Thread by @robpertray

The thing that terrifies the ruling class most about Marxism and communism aren't the theoretical frameworks or analyses contained within them, it's the simple fact that they actually name capitalism as a particular and in no way natural system that we live under.

Marx's most important work doesn't define or outline a path towards communism, it's simply an examination of what capitalism is. This is terrifying to capitalists. You know the story about the fish asking the other fish how the water is, and the fish responding: what water?

This idea has been written about by people like Mark Fisher, and it's broadly understood as "capitalist realism" — the idea that capitalism is all there is, that it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, that capitalism = the economy.

There's a reason why Margaret Thatcher, for example, went out of her way to convince the mass of people that "There is no alternative," one of her most famous lines. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was to convince the world that he doesn't exist. That there's no water.

But things would really start to shift if the mass of people began to understand that society and our economy have been very deliberately constructed. Every single aspect of our lives is the result of conscious choices by powerful people. Everything is political. EVERYTHING.

This is one of the biggest gifts that Marx gave us: he named the system, went into excruciating detail outlining it, and that's why whenever somebody first discovers his work it feels like you're finally waking up, like you're seeing the matrix for what it is.

And that's why there was an immensely successful and violent project waged by the ruling class in the United States with the complicity of all major liberal institutions to eradicate Marxism from public discourse. They literally arrested and blacklisted people.

The impacts have lasted well into the present, and as a result people in the United States are not just uniquely and unconsciously anti-communist, but more significantly, uniquely ignorant of what capitalism actually is.

Even most mainstream center-left media is unable to actually name capitalism when it critiques this or that problem within the system. Think of the John Oliver show or even NPR. And this is why the Bernie Sanders campaign was so dangerous: he forced them to say "capitalism."

This is why it's so important for us to name capitalism. Every time we critique a particular challenge or problem within this system we must remember to connect it. Unless our critiques are situated within an explicitly anti-capitalist framework, they'll remain disparate.

This is why I love the phrase "You don't hate Mondays, you hate capitalism." It's literally a trope in our society to hate Mondays. It's not political to say it. And yet it's clearly based on a mass hatred of wage labor. Of wage slavery. Of bosses. Of class rule. Of alienation.

When people begin to understand this: that everything in their lives is political, that capitalism isn't natural, that it represents just a blip in time. When they begin to understand what capitalism is, that it's not just a synonym for the economy, or markets, or technology...

that it's a particular system of class rule & ownership structures that rely on violence, coercion and exploitation. When that happens the ruling class's worst nightmare will finally come true: capitalism will no longer be the water we swim in, but the cell we are imprisoned in.