ferret them out for “blacklisting” and persecution. In Hollywood and the unions, anyone who ever publically supported anything progressive, including civil rights for Black people, was branded a “communist” or “socialist fellow traveler.” The irony was the “communists” were mostly just liberal Democrats and the “anti-communists” were the fanatics and authoritarian bullies they accused the communists and socialists of being.

Still this is the image that was fixated in public opinion for many years. As late as the 2008 presidential race, “red baiting” was a factor as the Republican vice-presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, labeled Sen. Barack Obama, the Democratic Party’s candidate for President, a “socialist,” a charge her “Tea Party” supporters have continued to make throughout his presidency, as well as “Communist” and “Muslim.” Since most Americans haven’t a clue what these terms mean, it not surprising we now have a candidate running for President calling himself a “Socialist.”

What is comical (and sad) about Sarah Palin and her crowd calling Obama a “Socialist” is that during the Housing Mortgage Crisis of 2008-2009, when hundreds of thousands of poor and middle class homeowners were losing their homes and being made homeless, the so-called “Socialist” Obama took billions of the people’s tax dollars to bail out the crooked banks and lending companies who caused the crisis and did nothing for the poor victims. How socialist is that? Obama has even outdone his predecessor, George Bush, Jr., in proving himself a faithful servant of the Wall Street elite.

Joe McCarthy and Sarah Palin going around mis-explaining what socialism and communism are about are part of the legacy of ignorance and confusion we must clear up. It is basically a question of who owns and controls the basic means of production. Either they are privately or publically owned. Any fool can see that public ownership is far more democratic. I am not claiming that all the social ills of capitalism will instantly disappear once socialism is initiated. What I am proclaiming is that true socialism and communism are the basis for creating a society based upon equality and social justice for all.

Along the way we must struggle against and defeat phony “socialism” which represents the last line of defense for capitalist-imperialism. Phony socialism or revisionism is a trick. It is a “bait and switch.” Because capitalism irrefutably does not meet the basic needs of the masses of people. In the early stages of socialism, there are a lot of carry overs from capitalism that can’t be just abolished overnight. There will still be classes, and class privileges, wage inequalities, advantages for those who do intellectual work or skilled labor over manual labor, and there will be sharp struggle over every attempt to restrict these privileges and expand the power of the people. Phony socialism will try to hold back these changes and accuse the real socialists and communists of “going too far” and trying to change things too fast, and given the opportunity, the revisionists will try to rig up a return to capitalism and make themselves a new bourgeois ruling class.

We have seen this happen in the former Soviet Union and in People’s China and elsewhere. Likewise, the struggle to end inequalities between ethnic groups and national minorities can also be set back along with inequalities between men and women, and between city dwellers and rural communities and so on. In the past, the “Socialist Bloc” was surrounded by the more powerful imperialist powers who waged the “Cold War” to force them to divert a huge percentage of their resources to national defense and maintenance of a military-industrial complex of their own as well as a powerful state apparatus with police, prisons and all that entails.

Only in the higher stages of socialism, when capitalist-imperialism has been overthrown as a global system, can society advance to eliminate all the vestiges of class exploitation and create a truly classless society, where the state will wither away and the advance to communism will be possible. Aiming for this and staying focused on it is what makes true communists what we call “all-the-way revolutionaries.” The United Panther Movement (UPM) is all about training comrades to be “all-the-way revolutionaries.” This means combating nationalism, racism, sexism and petty-bourgeois prejudices and opportunism within our own ranks as well as society at large.

Our concept of “Democracy” must go deeper than voting every four years or having the freedom to falsely accuse Obama of being a “socialist.” Democracy has a class context, and for the exploited masses it means having the power to end our own oppression. We can’t sit back and hope our class oppressors are going to become sympathetic to our oppression. We must elect or appoint leaders who truly represent us and will faithfully serve our interests, but we must have direct participation as well. This is what Maurice Bishop, the leader of the revolution in Grenada had to say before he was assassinated by the CIA:

“Our new constitution is certainly going to institutionalize and entrench the system of popular democracy which we have been building over these past four years in our country. Apart from the usual national elections, which will of course be there too, we are going to ensure that these embryonic organs of popular democracy continue to have a place…. Because to us, democracy is much more than just an election. To us, democracy is a great deal more than just the right to put an “X” next to Tweedledum or Tweedledee every five years …. The second principle of democracy for us is responsibilities. So the elected officials must at all times ensure that the mandate they are carrying out, if mandate it is, is the mandate the people want, and part of that responsibility means that the right to recall those we elect must be entrenched…”

Comrade Bishop further stated: “But if it is government of, for, and by the people, then it cannot be just government of the people you elect …. It also has to be for the people and it has to be by them. They have to have a way of participating – that is what the word ‘by’ means, and if that is absent, you don’t really have a democracy…” (Maurice Bishop Speaks, page 302).

Reforming capitalism is not, and cannot be, an option because no matter how you try to put a human face on it (of whatever ethnicity), capitalism will always work to make a rich exploiting class richer at the expense of the great majority, who are kept poor and exploited. It will always be anti-democratic and oppressive, so capitalism must be completely abolished.

John Hagee, who is a well-known Christian evangelist, has written a book entitled The Death of the Dollar. In this book he is speaking about how the Amerikkkan dollar has and is being depreciated. One might ask why would an evangelist of Christianity write a book about the depreciating value of money. Well, the answer is what I’ve said previously, which is that Christians are now using their voices as a rostrum to get rich off of propagating Christianity. So their God becomes money. This is very sacrilegious, because Christianity teaches that you can’t worship two gods: “You cannot be the slave of two masters. You will like one more than the other or be more loyal to one than the other. You cannot serve God and money.” (Luke, Chapter 16, Verse 13)

“These people think religion is supposed to make you rich. And religion does make your life rich, by making you content with what you have. We didn’t bring anything into this world, and we won’t take anything when we leave. So we should be satisfied just to have food and clothes. People who want to be rich fall into all sort of temptations and traps. They are caught by foolish and harmful desires that drag them down and destroy them. The love of money causes all kinds of trouble. Some people want money so much that they have given up their faith and caused themselves a lot of pain.” (Timothy, Chapter 6, Verses 5 through 10)

Some Christians might argue that they will be forgiven for transgressing this one law and God will let them in the Kingdom anyway, but James, Chapt. 2, Verse 10 states: “If you obey every law except one, you are still guilty of breaking them all.” So supporting capitalism is a sin in every form of Christianity. The only social system that is remotely similar to what Christian ethics upholds is communism. Isn’t it the sincere application of Christian values in action that is the determining factor in being a Christian or not?

No matter what spin these pro-capitalist evangelists try to put on it, capitalism is the root to the inhumane living conditions fostered on the poor and the root of all the evils capitalist-imperialism fosters on the world. I invite anyone to refute this if they can.

Kelvin Khaysi Canada
Red Onion State Prison, VA (2016)

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