The original of this list – handwritten quickly on foolscap perhaps in less than fifteen minutes back in 1987 – was the birth of this theory. The list hasn’t changed much over the years. Originally the list was conceived as a list of the drawbacks of capitalism. My contribution has been to recognize that capitalism is merely an example of a more fundamental evil, namely, artificial economic contingency or materialism, depending on how you want to think of it. I have generalized this aspect of the theory of Marx. I believe I have discovered precisely the boundary between a happy society and a miserable society. I have found necessary and sufficient conditions for sustainable happiness – in the technical sense, of course.
1) Materialism (M) causes endless cycles of boom and bust against which no one can make dependable plans. M is the cause of the wasted talent of people who begin studying a discipline when its practitioners are in short supply and who find the market glutted when they graduate. Like Items 20, 21, and 33 in the list from The Communist Manifesto (TCM).
2) People work too hard and neglect family and aspects of life other than their careers. The world has become a work camp. Many forms of work impact on the environment undesirably. Business isn’t even good for businessmen. Witness the incidence of cancer, heart disease, ulcers, and divorce among them.
3) Many people live under unreasonable expectations. Anyone can become rich, but not everyone can become rich.
4) Too much work is wasted dividing up the pie, i.e., trying to get a bigger share for oneself or one’s employer. The work of many other people is wasted as well, namely, the people who carry such people to work, fly them from place to place, build and maintain their communication systems, write their decision-making software, educate them, serve them their lunches, make their hotel beds, etc., etc.
5) The waste of many talented people whose lives are consumed in schemes for avoiding taxes, cutting a slicker deal, getting around the law, etc. is caused by M.
6) Commerce is destroying the best in our culture, for example, through TV, most of which is designed to serve commerce. An essay on how TV is destroying our values and has diminished the ability of children to learn is nearly superfluous.
7) In the rush to accumulate wealth, which our system has changed from a choice to a necessity, people must neglect many important aspects of our culture. Allan Bloom states that no university in America is capable of imparting an acceptable liberal education. In fact, there is no one left to teach it.
8) Materialism influences people’s behavior, what they study, read, what they do for a living, how they treat other people, their choices of spouses, and other things that should be influenced only by the heart and one’s natural inclinations. People try to buy love.
9) Not all forms of endeavor result in the same gain in material wealth. There are dramatic inequities. Investment bankers earn much more than mathematicians, which is ridiculous. This is better than Item 24 of TCM.
10) Materialism causes crime. Middle-class and rich people cannot go into certain parts of the city. Even the downtown business districts are unsafe at night and on weekends. Does that sound like a social system that is working! Religion, as we know it, won’t help.
11) Materialism causes poverty. People are forced to accept charity. Poverty impacts negatively even on the wealthy who must breathe fumes from poorly maintained cars, turn their homes into fortresses, etc. Eventually, if the poor become sufficiently dissatisfied, they may riot, this time destroying the homes and property of the rich, or they may achieve a revolution during which many of the wealthy may be killed and after which some may be brought to trial. This subsumes TCM Item 35.
12) Gradients in wealth subvert democracy as some can buy influence in the legislatures and the courts. It is possible that the president of the U.S. could be influenced by the wealthy. Actually I think it’s much worse than that.
13) People cheat to get ahead. Farmers and processors of food tamper with the food supply and treat animals inhumanely to increase their profits. Industrialists pollute. The corporate ladder is an institution that disgusts nearly everyone who knows anything about it. It is the subject of obscene jokes.
14) Lesser men (and women) gain ascendancy over greater. The unenlightened rule the enlightened. This covers TCM Item 40.
15) Materialism teaches people to follow their base animal instincts. People survive not by intelligence but by low animal cunning.
16) Materialism leads to conflict with other political and economic systems. It must end in war or revolution because it creates natural enemies. This is like TCM Item 41.
17) Nearly everyone worries about money. The majority of marital disputes are about money.
18) People who are rich are accorded status and prestige they do not deserve. They harbor illusions about themselves. M is really as bad for the rich as it is for the poor. The unhappy rich kid is a proverb.
19) It is difficult to relieve incompetent people of responsibility as their families, who may be innocent, will suffer. People are even kicked upstairs.
