religion and politics: my journey to the left

On the topic of religion and politics, I feel like I'm a bit of an odd duck in that my interest in philosophy and religion is what initially got me interested in leftist politics, and my contact with Catholicism in particular has reaffirmed my belief in, and energized my support of, anti-capitalist movements and politics. I don't know many who have had the same experience. And I feel even more like an odd duck since most of the leftists I've known have been dogmatic atheists, while most of the religious people I've known, especially Christians, have been politically very conservative. I often feel like an outsider on both ends of the spectrum.

For most of my young adult life, however, I was completely apolitical. Politics was like the Juggernaut, an entity that I couldn't move, but which had the power to move the whole of society. It was just so big and out of my control. Decisions were made by people who were groomed to make them, while I was a nobody. I didn't think I had a voice, because in the grand scheme of things, I didn't think I mattered. I wasn't rich. I wasn't college educated. I wasn't from an important family. I wasn't ruling class. I just did my best to get through the day and find something fun to do with my friends after work. My philosophy of life was very limited and pragmatic and bordering on the hedonistic, with a focus on survival and pleasure, not caring if the world around me burned.

My interest in philosophy and religion really began when I realized how unhappy I was, which was admittedly a selfish motivation to find relief from the suffering I was experiencing at the time. I wanted to be happier. I wanted to be a better person than I was. Sleepwalking through life and self-medicating just wasn't cutting it, and I decided to try something different. That journey led me to learning about things like meditation and philosophies of living a good life. Enter Buddhism and Stoicism. Buddhism plus Marcus Aurelius are what I mostly credit for my eventual political awakening, because I really did feel like I woke up to the existence of the greater world around me through them.

Buddhism helped open me up to politics primarily through my work with compassion, mindfulness, and the concept of interdependence. Developing compassion — one of the four divine abodes along with loving-kindness, sympathetic joy, and equanimity — helped me by breaking down the barrier between self and other so that I became more and more aware of, and receptive to, the suffering of others, which in turn gave rise to a growing desire to help ease that suffering. It seems like common sense, something we should all just know instinctively, and I thought I was already compassionate and whatnot. But my practice of Buddhism really showed me how disconnected from the world I truly was. Mindfulness helped me to better see my intentions and how they influence my actions and what I expect to come from them. (We lie a lot to ourselves about our motives.) That kind of constant self-reflection was also important for giving me the space to grow and open my mind to new things rather than always think and act on autopilot. And interconnectedness helped me to see the web of interconnectivity we're all a part of and how my actions affect those around me, which did a lot to counteract the hyper individualism I absorbed through American culture that I think prevents many of us from fully realizing our social nature as a species, and encourages self over others, competition over cooperation, profit over need, and the like.

This was all on an more individual and internal level, however, which is where Marcus Aurelius comes in. Aurelius was big on self-discipline and not focusing on the forces in life we have no control over. But he was also big on duty, and I was particularly inspired by his view of the duty of a citizen to be civically engaged, our duty to others within the society in which we live, a duty I had previously ignored. And I connected that to my individual Buddhist practice, which manifested as a conscious effort to do what I could to help address the suffering of others and make the world a better place through my actions. Interestingly enough, the Pali word Dhamma, often defined as the laws of nature or the way of right living, can also mean duty. I saw that I had a voice; I was simply failing to use it. That I had a duty to myself and to others I was shirking. And by using my voice collectively with others, I realized that I could be better heard and make more of a difference than if I were to simply stand alone. And all of this eventually led me to figure out where I stood politically, so that I could be more civically engaged, which quickly led me to discovering Eugene Debs and socialism and the religious/political mantra of, "From each according to their ability, to each according to need." That search also introduced me to the many Christian socialists and things like liberation theology, which I admittedly ignored at first due to the religious underpinnings of their socialist politics.

But years later, through my interest in monasticism and contemplation and my flirtation with Christian socialists, I began to explore Christianity in a less antagonistic way, which led me to discover Thomas Merton and his mixture of contemplative monasticism and social justice, the inclusiveness of Jesus' message in the gospels, and seeing in his words and actions a radical politics of compassion that ultimately challenges politics and systems of purity (which includes things like ideological purity, orthodoxy, etc.). Here, I'm particularly indebted to Marcus Borg's Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time and Paul Knitter's Without Jesus I could not be Christian, both of which had a big impact on me.

I mean, reading the gospel accounts, Jesus was a pretty radical figure. He was essentially a pre-industrial communist, preaching unconditional love, equality, and care for all, particularly the 'least among us,' the poor, the sick, and the oppressed (Mt 25:31-46), which is the spiritual heart of liberation theology and its "preferential option for the poor." He condemned greed and hypocrisy (Mt 23), standing up the religious ruling class and monied elites of his time, going so far as flipping tables and driving the latter from the temple with shouts and whips (John 2:13–16). He was a feminist-like ally, ministering to women in ways that were forbidden for men (John 4:4-42), and refusing to judge women by the harsh, patriarchal laws of his time (John 8:1-11). He associated with those whom his society feared, shunned, and looked down upon out of ignorance and prejudice, from those considered unclean to outcasts and sinners (Mark 1: 40-45, Mark 2:13-17), which many found scandalous. He lived counter to almost every expectation and social norm of his time and invited others to follow his lead. He stripped down all the religious bureaucracy and legalism of his day, teaching that God's law is fulfilled in keeping one simple precept, 'love your neighbour as yourself' (Gal 5:13-14). He chose all of his closest disciples from amongst the working class (fishermen), those looked down upon for their occupations (tax collector), women, and revolutionary zealots rather than the class of religious elites. And his mission, inherited from his heavenly father and voiced by his mother, Mary, included throwing down the rulers from their thrones, uplifting the lowly, and sending the rich away empty (Luke 1:46-55).

And in that story, I found something inspiring as well as unifying. All are one with the universal Christ, and Christ is one with all (Gal 3:28), which is radically egalitarian. Next to loving God, loving our neighbour as ourselves is the greatest commandment (Mt 22:34-40), which is radically compassionate. And the relational nature of God in the form of the trinity itself reflects the interdependent nature of humanity, the aspect of individuals as communal species-beings. Pope Francis himself once said something in an interview that I think perfectly summarizes why I'm drawn to both Christianity and communism, and why I see in Jesus a revolutionary of the people:

It has been said many times and my response has always been that, if anything, it is the communists who think like Christians. Christ spoke of a society where the poor, the weak and the marginalized have the right to decide. Not demagogues, not Barabbas, but the people, the poor, whether they have faith in a transcendent God or not. It is they who must help to achieve equality and freedom.

