It is time to kill the Poor and the Working Class!

This title sounds like a dystopian vision of the future, something straight out of Hollywood where the rich, living in their Elysium, have gained the ultimate upper hand over the majority, deprived masses. But dramatical pronouncements, if nothing else, are also the signs of something coming our way, the size and danger of which we will only realise when it is too late anyway. The danger here is the evolution of Capitalism, from Industrial Capitalism, to Finance Capitalism to Neoliberalism, and to the coming End Stage Capitalism, a phase I will call Capitalist Equilibrium.

Why Equilibrium? Because, it is in this stage of Capitalism that it will have to resolve its contradictions (Fallacies) that Marx had pointed out. I specifically speak here of the Monopolistic tendency peaking, the falling rate of profit being internalised and most importantly the Class contradictions being resolved along with Automation displacing workers. There are no resolute timescales to the Capitalist Equilibrium but it is safe to say that humanity is at its crossroads at this time to decide how it will survive on this planet.

Let us understand the nature of some of Capitalism’s contradictions first.

Tendency to Monopoly and the falling rate of profit.

All businesses and enterprises that are run are done for one sole motive: profit maximisation. This of course leads to competition and in the course of that competition, the strongest survive. This can be through the adoption of technology or through sheer weight of Capital and money power at the disposal of bigger Corporations. Our modern corporations like Apple, Google, Microsoft, Pepsi, Coke, epitomise this trend, where they are able to destroy competition through the sheer weight of their resources, buyouts, or even through political clout. This has been the case for so many decades now that the dream of many a startup is to grow big enough to be acquired; what a laughable ambition…. To grow big enough to be nourishment for another. This very trend is indicative of how Capitalism has resolved its contradiction by changing society to believe in the power of the Corporation – that is the benevolent dictator, the employer, that which sprinkles its goodness though charity, and that if you cross will crush you no matter how, through money and political clout. Thus, we also see how the Bourgeois Liberal Democratic framework post World War 2 has aided and lubricated this transition by being a Politics of the Rich and resourceful. Marx had put forth the absolutely brilliant critique in Das Kapital of the Falling rate of Profit. Again, something that we see in action today but never mentioned by the Bourgeois Economists. The Falling Rate of Profit is largely mathematical but in layman language it is the tendency of businesses to compete to the point of collectively reducing prices and thus profit per unit. This leads to the tendency to monopoly but the side effects of the falling rate of profit in the interim are catastrophic, as the drive to keep gross margins intact cause labour retrenchment and subsequently increasing the mass of the reserve army of unemployed labour. A majority of the people of the world living under the doom of Recessions that is caused by such a state is now being touted as the norm and inevitable – as if economic recession is like that inhalation and exhalation of a living organism. In any case, those who suffer in a Capitalist economic meltdown are not those who have caused it.

Class contradictions

Class contradictions basically mean the inability of there to be consonance and peace between classes. In today’s world, to most folks, this might seem to already be resolved but that is only the case if you go by what you are being told to believe. Class contradictions inherently stem from Economic power, and who holds the power of Resources in society, which further decides the way Production and Consumption is organised, which finally decides political power. Capitalism places the Class that rules as that class that has the most wealth in society and those that must be ruled as the working class.  This inherently creates a contradiction that we see today of the 1% ruling over the 99%. To maintain this form of dictatorship of a minority, the 1% via the media they own, ensure that the 99% are never made aware of their ability to rise up, are made to believe that their position in this world is decided by how much they consume (of the product made by the 1%), are told that they are constantly unskilled and must upgrade their skills (again, by buying the education sold by the 1%), and finally that the essential problem is that working class are just too numerous and must contain their propensity to procreate. History has shown that this inevitably leads to class conflict and the 99% do rise up and occasionally take power. Thus, there are two states in which the working class, or Proletariat live in – A Bourgeois Democracy or a Proletarian Democracy.

