The Commie Foil of Capitalism

While identity politics (and Russiagate) is crippling the Liberal party. The Conservative party, losing its mojo on race to Liberals, is falling hard for its other bogeyman, namely the communist hordes. The commies are somehow in charge where once there was a capitalist paradise: America The Beautiful. The reality is: society is crumbling under the cancer of its capitalist ruling class parasite. Right-wing believers need someone to blame, now that their capitalist god is flailing, thus the ruling class parasite directs their attention to more acceptable labels to blame. Capitalism out, commies in.

The great mistake these rank and file “anticommunists” make is confusing the inherent tendency for unaccountable power to concentrate and consolidate into the hands of fewer but ever more powerful actors for communism. Protecting and expanding its property and gains is one of the capitalist ruling class’s primary obsessions. This is one of the central problems with any ruling class. At all levels the ruling class is always trying to concentrate and consolidate itself. This deprives its base of the necessary nutrients to make and sustain First World wealth (which is far better than Third World wealth).

The tendency for power to concentrate is no more a communist problem than a capitalist one. In Our world the wealthy do not use their power and wealth for redistribution. In the anti-commie world of Libertarians and other Conservatives, the dominant capitalist powers are somehow being run by communists, yet these evil-doers don’t advocate for the abolition of property, nor do they refrain from using oppressed Third World labor at the expense of First World labor, nor do they work to redistribute the wealth or advocate for the common ownership of the means of production.

Warren Buffett supports a modest increase in wealth tax, and the right sees a communist conspiracy. Buffet knows quite well a tax increase on the wealthy won’t happen or it will be a minor token. Therefore he can “afford” to advocate for a privileged tax increase. Public Relations is an important part of capitalism. Contrary to the fantasies of the red-seeing right, Trump and his Liberal allies have already delivered to Buffett, et al. Now they are looking to score his second massive tax cut for the ruling class and its minions. This apparently is not the reality Libertarians and their Conservative cousins live in. They believe the commies are lavishing workers and the “irresponsible” and with excessive wages and benefits.

But then again, our stalwart freedom lovers believe in the mantra that “they’ve earned their billions and can do what they want with it”. The thinking goes: you can’t fault the rich or big business for the failures of society because they are proof of its liberty and success. Wait . . . weren’t these commies a second ago? Indeed, private wealth leveraging and extraction from the real economy is not communism (however much We might hate it).

The middling classes operate on capitalist terms. Just ask them. Practically everything is buying and selling, and done for profit. The capitalist ethic says its okay and it is even expected that individuals get evicted people out of their homes for lack of payment. This was immoral and unthinkable to the average village dweller at one time. Today Christians and other good religionists have no problem with this, unpleasant as they might find it. It is comforting for Us to know those unfortunates are merely losers in the game of capitalism. What is one to do? Whatever the justification, a healthy, wealthy society is expected to have desperately poor, miserable people, who could easily be help were it not for Our capitalist ethic.

The consequences of this profit logic, as We like to call it, leads to warped, twisted and unnecessary difficulties. Take Maryland’s crab industry. It is apparently in crisis. Trump’s machinations on immigration has created a shortage of visa which would allow migrants, mostly Mexican women, to go to Maryland to pick apart crabs. “Maryland’s seafood industry is in crisis: Nearly half of the Eastern Shore’s crab houses have no workers to pick the meat sold in restaurants and supermarkets,” opens the cited article above. Trump has dumped the “first-come, first-served basis” in favor of a lottery system in awarding visas. Somehow this has created a crisis.

Visa shortages have been a perennial issue for the crab industry since the last generations of Eastern Shore women who once picked crabmeat aged out of the tedious seasonal work. In the 1980s, crab houses started bringing workers from Mexico through a program that lets them live and work in the United States during the warmer months and then return to Mexico in the winter, when watermen are prohibited from crabbing.

But crab house owners say these are the most dire circumstances they have faced. They hope federal immigration officials issue more visas in response to skyrocketing demand for seasonal foreign workers. But if they have to compete in another lottery, they say, they worry there won’t be enough workers to fill their facilities.