And that resonates with me because I believe that kind of equality and freedom requires both a political (external) and spiritual (internal) foundation, a radical material and mental shift in our understanding of, and approach to, the way society is structured because both matter and spirit are intertwined. In a similar vein, Pope Francis has also said that the gospel requires Christians to reject an economy that exploits, that:

"The worship of the ancient golden calf has returned in a new and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly human purpose. The worldwide crisis affecting finance and the economy lays bare their imbalances and, above all, their lack of real concern for human beings."

And if that's true, then I think it most certainly require them to reject capitalism, because the god of capitalism is the profit motive, Mammon in the abstracted-flesh. As critics of capitalism such as Marx point out, capitalism thrives on the exploitation of labour and resources, and its internal logic is characterized by contradictions that sow the seeds for things like inequality, poverty, unequal social relations between capital and labour, massive capital accumulation into smaller and smaller hands, and the drive for accumulation for accumulation's sake. It conditions people to be slaves to money, and fosters the metastasizing of a consumeristic culture and a thing-oriented society rather than a people-oriented society with an overall focus on production for profit rather than human need. And my reading of the gospel concurs with that critique from a spiritual point of view, seeing in Jesus a radical and transformative figure who valued people above all.

All of that said, the negative contributions of religion shouldn't be ignored or understated. Religious ideas and institutions have been the basis for an incredible amount of intolerance, oppression, and violence. One can rightly criticize much about religion in general, especially in its institutionalized forms, from how it's turned many away from rationality and promoted bigotry, individualism, and conservatism to how it oppresses certain marginalized groups within society; and I'd agree with all of those criticisms. But much of that comes from the church (or equivalents) as an institution of privilege and power, and one can see the same effects in other institutions, even Marxist ones. (There are as many sects of Marxism as there are Christianity, and many of them are just as concerned with orthodoxy and intolerant of what they consider heretical or heterodox as any dogmatic Christian denomination.) So this isn't something limited to religion alone. A religious institution is just one of many social institutions of power that can, and often do, run on a politics of purity and utilize various divisions (class, cultural, economic, ethnic, religious, etc.) to maintain power for those at the top, which in the west has historically been wealthy, white, male elites. And the logic of any institution is first and foremost to preserve itself, regardless of the form it takes.

Ultimately, though, I see religious language and stories as symbols pointing us towards something deeper, to a moral knowledge that I feel is rather intuitive, and to a unitive and even psychologically-healing experience that pierces the illusion of our dualistic way of thinking, the illusion of separation between subject and object, between the non-spiritual and the spiritual, between matter (body) and spirit (mind). I know that many people grasp these symbols and stories too tightly, or else hold them in the wrong way, so that they turn to bite them like the proverbial snake, creating fanatics and fundamentalists; and I share the concerns of others about those kinds of people, and about those forcing others to agree with them. But that doesn't mean there isn't something of value here, that they haven't helped our progress as much as they've served to hinder it. Historically speaking, the religious and philosophical seekers of the time were often its best scientists. And science itself is just as easily capable of destroying whole cities as religion if held inappropriately.

In essence, religion is something that's not only helped me to be a better version of myself, but it's a huge part of what got me interested in politics, and leftist politics at that because I think they best reflect the material means by which a world characterized by peace, love, and equality can be realized. And I've found that a lot of my fellow religious seekers are of a like mind, particularly those drawn towards mysticism. I'd even go so far as to say that, after studying and practicing in multiple spiritual traditions, I've come to the conclusion a truly spiritual person with a mature understanding of what lies at the heart of all religious traditions will necessarily be empathetic, inclusive, and ultimately, intersectional in their politics, but more importantly in their actions regardless of what their politics are. I think this can be seen from the lives of people like Giro Seno'o, Dorothy Day, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Thomas Merton, Oscar Romero, Malcolm X, Thich Nhat Hanh, Gustavo Gutierrez, MLK Jr., Rachel Held Evans, and countless others. As Franciscan friar and author Richard Rohr puts it:

"If we are going to have truly prophetic people who go beyond the categories of liberal and conservative, we have to teach them some way to integrate their needed activism with a truly contemplative mind and heart. I’m convinced that once you learn how to look out at life from the contemplative eyes of the True Self, your politics and economics are going to change on their own. I don’t need to teach you what your politics should or shouldn’t be. Once you see things contemplatively, you’ll begin to seek the bias from the bottom instead of the top, you’ll be free to embrace your shadow, and you can live at peace with those who are different. From a contemplative stance, you’ll know what action is yours to do—and what is not yours to do—almost naturally."

And in my case, I am naturally drawn towards realizing a loving global community, with no needy person among us, all living "from each according to their ability, to each according to need."

tea

Last night, I drank some of the tea my mom had gotten me the last Christmas she was alive, pretty much the last time I saw her and really talked to her before she died. She got me a lot of cool stuff that year, among which were a couple of boxes of Oregon chai. I was really into tea that year, especially chai. I'd dipped into the boxes here and there in the following months, steeping the bags in hot water and milk and adding some honey, my favourite winter beverage. But after she was gone, I couldn't bear to drink anymore of it. It reminded me too much of her, and I wasn't ready to let go of these physical representations of her love and thoughtfulness. The wound was too fresh, too painful to even acknowledge.

The bags themselves expired in 2016, yet I still kept them, tucked away in the back of the cupboard. And last night, for some reason, I finally pulled them out and made a cup to drink on the way to run some errands. Even now, over three years later, it's still hard for me to part with them. It's like I hold onto them because it's a way to hold onto her. But they were a gift meant to me enjoyed, and I was finally able to bring myself to part with at least one bag. I made it just the way I used to, and each sip I took reminded me of her life and love and thoughtfulness, and to enjoy the fleeting moments of love and kindness we so often overlook, the moments that give life meaning.

saving capitalism

I finally got around to watching Robert Reich's Saving Capitalism tonight, and it wasn't as bad as I thought it'd be. For starters, I have respect for Reich as a person. I think he's smart, genuine, and I truly believe that his heart is in the right place. He truly seems to want everyone to benefit from the system. And in this film, based upon his book by the same name, he sets out to make the case that, yes, capitalism is broken, but it can be fixed—that all we have to do is change the rules and clean up leadership in Washington DC through our collective activism. But as admirable as his motivations may be, I think both his perspective and his solution falls short of what's needed to curb capital accumulation and structural inequality.

For starters, the current statistics concerning wealth inequality in the US are pretty shocking to many. As it stands, the top 1% alone controls about 40% of the total wealth of the US, while the bottom 80% only has 7% of that wealth shared between them, statistics that are a lot worse than people think they are. But the statistics themselves aren't the full story, and I think it's worth digging deeper to find out what that story is. I'm sure some will disagree with my particular answers, but the two main questions that I think need to be asked are: 'Why is there so much disparity when it comes to wealth distribution?' and 'Where does all that wealth come from in the first place?'

