Excerpt from "Proletarian God: Building the Socialist Future" by Siegfried Barazov
A
specter continues to haunt the world: the specter of communism. So many times pronounced dead it returns like
a vengeful ghost to menace the rich and the well-born, to shatter the
tranquility of monarchs and presidents, to disturb the profiteering fanaticism
of bankers and business moguls, and to drive liberal politicians into peals of
denial and protestations of loyalty to god, country, and the profit
motive. Above all, it is a phantom that
embodies the fear of a capitalist class order that knows, deep down, that it is
replaceable. That for all their power,
all their riches, all their palaces, mansions, cathedrals, works of art,
armies, bombs, weapons of mass destruction, and carefully crafted propaganda,
those who live off of the labor of the masses are ultimately at the mercy of a
god that they keep in chains but whose power they cannot live without.
The
present crisis is a world crisis, the product of an economic system that treats
human beings and human life as expendable commodities. This system is called capitalism and its
pathology of profit before human life and human life in the service of profit
has tainted every sphere of human relations along with our relations with the
natural world we rely on. Child labor,
starvation wages, austerity measures, cutbacks, structural adjustment,
humanitarian bombings, cancer villages, private prisons, and global warming are
the logical results of a system in which the vast majority of human beings on
this planet must toil to create wealth, leisure, and luxury for the rich while
often barely surviving themselves. The
capitalist owning class that controls the means of production in the modern
world inevitably shapes that world in its own image: those who control the mines,
the factories, the free-trade zones, media conglomerates, and banking cartels
dominate and control the political system that exists primarily to secure their
own profits at the expense of the people.
Thus the parasites who live and grow rich off of the labor of others are
the masters of the modern age while the working class creators and builders of
civilization and the makers of all that advances human wellbeing are consigned
to the status of servants, slaves, and commoners. In Michael Parenti’s words: “Capitalism
breeds the venal perpetrators, and rewards the most unscrupulous among
them. The crimes and crises are not
irrational departures from a rational system, but the converse: they are the
rational outcomes of a basically irrational and amoral system” in which
scheming billionaire investors can destroy the lives of millions and have their
crimes written off as just another part of the “natural” processes of the
business cycle.[1]
For
thousands of years the rich have exploited the poor in order to remain rich and
for thousands of years the poor have fought back in any way they could:
strikes, uprisings, sabotage, boycotts and revolutions. There is a war that rages on even now in
every workplace, in every city, in every country, on every continent. It manifests itself politically, economically,
culturally, and in every other aspect of society and human thought. It is a war between the haves and the have
nots, between master and slave, boss and worker, owner and employee, landlord
and landless, exploiter and exploited.
As Karl Marx said in 1848 these forces have “stood in constant
opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open
fight…that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of
society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes”.[2]
This war is called class conflict and it has burned and persisted for as long
as civilization itself; for as long as the few have exploited the many in the
name of profit, turning the collective suffering of generations of toilers –
slaves, serfs, and working class proletarians alike – into private riches for
pharaohs, kings, slave traders, feudal lords, wealthy merchants, capitalist
industrialists and bankers. This war is
the subject of this book and working class victory over capitalism, the victory
of the exploited over the exploiter, is its unapologetic goal and desired
outcome. For there can be no neutrality
in the battle to lay claim to human civilization; the battle lines of class
conflict are its very foundation.
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