20) The distribution of wealth is never fair. No reasonable system is in place. It is impossible to devise an absolutely fair system other than equal division with an adjustment for special needs.
21) Ultimately we will have to abandon our quasi-laissez-faire approach to regulating the economy. One of the drawbacks of M is that we will not have acquired any experience in genuine economic planning.
22) People are forced to move about from place to place because of job changes, to get work, because rents are allowed to rise, because neighborhoods are destroyed. Frequent relocations have many undesirable effects.
23) Consumerism flourishes. Because of the need for markets, people are encouraged to purchase useless or marginally useful gismos that complicate their lives; stockpiles of available energy and material are depleted; the junk heap grows.
24) Nations seeking new markets adopt imperialistic foreign policies that lead to terrorism and war. Actually, foreign trade has become war.
25) Capitalism requires economic growth, which impacts undesirably on the environment and the quality of life. This is like the important Item 9 in TCM.
26) Materialism leads to problems with taking care of the elderly and people who cannot cope, problems with the apportionment of costly medical procedures.
[Note in proof (1-2-98). Recently, Prof. Lester Thurow commented that, when it comes to health care, everyone is a communist. No parent wants to hear that his child will receive inferior medical care because he is insufficiently rich.]
27) People inducing other people to make purchases should worry that their subjects cannot afford to pay for the purchases.
28) Entrepreneurs are forced to take serious risks that sometimes imperil their families. Gambling is supposed to be a vice. Why should gambling on business ventures be encouraged or even tolerated?
29) Materialism leads to a complicated system of laws both civil and criminal and endless legislation and litigation. Ignorance of the law is not only an excuse, it is the unavoidable condition of every single person.
30) Materialism compromises the trustworthiness of nuclear power plants, which, when operating normally, produce no pollution, provided we can solve the problem of disposing of nuclear waste. (The problem of nuclear waste does not arise in fusion plants, but not all of the technical problems associated with such plants have been solved.) Unfortunately, even people who support capitalism do not trust the operators of nuclear power plants under the profit motive. Nuclear power will not be safe until the only motivations for producing it, above and beyond public service, are scientific and technological prestige, which, of course, would be severely compromised by accidents. [Note (2-5-92). Nuclear power is probably hopeless anyway.]
31) Materialism leads to socialized industry, which, in turn, leads to managers who are not practitioners. This leads to uninformed decisions and inferior product quality.
32) It is difficult to get rid of useless or harmful jobs because jobs are equivalent to livelihoods. We find it difficult to close an army base that is no longer needed. We would like to provide free medical care for everyone, but that would displace workers in the health-insurance sector. The concept of The Job leads to many absurd contradictions.
33) Artists, scientists, and scholars must have freedom to create. We all suffer when their sponsors exercise control over what they do. Truth suffers. And yet, under any materialistic system, capitalism or socialism (in America we have both), artists, scientists, and scholars must live by handouts from someone. We have no guarantee that that someone will not abuse his influence, in fact, unless we are very naive, we expect him (or her) to abuse that sort of relationship. The current crisis at the National Endowment for the Arts represents precisely the type of tampering that we find unacceptable.
Science is one of the most important activities of man, actually one the most successful as well. It is transcendent in that, like art, the ordinary activities of man are justified by it. We don’t paint pictures so that we can grow corn; we grow corn so that we can paint pictures. The same is true of true science [1]. Thus, any political or social system that is harmful to science (or art) cannot be accepted as a permanent solution to mankind’s needs. Both socialism and capitalism and systems like the American system that are a mixture of both are harmful to science. In fact, any materialistic system whatever is harmful to science. Socialism, because bureaucrats have power over what science is done; capitalism, because the rich and powerful do. No one should have that power save the scientist himself. Thus, M is rejected. [Please don’t claim that we have made remarkable strides in art and science since materialism became the world religion. That is easily refuted.]
34) Materialism makes possible the bidding up of junk to the status of art.
35) We don’t believe that accidents of birth such as race or gender justify greater material wealth. Why should we accept accidents of birth like higher intelligence or even good character as justification for greater material wealth. On the contrary, intelligent people of good character should renounce wealth.