In answer to the latter, I think we need to begin by taking a broader look at history and the evolution of capitalism, which to its credit has succeeded in greatly increasing both wealth and the efficiency of commodity production. For starters, I think it's worth noting that much of the wealth we're talking about has its roots in theft and violence, i.e., the primitive accumulation of capital in the form of colonialism and imperialism. The initial 'start up' capital for many early capitalists and industrializing nations came from the expropriation and consumption of the labour and resources of other places, particularly large parts of Africa, the Americas, and Asia by the West. And here I'm talking about everything from land grabs to slave labour, with literal black bodies acting as collateral in the first bond markets. (Capitalism also historically arose in conjunction with patriarchy, so more men tend to own and control land and shares of capital, fueling gender inequality as well as economic inequality, racial inequality, etc.)

Today, we do similar things via more civilized methods such as sweatshops and the IMF, which forces countries experiencing economic instability to adopt certain favourable policies (to the US and Europe, at least) in exchange for financial loans, etc.

Wealth is also created via the capitalist mode of commodity production, which is why capitalism was a revolutionary mode of production that eventually supplanted feudalism. The logic of capitalism spurs both the production of surplus value (which is where profits come from) and constant evolutions in technology, and this has both positive and negative consequences. One positive is that capitalism has revolutionized production methods, and the drive for the accumulation of profit constantly pushes the development of new and labour-saving technologies and increases in wealth creation. A negative is that the internal contradictions in the capitalist mode of production create crises that cause economic instability, and capitalist social relations are a major source of inequality, disproportionately accumulating the lion's share of that increased wealth into the hands of capitalists rather than average workers.

I'd concede that some of the wealth inequality we're currently experiencing (at least in the West) is due to policies and laws that have weakened unions, eroded the minimum wage to the lowest level (in real terms) since the 1950s, put Wall Street’s toxic innovations ahead of workers, etc. Nevertheless, I'd strongly argue that a great deal of this inequality is a direct result of the way capitalism functions and the social forms (including the state) that that functioning engenders, with capitalism conditioning many of those policies and laws. I think our politics have always been 'sick' in the sense that they've always been dominated by the interests of a privileged class of wealthy, ruling class elites — whether it's been the white, male landowners of the late 1700s or the 1% of today — and their ownership of the means of production and finance give them the means to appropriate the lion's share of wealth, whether created or simply expropriated from elsewhere (i.e., accumulation by dispossession), and keep its control out of the hands of the vast majority of working people.

This seed of inequality, however, is easily obscured, as are capitalist social relations and the origin of profit, which from the Marxist perspective arises out of the division of the workday into necessary labour and surplus labour. But since all labour appears as paid labour, it's easy for the capitalist apologist to argue that capital is the source of value (essentially separating capital as an independent and autonomous factor of production) despite the actual complexity of capitalist production and distribution, completely obscuring labour's contribution in the creation and realization of profit and the lopsidedness of the actual relations between capital and labour.

But as David Harvey illustrates in Limits to Capital, part of Marx's critique in Capital details precisely how the contradictions inherent within the capitalist mode of production produces a fundamental contradiction between the equality presupposed by exchange and the inequality via the exploitation of labour required to gain profit. So from the very onset, the kernel of inequality is already present within our political-economic system. And that inequality is the basis for much of the struggle between capital and labour and how surplus value is distributed.

On the one hand, workers are, in principle, "free to sell their labour under whatever conditions of contract (for whatever length of working day) they please" (30), which highlights the equality, freedom, and individuality characterizing exchange relations, recalling both Aristotle's argument that "exchange cannot take place without equality" and Marx's argument that "the circulation of commodities requires the exchange of equivalents" (19). However, workers must also compete against one another in the labour market, where capitalists who are forced to internalize the profit-seeking motive due to the coercive laws of competition purchase workers' labour-time with the sole purpose being the accumulation of profit (accumulation for accumulation's sake), and who more often than not dictate the duration and conditions of labour workers must accept or else risk privation while seeking something better, putting workers at a disadvantage on an individual level. (28-30) (One of the main reasons I favour some kind of universal basic income is that it has the potential to empower workers, decommodify labour-power by helping free workers from absolute dependence on wage labour for subsistence, and enlarge the nonmarket social economy.)

The expansion of value in this process occurs via the production of surplus value by capitalists who employ wage labour, a social relation in which the worker — who gives up their rights to control over the production process, the product of their labour, and the added value incorporated into and created by the production process — receives the value of their labour power and nothing else (42-3). And this is important because this is the point where the surplus value created in the labour process is appropriated by capitalists who are conditioned to employ wage labour with the primary objective being the accumulation of that additional value/profit, i.e., how they transform money (M) into commodities (C) and then back into money plus a surplus (M + ∆M), the added value being the result of the additional amount of labour-time capitalists can extract/contract out of the worker in excess of what it takes for them to produce the value of the wages they receive.

More broadly speaking, however, workers generally seek (and one could rightly even say are compelled) to purchase commodities with the money they earn through their role in the production of commodities (C-M-C); and through the maintenance and reproduction of the working class (primarily through their role as consumers of commodities), the reproduction of capital is created. Surplus value, then, is produced via the production process and realized via market exchange, where workers as producers and consumers give of themselves twice to capital—first as what's conventionally viewed as unpaid labour and second as wages for commodities (as well as things like rent, etc.) (56).

And that inequality in the economic sphere is further carried into the political sphere since the accumulation of profit on the part of capital in the form of money, which itself is a form of social power, gives capital (particularly as a class) a disproportionate political advantage, putting workers at a disadvantage on a broader political level. Capital does this through various means, from acting as the primary financial benefactor of politicians and their campaigns and having the time and power to directly communicate with and advise legislators to using their jobs and capital as leverage and providing employment for compliant policymakers in top administrative positions once they're done with public service. In addition, the more workers collectively resist the depredations of capital, the "more the capitalists are forced to constitute themselves as a class to ensure collectively that the conditions for progressive accumulation are preserved" (30), meaning putting aside competition between each other whenever they need to in order to reinforce their political and economic dominance. (And the state is primarily the political representation of capital, the social relation, that subsumes the capitalist class and working class alike, and which seeks to help resolve the reoccurring crises of overaccumulation that result from the intrinsic contradictions within the capitalist mode of production itself.)

Of course, one can always look at the numbers and argue that the massive wealth in the hands of the uber-rich is simply due to the amount of the proverbial pie being a lot bigger than in the past, and that the ends of increased wealth (assuming it's not just inflationary numbers we're talking about here) and evolutions in technology justify the means (which include a lot of ugly truths), especially from the relative comfort of the US, which has appropriated and expropriated a vast quantity of global wealth that's trickled down to its working class while exporting some of the harshest and most exploitative industries to poorer countries across the border and overseas. But I think it's misleading to look at the size of the pie without also looking at how the slices are distributed and where the ingredients come from. Last year, for example, capitalism created ten pieces of pie, and a small handful of capitalists took eight pieces, leaving the entire rest of the world, composed of billions of people, to split two.

