Capitalism is Violence

Some of ya’ll are willing to die on the Cross of Capitalism. Lay down you life for the burden of Billionaires that will sacrifice a million lambs on their altars. Yet, so many people neglect the ugly truth. Capitalism is violence.

Capitalism suggests equality. It promises that everyone has the chance to start their own business and everyone can be “successful.” Capitalism vows, like America, that everyone has a fair shot. And Capitalism, like its red, white, and blue counterpart, is lying to us all. Only a select few are allowed to start businesses; those of us with the right pedigree. By virtue of whose family has enough spare money to loan their offspring can become a startup. That’s how the Greats do it. Jeff Bezos got his initial capital of $300,000 from his parents. $300,00!!!!! These parental loans for the highest grossing companies range from $250,000 to $1M. From their parents. Hear that. Google that. These faux “average Americans” have a quarter of a million dollars or more just lying around to gamble on their child’s first business venture.


Even still, let’s say the average American doesn’t have the chance to grab cash from Mom Dukes and their Old Man. They could go to their friends and pool their collective trust funds, or stocks, or whatever liquid money and found their corporation. With just a few phone calls their new enterprise is off an running, provided their friends aren’t minorities or getting paid half of their white counterparts because they are not male. I will leave your imagination to think about how some people just have exorbitant amounts of disposable income.

Better yet, let’s say these future entrepreneurs don’t have enough liquid capital from their parents or their colleagues. Hypothetically speaking, these future business owners decide to go to a bank for small business loan. The bank will then assess the borrowers’ current income level and earning potential to determine how much they would trust someone to repay. Pretty basic, right? However, there is another factor that comes into play for each loan that lenders grant: race. Yup. You guessed it. According to The Guardian, Black-owned firms are twice more likely to be rejected for a small business loan. Furthermore, their loans were among the highest percentage of loans to never be fully financed. I won’t go into all the details. I recommend you check out the article yourself. Truly infuriating stuff. Anyway, on the opposite end of the spectrum white borrowers are more likely to get loans for larger amounts at lower interest rates. Thus, allowing them to keep statistical advantage over similarly qualified Black borrowers. Coincidence? Not at all. Black people and other minorities have faced this sort of discrimination time and again. An elusive hand pushing the pieces around the board. Intangible roadblocks that certain populations feel all the time because of systematic discrimination.

Capitalism is hateful in that it hides the direct consequences of its actions behind bureaucracy. You didn’t get approved because there was an issue with your mailing address, your social security number, your income verification, your professional references. It is this organized bureaucracy that disguises the gatekeepers who keep people poor.

So many factors come into play where the decision makers hold the power to grant or deny access to certain resources in our society. These locked doors that exist for poor people never seem to swing open even when they wave the right credential before the scanner. It leaves them proverbially and literally out in the cold. Just ask the soldiers who returned from World War II. Only some of those who served were allowed to use the GI Bill to purchase a home. I’ll give you a wild guess as to who wasn’t allowed to buy real estate. Capitalism and patriotism in this way sort of intersect. You are proud of the country you fought for. You are supposed to be rewarded monetarily for your service to the Union. Imagine how Black soldiers felt for defending this godforsaken land and coming back to find the door still firmly shut to them and realizing their dreams. What betrayal they must have felt. And now Capitalism tells them to get a job, but they like many others will be told things like they do not have enough experience. Gatekeepers. Telling you, you are not enough. It is a spit in the face. You held the same promise that someone else did and now you feel foolish for believing a liar. Capitalism pulls the rug from under people and tells them they tripped.

We press on. Let’s say you are a person of color (POC), specifically Black. And let’s just say you work in Corporate America. And you work hard. After all, it is the American way. Did you know that you will make between 61% and 85% of what your white male counterpart is paid for the same job and at the same level of education. Black employees are more likely to be passed over for promotions as their antithesis. If minorities are “low-skilled laborers”—who the pandemic taught us were essential workers—the company you work for is more likely not to pay you a living wage and to steal said unlivable wages. Just ask McDonald’s, WalMart, and countless other corporations who shave hours, don’t pay overtime, don’t give breaks, pay for healthcare, and have “at-will” hiring practices that hold workers hostage to their tyranny.

In true Capitalism, these folks should be paid what they are due, but according to the Economic Policy Institute, an estimated $50 billion is stolen from low-wage workers annually. Where is the outrage from all these people who keep telling us to work hard in this society? These folks work hard and are overlooked, because they are not powerful. They do not command the economy in a meaningful way, because they are not the corporate fat cats calling the shots. They are merely the worker bee dying while the rest of the hive is too busy to notice their sacrifice.

And that is the nature of our precious economy. It is evident when politicians are willing to send us out into the global pandemic outdoors so that their precious system can survive. No science to support reopening. No protective gear to ensure safety. No logical reason to take such actions, just a knowledge that this de facto aristocracy cannot survive if the poor don’t spend any money or make any money for their cash cow. Violence.

Frankly, I am disgusted by all the ways Capitalism shows its hand. And the collective majority defends it, based off what it stands for, rather than what it actually is. A bunch of blind capitalist extremists. There are far fewer Black billionaires and POC billionaires in the world, yet somehow we tell ourselves this system is working. Far less women that helm corporations and upper management and yet we trust this system is working. Working for who? Capitalism says the market is free and unhindered by government. Unless the government has vested interest in the market. Unless Big Business is failing, at which point the government writes a big fat blank check. Capitalism tells us that healthcare should be tied to people’s jobs and then fires half of its workforce when profit margins dip or stock shares are low, leaving people without income or medical coverage. Capitalism tells you that minimum wage doesn’t need to be increased. The same wage people have made since 1990 is good enough for 2020, but inflation has increased tenfold every year since the first George Bush. Capitalism suggests that people are homeless because they are lazy or stupid. Capitalism will never admit that rent is too high and mortgages favor lenders. People should be more frugal. If they didn’t buy the new iPhone or the latest Jordans they wouldn’t be poor. They could be buying homes and they are wasting away their wealth. Never mind where generational wealth comes from. Never mind that the average wealth in a white family would take the average Black family 3 generations to build up. But no, of course it is our fault. What’s worst, Black people, RocNation Brunch Twitter, gets online and tells us we should invest the measly $1200 check Uncle Sam cut, when it was meant to last us 4 months. Man, fuck you.

