Cruelty of Capitalism
http://socialistviewpoint.org/novdec_20/novdec_20_02.html
By Bonnie Weinstein
The human condition
Friedrich Engels (November 28, 1820-August 5, 1895), a German
philosopher, historian and political scientist developed the ideas of
scientific socialism together with Karl Marx (May 5, 1818-March 14,
1883). The two were lifelong friends. In fact, Engels, born to a wealthy
family who owned a textile mill, gave financial support to Marx so that
Marx was free to do the necessary research to write Das Kapital. The two
co-authored The Communist Manifesto in 1848 and in 1884. A year after
Marx died, Engels published a very important little book, The Origin of
the Family, Private Property and the State based on Marx’s scientific
research on people, their environment and the structure and origins of
human social organization and culture.
Before his death Engels was working on a book about scientific thought
process, The Dialectics of Nature, which he left unfinished but was
compiled and published in the USSR in 1925. In chapter IX titled “The
Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man” he wrote about
human interaction with nature:
“Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human
victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on
us. Each victory, it is true, the first place brings about the results
we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different,
unforeseen effects which only too often cancel the first. The people
who, in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor and elsewhere, destroyed the
forest to obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that by removing along
with the forests the collecting centers and reservoirs of moisture they
were laying the basis for the present forlorn state of those countries.
. . Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over
nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing
outside nature—but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to
nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists
in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being
able to learn its laws and apply them correctly.”1
These words sum up the fundamental relationship between our species and
all life on earth. Marxism—socialism—is a guide to living on the earth
without destroying it—by creating an economic system of equality based
upon production for the needs and wants of all instead of production for
the private profit of the few.
Socialism is a system that does not waste labor and resources on
producing things built to destroy life or self-destruct—but on creating
useful things of the highest quality—and still be able to provide the
necessities for a comfortable, bountiful, enriching and creative life
free to all. It is a system that is a protector of the diversity of
life, not in competition with it.
War, poverty and racism—the products of capitalism
Racist and class-based police murders, mass incarceration, vast economic
inequality, healthcare and educational inequality and the degradation of
our environment from wars and polluting industries are just a few
examples of the cruelty of the capitalist private profit system.
Capitalist production for private profit syphons wealth from the masses
of the working class into the coffers of the elite .01 percent of the
worlds’ population who are the owners of the means of production. They
pay workers as little as they can get away with, and sell the products
workers produce at a cost significantly higher than the cost to produce
them—making themselves a tidy profit.
Every decision made by business interests is designed to exploit workers
in order to increase their own rate of profit and to do all they can to
inhibit workers’ ability to unite and fight in their own common interests.
Any and everything to make a buck
The extent to which the capitalist class carries out cruel injustices to
make a profit boggles the mind.
In a September 29, 2020 New York Times article by Caitlin Dickerson,
Seth Freed Wessler and Miriam Jordan titled, “Immigrants Say They Were
Pressured into Unneeded Surgeries,” about unnecessary invasive
gynecological procedures performed at the Irwin County Detention Center
in Ocilla, Georgia—a private Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)
detention center for immigrant women:
“The Irwin County Detention Center in Ocilla, Ga., drew national
attention this month after a nurse, Dawn Wooten, filed a whistle-blower
complaint claiming that detainees had told her they had had their
uteruses removed without their full understanding or consent. Since
then, both ICE and the hospital in Irwin County have released data that
show that two full hysterectomies have been performed on women detained
at Irwin in the past three years. But firsthand accounts are now
emerging from detainees…who underwent other invasive gynecological
procedures that they did not fully understand and, in some cases, may
not have been medically necessary. …The Times interviewed 16
women who were concerned about the gynecological care they received
while at the center, and conducted a detailed review of the medical
files of seven women who were able to obtain their records. All 16 were
treated by Dr. Mahendra Amin, who practices gynecology in the nearby
town of Douglas and has been described by ICE officials as the detention
center’s ‘primary gynecologist.’ …Independent doctors that provide
treatment for ICE detainees are paid for the procedures they perform
with Department of Homeland Security funds. Procedures like the ones
that Dr. Amin performed are normally billed at
thousands-of-dollars-each. …Data from ICE inspection reports show that
the center, which is operated by a private prison company, Lasalle
Corrections, refers more than 1,000 detainees a year for outside medical
care, far more than most other immigration detention centers of the same
size.”