So why isn't redistributionalism a viable long-term solution? The basis of our economic system is relatively simple. On the one hand, money is invested as capital (to purchase equipment, raw materials, labour, etc.) to produce commodities (goods and services) that are then sold for a profit. On the other, the majority of those commodities are purchased by the people employed to produce them, the working class. Jobs, then, are created in the flux of this symbiotic relationship between supply and demand. If investors don't have the money to invest as capital, then supply is reduced, the economy slows, and jobs can't be created. If consumers can't afford to purchase goods, then consumption is reduced, the economy slows, and jobs can't be created. Ideally, supply and demand should be in equilibrium.

Within this process of transforming money into commodities and then back into money plus a surplus (profit), however, there are a number of contradictions that give rise to imbalances and crises of overaccumulation. And when due to these, both the mass of superfluous (i.e., unproductive) capital and labour increase in conjunction with technological advances and efficiencies in production, they cause the rate of profit to fall and a shrinkage in the absolute mass of profit produced, creating an unsustainable situation that eventually needs to be resolved. Moreover, if the rate of profit in that process falls to a certain level, preventing money from being able to be transformed into money plus a surplus, then both supply and demand are reduced, and as a consequence, employment, which feeds back into the downturn, again creating an unsustainable situation that eventually needs to be resolved.

In essence, when accumulation is too high and the market is flooded with devalued capital that prevents its reinvestment from producing sufficient returns and/or goods and services that can't be sold, the economy stalls. If profit can't be realized, then capital can't function as capital and it sits unutilized. To get things started back up, both employers and the state look for ways to overcome this problem, whether through encouraging debt spending by consumers, the opening of new markets for export, the 'creative destruction' of superfluous capital (mostly through state consumption), or creating ways to increase the mass of profit via evolutions (i.e., innovations) in the means of production and finance that, in turn, set up the conditions for further overaccumulation and crises.

The post-WWII boom is a case in point. People (especially on the left) often like to point towards this snapshot in history as an ideal time, an economic golden age, noting the fact that taxes on the wealthy were high and so was employment, wages, and economic growth. What those same people may not realize, however, is that the massive destruction of superfluous capital (as well as the industrial centres of Europe and Asia) caused by the war paved the way for the US's growing prosperity following the Great Depression, which was arguably caused by a crisis of overaccumulation and the subsequent over-indebtedness and financial speculation utilized to bolster consumption and profits. In other words, it wasn't simply an issue of taxes and wages being just right, but Washington's consumption of unproductive capital and labour through the war economy and the increase in exports that resulted from the actual destruction of Europe and Asia's means of productions allowing for a relatively long period of stability and growth until Europe and Asia rebuilt their economies and global capital began to compete with one another on a more equal footing, leading to the decline of both profits and wages in the US (but of course the losses fell predominately on the working class in the form of decades of stagnant wages).

The inconvenient truth of capitalism is that crises arise naturally and are needed to help destroy unproductive capital, whether through businesses failing, the depreciation of existing value/wealth, wars, or whatever, clearing the way for the creation of future value/wealth. This, in turn, creates a decrease in the labour force (i.e., unemployment of productive labour) that helps drive down wages, allowing capital to temporarily increase nominal profits even if the tendency of the rate of profit falls in the long term. And since it appears on the surface that either a lack of supply or a lack of demand is the problem, the role that crises play in acting as what Marx calls a 'counteracting factor' is obscured.

The way I see it, this obscuration is one of the things that make capitalism appear like a perpetual growth/profit-making machine, as well as more stable than it truly is. This is somewhat similar to Chris Harman's take on the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, i.e., that crises are the prime counteracting factors mentioned by Marx, with recoveries being limited in effectiveness over time due to a combination of things like units of capital become larger and more interlinked (the bigger they are, the harder they fall) and increases in the level of unproductive labour in both the private and public sector (the former due to capital attempting to defend and expand markets in unproductive ways, waves of speculative investments, top-heavy corporate hierarchies, what David Graeber calls bullshit jobs, etc.; the latter due to government spending via the military, stimulus measures, etc.).

The true limit to crises as a counteracting factor, however, may be labour itself, specifically labour-time, which capital tries to increase in order to extract more profit from the labourer in order to compensate for a falling rate of profit and the fact that much of this labour is itself superfluous, i.e., labor-time that, in the words of blogger Jehu, "consists in the production of values that do not reenter the capitalist reproduction process" [8]. But a person can only work so much, and if the labour itself is 'unproductive,' increasing it only serves to lower the rate of profit in the long term. This, as a consequence, creates the conditions for future (and potentially more severe) crises. One possible solution on the road to a post-capitalist society, then, may actually be an overall reduction in hours of labour.

The real question is how this society of minimal hours of labour and maximum hours of leisure can be achieved, which, under the logic of capitalism, it can't, since this is the point where surplus value is created and realized by capital, i.e., a reduction in labour hours under capitalism will ultimately serve to reduce the mass of surplus value (and with it profit), which, according to the labour theory of value, is itself intimately tied into the amount of labour-time required for the production of commodities. Simply socializing aspects of capitalist production (such as finance) or instituting more aggressive forms of wealth redistribution while ignoring the process of production itself won't get rid of the "coercive pressure of competition and accumulation" inherent within capitalism, and hence can't fully transcend it or its limitations.

We're at the tail end of the worst economic slump since the Great Depression, which in my opinion was almost certainly caused by a crisis of overaccumulation and the subsequent over-indebtedness and financial speculation utilized to bolster consumption and profits, and experiencing historic levels of wealth inequality. But solutions Reich puts forward, like less corporate subsidies, would slow growth and stall the economy. And a more progressive tax structure may help to consume some of this unproductive capital, which in turn can be used to subsidize social safety nets for struggling workers and help to reduce inequality (assuming it could get passed), but it's not enough to fix the underlying problem. Employment may rise, and the economy may continue to grow post-recovery; but the cycle of capitalistic crises in some shape and form and the pain they cause will continue either way, and those will be further exacerbated by the negative environmental impact capitalism has wrought on the world in its logical need to continuously grow and the consumerism needed to feed that growth.