But back to the present and we see that the three decade long Neoliberal project has largely ensured that the Proletarian class looks at uprising and mass organised revolt as something their masters do not appreciate. One cannot blame them, considering that the State – that is owned and commanded by the Rich Capitalist class – comes down heavily upon them, to the point of even censoring Free Speech the minute it threatens the power of the Bourgeois State. An entire two generations have now been born in the world since the collapse of the USSR and this means that no one knows what the alternatives to Bourgeois Hegemony are. This will continue as well – even despite the rise of Reactionary forces and Right Wing Populism – which ultimately does not contradict the rule of Capitalism anyway, just of democracy itself.

Therefore, we see that the working class have submitted to the rule of the Bourgeoisie and be it in the first world or the third, there is almost no revolutionary potential left. Class contradictions have therefore come to a stage of resolution where the working class is satisfied being just the working class that is servile to the Capitalist 1%.

Here we come back to Capitalist Equilibrium. The masses who should rise up to prevent this final stage of Capitalism are now docile, servile and supine. In this environment, the last project of Capitalism can be evoked and that is the slow genocidal elimination of the Poor and subsequently of the Working Class itself.

The destruction and killing of the Poor is a conscious project in nearly every country now except those that still claim to profess Socialism. This is done through insidious ways like cutting welfare, using the Police to clear out the poorest of the poor – making some citizens legally entitled to the country but only if they are wealthy enough to be so, ensuring that hygiene and healthcare is not something that exists for those who cannot afford it, and finally through high food prices and dumping food. In the third world, we see this project in more obvious forms like forced and incentivised sterilisation, evictions from ancestral lands, the use of the army and police to clear out those deemed to not support ruling governments and then there the use of Reactionary Ideology to orchestrate genocides to clear people from land as is the case in the Rohingyas.

As far as the Working Class that have some rights to exist in their societies because of what wealth they do possess, they are made to live in polluted environments, to suffer the cutbacks of govt expenditure on clean water, reduced regulation of industrial waste treatments, etc etc. This the Working Class might occasionally fight back against but cannot ultimately do anything about – take the examples of Fracking in the US, the Pollution in Indian cities, the potholed roads, the lack of Public infrastructure in cities.

Automation and Technology

The final blow that will end the existence of the Working Class is the advent of Artificial intelligence and Machine Learning. These technologies are being touted today as those that will free the Working Class from doing menial tasks – though Machine Learning has already blown the cover of the nefarious plans of the Bourgeoisie. Marx had predicted that Automation will be the single most potent weapon that will be used against the Working Class. Where automation and technology should have been used to reduce the costs in Capital and to ensure that more and more jobs are created, Privatisation of technological innovation has ensured that Technology innovation is only for driving Profit making.

Today, that project has reached the point where masses of people losing their job is seen as some sort of evolution of business, where in actual fact, it is simply the distortion of evolution by the Capitalist class. We today see this now where masses of IT developers are being made redundant and ironically, the most profitable IT developer jobs are in those that make the very damned software that will make them redundant! Why the Working Class, like mules, follow this nefarious genocide of their own without protest is a testament to the success of media, the alienation brought about by Capitalism, and Liberalism as the preferred ideology.

The Dystopia that stands before us.

From the above analysis, we can see that Equilibrium will be reached – not by the synthesis from a dialectical perspective but from the destruction of the antithetical thought itself. But what is the alternative to such a dystopia. It is the very the project that was initiated a 100 years ago in Russia – the creation of the worker’s state and the establishment of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. The challenge here is one of confusion whether the Working Class gets Revolutionary potential first or the Communist movements stir the Working Class to Revolutionary potential. Yet another problem is the question of “What is Revolution?” Is it violent or democratic? This is the needless banter that promotes indolence – an indolence that is a result of Bourgeois academics endlessly ruminating in the realm of academia instead of taking to the streets. Revolution is the seizure of power – simple, where the state allows for it through democracy - good, where it must be seized through the violent overthrow of the Bourgeoisie, the better.

There is no alternative to the very existence of the Working Class than Socialism and there is no alternative to sustainable elimination of Class than Communism. The only other way is murder.