“Companies that have been relying on this system for 25 years suddenly have no workers,” said Bill Sieling, director of the Chesapeake Bay Seafood Industries Association. “It’s totally unfair and irrational, really.”

“Irrational” the man says. Meanwhile in nearby Baltimore and Washington DC much of the native population struggles in poverty. This is their economy. It is not the thriving economy portrayed on TV and corporate media. But even in this fake recovery the media cannot hide the fact that Baltimore and DC are suffering high unemployment. Those are Americans, and they could use the jobs created nearby — in America — yet the crab industry can’t find workers if it doesn’t get them from a Third World country. That is capitalists “rationality”. It works for Us.

In another Washington Post article, the author quoted Harry Phillips, owner of Russell Hall Seafood, “We depend on the Hispanics . . . They’re the ones keeping us in business. No American people are going to do this job. We’ve tried.” He’s been importing Mexican workers to Maryland since 1992. States the article:

Here’s the problem. The administration isn’t taking aim at just undocumented immigrants. The knee jerk, simplistic, shut-it-down, build-that-wall approach to the complex issue of immigration is also affecting workers who have been legally coming to the United States and are an integral part of our economy.

Unfortunately, unemployed Americans are not “an integral part of the economy”, but desperate migrants traveling some two thousand miles to pick crab meat are.

Daniel Costa of the Economic Policy Institute found that these employers typically pay three to four dollars an hour less than the Maryland average. In 2017 they paid seasonal meat pickers nine fifty per hour, where the average native Maryland wage was almost thirteen.

From a ruling class perspective this makes sense. Lower order Americans are far more expensive than We would care to pay for labor. They are often stuck in a cycle of poverty and without access to skills. What makes them truly unemployable is their privilege. They would be required to be paid more than migrants, entitled to benefits and, crucially they have recourse to the law, and have a greater attachment to the community where the migrant is isolated. Thus unemployable, the native poor become the surplus labor, an unusable burden, for the good of the ruling class. More important for the crab industry, Liberals and Conservatives are the cheaper imported migrants, who are plentiful thanks to trade policies that destroy their native economies.

We are told this is the case by Bill Sieling the seafood industry representative because “nobody wants to do manual labor anymore . . . It’s just a very, very tight labor market right now, particularly in industries that are seasonal.” In a “free market” this means one would have to pay a higher wages to attract labor. This is not how a communist would behave. So how does one solve a problem where none exists, namely a shortage of labor in a high unemployment area? What would a commie do?

We should rather ask the socialist. They are more abundant and acceptable. They are broader in scope, not necessarily committed to absolute abolition of private property. Perhaps they would beat Libertarians at their own game and declare that they will not interfere in the relations of labor so long as they are fair, which means you employ locally until you can’t. If an industry is not viable paying a living wage, then the government may buy it out and set it up as an independent cooperative run by the workers and public interest, cutting out the middleman profiteer.

Large profits would be made secondary to proper management by excellent fixed management wages tied to the average wage of the cooperative. Just this would remove a lot of corruption, argue some socialists. Local individuals would be hired. This will help ensure a local market and a dependable labor source. A socialist government would improve conditions for small business where the current economic environment is hard on small business but excellent for the ruling class. Socialism would try to reverse that situation.

We do not see anything remotely along socialist lines that would indicate even a mild form of communism among the big powers of the First World. Conservatives and Libertarians must recognize that the ruling class pushes communism because We prefer not to take the blame for a failing society. And at the end of the day, this applies to Liberalism as well, for they are followers of the Establishment as much as Conservatives and Libertarians.

The Preservation society is not promoting socialism in any way but a little socialism now and then keeps the revolution away. The right must learn to appreciate the value socialism has for their interests. They must learn to leverage it for their own interests as the left once had done. It is unbelievable that members of the ruling class are pleading with the masses to come to their senses. Don’t they want paradise on Earth? The hour is getting late, but it is never too late to come to your senses.