Tl; dr: I think the guy at the beginning of the film is a lot closer to the truth when he says that capitalism is "an economy that has been immoral from its inception. It was not designed to include everyone in a fair way." And if we truly want a healthier, more egalitarian, and more democratic society, we must find an alternative socioeconomic system to capitalism.

saving capitalism (essay style)

I finally got around to watching Robert Reich's Saving Capitalism tonight, and it wasn't as bad as I thought it'd be. For starters, I have respect for Reich as a person. I think he's smart, genuine, and I truly believe that his heart is in the right place. He truly seems to want everyone to benefit from the system. And in this film, based upon his book by the same name, he sets out to make the case that, yes, capitalism is broken, but it can be fixed—that all we have to do is change the rules and clean up leadership in Washington DC through our collective activism. But as admirable as his motivations may be, I think both his perspective and his solution falls short of what's needed to curb capital accumulation and structural inequality.

For starters, the current statistics concerning wealth inequality in the US are pretty shocking to many. As it stands, the top 1% alone controls about 40% of the total wealth of the US, while the bottom 80% only has 7% of that wealth shared between them, statistics that are a lot worse than people think they are [1]. But the statistics themselves aren't the full story, and I think it's worth digging deeper to find out what that story is. I'm sure some will disagree with my particular answers, but the two main questions that I think need to be asked are: 'Why is there so much disparity when it comes to wealth distribution?' and 'Where does all that wealth come from in the first place?'

In answer to the latter, I think we need to begin by taking a broader look at history and the evolution of capitalism, which to its credit has succeeded in greatly increasing both wealth and the efficiency of commodity production. For starters, I think it's worth noting that much of the wealth we're talking about has its roots in theft and violence, i.e., the primitive accumulation of capital in the form of colonialism and imperialism. The initial 'start up' capital for many early capitalists and industrializing nations came from the expropriation and consumption of the labour and resources of other places, particularly large parts of Africa, the Americas, and Asia by the West. And here I'm talking about everything from land grabs to slave labour, with literal black bodies acting as collateral in the first bond markets. (Capitalism also historically arose in conjunction with patriarchy, so more men tend to own and control land and shares of capital, fueling gender inequality as well as economic inequality, racial inequality, etc.)

Today, we do similar things via more civilized methods such as sweatshops and the IMF, which forces countries experiencing economic instability to adopt certain favourable policies (to the US and Europe, at least) in exchange for financial loans, etc.

Wealth is also created via the capitalist mode of commodity production, which is why capitalism was a revolutionary mode of production that eventually supplanted feudalism. The logic of capitalism spurs both the production of surplus value (which is where profits come from) and constant evolutions in technology, and this has both positive and negative consequences. One positive is that capitalism has revolutionized production methods, and the drive for the accumulation of profit constantly pushes the development of new and labour-saving technologies and increases in wealth creation. A negative is that the internal contradictions in the capitalist mode of production create crises that cause economic instability, and capitalist social relations are a major source of inequality, disproportionately accumulating the lion's share of that increased wealth into the hands of capitalists rather than average workers.

I'd concede that some of the wealth inequality we're currently experiencing (at least in the West) is due to policies and laws that have weakened unions, eroded the minimum wage to the lowest level (in real terms) since the 1950s, put Wall Street’s toxic innovations ahead of workers, etc. Nevertheless, I'd strongly argue that a great deal of this inequality is a direct result of the way capitalism functions and the social forms (including the state) that that functioning engenders, with capitalism conditioning many of those policies and laws. I think our politics have always been 'sick' in the sense that they've always been dominated by the interests of a privileged class of wealthy, ruling class elites — whether it's been the white, male landowners of the late 1700s or the 1% of today — and their ownership of the means of production and finance give them the means to appropriate the lion's share of wealth, whether created or simply expropriated from elsewhere (i.e., accumulation by dispossession), and keep its control out of the hands of the vast majority of working people.

This seed of inequality, however, is easily obscured, as are capitalist social relations and the origin of profit, which from the Marxist perspective arises out of the division of the workday into necessary labour and surplus labour. But since all labour appears as paid labour, it's easy for the capitalist apologist to argue that capital is the source of value (essentially separating capital as an independent and autonomous factor of production) despite the actual complexity of capitalist production and distribution, completely obscuring labour's contribution in the creation and realization of profit and the lopsidedness of the actual relations between capital and labour.

But as David Harvey illustrates in Limits to Capital [2], part of Marx's critique in Capital details precisely how the contradictions inherent within the capitalist mode of production produces a fundamental contradiction between the equality presupposed by exchange and the inequality via the exploitation of labour required to gain profit. So from the very onset, the kernel of inequality is already present within our political-economic system. And that inequality is the basis for much of the struggle between capital and labour and how surplus value is distributed.

On the one hand, workers are, in principle, "free to sell their labour under whatever conditions of contract (for whatever length of working day) they please" (30), which highlights the equality, freedom, and individuality characterizing exchange relations, recalling both Aristotle's argument that "exchange cannot take place without equality" and Marx's argument that "the circulation of commodities requires the exchange of equivalents" (19). However, workers must also compete against one another in the labour market, where capitalists who are forced to internalize the profit-seeking motive due to the coercive laws of competition purchase workers' labour-time with the sole purpose being the accumulation of profit (accumulation for accumulation's sake), and who more often than not dictate the duration and conditions of labour workers must accept or else risk privation while seeking something better, putting workers at a disadvantage on an individual level. (28-30) (One of the main reasons I favour some kind of universal basic income is that it has the potential to empower workers, decommodify labour-power by helping free workers from absolute dependence on wage labour for subsistence, and enlarge the nonmarket social economy.)

The expansion of value in this process occurs via the production of surplus value by capitalists who employ wage labour, a social relation in which the worker — who gives up their rights to control over the production process, the product of their labour, and the added value incorporated into and created by the production process — receives the value of their labour power and nothing else (42-3). And this is important because this is the point where the surplus value created in the labour process is appropriated by capitalists who are conditioned to employ wage labour with the primary objective being the accumulation of that additional value/profit, i.e., how they transform money (M) into commodities (C) and then back into money plus a surplus (M + ∆M), the added value being the result of the additional amount of labour-time capitalists can extract/contract out of the worker in excess of what it takes for them to produce the value of the wages they receive.

More broadly speaking, however, workers generally seek (and one could rightly even say are compelled) to purchase commodities with the money they earn through their role in the production of commodities (C-M-C); and through the maintenance and reproduction of the working class (primarily through their role as consumers of commodities), the reproduction of capital is created. Surplus value, then, is produced via the production process and realized via market exchange, where workers as producers and consumers give of themselves twice to capital—first as what's conventionally viewed as unpaid labour and second as wages for commodities (as well as things like rent, etc.) (56).

