On Trudeau’s Marxism

Then in the 19th century, Marx saw the factory workers made to work every waking hour to make just enough money to survive in order to work again the next day. He believed we’re all worthy of basic rights, and advocated, through anonymous pamphlets, that workers seize the means of production (i.e. take over the factories). If you do all the work in the factory, the factory should be yours. You should be able to own what you produce! People loved it, and it ushered in a bunch of revolutions in the Spring of Nations, but Marx was also exiled. He wanted to do away with property ownership because so much property got monopolized by a small group of wealthy owners who then exploited the workers further by making rents just barely affordable. He explains in the Communist Manifesto,

“Private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; it’s existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths.”

What would no property rights look like? Check out this 20 minute video using a comic book analogy: The housing market creates the housing crisis. Homelessness isn’t about how many houses we have, but about how many we take off the marked (leave empty or buy and sell as investments) in order to keep prices artificially high. Airbnbs sideswipe regulations and labour unions under the guise of “freedom.”

Marx would want to stop all that from being legal. So do I. His buddy Engels, in 1887, showed why it’s not enough just to regulate housing, but that it requires we,

“abolish altogether the exploitation and oppression of the working class by the ruling class. . . . The cornerstone of the capitalist mode of production is, however, the fact that our present social order enables the capitalists to buy the labour power of the worker at its value, but to extract from it much more than its value.”

The real issue isn’t housing or property rights, but exploitation of the working class. This is why I also maintain that what Russia did, for instance, wasn’t what Marx intended. In common vernacular, however, “Marxism” is typically used any time a government tries to control the actions of citizens by making a rule they want everyone to follow, particularly any move that brings more equity, which is so often conflated with sameness with a vision of everyone wearing the same clothes in the same housing chanting the same mantras. “If you want to install a Marxist mask mandate, next thing you know we’ll all be in jumpsuits having mass weddings.”

Instead of as a reaction to this:

My issue is why don’t we all see that this is the crux of the problem??? If you do the work, you should get the profit, right? Not that everyone must make the same pay, but that nobody working should be making so much less than the boss. And that can be corrected if they have, say, equal shares in the company. That would be Marxist.

A recent study found just giving unhoused people money actually resulted in “societal cost savings” as people were able to get on their feet and no longer used social services. Now if we could keep that up in a basic income set-up so as to assure all of their basic needs being met, then we workers could choose to avoid exploitative and harassing and harmful places of employment!!

The problem isn’t that people want the right to earn the value of their work, but that some people want the right to rip off others. If they get away with it, it just means the workers are idiots who deserve to be scammed! If people make enough to be able to choose where to work, and whether to work, then this little exploitation scheme goes down the toilet.

Marx’s position is similar to current calls to strike for fair pay and working conditions, tax the rich, provide basic income, as well as to reestablish and enforce rent controls. It’s not all-the-way Marxism without the recognition that the system, itself, is the problem, and no amount of tweaking it while working within it will work. However, not many people think it’s worth the effort to even suggest somehow workers taking over control of Amazon. We’ve gone in a different direction, banking on tweaking.

Technically, Trudeau’s CERB could be considered Marxist in spirit. He just straight-up gave people money to survive! However, he doesn’t do enough of the other stuff to stop the general exploitation of the working class to be able to wear the label proudly.

Even Capitalists Wanted Limits to Property Rights:

Most political philosophers were very clear that there must be LIMITS to how much people can own.

In 1689, Locke said you can take what you can work with or pay someone to work with (or have a bunch of kids to labour for you), but ONLY ,

“where there is enough and as good left in common for others.”

You can’t just take everything you can get your hands on or even all that land that you can pay people to work on. You have to make sure there’s enough left, of the same quality, for everyone else!

In 1754, Rousseau (in On the Origin of the Inequality of Mankind) warned,

“You are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and the earth to no one.”

He created three rules of occupancy: the land can’t be already occupied, people can’t occupy more than they need to survive, and like Locke, we can only claim possession by working on the land, including building on it.

In 1776, Adam flippin’ Smith (in Wealth of Nations) also warned,

“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.”

Profit is great, but we have to have legal limits to prevent people from taking too much since we’ll always act in our own self-interest. We need the right incentives in society to provoke us toward community-minded actions. Kinda like what this guy said,

In 1848, Marx was fine with people profiting off their labour, and paying others to work for them, provided they don’t exploit anyone in the process, for instance, by using their labour to profit from themselves, but leaving them with just enough to survive to work again the next day! (Sound familiar?) Exploitation means giving them so little that they can’t do anything but work, and they can’t save up and choose to leave. Paying people just enough to barely cover food and rent is pretty much the same as owning them as slaves. He explained (Communist Manifesto),

“We by no means intend to abolish this personal appropriation of the products of labour . . . all that we want to do away with, is the miserable character of this appropriation, under which the labourer lives merely to increase capital, and is allowed to live only in so far as the interest of the ruling class requires it. . . . to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such appropriation.”

