The spiritual crisis of modern capitalism

There is an anger. Palpable. A despair, a spiritual angst that, after years and years of building to a simmer is beginning to boil over. Maybe you’ve felt it yourself. Years spent working, your financial situation always precarious, one car repair, one hospital visit, one accident between you and economic ruin. Your checks immediately gone into a never ending series of student loan bills, hospital bills, ever higher rents, car repairs and payments, a few hundred dollars here and there stuck into a meager 401k maybe, the shadow of these burdens casting an ever present shadow over your mind. You are perpetually tired, maybe working a full time job and then spending your weekends or weeknights tending bar, waiting tables, something to add a little peace to your perpetually worried mind. There is an indignity you feel, a sense of being lesser maybe, of not having reached your full potential, your sense of self worth inextricably tied to the highly fluctuating balance of a checking account that could be emptied due to one unexpected circumstance. You went to school, maybe working at the same time, assured that once you had completed your degree the thousands of dollars of student loan debt you acquired would be steadily paid off once you were part of the work force, but here you are, years later, and the promises of the foundational bedrock of the American Ethos, the ever present American dream, remains just that. What happened?

For the past two years we have watched a culture war rage across the internet, across social media and the newscape, with politician’s of both our parties attempting to speak the language of class struggle to a populace that has reached such a critical level of despair that they are willing to listen to anyone, anything, that promises to ameliorate it. The wage that once would have supported a family is now barely enough to get by, the base of American manufacturing and agriculture that once held whole regions of the nation in prosperity has been outsourced or automized away, leaving a landscape of emptied neighborhoods, hulking shells of former factories and vast swathes of the country in a state of economic despondency, and a degree that 30 years ago would have guaranteed a future might not even guarantee you 30 k a year. We have been told over and over that this is the price of the new global economy, and a liberal elite that once championed the worker over all else at the beginning of the 20th century, that fought for unions, that fought tooth and nail and shed blood for workers rights and for a 5 day work week, overtime, and a fair wage, tells us this is the price of globalization, this is the natural evolution of capitalism that we should have seen coming, they sneer in contempt at those who clamor for the return of manufacturing jobs, for the idea that somehow someone without their education in this day and age is not entitled to the benefits of a good job and security seems churlish, naive even, this is the 21st century after all. The disappearance of a liberal class that is willing to stand up to the corporate interests that have essentially subjugated us into a state of wage slavery, the conglomeration of news and media in the US into the hands of a few entities, the stagnations of our wages while the price of health care and education skyrocket to levels double or triple those of 20, even ten years, ago, leaves the great majority of us adrift, afraid, struggling to stay afloat in an economy that abuses us with low and stagnant wages even though productivity has more than doubled in the last 30 years, right to work laws that mean we can be fired without reason, tuition for school that in some states has risen 100 percent in just a decade arbitrary drug testing, cut throat health care, and yet tell us that our failure to achieve the modest standards of the Capitalist promise is our own, and it is there that we find ourselves, not just in a financial crisis, but a spiritual one, a crisis of our identity, for when they rob us of our jobs and our wage they rob us of our dignity, they rob us of the one thing we have been told to believe, namely, that if you work hard and do all the right things you can get ahead, you can have a good life, and for so many of us raised in the capitalist ethos of the free market, that you are defined through your work, without it, what are we?

This is the reality of millions of us, living what can only be called a 21st century state of corporate feudalism, afraid to leave our jobs, perpetually in debt despite working full time, or in many cases 2 jobs, where we are injected with the elixir of the free market, of the invisible hand, of the perverse ideology of Objectivism, of the vicious heartless, anti immigrant, pro corporate, militaristic, racist, rhetoric of the American right, and the few institutions who ever sought to protect us or speak out against this heartless lie, the democratic party, our universities, our media, now spinelessly pay lip service to the ideas of equality and justice while doing nothing to combat the institutions that abuse us, make us afraid to visit the doctor, unable to get an education, and uses or taxes dollars to pay contractors to fight foreign wars that do nothing but harm, or to bail out banks that use our money irresponsibly.

This is the world that we have come up in, us Americans that are in our twenties and early thirties, the most educated Generation in our history, yet we are saddled with debt, and heirs to a crumbling economy that has reduced us to wage slaves, we have little power, and the means of acquiring social and financial capital, education, homes, equity, are slowly being pulled further and further from our grasp. Those of us that demand better, cheap education, higher wages, health insurance we can afford, are scoffed at by the pedantic, droning voices of cable news, painting us as mewling spoiled brats, a generation of whiners who don’t know what it is to work. All this despite the fact that we are better educated, more productive, and in many cases working a lot more for a lot less than previous generations. This is our crisis, the spiritual destructive forces of capitalism have forced us to be defined by our labor, it assigns us a value for our wage, it destroys our humanity and leaves many of us without an answer to the question “ what are we if we are not defined through our work?”. It is easy for those who have never had to live life through the lens of this of this great injustice, who have never had to endure the grinding struggle of the working poor, who have never felt the indignity of poverty, to smirk in contempt at those that question the capitalist, Libertarian ethos that dominates the American political and economic landscape. Even the American left, the supposed champions of the poor and the working class, has stood idly to the side while money and jobs has bled away for decades, while more and more Americans are being saddled with debt, while banks and financial institutions invested billions in sub prime mortgages, ignoring the ever widening income inequality while those of us who used to be middle class have been reduced working poor, and awaking to shock on Nov.7 2016 to find that the Americans they had so long ago abandoned had finally abandoned them. They failed to listen to our despair, and desperate people are vulnerable, and in their vulnerability they can be influenced easily by anyone proffering a solution.

So here we are, where we must decide on what will be the defining characteristic of our lives, of the things that we will derive meaning from. In the battle for the salvation of our souls, we should refuse to let ourselves be defined merely as a collection of hours worked, we must begin the search for a new meaning, for in this moment of great discontent there is perhaps the seeds for blossoming of a new society, of a new philosophy of being, one in which we are defined through our contributions to the human soul, where our lives are not defined through accumulation, where our lives do not pass by in a tired haze of hours spent at work, of going from job to job, and the anxious weight of financial stress and burden has been replaced with comfort in knowing that in our collective commitment to building a better world we strengthen at the same time our individual selves.

“The less you eat, drink, buy books, go to the theatre or to balls, or to the pub, and the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you will be able to save and the greater will become your treasure which neither moth nor rust will corrupt — your capital. The less you are, the less you express your life, the more you have, the greater is your alienated life and the greater is the saving of your alienated being.” Marx 1844

Originally published at medium.com on October 28, 2018.