#and also make school less like work slash prison and more like somewhere you can be a human being

[vamptastic]

looking for advice on college essays and everything i see is like "don't talk about mental health or disability or racism or your mom dying or being lgbt it makes the essay readers too sad" like damn okay. it makes me sad too. let me into your school.

[theculturedmarxist]

Tomorrowland

As ridiculous and irrational as bourgeois behavior appears on the surface, the bourgeoisie aren’t stupid. You don’t need an advanced understanding of Marxism to be able to read a chart or understand history, and whatever their opinion on Capitalism as a system, they still know and can see as well as anyone else that even under the best conditions, the economy runs in cycles, with booms and busts occurring in somewhat predictable patterns.

They know too the extent of the ecological damage already inflicted as the effects that these developments will bring. While the bourgeoisie are collectively opposed to workers as a class, the bourgeoisie is not a monolithic entity. While the Oil Tycoon and his Green Energy counterpart might be united as a class against the interests of their employees, the financial interests of the oil capitalist and the solar capitalist are diametrically opposed. Or, put another way, it’s in the interest of the oil capitalist for people to remain ignorant of or otherwise ignore the effects of climate change, while the insurance capitalist that profits from the guarantee of the property in coastal cities for example stands to lose considerably. The latter profits by getting government to build sea walls to protect their investment, while the former stands to lose from any official or public recognition that their business is causing such catastrophic harm.

The mistake many people make is believing that the capitalist class is ignorant of what is going on in the world or what they are doing to it. They are just as aware as anyone what the consequences of their actions are, the bourgeoisie. They know that climate change is here already and only going to get worse before it gets better. They know too that a reaction to the decade of economic negligence and pillage committed after 2008 is on its way as well. Many people make the mistake of believing that these things aren’t being noticed and acted upon, that “something needs to be done now” about global warming, or whatever, themselves ignorant of the fact that, yes, actually, something is already being done about it, and has been in motion for some time.

Teachers and schools get defunded in favor of cops and prisons. Vital government services and branches are shut down while the military is given a blank check. The ocean eats away the coast and increasingly severe storms make the inland progressively unlivable. It is true that the wealthy can certainly insulate themselves enough to honestly have no knowledge of these things, but the reality is that these things aren’t happening due to incompetence, or the out of control effects of a system with no one at the helm to guide it, but that in fact these are all deliberately executed plans meant to prepare for the consequences that were foreseen long ago.

The global economy as we have understood it since the end of World War 2 is on borrowed time. The so-called “consumer economy” is undone by the natural functioning of capitalism. Any given capitalist enterprise is designed to take in more money than it expends. Naturally, a business that spends more money than it takes in doesn’t stay in business for very long at all. The net effect is that all the unclaimed capital, represented as the money in the pocket of every person that has to buy the things they need to live, eventually becomes claimed, collected, and ultimately concentrated into the hands of the owner of the business, where it is more or less trapped. It accumulates more quickly than its new owner can spend it, resulting in a hoard of wealth for these few people, but also in the exsanguination of the consumer economy itself.

The lifeblood of the consumer economy is restored largely by two ways: wages, and credit. As a rule, wages are pushed down as low as they can possibly go, despite the necessity of this resource’s renewal. Increased wages out means diminished profits in. However, the tendency following this rule is what you’d expect: with less money with which to buy, people buy less, damaging the economy both as consumption drops and as companies with increasing desperation seek to secure the ever diminishing stock of funds available to collect. This has been the tendency since the 1970s, to keep wages as low as possible, regardless of the effects on the economy.

This tendency has been facilitated by the rapid and aggressive expansion of consumer credit. Credit is attractive for a number of reasons, not the least of which is its ability to produce money from only the simple promise of having money at some indeterminate point in the future. The more a creditor lends, i.e, the less money it has, the greater its income, which in turn allows it to lend more in the future. In effect, none of the creditor’s personal cash is ever jeopardized. They’re theoretically guaranteed both the principle of whatever they’ve paid out, plus whatever fee they’ve charged for the use of this theoretical cash. In many retail environments that offer credit, the employee discount has gone the way of the Dodo, replaced with store credit schemes where the employees basically pay the store for the privilege of not being paid enough to buy any of the things in the store with their regular wages.

The major defect with credit is that however much money is loaned out, the value of the loan fluctuates in relation to the borrower’s ability to pay it back. The loan itself could be for five or five-million dollars, but it isn’t worth either if the individual borrower can never repay that amount. Even if all the money from the loan was placed into a briefcase and dropped into the Marianas Trench, despite the factual existence of that money, without the ability to either retrieve it, or replace it via the labor of the borrower (which at, say, minimum wage, would take quite a while), the loan itself is effectively worthless. Naturally, the “debt load” an individual can carry varies based on numerous circumstances, like their employment, age, sex, wealth, health, and so on. There’s a whole system for appreciating, grading, and assigning value to this sort of debt. In fact, a major contributor to the 08 financial crisis was the various types of scheme run by banks to try and make worthless debt, so-called “toxic assets,” to appear valuable.