And that inequality in the economic sphere is further carried into the political sphere since the accumulation of profit on the part of capital in the form of money, which itself is a form of social power, gives capital (particularly as a class) a disproportionate political advantage, putting workers at a disadvantage on a broader political level. Capital does this through various means, from acting as the primary financial benefactor of politicians and their campaigns and having the time and power to directly communicate with and advise legislators to using their jobs and capital as leverage and providing employment for compliant policymakers in top administrative positions once they're done with public service. In addition, the more workers collectively resist the depredations of capital, the "more the capitalists are forced to constitute themselves as a class to ensure collectively that the conditions for progressive accumulation are preserved" (30), meaning putting aside competition between each other whenever they need to in order to reinforce their political and economic dominance. (And the state is primarily the political representation of capital, the social relation, that subsumes the capitalist class and working class alike, and which seeks to help resolve the reoccurring crises of overaccumulation that result from the intrinsic contradictions within the capitalist mode of production itself.)

Of course, one can always look at the numbers and argue that the massive wealth in the hands of the uber-rich is simply due to the amount of the proverbial pie being a lot bigger than in the past, and that the ends of increased wealth (assuming it's not just inflationary numbers we're talking about here) and evolutions in technology justify the means (which include a lot of ugly truths), especially from the relative comfort of the US, which has appropriated and expropriated a vast quantity of global wealth that's trickled down to its working class while exporting some of the harshest and most exploitative industries to poorer countries across the border and overseas. But I think it's misleading to look at the size of the pie without also looking at how the slices are distributed and where the ingredients come from. Last year, for example, capitalism created ten pieces of pie, and a small handful of capitalists took eight pieces, leaving the entire rest of the world, composed of billions of people, to split two [3].

So why isn't redistributionalism a viable long-term solution? The basis of our economic system is relatively simple. On the one hand, money is invested as capital (to purchase equipment, raw materials, labour, etc.) to produce commodities (goods and services) that are then sold for a profit. On the other, the majority of those commodities are purchased by the people employed to produce them, the working class. Jobs, then, are created in the flux of this symbiotic relationship between supply and demand. If investors don't have the money to invest as capital, then supply is reduced, the economy slows, and jobs can't be created. If consumers can't afford to purchase goods, then consumption is reduced, the economy slows, and jobs can't be created. Ideally, supply and demand should be in equilibrium.

Within this process of transforming money into commodities and then back into money plus a surplus (profit), however, there are a number of contradictions that give rise to imbalances and crises of overaccumulation. And when due to these, both the mass of superfluous (i.e., unproductive) capital and labour increase in conjunction with technological advances and efficiencies in production, they cause the rate of profit to fall and a shrinkage in the absolute mass of profit produced, creating an unsustainable situation that eventually needs to be resolved. Moreover, if the rate of profit in that process falls to a certain level, preventing money from being able to be transformed into money plus a surplus, then both supply and demand are reduced, and as a consequence, employment, which feeds back into the downturn, again creating an unsustainable situation that eventually needs to be resolved.

In essence, when accumulation is too high and the market is flooded with devalued capital that prevents its reinvestment from producing sufficient returns and/or goods and services that can't be sold, the economy stalls. If profit can't be realized, then capital can't function as capital and it sits unutilized. To get things started back up, both employers and the state look for ways to overcome this problem, whether through encouraging debt spending by consumers, the opening of new markets for export, the 'creative destruction' [4] of superfluous capital (mostly through state consumption), or creating ways to increase the mass of profit via evolutions (i.e., innovations) in the means of production and finance that, in turn, set up the conditions for further overaccumulation and crises [5].

The post-WWII boom is a case in point. People (especially on the left) often like to point towards this snapshot in history as an ideal time, an economic golden age, noting the fact that taxes on the wealthy were high and so was employment, wages, and economic growth. What those same people may not realize, however, is that the massive destruction of superfluous capital (as well as the industrial centres of Europe and Asia) caused by the war paved the way for the US's growing prosperity following the Great Depression, which was arguably caused by a crisis of overaccumulation and the subsequent over-indebtedness and financial speculation utilized to bolster consumption and profits. In other words, it wasn't simply an issue of taxes and wages being just right, but Washington's consumption of unproductive capital and labour through the war economy and the increase in exports that resulted from the actual destruction of Europe and Asia's means of productions allowing for a relatively long period of stability and growth until Europe and Asia rebuilt their economies and global capital began to compete with one another on a more equal footing, leading to the decline of both profits and wages in the US (but of course the losses fell predominately on the working class in the form of decades of stagnant wages).

The inconvenient truth of capitalism is that crises arise naturally and are needed to help destroy unproductive capital, whether through businesses failing, the depreciation of existing value/wealth, wars, or whatever, clearing the way for the creation of future value/wealth. This, in turn, creates a decrease in the labour force (i.e., unemployment of productive labour) that helps drive down wages, allowing capital to temporarily increase nominal profits even if the tendency of the rate of profit falls in the long term. And since it appears on the surface that either a lack of supply or a lack of demand is the problem, the role that crises play in acting as what Marx calls a 'counteracting factor' is obscured.

The way I see it, this obscuration is one of the things that make capitalism appear like a perpetual growth/profit-making machine, as well as more stable than it truly is. This is somewhat similar to Chris Harman's take on the tendency of the rate of profit to fall [6], i.e., that crises are the prime counteracting factors mentioned by Marx, with recoveries being limited in effectiveness over time due to a combination of things like units of capital become larger and more interlinked (the bigger they are, the harder they fall) and increases in the level of unproductive labour in both the private and public sector (the former due to capital attempting to defend and expand markets in unproductive ways, waves of speculative investments, top-heavy corporate hierarchies, what David Graeber calls 'bullshit jobs' [7], etc.; the latter due to government spending via the military, stimulus measures, etc.).

The true limit to crises as a counteracting factor, however, may be labour itself, specifically labour-time, which capital tries to increase in order to extract more profit from the labourer in order to compensate for a falling rate of profit and the fact that much of this labour is itself superfluous, i.e., labor-time that, in the words of blogger Jehu, "consists in the production of values that do not reenter the capitalist reproduction process" [8]. But a person can only work so much, and if the labour itself is 'unproductive,' increasing it only serves to lower the rate of profit in the long term. This, as a consequence, creates the conditions for future (and potentially more severe) crises. One possible solution on the road to a post-capitalist society, then, may actually be an overall reduction in hours of labour.

The real question is how this society of minimal hours of labour and maximum hours of leisure can be achieved, which, under the logic of capitalism, it can't, since this is the point where surplus value is created and realized by capital, i.e., a reduction in labour hours under capitalism will ultimately serve to reduce the mass of surplus value (and with it profit), which, according to the labour theory of value [9], is itself intimately tied into the amount of labour-time required for the production of commodities. Simply socializing aspects of capitalist production (such as finance) or instituting more aggressive forms of wealth redistribution while ignoring the process of production itself won't get rid of the "coercive pressure of competition and accumulation" inherent within capitalism, and hence can't fully transcend it or its limitations.

