Freedom Requires Socialism

So one of my favorite things to do is to rock the boat intellectually.  To say things that make people think outside of their box.  Sometimes it will cause people to not want to be my friend anymore and that is OK.  Its kind of like thinning carrots.  If I thin some of the carrots after they germinate the ones that remain will be bigger.  Not every seed makes it to the dinner plate.

This title should certainly get a rise out of most of you because it completely goes against what we have all been taught.  We have been taught that individual freedoms decrease as "socialism" increases.  The state takes over our basic needs.  We sacrifice individual freedoms (pay more taxes) to have our basic needs met.  Basically group security over individual freedom.  Friends I tell you this was most certainly not what Karl Marx intended when he coined the phrase socialism.  We have all been lied to.

So what was Marx really saying?  I have read large parts of Das Kapital, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and The Communist Manifesto and find Marx to be fascinating and inspiring.  My interpretation of his words is that socialism is essentially an individual philosophy of how mankind should associate with each other in the industrialized modern world.  Marx was attempting to get us to awaken to our true potential as autonomous, free thinking and productive individuals not under the yolk of our slave masters whom we idolize.  Marx was very much writing about individualism and how we could all increase our own economic standings in society if we stuck together.

Marx utilizes the term the haves in society as those with most of the existing money and power.  These are the monoliths of industry that maintain this position through brute force, coercion, corruption, slave wages and manipulation of government.  They maintain their positions through our detachment from our true nature and our detachment from other humans.  They need us to be on individual islands to keep us separated.  What Marx sees is the beautiful potential of labor and the power we could have if we all stuck together and co-operated.  If we co-operated instead of competing for the scraps from our fascist overlords, we could all have more of the capital pie.  Marx does not see why we should glorify and idolize existing capital.  Capital does not exist without labor.

The fascists would say that labor does not exist without capital.  This is the trickle down theory that the rich create jobs.  This is another big lie.  The true working man and woman would produce without money and then barter for what they needed.  Our fascist oligarch have monopolized the entire economy and taken away man's ability to provide for themselves.  They have diligently chipped away at the small farm and the small business owner.  They have tricked us into thinking this is how it should be and we begin to think we need their capital to labor.  Thank you for the jobs you have provided for us.  Oh no, it is they who should be thankful for the labor we provide to them!  We help them to maintain their capital positions without having to labor.

But what about the millions of people who have died under oppressive "socialist" regimes?  Gangsters like Lenin, Stalin, Khruschev, and Mao Zedong were really fascist dictators who severely twisted a philosophy popular with the people to rise to power.  In essence duping the people into giving them the reins of society and then flipping the script.  To stay in power they would maintain police states requiring large amounts of money for the military.  To extract that much money from the people without revolt they would essentially trickle back bread crumbs in the form of basic social needs.  Just giving the people enough to not revolt while simultaneously maintaining a police state so as to squash any revolt that would arise.  Marx's ideals were suffocated in these oppressive regimes because those in power stayed in power and the common laborer continued to be enslaved.  The old bait and switch.  This should sound familiar...

In the USA we are told we live in a capitalist democracy where the means of production are in the hands of the people and we the people govern ourselves.  Insert awkward record scratch sound because both are lies.  In reality we are also a fascist oligarch with the means of production largely in the hands of multi-national corporations which indirectly control the puppet government through lobbying (legal bribery).  In return the puppet government only exists to rig the economy in their favor, to keep the people entertained, confused and divided precisely in two.  Democracy and capitalism remain philosophical pipe dreams just out of the reach of the people.  Over the last few hundred years we have essentially gone from feudalism to fascism with a glimmer of hope at the end of the 18th century thanks to our founding fathers.

Let me be perfectly clear, it is not wrong to have capital and to invest.  In my previous posts I wrote about disposable income being the key to freedom.  You can never get ahead if you are always consuming everything you produce.  When you consume less than you produce you become a capitalist.  Many people never move beyond investing in their own future security through savings accounts and buying stocks and that is OK to not want to be a burden upon the rest of us in the future.  Entrepreneurs have the wisdom to know they will always be able to produce and the capital they have now is going to be invested in a business so they can be in charge of their own destiny and not have to work for "the man" forever.  Small business owners are not the haves that Marx was referring to.  Marx was referring to the oligarchy within the fascist systems we all live.  The ones with enough wealth for endless generations of comfort and yet they strive for more and more.  We must all work together to break their hold upon our governments and economy if we are ever to realize our true destiny as human beings.  As our fascist overlords continue to hoard and suck the life out of our system, we will fall further and further down the hole and closer to indefinite servitude.

I was never a good order taker, as a child or as a corporate slave because I don't like being told what to do.  The "what to do" always needed to be figured out in my own mind.  This is why I became a small business owner.  My small pie is something that I make daily from scratch with the help of my employees.  I take care of them and they take care of me, a true collaboration!  After everyone else is paid and there is a profit then I take whatever is left because true leaders eat last.  By leading a minimalist lifestyle we are then able to take this excess from the process and reinvest it back into the business or give it away to those in need.  People see this and want to do business with me.  I try to be an upstanding business owner and want employees and customers to know that their investment in my company is returned to them so the cycle can continue and repeat itself indefinitely.  This is capitalism, localism, anarchy, and socialism because they are not mutually exclusive ideals.  Rather, they are all philosophies that have yet to be fully realized.  Someday soon they will.

Our true destiny is in autonomous cities and villages governing themselves, made up of productive individuals freely choosing to work together to create more for all.  The excess capital is nurtured by local capitalists who take care of their employees and reinvest this excess back into the system instead of hoarding it in fear.  This is not egalitarian, because there will always be those with more.  It most certainly is not in the hands of fascist bureaucrats.  This only works if we take control of our own means of production, each and every one of us, by working together.  To be free we must work together.  If we stay isolated we stay slaves.  That is all Marx was trying to say.