Capitalism is good, actually, at several factors. Such as exploitation and rot. It is not in human nature to exploit, but it is the nature of capitalism and thus the nature of those within capitalism to cheat, to compete, to exploit— even the nicest ones of us — in order to keep our livelihoods. The function of our jobs rests within abuse.
That misuse can be focused on the workers themselves, such as in the food industry, nonprofit sector, retail and much of manufacturing in non-protected spaces. Many of these industries rely on cheap, disposable surplus labor: of college students and teenagers trying to eek out a few bucks on the side and of immigrants seen as dispensable by both the food and manufacturing industries as well as by the general liberal consciousness. Slogans such as “Immigrants get shit done” and “Immigrants are welcome here” tie in nicely together when we consider how the exploitation of migrant laborers connects with the current Wall War. Does thes United States actually welcome strangers, or just their hyper-exploitable labor?
Another observable example is the retail clerk and restaurant server who must meet every demand and whim of the Never-Wrong Customer. Not only is this morally, psychologically and even physically abusive, it also exacerbates gender and racial abuse when we consider who the lowest-paid and most-demanded clerical and wait staff tend to be. Many of whom are forced to live at sub-minimum wage rates and have no protections in their workspace against the various harassments they face from entitled customers, bosses and co-workers.
But just as often the exploitation is within the work itself. Mining, industrialized mono-culture farming, and oil digging, fracking, and transport exploit the very physicality of the earth — any of which may be necessary to a certain degree, but capitalism by its nature drives to such extremes that the earth is literally dying both internally and environmentally. Industries under capitalism can also be driven to exploit their subjects (whom we often call customers as if they have the power in the matter). Health insurance is completely unnecessary, but it serves a purpose in privatizing and justifying the consumptive nature of healthcare under capitalism.
The forces responsible for ensuring and bounding all of this exploitation, however, are the twin energies of the police and military. I want to preface this section by noting that the ACAB concept is limited as it reduces the function of policing within racist capitalism to the work of individual actors within it, and does not recognize the different role police play in a state that isn’t racialized and driven by private property concerns — that doesn’t need a militarized police force to contain, threaten, kill, and incarcerate Black and Brown people for class interests. However, if we applied ACAB logic to the militarized police, why not the policemen of the world itself, the US military? Is that also not their function within imperialism (the ‘highest stage of capitalism’ as Lenin pointed out a hundred years ago)? To threaten, contain, and kill people of color throughout the world that would resist US business hegemony with its 800 overseas military occupation zones, not to mention its neocolonies that act as glorified military bases? Even the DPRK (North Korea) with its massive military does not spread its might throughout the world but is only used for defensive purposes (1). As it is, the militaries of the US and its capitalist allies in NATO kill hundreds of thousands of Black and Brown people a year and threaten hundreds of millions more for the sole purpose of protecting and strengthening the business interests of the colonialist powers. They are the globally-repressive police and must be abolished before they can be repurposed, just like policing itself.
Third, under capitalism, even the best and most necessary industries are corrupted by its exploitative nature to such a degree that they need to be completely redesigned and repurposed. Healthcare work, for instance, is absolutely necessary, but its privatization within the US (and increasingly in other capitalist nations where the ruling classes want to emulate the failures [2] of the US system) means that the work is ultimately not about healing but about the cash flow itself. This leads to a stratification where doctors are seen as vital and other hospital staff are seen as expendable. This is reflected in not just the salaries, but the prohibitively-expensive training and treatment of medical personnel: from the hierarchical nature and of surgeons down to interns to registered nurses, radiologists, certified nursing assistants, and janitors resting somewhere on the very bottom — although we know that cleanliness is absolutely vital to the health of the entire hospital. No job necessary to the health and well-being of human lives should be seen as disposable, let alone no one who does that work.
The education profession, of which I’m a part, has also primarily become about making money for the capitalist class — at every level. We see that in the privatization efforts of the charter school system, in the expensive and exclusive day care culture that wealthy people subject their children to (and which we are subjected to in family sitcoms as if the families of network television shows are at all emblematic of our lives), and of course in the debtor economy, vulture economy, and adjunction of higher education. This is not to mention the heavy emphasis on school sports not as a healthy outlet for students but as another means of exploitation, this time of athletes who are usually given subpar scholastic support, much less the atmosphere necessary to thrive academically. This is not to mention the role that the stratisfication of education plays in maintaining and shaping class and racial relations (3).
Of course most industries overlap their exploitation. As an adjunct professor, I’m well aware of the roles that my field has in exploiting myself and my peers. To some degree, the work itself is altered by the means of capitalism as are the students, their goals, and certainly their pocketbooks. Social care workers come into the career with the best of intentions, which makes them easier to exploit with low-paying and spirit-breaking work that they can never hope to solve, only alleviate. Non-profit work depends on the private sector — largely rich people with strings-attached donations — and local, state, and national governments (which themselves are auxiliary of the business sector). By performing charity work off the dross of their ill-gotten wealth, the rich not only take tax deductions from their charity, but they get to decide how that money is used, how much is used, and for whom. All of this for what is basically stop-gap work to stem the tide of revolutionary fervor. But nonprofit work also relies on empaths who feel a necessity to do good but are emotionally and financially exploited by the same non-profits funded by billionaires. What’s more, the direction of these organizations are limited and pointed by the donors themselves, who are invested — literally — in bourgeoise means of production, including the police and incarceral state.
All of these industries need to either be completely, organizationally, foundationally, structurally, and materially reconfigured or abolished. Many will need to be abolished and then reconstituted in a way that makes sense for a society of human beings dedicated to human flourishing. Which means that, yes, tens of millions of people will be out of work and many more will see decreased income. Social democracy or liberal political systems will not fundamentally change these industries to no longer rely on exploitation, because they are still fundamentally capitalist and thus fundamentally exploitative. More Americans joining the settler colonial bourgeois leisure class will not change the nature or function of capitalism; in fact, it would make wealth inequality more deadly on a global scale. This nation would still rely on exploitation in all its fields, only export more of that exploitation to the Global South and continue the hyper-exploitation of Black and Brown people here.
But imagine a world where we are involved in cleaning the earth, planting trees and wildlife, farming in our cities, housing all our citizens, feeding the hungry, healing all the sick, giving emotional and physical therapy to everyone who has need. And training old and new people to take on new tasks. Just trying to figure out reparations is a set of huge tasks that will require multiple workers.
The work is there. It’s all there. Lord knows, so is the money.
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1 Seeing as how the US is still at war with it, has several nuclear bombs and military bases pointed at it, commits large-scale exercises just outside its borders to demonstrate full-scale genocide, it only makes sense that the DPRK would spend so much of its resources towards defending itself and keeping infiltration out. However, if the World Police were not insistent on once-again leveling the country until there’s not one story on top of another, then the DPRK could focus its resources elsewhere as well as build trade peacefully.
2 Nb4 someone says “It’s a success to them…” Sorry, but I don’t gaf what capitalists want and rather not appreciate centering their narratives on something that affects us so personally and widely and aggressively.
3 Hello, Harvard, home to four of the last five presidents, I think? Your prestige is abysmal.