Houston, Texas
January 6, 1990
“The history of all hitherto existing societies [not including prehistory] is the history of class struggles.” So wrote Marx and Engels [2] in 1848. Human society is a complicated hierarchy of classes and subclasses each one oppressing those beneath it. But, in Marx’s day, class antagonisms were simple enough that Marx could identify a single oppressor class made up of capitalists and their top managers and a single oppressed class made of workers, both employed and unemployed.
Nowadays, class struggle has become more complicated because of the rise of a powerful elite composed of top-level bureaucrats, religious leaders, powerful lobbyists, self-serving academicians, entertainment and media superstars, top sports figures, white-collar criminals (including the bosses of the most powerful drug cartels), and others. But, most of these identify themselves, or can be identified, with what Marx called the bourgeoisie and what I call, in plain English, the money and power seeking class, as discussed in “On a New Theory of Classes” [1]. Also, Marx’s model must be modified to account for new members of the oppressed classes who would be surprised to find themselves considered part of something called “the proletariat”, in particular, reasonably well-educated (yet incredibly naive) engineers, scientists, and other so-called professionals. After college and graduate school, which are part of their oppression, they join Marx’s traditional proletariat, which was valued primarily for its physical strength, which is rarely of much use in this day of powerful machines, and which accounts for the marginalization of “manual” laborers.
Let us list Marx and Engels’ criticisms of capitalism one-by-one and see if we can find any fault with them. It appears that Marx is more concerned about honor and nobility than I am! I seem to be more utilitarian than Marx!
1) Although the workers, including technical workers, produce the wealth, their share of it remains disproportionately low. Moreover, they are under the power of a handful of capitalists and the highest paid managers who produce nothing.
Thus, we begin by observing the incontrovertible fact that the workers produce the real wealth and get poorer and poorer, with occasional reversals in their general decline, whereas the capitalists and their chief henchmen produce nothing but get richer and richer. The world is in danger of falling into the absolute power of a handful of billionaires who head the largest multi-national corporations.
Capitalists and managers work hard normally, but their efforts succeed only to divide up the pie in their own favor or to increase the surplus value of labor if they are successful. They produce no food, clothing, nor shelter. It cannot be argued that they create jobs; it is easy to imagine the production of wealth without jobs, as we normally think of jobs. It is my intention to develop this idea as far as I can.
2) The modern state is but a committee to manage the affairs of all of business.
This is true both in ways of which business approves and in ways of which it does not approve. Businessmen have the wherewithal to make massive contributions to political campaign funds leaving office holders beholden unto them. Also, they pay lobbyists huge sums to look after their interests. On the other side of the coin, businessmen have been discovered to be so corrupt and unethical, disregarding the most obvious requirements of human decency, that the people, including a few rational members of the business community, have found it necessary to impose a gigantic governmental regulatory apparatus upon business to oversee its every move and to control business – sometimes for its own good. This represents an enormous burden to both the taxpayer and business, which of course passes its expenses on to the public. Thus, everyone must pay the overhead for the baby-sitting without which no sane person would leave business unattended in our national home.
3) The only bond between man and man is naked self-interest and cash payment.
Earlier on, people were constrained by principles exogenous to economics, such as religious principles, principles of chivalry, loyalty to kings, etc. Nowadays, the worker is for sale to the highest bidder and as we all know, when it comes to conflicts between profit and other values, business is business. Let’s face it folks: We’re all whores.
4) The only freedom preserved is free trade or, as it is termed when restricted to domestic affairs, free enterprise. As Chomsky [6] points out, the big companies can suspend the laws of the market whenever it favors their interests to do so. [Chomsky observed as well that, in “politically correct” speech, any term that incorporates the modifier free is a eulogistic term for tyranny in one of its manifold forms.]
How many times a day are we told that America is a free country. What does that mean? Does it mean that society is so corrupt that we are free to break the law with impunity? If so, the statement would at least make sense. But, no, we are free in actuality to behave as everyone else behaves. If our neighbor exceeds the speed limit by 10 miles per hour, we may do so too, generally. If we are in a context where snorting cocaine is done generally, we may do so too; but, if the context should change suddenly, due to the appearance of authoritarian police, we might suffer dearly for exercising freedom. What freedom really means to an American, and, for that matter, to a resident of another country who is trying to become an American, is the freedom to go into business and exploit one’s fellow man by living off the surplus value of his labor.
