Thread by @AdamCatalyst

Last night my partner tried to read me an article titled something like “How Capitalism is Literally Killing Us”. The Jacobin author romantically recounted their time spent in vibrant socialist Venezuela while contrasting that to the “soaring death rate” in capitalist America…

I found this confusing, to say the least.

How could the death rate, which has been stable since the dawn of time at 100% (give or take a prophet or two), now be “soaring” in the USA!?!

I assumed that the author was insinuating that the death rate in socialist countries (or at least Venezuela) was now less than 100%. How could I have been so ideologically myopic to have missed the news on such important news coming out of Venezuela…

I checked to see if any emergent research contradicted my outdated understanding of mortality, but I could find no serious scholarship on the matter since The Onion reported on research in the field conducted back in 1997 theonion.com/world-death-ra…

At this point I realized…

…I'd made some foolish assumptions. Could the death rate in the US could be soaring ABOVE 100%? Could people be dying more than once? The article *had* in fact described Americans as mindless zombie-like consumers, but could capitalism *literally* be turning people into zombies?

This seemed logically consistent, until I remembered that the article was titled ~”How Capitalism is killing People” and NOT “How Capitalism is Resurrecting People”. Furthermore, it is common knowledge that Zombies aren’t resurrected through Capitalism…

…they are borne from radiation leaks, lightning striking the earth, top-secret biological experiments gone wrong, academic grievance studies departments, or some combination thereof. It was then I realized the true meaning of the story…

…The Jacobin article was written *for* zombies *by* a zombie! When the headline referred to “us” it was referring to fellow Marxist-Zombies, who were being killed by Capitalism despite their ungodly ability to resurrect no matter how many times their ideas had been discredited…

It all made sense now, except for one key point… what does the socialist utopia of Venezuela have to do with any of it?

In the past year I’ve been guilty of using the example of Venezuela to support my beliefs in the fallibility of certain economic and political systems…

These people deserve so much more than this. 2017 was a terrible year for Venezuela. 2018 was incomprehensibly worse. Right now, the Venezuelan people are not living through a text-book example of anything. They are a real people, badly suffering, without an end in sight…

Let's turn our focus away from the politicizing post-mortem op-eds on Venezuela, and instead spend our energy on potential solutions to try and help Venezuelans get out of their current situation, first and foremost. Let's not let 2019 be even worse for our Venezuelan friends.

@threadreaderapp please unroll