Capitalism deteriorates to glamorous forms of slavery – allow me to explain.
Unrestricted capitalism (its systems without boundaries), will inevitably resort to commodifying humans. Humans devolve to capital, to assets. And the purpose of assets are to be used. That’s called slavery.
You are an employee working at a company. Your value is proportional to the value you deliver. The moment you reduce your value, your perceived value is also reduced. Quite a transactional relationship. Sure interpersonal relationships exist, but no “financially-astute” company hires friends to simply hang out. To put it frankly – you are a servant, or a paid slave.
Let’s say you are a business owner; more specifically self-employed. Assuming you have even a little bit of control over your schedule you become a glamorous slave to the work and to the demand of the business you created. The moment you stop working is the moment you stop producing. Relationships crumble. The hamster wheel becomes almost as bad as being an employee.
Now let’s say you are the owner of a company hiring W2 employees. It is very widely known in the entrepreneurial in business space to use “OPM” or Other People’s Money, or other people’s time. The “key to success” is trading the time of others for as little as possible to make yourself a profit. Essentially if you are employing slaves to do the work that you yourself won’t do anymore.
And so to build wealth, to become rich, you essentially play this game of passing the responsibility of slave onto the next person. Of course I’m speaking from a perspective of capitalism in the United States. And I must say that speaking of slavery in this context does not and should not diminish the harm brought about by real slavery as seen in our dark history.
It’s a sad reality which I am just now realizing myself. For the longest time I saw the working class of this country as a given, a necessity, the way it has always been. If people wanted to move out of the working class, they work harder through education and a healthy amount of grit. Wow, what an ignorant mindset! The thing I forgot about with this fucked up formula, is life. Life is much more nuanced and fragile than my prescription accounts for.
I got tastes of life’s unpredictability in my own experience as well as in what I finally began to see in others’. What people who believe in the self-actualization mindset fail to recognize is the real effects of depression, anxiety, compounding stressors, family situations, a mismatch in fulfillment of work, health issues, raw human-centered problems, and far too many other variables. Any scientist would laugh at the idea that there is one solution to the [life] problem (which many claim is solved with hard work and education).
I have since revised my thinking to more openness and grace. Since leaving college and my first job (after working more physically intensive part time jobs), I have come to see life as grayer than it is. It’s not a widely understood concept unfortunately. I have also come to see in between and beyond obvious lines. A people never forget. Hate comes from somewhere. It never exist from the onset. It is learned.
Thanks for listening to my half-baked, collection of thoughts.
-Mario