Mikhail and Hodj's Political Thread

The first and ironically, the hardest, step on the road to anywhere, to anything, is education. We and the American people must really learn how the system in which we livereally worksbefore anything can be done. The comprehension of the innerworkings of this system, related to each person within it sitting on the couch watching, is the first task to be done before anything else, and I said, it's the hardest. Why? This stuff isboring, and it's very hard to get people to listen to this before they've already turned into mob status due to some crisis, or instead of watching the football game, instead of turning it on MTV after work. That is a monumentally difficult task that the capitalists have done over the past century, and they've done it very well. To win the minds of people, you have to win their hearts first. And that takestime, repeating the same message over and over with fancy graphics on the tv screen. However, the difference isourmessage will be one ofunabridged and unbiased truth, not a Fox News-esque propraganda vehicle designed to convince people to vote against their own interests. Truth is where we begin will finally end.

I would use my gazillion dollars to buy airtime on major networks, NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN in primetime slots and construct a news program that reports, and allots time to, understanding the role of money, of capital in our everyday lives. This would start slowly, and it would sprinkle in a broad range of topics over time. Even if people disagree with it initially because the brainwashing has gone on for years with the 24/7 news outlets, I would continue this to raise awareness. I would be bringing in charts, videos, TED speakers, showing the accumulation & concentration of wealth, the stagnation and even fall of wages, what synthetic markets actually are and how the rich utilize them - i.e.,I would show them how they're actually losing their stake in the increasing wealth of the country.
A big part of this is presentation, not content. It has to be accessible and quick to digest because that's our culture, which is why OWS failed: proper presentation of their protest.

The topics would slowly get more complex as the show continued, and I would continue to buy more airtime, ad campaigns, and begin townhalls all around the country. In short, what has to happen is that our message becomes just as ubiquitous as the other news media: people have to feelcomfortablewith words likecapital accumulationandrights at the point of production, just as Fox has made words like entitlements and welfare state part of the everyday lexicon. And again, the difference is ours is completely truthful and honest, even mathematically so.

To be as brief as I possibly can, capitalism is a system where a person benefits from another person's work. This is exploitation, whether or not you or the audience still agree with the exploitation itself, and so this relationship between these two people isn't genuine (they may not even wish to talk to one another otherwise), and it's mediated through something called capital, through things called money and a wage. This thing called money is an abstraction of value, and it's definitely a very useful concept: we can compare the 'value' of a painting to a dildo. But lots of interesting stuff happens when these things gain this 'value' that you can compare to dildos and paintings. The thing no longer just has value as a thing (enjoying a painting, using a dildo), but it now has a different value, something called a market value. This is different, because someone may be willing to pay a hundred dollars for a black dildo, but it's used the same way. This thing, here a dildo, now has a property, a value, it never had before. Why does it have it? Because of something we made up, that doesn't exist in reality, only as an abstraction to ourselves:money now has value, and the value things have don't reflect their actualthings as thingsin reality.

Dumar, you're rambling. Why is this important? It's very important. Because this is the beginnings of where capitalists (i.e., those with lots of money) can exploit the system without doing any real work. A laborer doesreal work, something gets done, in the physical world: a tree gets chopped down, a toilet gets cleaned, a computer gets programmed. But the person or even group of people that did these activities don't realizeanyof the benefit from doing it, what they realize is a wage paid to them by the person or people whoownwhatever piece of land, office, or company in which the real work gets done. So what we have here is another layer of abstraction, the concept of a company or corporation. Only existing on paper, it states that a person or group of people ('shareholders') own something called stock that entitles them to all of the productive output of the people doing this real work, and the least these workers are getting would be a 'fair market wage' for this work done in reality. You can see then, that anyrights related to this production, even constitutionally, has been ignored and is taken for granted from the viewpoint ofownership, which obviously benefits theowners- this has been the exclusive, entire focus. And it's one reason our Constitution is somewhat flawed.

If someone with lots of money, then, can reinvest that money into different markets, it's seen as a good thing by the national narrative ('job creators'), but the problem is money begets money, capital accumulates more capital more quickly than work accumulates capital. If I have a million dollars, I can make a million more much more easily than the first million. I won't mention that dude with a four-letter name because you requested I didn't, but this is what he predicted. Capital, or wealth in this case, gets concentrated in fewer and fewer hands because of the way the system benefits the people with that capital and wealth to begin with. What is the natural consequence of this then (the 'not being aware of itself' I mentioned in another post)? Capital and wealth takes limits as barriers to overcome, and by overcoming generate yet more capital, more wealth. So we get these massive market bubbles and synthetic markets (derivatives) whose entire purpose is to generate more wealth for those that already have it. The chain of market collapse in 2007 led to real, tangible asset loss, real homes being lost, by people with jobs like the lumberer, janitor, or programmer. This was due to themarket value(remember?) of their house, not anything real about the house. Through what existed on paper and the manipulation and overcoming of that that by capital, another crisis in capitalism ensued. With the fact that real wages haven't increased in decades, those working people aren't actually evergaininganything but continue to lose more and more, despite increases in productivity, output, or profit for those shareholders and that thing that exists only on paper, the company.

What are the consequences of this type of societal structure on us as human beings? We're taught in our modern way of life certain cultural norms, certain things that once we hear them enough, are taken for granted as 'normal'. Each culture throughout history has done this. It was 'normal' and therefore healthy in pre-modern Japan to view the Emperor as descended from Amaterasu-omikami (God), for example. It was 'normal' to throw Spartan babies into the sea. Looking back at these cultures and ours, can we point to thoughts or activities instilled into us and them that are objectively unhealthy for all of us as human beings? And if there are objectively unhealthy things in ours and those cultures, what then, are objectively healthy states for all of us, as human beings?

If we look at our culture, our way of life, we see it's entirely dominated by a market structure: our culture's laws, institutions, and therefore, our thought patterns, all support and rely on that structure to make sense of the world. All social relations, then, from worker to owner, to romantic partners, to even family, are represented in our minds by this market structure. That's why you get sites like OKC and analyses such as the sexual market value chart. The representation of reality in our minds is reflected by the institutions that instilled them, and that conception, our conception, is to view everything as this transactional, give-and-take market activity.

Even beyond our thoughts, our feelings, our emotions are regulated and conceived of through the concept of market activity. Doing dishes for your wife is seen as 'buying favor' for sex later. Dating 'game' is but a reflection of a business relationship in a 'market'. The relationships under modern capitalism are not genuine relationships, but are created and thought of in terms of the structure that regulates economic activity and man's labor. And so, personality traits such as greed, hyper-assertiveness, and excessive confidence are prized not just in the sphere of the economic, but the interpersonal: it's all rolled into one.

Let us suppose that the role of society, the role of culture, is to facilitate for each and every individual to realize their full potential as human beings and enter into relationships with other human beingsof their free will and association. This our type of character ordination, these celebrated behaviors, are very unhealthy, much as the Spartan babies, not just for the individual, but for the society around them. It leads to mental illnesses, a feeling of alienation in one's life, even violence. We need to replace the concept of that market structure with something else for the genuine individual and his relationships to flourish.

And that is what communism has set as its task. To free man from man by man. To free ourselves of these same types of exploitative relationships in all spheres of life. To let real human history begin.

Step 1 is getting this message out to every media orifice out there and hammering home, through effective presentation, the truth about how our system works.

And from there, the road to real human freedom, real communism. Stay tuned for part 2.