Political pundits go on national television and attest that you are on government assistance because you don’t work hard enough. Surely, these people who are making pennies on the dollar for every billionaire in the world is working hard enough. Capitalism actually villainizes the very people it victimizes. And media, city officials, and the community at large are all in on a sick joke. They get to sit in their ivory towers and tell themselves they belong there. They get to live in excess while others die of severe lack. Capitalism tells us we can’t afford infrastructural change, and then spends money on bullshit day in and day out. CEOs embezzle billions of funds, defraud investors, and stiff the working Jane to line their own pockets. But please, go on and tell us to believe in this system. The powerful prey on the weak. Executives price gouge vital prescriptions that people will actually die without. Remember Martin Skrelli? He hiked the price of a cancer pill up 5000%. He basically told cancer patients yes, I know this pill keeps you alive, but if you don’t feed my greed you can go die. In this all too perfect metaphor, the amount of money in your checking account could literally determine if your heart gets to keep beating.

Capitalism did that. And there is no one to check this system. Just clarion calling champions telling all of us that we too can have the American Dream. This dream was built on the bed of Black people’s untaxed labor. Slavery, unequivocally laid the groundwork for generational wealth to handed down to the descendants of racist tyrants who never meant to share the resources of the land with anyone except themselves. Bet the factors of production work really well when you don’t have to pay the labor force. That concept has never left the collective consciousness based on how modern day Capitalism functions. It is a tool of white supremacy used to teach everyone their place in the social hierarchy. It teaches many Americans that they will never know the American Dream.

Capitalism teaches you that certain people have no right to this privilege. It screams it from the top of the Dow and the bottom of the cages that the immigrant children live in to this day. Capitalism, lines the pockets of the right politicians and city planners who redline the Black communities and starve them of resources. Capitalism plops a McDonald’s and liquor stores on multiple corners in Black neighborhoods and calls it access. Food deserts, lack of housing, high unemployment rates, and high policing of specific areas are the result of Capitalism. Because communities with more money don’t need as much surveillance and control. Those places do not need to drown their sorrows in the alcohol to dampen the ugliness of knowing that society never ascribes you a dollar amount of more than $7.25 an hour. And people tell you, you are poor because you didn’t save the $290 you brought home each week, after 40 hours of glorified slave labor. Your ancestors were never compensated for all the years that put in on the only job they had ever known in this country, but please do go on about how Millenials complainers ruining the economy because we can’t pay back our student loans or afford children or buy houses. Certainly, our participation in the economy or lack thereof has bankrupted this rotten foundation.

Capitalism doesn’t teach you these affirming lessons about the triumph of the human spirit. It does not fill you with resilience like that of kid’s from third-world shithole countries. It demoralizes you. It teaches you that you are there because of your fault and the choices you made; never due to the only choices you were afforded. You deserve minimum wage. You deserve a small apartment. You deserve to rent a room week to week. You deserve to be homeless. You deserve to be sick. You should have taken better care of what you were given. Never mind that you weren’t given anything and someone else was given a lion’s share. And they, like you, tell themselves they deserve that privilege. They tell themselves they deserve their big house. They deserve their degree or their fancy job. They worked hard for this. But what about everyone else’s hard work?

What about the young person bagging groceries at the store during a global pandemic? Are they not working hard? Don’t they deserve to be better compensated? Their job is literally providing the food source for the whole country. Is this not their America too? Capitalism has the audacity to name people “essential workers” and treat them as disposable street rats. Capitalism gave struggling families and individuals $1200, 2 months into quarantine, and assumed that that should be enough to keep the world afloat for however long you are out of work. Or it told you to go back out into the highest infected nation’s great outdoors and chance getting COVID19 while trying to get income. Capitalism is companies putting out ads saying “we are all in this together” and letting its workers die because they refuse to buy Personal Protective Equipment.

Capitalism has the nerve to question how high to make the current federal minimum wage, but it doesn’t bat an eyelash at the millions that CEOs take in corporate bonuses. I don’t know who needs to hear this, but that isn’t fair. No one deserves a billion dollars. Just like no one deserves to be poor and homeless. But people especially don’t need to be homeless when they are people with a billion dollars. I am so sick of people telling me I am an anarchist because I think the system America has is broken. Capitalism is corrupt. Capitalism is violent. It wages war on people and tells them to defend themselves by playing its game. When will sound minded people admit the game is rigged? When will those who believe in justice think of something better than this?

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/jan/16/black-owned-firms-are-twice-as-likely-to-be-rejected-for-loans-is-this-discrimination

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/grocery-store-worker-leilani-jordan-died-coroanvirus-kept-working-wanted-to-help-people/


https://www.history.com/news/gi-bill-black-wwii-veterans-benefits

https://www.aauw.org/resources/article/black-women-and-the-pay-gap/

https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/25/business/mcdonalds-wage-theft-settlement/index.html

https://www.epi.org/publication/employers-steal-billions-from-workers-paychecks-each-year/

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/21/business/a-huge-overnight-increase-in-a-drugs-price-raises-protests.html