The Capitalist Manifesto

The history of all hitherto society is... complex.

“If there was any system that could guarantee each person housing, whether you call it the abolition of private property or ... a statewide housing guarantee, it is preferable to what is going on right now.”

~ Zohran Mamdani, Mayor of New York City

Joel Bowman with today’s Note From the End of the World: Buenos Aires, Argentina...

A specter is haunting the world – The specter of Capitalism.

All the powers of the Old West have entered into an unholy alliance to exorcize this specter: Pope and King, Presidents and Prime Ministers, legacy media and learning academies, cultural radicals and government spies, dis/misinformation snoops and self-appointed “fact checkers.”

Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as “Capitalistic” by its opponents in power?

It is high time that Capitalists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Capitalism with a Manifesto of the movement itself.

To this end, one capitalist has assembled at the End of the World, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and sketched the following Manifesto, to be published in a fringey Substack newsletter, available to a renegade readership of free thinkers, outsiders, preppers, paranoiacs, weirdos, fringe-dwellers and assorted other “deplorables.” (The kind of people you want around your dinner table, in other words.)

Our philosophy, such as it is, below. But first...

An Unholy Alliance

Students of history and casual noticers alike will recognize the preceding passage as a loose riff on the (in)famous opening of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ irksome little pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto (1848). Weighing in at just under 51 pages, it may fairly be argued that, page for page, no other text has packed such a devastating civilizational gut punch, at least not in our modern times.

Though at times whimsical, even poetic in its prose, its fundamental read of history - that is, through the warped and narrow prism of dialectical materialism - is at once shocking and shockingly virulent. Apparently deaf to the lessons of history, Marxist apologists mobilize their Dear Comrade’s theories to open fresh wounds in our societies to this very day. (See our ongoing Notes about New York City’s card-carrying collectivist mayor for reference.)

One and three-quarter centuries after Marx (an impecunious academic) hitched his wagon to Engels (son of a wealthy industrialist), in order that the pair might more fully and effectively rage against the capitalist machine (the very same that was funding their publications), the world is once again wrestling with this threat to liberty and human flourishing, to self-determinism and genuine cooperation, to free markets and – by extension – free people.

A survey by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation a few years back found that four in ten (40%) Americans held a “favorable” view of socialism, communism’s half-wit cousin. Perhaps unsurprisingly, youngsters were even more enamored by collectivist ideology. Almost half (49%) of Gen Z found socialism to be to their liking, up from 40% the previous year. As for fully-formed Marxism, millions yearn for a future as gray as Stalin’s socks. From the survey:

• 18% of Gen Z and 13% of Millennials think communism is a fairer system than capitalism and deserves more consideration in America

• 30% of Gen Z has a favorable view of Marxism, up 6% from the previous year, compared to 27% of Millennials

• Over a quarter of Americans (26%) support the gradual elimination of the capitalist system in favor of a more socialist system with a surge in support among younger generations (31% of Gen Z and 35% of Millennials)

Incredibly, more than a third (37%) of Gen Z and Millennials reckon The Communist Manifesto better guarantees freedom and equality than does that alternative, unfashionably American document... you know, the one that waxes, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Class Backwards

One wonders how many of communism’s dreary devotees have bothered to even browse the 51-page primer, much less spend any time in, say, Cuba or Transnistria or Venezuela, where Groundhog Day is not just another classic Bill Murray movie, but a bleak, inescapable reality, where quality, universal social services are so free nobody can actually afford them.

Nor is the Manifesto an obscure, hard to find text... or altogether unavailable... or under threat of being censored, canceled or “selectively rewritten,” Ministry of Truth style, in some windowless, brutalist structure by g-men drones. (We have on our desk the Little Black Classics version, readily available on Amazon and published by Penguin...for a profit, we assume.)

Nor does the twitchy Tik Toking youth even need to advance beyond the 140-character limit of his/her/zir Twitter-stunted attention span to get the gist of the document. Apparently in something of a rush the day he wrote it, Marx waited until the very first line to get everything wrong.

“The history of all hitherto society is the history of class struggles,” declared he, going on to notice that there are both freemen and slaves, patricians and plebeians, lords and masters, guild-masters and journeymen in the world.

Like the “anti-racist” who sees nothing but skin color... or the jealous lover who sees naught but furtive glances... or the chain smoking Freudian psychoanalyst who espies nothing but cigars, cigars and more cigars, everywhere Herr Marx looks he sees class warfare. Upper and lower. Bourgeoisie and proletariat. Oppressor and oppressed. For the whiny denizen of Struggle Street, everything comes down to power, property and profit. He who has the power gains the property, and he who has the property, profits. The problem, as Marx sees it, lies in the “struggle” between these opposing forces.

Never does it occur to the man that, absent the aggression of a state, human beings might enter into mutually beneficial arrangements all of their own accord. (Like, say, two men sitting down to publish a political pamphlet together...) That consensual exchange is, ipso facto, a necessarily value-adding undertaking. That cooperation, not compulsion... voluntarism, not violence... commerce, not coercion... is the path toward human flourishing, what the wise old Greeks called eudaimonia.

And yet, the “struggle” Marx imagines everywhere is motivated by the zero-sum nature of his own constrained thinking. To Marx’s eye, the oppressor only has the big house, the fast car, the pretty blonde wife, because he has denied these things to his oppressed (and no doubt covetous) neighbor. Or worse still, it is stolen from him through the exploitation of his labor.

Injustice for All

Never is there any allowance for an individual’s own preferences, his unique goals, aspirations, proclivities. Suppose someone prefers to rent than own... to walk than drive... and brunette’s over blondes! Imagine a world where not everyone wants to be CEO, to work weekends, shoulder risk, front capital, lease land, plan businesses, make payroll, stock merchandise, figure distribution, carry costs, etc. What of the fellow who prefers to sit on the dock of the bay, wastin’ time? Should he be guaranteed the same outcome as the man who builds his enterprise from scratch?

Furthermore, because of Marx’s zero-sum mentality, everything must be taken by force...including, and especially, real estate on the class totem pole. As a man who never, as far as we can tell, wrapped his chubby, uncalloused palms around a single hammer or sickle, Marx foresees a utopia in which the “workers of the world” have nothing to lose but the chains he has imagined for them. If only they will take up the tools he himself eschews.

“The communists disdain to conceal their views and aims,” he writes in the “call to action” section of his copy. “They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.”

It is true, the world is rife with inequality, but correlation does not equal causation, as the saying goes. Yes, there are owners and renters... buyers and sellers... bosses and workers, just as there are Olympians and lounge lizards, morons and geniuses, fatties and anorexics.

How then to “equalize” for the myriad physical/emotional/psychological/intellectual/material etc. differences in the world, besides cutting everyone down to the same diminutive size?

Marx’s “remedy” calls for a coercive state bureaucracy filled with know-it-all busybodies just like himself, charged with guiding each and every invisible hand in the land... until they wind up choking civilization itself.

But back to our own Capitalist Manifesto, as promised above. We’ll keep it to a pithy two-liner:

The history of all hitherto society is... complex. That in mind, do as you will and compel no other.

And as always, stay tuned for more Notes From the End of the World...

Cheers,

Joel Bowman