In that very same year, John Stuart Mill (who was all about freedom and later wrote On Liberty), also wrote about the importance of having strong labour unions to limit exploitation over workers. He argued (in Principles of Political Economy),

“The trade societies which render strikes possible, are for these various reasons not a mischievous, but on the contrary, a valuable part of the existing machinery of society.”

The philosophical origins of both capitalism and communism both agree to limits. They all agreed with the ability to make profits, just not unfettered profits. It doesn’t benefit society if some people get very rich while others struggle to survive. Getting rich isn’t in itself evil, but it’s a problem if it’s due to exploitation, and most often any vast, accumulated wealth of an individual is the result of exploitation at least somewhere down the supply chain!

No Limits under NeoLibertarianism

But then came Ayn Rand in 1964 to usher in the whole neolibertarian morality which is arguably amoral. Rand’s basic premise, in The Virtue of Selfishness, is that, since everyone can fight to take as much as they want, then it’s perfectly fair and equal to allow people to accumulate as much as they can without limits. Chomsky remarked in an interview, “Can you imagine the non-pathological person who could even dream of that idea?” (Also see Linda McQuaig’s book for the origins of neoliberalism in Canada and Naomi Klein for their playbook: how to deregulate, privatize, and bust unions.)

When it comes to whether or not someone’s liberal or conservative, or left or right, that used to hinge on whether or not we should raise taxes in order to provide more social services for everyone and to have more public ownership or lower taxes to put more money in people’s pockets and have more individual ability to pay their own way and private ownership, although the highest marginal tax rate was over 90% under Eisenhower’s Republican government in the states. (Check out Robert Reich‘s video on that. Also Eisenhower’s the guy who said, “If a political party does not have its foundation in the determination to advance a cause that is right and that is moral, then it is not a political party; it is merely a conspiracy to seize power.”) Also, if you think taxes are a four-letter word, check out this primer on progressive taxation.

More and more, instead of a general left/right split, we have the labels of social democrat / socialist / communist / Marxist on one side and capitalist / neolibertarian on the other, despite many socialist programs also being capitalistic in nature in that they are controlled by private owners for profit – they’re just limited.

At some point having any limit on profits and any social welfare programs became seen as “Marxist” even though what we have in Canada is technically capitalists because workers do not own the means of production.

I believe that’s from the Neolibertarians successfully shifting the Overton window on what good capitalism looks like.

Now you might be a social democrat or a Marxist commie if you think there should be a limit to profits in order to ensure basic survival for all, regulated markets, minimum wages attached to the cost of living, labour unions, rent controls, government support for basic needs (healthcare, pharmacare, public education), public ownership of the means of production (Crown corporations like CNR and Ontario Hydro), and attempts to dismantle the class structure or otherwise implement things like anti-racist movements. It’s all to ensure that everyone can thrive in society.

Neoliberal capitalists want zero limits to profits, no regulations including no minimum wages or limits to outsourcing in order to pay smaller wages (or no wages) in other countries, no environmental regulations to allow for limitless resource extraction, no labour unions because they prevent maximizing profits, allow markets to dictate rent prices to keep jumping the value of homes and make homeowners wealthy at the expense of anyone renting or still paying a mortgage, no support for basic needs, and, hey, why not bring back debtor prisons where people can work in the new-fangled slavery. If people don’t have what it takes to work themselves up to the top, then they just need to work harder.

Clearly, far more people benefit from the former, and only a tiny little percentage benefit from neoliberal capitalism, BUT many people have been convinced they will benefit from a free market one day in the near future. So they vote for Trump and Ford and then can’t find an open emergency department in their region.

It’s a mess.

Here’s some Simone Weil, in 1938, in a Letter to George Bernanos, her literary friend:

“Once a certain class of people have been placed by the temporal and spiritual authorities outside the ranks of those whose life has value, then nothing comes more naturally to men than murder.”

Think of how we treat the unhoused now having their encampments bulldozed, and the disabled being told to just stay home if they don’t want to be further incapacitated by a virus that we’re doing nothing to mitigate. We are so close to murder. The “vulnerable” falling to the wayside are just first on the list.

Keep fighting the good fight!