Righteous Wrath

Socialists, and Leftists in general, are often portrayed as angry, or violent. And much of it’s true that they are angry, and should be angry; indeed much goes on in the world which should cause anyone with a sense of absolute humane morality to blaze with righteous fury, who can disagree with that? Yet it is not the bosses and middle management, indeed not even the elite who should be the target of this wrath, for they are just as much pawns in the system as everyone else. It is an unfortunate, but true, fact that humanity is large and an individual will small in the wake of such numbers as society represents; it takes a long time for an idea to filter through all of society or will towards a singular purpose. As a result, society changes itself very slowly and tends towards a reproduction of what has already been done in terms of patterns of thought, cultural traditions, and institutional structures. Ultimately socialists are mad, and rightly so, about the inefficiency of society–that’s what it means to be socialist. To be a socialist is to have studied the arc of human history, and human society, and to note the direct connection between power (the ability to “produce,” if you will, your own will into reality) and economics (i.e. the modalities, institutions, and relations through which society carries out production of all goods and services designed to execute a will, or enhance in power, the general capacity to carry out will). That is to say, the power in a society is directly tied to the means of production, and that the dominant interests which naturally will have the greatest power to reproduce themselves in society will be those with the largest share of control over the means of production. But while that is capitalist, it’s not democratic, in the sense that society ultimately replicates the interests of a small group of special interests that control the means of production, in our current scenario the capitalist class, but it hasn’t always been called that. The used to be called lords (well obviously not any capitalists now; the capitalists replaced the feudal system because, a democratic system is ultimately more efficient, and more to the logical point of society–to maximize benefits of participants, not minimize them). So they are sensibly mad, that society is not maximizing utility, that it is not the most efficient organization of productive relations, and that these productive relations are not exercised to their maximum utility. But that is a systemic problem, requiring a systemic solution, and to be angry at the “bosses” themselves, or even the CEO’s of companies (who while they may also be capitalists if sufficiently wealthy to own firms in which they have no constructive input other than simply to “own,“ in a manner of speaking ”renting one’s money,” a portion of the firm and extract rent on the basis of this title), but instead at the system that creates these people (many of whom would still be necessary in the system and whose wages would most likely increase, as some increase in income parity is expected when the inefficiencies of titular rent-seeking behavior (or payment for ownership) are ended in the means of production, but it is a side-effect, not a direct objective of socialism. And indeed, isn’t it inefficient to have, as part of the productive process, people who add to the cost of production without adding to the value–in economic terms, extracting a rent without adding value? Money that could be spend on productivity, on maximizing the utility of or means of producing our will, is instead wasted, and disproportionately inflates the pockets of someone who didn’t provide a service in return–a thief.