We're at the tail end of the worst economic slump since the Great Depression, which in my opinion was almost certainly caused by a crisis of overaccumulation and the subsequent over-indebtedness and financial speculation utilized to bolster consumption and profits, and experiencing historic levels of wealth inequality. But solutions Reich puts forward, like less corporate subsidies, would slow growth and stall the economy. And a more progressive tax structure may help to consume some of this unproductive capital, which in turn can be used to subsidize social safety nets for struggling workers and help to reduce inequality (assuming it could get passed), but it's not enough to fix the underlying problem. Employment may rise, and the economy may continue to grow post-recovery; but the cycle of capitalistic crises in some shape and form and the pain they cause will continue either way, and those will be further exacerbated by the negative environmental impact capitalism has wrought on the world in its logical need to continuously grow and the consumerism needed to feed that growth [10].

Tl; dr: I think the guy at the beginning of the film is a lot closer to the truth when he says that capitalism is "an economy that has been immoral from its inception. It was not designed to include everyone in a fair way." And if we truly want a healthier, more egalitarian, and more democratic society, we must find an alternative socioeconomic system to capitalism.

1. Egan, Matt. (2017, September 27). Record inequality: The top 1% controls 38.6% of America's wealth. CNN. http://money.cnn.com/2017/09/27/news/economy/inequality-record-top-1-percent-wealth/index.html; politizane. (2012, November 20). Wealth Inequality in America. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM

2. Harvey, David. (2006). The Limits to Capital. Brooklyn, NY: Verso.

3. Kottasova, Ivana. (2018, January 22). The 1% grabbed 82% of all wealth created in 2017. CNN. http://money.cnn.com/2018/01/21/news/economy/davos-oxfam-inequality-wealth/index.html

4. Creative Destruction. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_destruction

5. Clark, Simon. (1990-1991). The Marxist Theory of Overaccumulation and Crisis. Science & Society, 54(4), 442-467. Retrieved from: http://homepages.warwick.ac.uk/~syrbe/pubs/sands.pdf

6. Harmon, Chris. (2007, July 2). The rate of profit and the world today. International Socialism. Retrieved from: https://www.marxists.org/archive/harman/2007/xx/profitrate.htm

7.Graeber, David. (2013). On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs. Atlas of Places (originally Stirke Magzine). https://www.atlasofplaces.com/essays/on-the-phenomenon-of-bullshit-jobs/

8. Jehu. (2012, September 28). Reply to @sushi_goat: How does reducing hours of labor work?. Re: The People. http://pogoprinciple.wordpress.com/2012/09/28/

9. (2013, July 20). Reconsidering the Labour Theory of Value. Unlearning Economics. https://unlearningeconomics.wordpress.com/2013/07/20/reconsidering-the-labour-theory-of-value/https://www.marxist.com/marx-marxist-labour-theory-value.htm; Brooks, Michael. (2005, July 12). An introduction to Marx's Labour Theory of Value. In Defense of Marxism. https://www.marxist.com/marx-marxist-labour-theory-value.htm

10. Hickel, Jason. (2018, September 12). Why Growth Can't Be Green. Foreign Policy. https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/09/12/why-growth-cant-be-green/

to kill a mockingbird

I recently finished To Kill A Mockingbird the other day and can see why it's often assigned to kids in school. I found it to be a short, well-written, and descriptive coming-of-age tale that offers the reader a peak at the life within a small southern town during the Depression era. And being told from the point of view of a young girl, I think that it's able to grapple with a number of difficult issues in a way that's easily digestible, especially for younger readers.

In confronting the reality of racism and the unequal treatment of blacks in the US, for example, it's clearly evident from Scout and Jem's point of view (as well as Atticus' understanding of law) that the treatment of black people by the justice system and white society in general is wrong, and it hurts them deeply to see what befalls Tom Robinson and his family.

I think Lee also manages to address the longstanding existence of racial prejudices, white privilege, and classism in a simple yet powerful way. Here, I'm particularly thinking of Atticus' speech at the end of the trial, which acknowledges that, as a poor women in rural America, Mayella Ewell is disadvantaged in life; but being white, she's still better off/privileged compared to anyone who happens to be black.

It also explores things like social norms and gender roles, and how one has to sometimes ignore them in order to be their best selves despite the disapproval of 'polite society,' which is often anything but polite. Mr. Raymond is in an interracial marriage but has to pretend to be a drunk for that to be tolerated. Scout wears pants, questions authority, and does other things considered unladylike, even feminist, which engenders a fair amount of criticism from her aunt. Atticus (a personification of an ally) is treated harshly by many of the citizens of Maycomb County for defending a black man against his white accusers because, under the law at least, he believes that black lives should matter as much as anyone else's.

And all of that leads to the underlying themes of being yourself and doing the right thing, even if it's difficult or puts you in danger. In doing so, the book delivers a powerful moral lesson about equality and respect without being preachy. It's as if Lee tried, and somewhat succeeded, in penning a modern parable extolling the virtues of Christian (and arguably humanistic) ethics like the golden rule we'd ideally like to be the moral foundation of our society but so few actually seem to live by. That said, it's not quite universal, and not everyone will get the same messages out of it.

I find myself agreeing with Roxane Gay's critique of the book, for instance, as being primarily written for a white audience and not people of colour, who themselves are painfully aware of the inequality and racism that exists in our society; that the language is oftentimes harsh and offensive; and that the black characters are relatively shallow. Which I think goes to show that for all their positive impact, even literary classics can still have their flaws.

virtue is its own reward

The Stoics often said virtue is its own reward. Epictetus, for example, argued that there's no reward for a person greater than doing what's good and just. In response to one of his students, who asks what good can be expected from the development of virtue, Epictetus says, "What greater good do you look for than this? You were shameless and shall be self-respecting, you were undisciplined and shall be disciplined, untrustworthy and you shall be trusted, dissolute and you shall be self-controlled. If you look for greater things than these, go on doing as you do now: not even a god can save you." And the older I get, and the more I look around at the world around me, the more I'm inclined to agree that this, in and of itself, is indeed reward enough. A virtuous person is as rare as gold and twice as precious.

notes from a potential revolutionary

I've always loved Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Notes From Underground. For one, it speaks to me in a way that no other piece of literature has, and I see a lot of myself in the Underground Man. In addition, the more I read it, the more I get out of it. For example, while seemingly outwardly critical of Nikolai Chernyshevsky's socialism and 'western' views as expressed in What Is To Be Done?, I think one can also read Notes from Underground as a complimentary (but unintentional) form of revolutionary literature if one views:

* The Underground Man's spite as a symptom of a deep moral, spiritual, and existential malaise born out of a feeling of powerlessness, as well as a rebellious and revolutionary spirit that lacks any obvious theoretical or practical outlet. His vulgarness is one born out of the vulgarness of bourgeois culture and values. And all of his acts of spite and humiliation are simply a way for him to assert his free will in a world where few other choices really are open to him.