The problem now is that the public at large is reaching its debt “carrying capacity,” which is to say that they are reaching the limits of what they can borrow with any reasonable expectation of ever paying it back. The total amount is reaching beyond what any person or collection of people will ever be able to pay back in their own or collective lifetimes.

So, the post-WW2 paradigm of high pay, high education, and strong worker protections which made the conditions possible for the consumer economy in the first place have long been dead and buried, killed by Carter and entombed by Reagan. All the wealth poured into the economy by the US government and the New Deal is gone, and the credit system that replaced it is reaching critical mass. There can be no consumer economy if those meant to consume have nothing with which to consume.

In light of these facts, what have we seen instead? Wages continue to stagnate and shrink. Subsidies that offset the costs of necessities like education or food continue to get slashed. Inflation ticks upward every year while the ability of people to pay is eroded with every wave of economic distress. We see the economy imploding around us in real time, and it looks like nothing is being done to stop it.

If they venture to imagine that what is happening can be stopped, the natural bourgeois thought is, why stop it? Maintaining the economy only makes sense if its maintenance means increasing profits. However, what profit is there left? The money has been drained from the economy. To get it started again would require a truly awesome injection of liquid capital. This is politically unfeasible for numerous reasons, but in particular, that money would have to come from somewhere, and the only two possible sources of such a disbursement of wealth would have to come either from the bourgeoisie itself, or the government. Naturally, the bourgeoisie aren’t eager to give up “their hard earned” wealth, nor are they willing to let the government start “giving away” money to working class people. It would completely implode the political paradigm they’ve been constructing for the past twenty years. They’re perfectly fine with the government printing money, to the tune of a trillion dollars a year, but only so long as it goes to them. Yes, capitalism’s obsession with “efficiency” would hardly let them imagine the “wasteful” step of the government giving money to consumers to buy bourgeois commodities when the government can just print the money and give it directly to the bourgeoisie themselves. This is to say nothing of the dangers of a precedent of the government helping people, or the public admission that the government can’t run out of money, and that all the suffering that emerged from the era of Austerity Politics amounts to a needlessly inflicted criminal act.

Any beginning student of Marxism can tell you: capitalism evolves. It needs must change with the times, and the circumstances that surround it and propel it. The circumstances of the 20th century are gone and rapidly becoming an increasingly distant memory. Capitalism no longer needs a massive reserve army of labor to move it and provide it with sustenance. Technology does nothing but obviate human labor. A single secretary with an ipad can do what used to take a whole secretarial team to accomplish. Personal computers have eliminated the need for lots of large, expensive industrial equipment in industries like typography. The internet means not just competing with the people in your town, city, state, or even country, but with every other qualified candidate around the world. Teeming billions of people now are not only “unnecessary,” but in fact exist as a direct, existential threat to the existence of the bourgeoisie. We see what happens to “useless people” all the time under capitalism. They’re discarded, beaten, imprisoned, persecuted, left to die. Without money, you’re disposable, and the fact is that most people have no money, no real reserve of cash or even tangible assets to their name.

The bourgeosie know all of this and are acting, rationally, logically, in their own self interests. With neither the ability nor willingness to avert whatever is to come, they instead invest in preparing for the inevitable fallout. We see on the news what they’ve been investing in. Weapons, weapons, weapons—weapons for the cops standing between angry crowds and the glittering towers of their oppressors, weapons for every little tin-pot dictator and bloodthirsty tyrant ready to kill his own people for a portion of the looting of their country, weapons for the militaries of competing capitalist states and interests, up to and including new nuclear weapons. They’re content for now to let “natural” disaster, disease, and conflict to take its toll on the working class while feigning only the most mild concern, but they know that when it finally happens, their only recourse to the needs and demands of the people is going to be raw, naked force. Whatever disaster comes, they will be largely immune, kept safely insulated in their cities and private fortresses behind walls, fences, armed checkpoints and armored mercenaries. The public can bay and bark all they like at the army of goons paid for out of their own pockets, and eat cake or lead, as they choose, while the wealthy that ruined their lives and their planet go on obliviously.

And when it’s all said and done, and the plutocrats emerge from their warrens to find the country beyond the city walls covered in working class skulls, just imagine how heartbroken they’ll be watching all those bones ground into dust for their country-club’s sand traps or the sparkling, clean beaches they’ll be able to enjoy, and no fucking poor people around to mess it all up.