Capitalism is so bad young people kill themselves to escape it.

"Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like an Alp on the brains of the living." Marx

Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired

As the two main capitalist parties vie for which section of the US capitalist class will govern US society next four years, the country is being consumed by crisis on all fronts. The US bourgeois' grip on its political parties and their system of bourgeois democracy itself is being undermined with help from the Predator in Chief.  The economic horizon is not so bright either as the previous blog post pointed out. So the US is in the midst of an economic, political and social crisis. The latter on the verge of an eruption.

I have not seen the video above but read thelong article about it in yesterday's Wall Street Journal. I am assuming this video covers the same information. The issue is the level of suicides among high schoolers and in particular at Herriman High School in Utah where there has been been 6 suicides in less than a year.  The WSJ print article points out that the US suicide rose 26% between 2007 and 2017, a statistic referred to as "deaths of despair". For children between the ages of 1- to 12 over the same period the rate has almost doubled the WSJ adds.

Suicide is now the leading cause of death for 10 to 17 year olds in Utah as youth suicide has tripled over the past decade. It is no coincidence from my viewpoint, that Utah is also the most religious state in the country and the article (and I assume the video) goes in to gruelling detail about what the means. 

Suicide in Mormonism is a sin and you won't get in to the Mormon heaven if you do it, but it seems that given all the suicides, god changed his mind. Speaking through his human representatives atop the Mormon church, he backed off on that one. Here's a few of the pressures that young Mormon teenagers face and the religious indoctrination units are alongside the school. From the WSJ: "Homes are a source of pride in the town. Christmas lights are a must. Hair is kept tidy. Beards are rare. Herriman High bans, 'conspicuous, extreme, odd' hair colors or styles as well as any clothing that is 'mutilated, cut off or immodest'"  

"The LDS church forbids tobacco, alcohol, coffee, premarital sex, pornography, and any same sex contact"  Only last week god, through his representatives atop the Mormon Church reversed the same sex policy that declared it apostasy. I can only assume same sex contact includes masturbation which is as natural as breathing air. 

Utah is not alone in its madness and Mormonism is not the sole religion that destroys basic human creativity, solidarity and desires.  I started to read a book by some trendy academic recently on psychology and human behavior. it talked of hostile behavior among men for example but after about half an hour I put it down. How can we talk of human behavior and not have the social conditions under which we live and produce the necessities of life be integral to it. We would attempt to see discover why the fish in our pond are dying by checking the water first. No experienced gardener would not ensure the right conditions, placing and soil are present for a health crop.

And outside of all the extraneous issues, instead of simply referring to these suicides as "Deaths of Despair" we have to ask why the despair and it is not conspiracy theory to look to the economic system of production we function in and that we call capitalism.

What is so bad about capitalism that young people are killing themselves to escape it?

This is the starting point. We can't simply put it all down to "mental illness" in the abstract. The problem is that capitalism affects us in so many negative ways as human beings. It is an exploitative system in which wealth is accumulated by a small minority off the backs of the vast majority whose subsistence is based on wage labor. It promotes individualism, selfishness, and considers the strong exploiting the weak as a virtue, as the road to success. Miss no opportunity to make money without working. Everything is commodified, land, water, our bodies and nature in total. Capitalism relies on competition for the basic necessities of life in order to work.

In that vein it promotes this competition and the striving of individual gain at the expense of others through religious, racial and sexual divide and rule tactics. racism and sexism are integral to class society and capitalism.

All this goes against a powerful aspect of human nature and our history as a species. We have advanced this far not through individual self serving culture but through collectivism, solidarity and sharing. We are naturally gregarious creatures.

But capitalist ideology teaches that human nature is naturally greedy and selfish, when human nature is determined by objective factors to a great degree.  How we live determines how we act. Organized religion is the bedfellow of the capitalist system and its adherents. Of all the restrictions the various religious authorities place as they mold their flock in to blind automatons, making money without working isn't one of them. Religion itself is a product of class society. The Catholic Church once the religion of European feudalism faced a revolt as the rising capitalist class had to abandon a religion that looked down on commerce and mercantilism and Protestantism arose as the religion of capital.

These suicides are related to the system, its suppression of basic humanity and the enforcement of this straitjacket by capitalism's religious authorities.  We are all sickened by this inhumane system but the youth more so as we enter the system in an age of its extreme decay and moral turpitude.  

Instead of looking to the dirty water in the goldfish bowl, the barren soil in which the plants droop, organized religion------itself an arm of capitalism and the so-called free market------promotes the system while promising some nirvana in the sky, eternal happiness, to escape the savagery that the system imposes on humanity. In place of scientific social analysis, in place of an historical materialist explanation of the world (history is driven by material conditions rather than ideas) and why they are feeling alienated from it, it fills the heads of the youth with phantasmagorical tales of saints and sinners, cherubs and angels, devils and demons. It teaches that we are born evil, that our bodies are evil. Which section of society benefits most from that philosophical view? I remember it well; "Mea Culpa, Mea Culpa, Meas Maxima Culpa------Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault.

Instead of an explanation of thing, it fills their heads with nonsense.
Not having a serious explanation for their alienation, suicide becomes the only option and in that sense it is a death of despair but the source of despair is capitalism, it is social. But struggle, fighting back can rescue the youth from this crisis.  The recent strikes and protests against market savagery by teachers and other education workers offers hope and  an alternative to victimhood and helplessness. These statistics show a way forward and and we should take note:

In 2018, 485,000 workers participated in what the Bureau of Labor Statistics classifies as a “major work stoppage,” up from just 25,000 in 2017. It was the first major increase in work stoppages in three decades, and it was nearly entirely driven by 379,000 teachers and other education workers, who accounted for 78 percent of all those who went out on strike.