* The Underground Man's self-hate and self-harm (chronic depression?) as being conditioned in large part by how bourgeois society makes him feel about himself (i.e., unfulfilled, lacking in comparison to others, unproductive, alienated from others and his work, etc.), which in turn conditions his anger towards the society that makes him feel this way. He's oppressed within and without. He could just as easily be called the Alienated Man.

* The Underground Man's praise of lazy idleness and criticism of vocations in general as the lamentations of someone living within a mode of production that forces people into 'vocations' for the sake of getting ahead/being someone. Possibly a criticism of the protestant work ethic and bourgeois social values imported to 19th century Russia from Europe and its bourgeois revolutions, as well as the drudgery of work under capitalism itself. Compare this POV to the liberation of the working class from the confinement of capitalist social relations touched upon by Marx in The German Ideology:

Further, the division of labour implies the contradiction between the interest of the separate individual or the individual family and the communal interest of all individuals who have intercourse with one another. And indeed, this communal interest does not exist merely in the imagination, as the 'general interest,' but first of all in reality, as the mutual interdependence of the individuals among whom the labour is divided. And finally, the division of labour offers us the first example of how, as long as man remains in natural society, that is, as long as a cleavage exists between the particular and the common interest, as long, therefore, as activity is not voluntarily, but naturally, divided, man’s own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him. For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic. This fixation of social activity, this consolidation of what we ourselves produce into an objective power above us, growing out of our control, thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our calculations, is one of the chief factors in historical development up till now.

* The Underground Man's acute consciousness as an awareness of the ills of bourgeois society while at the same time partaking of and deriving enjoyment from them, i.e., a psychological contradiction reflecting material contradictions inherent under capitalism. His awareness of this contradiction is viewed from his POV as a disease stemming from the scientific rationalism of bourgeois society that infects/influences his particular consciousness.

* The metaphorical wall the Underground Man often speaks of as representing capitalism (which some, like Francis Fukuyama, see as the natural end of history) and all the material and psychological barriers present within bourgeois society to living a more healthy, fulfilling, and less alienated life. He prefers his 'corner' (or hole) to that outside world, unable to let himself believe that there's any alternative he can actively (and successfully) fight for. He doesn't have the strength to break through it or the 'natural laws' that give rise to his present reality, but can't (or won't) make peace with them, either. For the Underground Man, only the ignorant can accept this reality and act; the intelligent, on the other hand, are doomed to think themselves into inaction. Compare this, however, to Frederick Engels' perspective in Anti-Duhring:

Freedom does not consist in any dreamt-of independence from natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws, and in the possibility this gives of systematically making them work towards definite ends. This holds good in relation both to the laws of external nature and to those which govern the bodily and mental existence of men themselves — two classes of laws which we can separate from each other at most only in thought but not in reality. Freedom of the will therefore means nothing but the capacity to make decisions with knowledge of the subject. Therefore the freer a man’s judgment is in relation to a definite question, the greater is the necessity with which the content of this judgment will be determined; while the uncertainty, founded on ignorance, which seems to make an arbitrary choice among many different and conflicting possible decisions, shows precisely by this that it is not free, that it is controlled by the very object it should itself control. Freedom therefore consists in the control over ourselves and over external nature, a control founded on knowledge of natural necessity; it is therefore necessarily a product of historical development.

* The idea of 2 × 2 = 4 vs. 2 × 2 = 5 as referring to, in part, the influence of ruling class ideology and capitalist social relations on the working-class. The Underground Man connects the former to 'natural laws,' which here can be reflected in the slogan coined by Margaret Thatcher, "There is no alternative" (TINA), i.e., the idea that capitalism is akin to a natural law that's impossible to rebel against.

* The Underground Man's criticism of rational self-interest, the idea that people will do what's profitable for themselves rather than what's harmful, as a criticism of heterodox economics, which posits producers and consumers as rational agents. Sometimes, as the Underground Man argues, what profits a person is against their interest. And the market is often irrational. Moreover, capitalism is a system based on profit to the exclusion of all morality. Benefit and harm are extraneous concerns to the creation and realization of profit. In fact, it actively creates desires that are harmful and then feeds them to grow ever larger (e.g., tobacco industry, fossil fuel industry, weapons manufacturing, etc.). And the logic of capital accumulation itself tends to lead to crises of overaccumulation, i.e., capital's own self-interest (accumulation for accumulation's sake) actually destabilizes the economy and creates both violent economic crises and social and political inequality, one of the biggest contradictions inherent to capitalism. He's critical of the rational egoism of Chernyshevsky in his argument that people will do what's harmful to prove or express their free will; yet at the same time, he's a victim of a system that subjects him to the amoral (and often destructive and dehumanizing) whims of the market, which gives us the illusion of choice and freedom while in reality stripping us of real control over the production process, the product of our labour, the added value incorporated in production, and ultimately, the material shape of society.

* The Underground Man's admission of having become "unaccustomed to living life" as a response to the alienation and existential suffering created by the suppression of his/our species being, i.e., the emotional and psychological pain of living a world dominated by capitalist social relations and bourgeois individualism, complete with the numerous contradictions and forms of alienation that separate us from one another, as opposed to the fullness of life possible under a less exploitative socio-economic system.

* The Underground Man's conclusion that it's "better to do nothing" while at the same time admitting that, in actuality, he thirsts for something different/higher as reflecting an acute awareness of the alienation and exploitation of capitalism — the life of capitalists/bourgeoisie/normal people 'above ground' who don't challenge the system, intellectually or otherwise, and buy into the dominant ideology of TINA — vs. his intuition that there really is an alternative (represented especially by the potential for love personified in the character of Liza), one that has the potential to unite and liberate all classes, 'above' and 'below' ground, but one that he seems unable to fully articulate. He envies those above, yet doesn't want to be them "in the circumstances" he sees them. In essence, it's expressing the struggle of an emergent class consciousness within him, a struggle between the 'false consciousness' of bourgeois rationalism and the alienation that that engenders within the Underground Man and his dream of something better.

Basically, where Dostoyevsky tries to imply a turn towards Orthodox Christianity as the synthesis to these internal contradictions within the Underground Man's psyche, it can also represent the Underground Man's failure to connect his existential suffering to the bigger picture contained in anti-capitalist politics, becoming lost within the nihilism and depravity of the individualism of bourgeois culture, politics, and ideology rather than turning towards the 'salvific' communalism of socialism. Christianity, in this sense, can be seen as the spiritual embodiment of the French slogan "liberte, egalite, fraternite" (liberty, equality, fraternity) and the Underground Man's unrealized wish of something different, i.e., the love of others and useful action represented by, and symbolically contained within, the radical love and egalitarianism of Christ.