Letter to David with Thanks for Picture

"I am thinking this morning of the men in the mills and the factories; of the men in the mines and on the railroads. I am thinking of the women who for a paltry wage are compelled to work out their barren lives; of the little children who in this system are robbed of their childhood and in their tender years are seized in the remorseless grasp of Mammon and forced into the industrial dungeons, there to feed the monster machines while they themselves are being starved and stunted, body and soul. I see them dwarfed and diseased and their little lives broken and blasted because in this high noon of Christian civilization money is still so much more important than the flesh and blood of childhood. In very truth gold is god today and rules with pitiless sway in the affairs of men." (Eugene Debs, Statement to the Court, 1918)

I had these thoughts looking at my friend David's picture of himself with his father in front of Karl Marx's grave. "Workers of the world unite!" is prominent on the gravestone, appearing above and to the right of Dave's and his father's heads.

For me it just seems intuitively obvious that one might object to a system that even its most passionate and competent proponents admit "causes"* arbitrary harm to innocent people. Maybe all systems "cause" such harm, but as debaters say, a critique doesn't HAVE to be unique. The impact scenarios are unique, and now is certainly the time, but the "moral compulsion" against capitalism seems intuitively defensible. Not so much that I think people who support capitalism are all evil, but that Marx's ideas ought to at least be an accepted part of public political conversation because anyone in their right mind should be able to understand why others desire socialism, even (I know I've belabored the point) if one does not agree with them. Even if socialism is guilty of moral naivete (and I will argue well into the evening and morning why it is not guilty), the instinct and basic idea of social altruism is inherently, logically, and intuitively defensible, and should be communicated as such. That natural understanding sometimes expresses itself in ways which seem sentimental and "unscientific."

Eugene Debs "recognized" his "kinship with all living things"** -- "recognition" indicating both an arrived-upon conclusion and the acknowledgement of something...already there. More and more I think that moral opposition to capitalism, as imperfect as moral schemes are, is an indispensable way, for now, to establish a common space of argument for a socialist political project. Not merely because most other spaces of radical argument consciously or unconsciously point away from "socialism," or because, to a large extent, corporations own the very ground of public argument itself, although both of those observations are important. The main reason I find the moral-ethical argument important is that it contains an intuitive affirmation of human solidarity that one can understand even if one does not agree. This may be because dialectical materialism and socialist politics are fundamentally rational, so it's only natural they would also be intuitive. Altruism may (as has been reported before on this blog) be hardwired or evolutionary. But whatever the reason, we should express it as such, and be no more or less ashamed of its sentimentality than Debs was in that beautifully sentimental language, or of the simple grandeur of "Workers of the world, unite!"


* The capitalist would probably be more comfortable with the phrase "results in arbitrary harm," a concession that would mean more to them than it would cost us.

**"Years ago I recognized my kinship with all living things, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on the earth. I said then and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free." (Eugene Debs, Statement to the Court, 1918)