Who’s a capitalist? Almost nobody. And the chances that you, the average person, are a capitalist, are vanishingly small — about 1%, because that’s how much of society actually is. Hence, I can confidently say: no, you’re not a capitalist. And I’d be right about 99% of the time, because the average American isn’t one.
The average American is something truly weird. A prole — someone earning a living by selling their labour for a wage, which, on average, isn’t much higher than the poverty line. But a special kind of prole. The average American is a prole who believes — earnestly, fervently — that they’re a capitalist.
If you really understand all the above, if you know your economics, which I’ve laboured to teach you in this essay, you should begin to see how utterly bizarre this state of affairs really is. The average American appears to be deluded. They think they’re something they’re not — and will never be. And yet because they think they’re already that thing, they’re further deluded into supporting the interests of that thing, that class of people, which is just about 1% of society. No wonder the average American always votes “against their own interests.” No wonder they don’t seem to know up from down. They’ve been deluded into thinking they’re capitalists, when they’re really just proles.
And if you try to teach them that, well, woe betide you — they’ll get incandescently angry at you, instead of calmly learning anything. “Hey, a-hole!! I’m a capitalist! Didn’t you hear me? What are you, stupid?” No, Steve, you’re not a capitalist.
How do we make sense of all this? Well, all this is — funnily, sadly, stupidly — exactly what Marx predicted a few centuries ago. No, I’m not some kind of die-hard Leninist Marxist who thinks we should all be living in dorms. But I have to admit — as any thinking person does right about now — that many of Marx’s criticisms weren’t just valid, but piercingly accurate.
Marx spoke of a thing he called “false consciousness,” which would go on to corrode the mind of a society. What is a “false consciousness”? It’s when proles believe they’re capitalists, so they come to support the interests of capital, politically, socially, culturally, and most perversely, economically. Proles then begin to defend the rights of capital — interest, dividends, bonds, hiding all that money, that money itself matters more than human lives, or infrastructure, or quality of life, and so forth — more than their own interests. Interests they should have, like having functioning healthcare or retirement or dignity or value or worth.
Bang. A society collapses into a jungle that way, and it’s norms begin to corrode. Selfishness, greed, indifference, cruelty, and brutality begin to replace expansiveness, generosity, kindness, and warmth. Social bonds corrode. People begin to see each other as commodities. And seeing each other as commodities — not fellow citizens joined together in the endeavour of building a modern, civilized society — their only role is to exploit, degrade, and abuse each other.
Society becomes a free for all. Every person’s role has been reduced to to finding some way to survive by finding some way to make a buck off the next guy — because, well, they’re not a human being at all. We’re all just “capitalists,” trying to exploit each other for profit. We’re not in it together, giving each other healthcare and retirement and education. Lifting each other up. Elevating one another’s quality of lives with the systems and institutions we all need. A society descends into fascism, by way of poverty, this way, because it never develops, matures, it remains a place where everyone is trying to exploit everyone else, and worse, they fervently believe that’s all a society can and should be.
Does that sound like America to you? It should. Europeans and Canadians are different. They’re warm, gentle, kind. To meet a Canadian is to encounter their legendary “niceness,” as Americans put it. To meet a European is to feel a sense of warmth and friendliness. But those qualities exist in Europeans and Canadians for a reason. Because they don’t have such a massive, overwhelming false consciousness.