Further, in an October 6, 2020 New York Times article by Amol S. Navathe
and Harald Schmidt titled, “Why a Hospital Might Shun a Black Patient,”
the authors noted:
“Research shows that doctors are more likely to choose procedures and
treatments that are more profitable for them, whether these are better
for patients or not. For example, cancer doctors frequently recommend
higher-cost chemotherapy because they profit handsomely from it. And
hospitals do more of the kinds of surgeries that come with high profit
margins, like hip and knee replacements and heart valve procedures… in
the 1990s, the New York State Department of Health began grading
surgeons who performed coronary bypass surgery and making their report
cards available to the general public. The aim was to make outcomes more
transparent and to help surgeons improve. But to this day, the
initiative makes it harder for Black patients to get surgery. Why?
Because statistically, outcomes are generally worse for Black patients
because of larger issues of systemic racism. So, surgeons avoid them to
protect their scores. …since people with worse living and working
conditions are readmitted more frequently, hospitals that serve more
worse-off racial and ethnic minorities were more frequently penalized.”
These two examples illustrate how the profit motive works to the
financial advantage of the capitalist class and to the outright
detriment to the lives of workers—including performing dangerous,
debilitating and unnecessary surgery and dangerous treatments on people
just to make money—whether the patient is harmed or not.
Competing for the basic
necessities of life
Under capitalism, everyone is in competition with each other. Even
families will compete with each other for the last few grains of rice if
there is not enough to go around.
We must compete for jobs, food, housing, healthcare, quality education,
because capitalism sees to it that there is not enough to go around and
that it is expensive.
They lay waste to vast amounts of resources through industrial
carelessness, and intentional wars. They profit most off of the sale of
weapons of mass destruction.
The U.S. war industry is the most profitable of all industries on the
planet and it costs the capitalist owners of these corporations little
to nothing to run it. And it serves three purposes—to make lots of money
for capitalists, to exploit and control the world’s resources, and to
divide and thus control the masses of workers of the world.
The capitalists do not pay for the manufacture of these weapons—workers
pay for this industry through taxation that capitalists themselves, are
able to avoid by creating tax laws that benefit them at workers’ expense.
The whole economic system of capitalism is designed to keep the wealthy
in power by keeping the working class in competition with one another
for the basic necessities of life.
Racism and bigotry serve the rule of capital not the needs of humanity.
Every human being needs the same things—healthy food, comfortable
housing, good, quality education and healthcare. We need a clean and
healthy environment in which all can thrive—a society where the free
development of each is the condition for the free development of all—a
world of cooperation, careful planning and conservation, not plunder and
war.
What humanity is capable of
In his book, The Revolution Betrayed published in 1937 Leon Trotsky
wrote of socialism:
“The hypocrisy of prevailing opinion develops everywhere and always as
the square, or cube, of the social contradictions. Such approximately is
the historic law of ideology translated into the language of
mathematics. Socialism, if it is worthy of the name, means human
relations without greed, friendship without envy and intrigue, love
without base calculation.”2
Socialism—an economic system based upon production for human needs and
wants instead of profit—changes the whole dynamic of human interaction
both between each other and nature.
Socialism is in the interests of everyone. It eliminates competition for
survival, and in its place, encourages cooperation and democratic
planning to create the best possible conditions for the full development
of each individual—to each based upon need and want and from each based
upon individual talents and skills. Socialism is necessarily a
non-competitive, cooperative system that benefits everyone and the planet.
Socialism is necessary—not only to survive—but to flourish.
1 https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/don/ch09.htm
2 Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, p. 155, Pathfinder, 1972
(Chapter VII, Family, Youth and Culture)
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Sam Harris
“Are you really surprised by the endurance of religion? What ideology is likely
to be more durable than one that conforms, at every turn, to our powers of
wishful thinking? Hope is easy; knowledge is hard. Science is the one domain in
which we human beings make a truly heroic effort to counter our innate biases
and wishful thinking. Science is the one endeavor in which we have developed a
refined methodology for separating what a person hopes is true from what he has
good reason to believe. The methodology isn't perfect, and the history of
science is riddled with abject failures of scientific objectivity. But that is
just the point-these have been failures of science, discovered and corrected
by-what, religion? No, by good science.”
― Sam Harris
