Musings of a Working Man. Adam and Eve Didn't Do It For Me.

Just needed to express myself a bit this morning.

Richard Mellor

11-15-24

 

Most workers know that the means of production in society, the factories and workplaces that produce the commodities we use every day from cars to houses, are owned by a small group of people or section of society, we just don’t usually use the term “means of production”. The primary reason for this is that most of us do not read Marx, or left wing historians and if truth be told, any reading at all of that nature.

 

We also know these people basically govern society. Many of us attribute their role or extreme wealth to criminal activity, corruption, bribery and so forth. They’re just nasty people. We tend to call them the elite rather than the capitalist class and certainly not the bourgeoisie. When we do explore this subject a little further we can see where the term bourgeoise comes from and how it is related to urban dwellers and the role certain urban dwellers played in the production of the goods and services a modern society needs.

 

But one thing we are acutely aware of is that they are greedy; money is everything for them. Greed doesn’t explain it though. Some people might consider a well-paid worker greedy for owning a motor home for example or a fishing boat or taking a world cruise . It’s not greed in the abstract that is the problem.  

 

The need to accumulate wealth is built in to the system of production we know as capitalism; they can’t escape it. Capitalists are driven to accumulate capital from the surplus value the workers produce that the capitalist pays no wages for. A portion of that is their profits, or rent to other major capitalists like the big landlords or landowners.  But they also have to plow some of it back in to production, to continue the production process and the profit cycle continues. This is a life and death matter for the owners of capital as if they disrupt this process they die, they cease to be capitalists. Marx said of the capitalist’s role in production, “The never-ending augmentation of exchange-value, which the miser strives after, by seek­ing to save his money from circulation, is attained by the more acute capitalist, by constantly throwing it afresh into circulation.”

 

 So accumulation of wealth and along with it, ruthless competition and ultimately war and violence, are an integral aspect of capitalism and the so-called free market. They are driven to war and accumulation by the laws of the system

 

We know they rip us off day in day out. Yes, they are rotten bastards but at least they’re our rotten bastards. Even this view is losing its ground. More often than not, it is the understandable but incorrect view that there’s nothing we can do about it, “you can’t change city hall.”

 

What’s just as important as understanding who owns and directs the productive forces of society, it is equally as important to recognize that these same people own the means of producing the dominant ideas in society. What do I mean by that? 

 

Well, what we think about the world, or our consciousness doesn’t just spring out of our heads like the magician’s rabbit from a hat; ideas have a material base. While other things influence what we think about the world, it is the conditions of our existence that is the prominent source of our thinking. Marx’s comments on this had a profound influence on how I saw the world around me when he wrote: 

“The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.”

 

Through their ownership of society’s mass media, the capitalist counter this class consciousness that arises from our condition as workers.

 

The serious journals of this class of owners, of big capitalists, are far more honest with their content than the outlets that are directed at the working class which is most of us. These are their theoretical journals that have to have a balanced realistic approach; after all, they are discussing how best to govern society. I remember back 1974 in a BusinessWeek edition a quote that makes that clear:

 

“It will be a hard pill for many Americans to swallow--the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more...Nothing that this nation, or any other nation, has done in modern economic history compares with the selling job that must be done to make people accept this reality.”  Business Week 10-12-74

 

That still holds true today but social media for one example is making it harder and harder for them to paint the rosy picture. As I said, in the end, objective reality comes in to serious conflict with the propaganda. Even in early colonial times as European and African workers, bondsmen or chattel slaves worked the sugar plantations of the West Indies, bonds were built between them and people ran away together, fought together. Laws had to be introduced to undermine the solidarity that arises when human beings find ourselves in the same boat, exploited by the same people. That’s what propaganda is and whet the media of the ruling class is intended for. It’s why the concept of a White Race was invented in colonial America.

At all times there is the oppression of women. Capitalism is a patriarchy.

 

In the UK colonised people had to be portrayed as lesser human beings, they had to be demonized; their religion trashed. The Irish were the savage race and the people of the colonies that followed in Africa, India and elsewhere, faced the same barrage of propaganda. Any significant difference was used to explain the need to colonize the savages.

 

Class consciousness which arises from the material conditions, is an obstacle to this warfare so class war is always there when it comes to the exploiters. Resistance can be spontaneous, unplanned unorganized which is easier to crush. The rise of unions and political parties based on the working class and our communities and leaders with a theoretical understanding of what is taking place and what can be done about it is a counter to this. As capitalism encompasses the entire globe, as Marx put it, “The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.” solidarity with workers in other countries grows and the capitalists undermine this development with nationalism in particular. 

 

The explosion that took place on October 7^th 2023 when occupants of the world’s largest outdoor prison we know as the Gaza Strip, 2 million people trapped and under siege for almost 20 years, broke free and launched an attack on the occupying power taking hundreds of captives has changed the game. The response from the occupying power has been savage, brutal, with no concern for human life whatsoever. The intention being to eradicate the indigenous people of the European colony set up in 1948. But the aggressor is not the victor. The Zionist regime and its backers in the US has been discredited beyond repair. Both Israel and the US will not recover from this genocide it has waged against an entire group of people. 

 

In this case the propaganda that Israel and its backers in the US and western Europe, although sophisticated, has been exposed primarily though social media but also a rival international media company in the Arab world, Al Jazeera. But it is primarily social media that has exposed the so called liberal democracies and their lies and the brazen confidence that the soldiers committing the genocide have shown by videoing and sharing their brutal acts on the Internet. They have acted in this way for decades without fear of retribution having the backing of the world’s greatest superpower; that era is over. The deaths of 40,000 people have not been in vain.

 

The world will not be the same.