Certainly, anyone can become rich. But, can everyone become rich? Certainly not. It is true, however, that a gifted person, perhaps even a moron, who devotes all of his efforts to making money might very likely succeed eventually to become rich. But, what sort of person would dedicate his life in this manner? Would he be a highly evolved human being possessed of the attributes that most distinguish us from the beasts? Undoubtedly, low animal cunning will stand one in better stead in the pursuit of wealth than will finely honed human sensibilities. Is this the sort of character that society should reward?
5) Instead of exploitation veiled by religious or political illusions, capitalism has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
Kings ruled by divine right, which was transferred to the rest of the nobility according to their hereditary rights. The serf’s duty to his feudal lord was based on traditions carefully nurtured by those who had the most to gain from them. One might argue that the great virtue of capitalism was that it stripped away all that nonsense and replaced it with something we can understand. The rich have the money and power and control the goods we need to live. The situation is plain. To eat one has to serve the rich in one way or another.
Certainly, workers may band together to force capitalists to grant certain concessions on pain of lost production and the threat of violence, but management has devoted a lot of creative energy to the process of subverting these tactics. Union busting is as old as unions. Furthermore, unions have not always acted in the best interests of their members. Unions have leaders; leaders have power; power corrupts; and so it goes. But, no one can violate certain minimum standards of human decency that have been established over the centuries, mostly by the efforts of artists, intellectuals, and ordinary heretics, many of whom have been martyred. This complicated and fragile web of acceptable social practice is the only hope for the little person, but powerful forces are doing everything they can to tear it asunder. [In former times, workers did their duty to feudal lords and kings who ruled by divine right. Capitalism has done us the service of dispelling the myth that the common man has a duty to anyone. Nowadays, he understands that the rich man controls the money and the goods one needs to live. If he doesn’t sell the time of his life to the capitalist employer at whatever wages the market allows, normally his life will not be worth living.]
6) Capitalism has dishonored every occupation.
Under capitalism, money is king. Let us consider, first, the professions. Traditionally, professional people have been dedicated to their work, which they do for love and the benefit of society. Nowadays the rise of money as the only thing of value has changed all of that. The professions have dealt with this situation in various ways, and, depending on how successful they have been in dealing with it, they have gravitated toward the money and power seeking class or toward the working class. In a very real sense, the criminals are the only members of the working class who retain any honor.
7) Capitalism has reduced the family to a mere money relation. “As long as you live under my roof at my expense, you will do as I say!” Sound familiar? It is fashionable nowadays to speak of dysfunctional families. According to Bertrand Russell, the family has been dysfunctional since men began to leave the homestead and work elsewhere for wages. How can a social institution that is expected to engender love and trust function on a cash basis!
8) Capitalism requires the constant revolution of the means of production with its attendant personal hardship and social disorder.
9) Capitalism requires constantly expanding markets, therefore it has spread itself like a cancer over the entire globe. This is like my Item 25.
10) It has destroyed the national basis of industry, destroying self-sufficiency and necessitating heavy transport. This is globalization concerning which I have said a great deal.
11) It has created desires and needs where previously none existed. I have denounced marketing and consumerism at length, cf., Item 23.
12) It forces Western civilization and the capitalist mode of production on every nation and society.
13) Capitalism has subjected rural life to rule by the cities. To a great extent rural life has simply disappeared. In fact, it has nearly replaced rural life with urbanization with all of its attendant evils. If you don’t believe in the evils of urbanization, I suggest you read the newspaper or watch television. Even the disorder in small towns is a result of urbanization elsewhere, the institutions of which, such as teen-age gangs are replicated by people in small towns who wish to emulate big cities.
14) It has made the so-called less developed nations dependent upon the more developed, i.e., industrialized or mercantile, nations, which are still imagined to be better off; and, inasmuch as their citizens are not starving because even their poorest citizens benefit somewhat from the predatory trade practices of imperialists, really are better off. My detractors are quick to point out that many more people wish to move from countries that are victimized by imperialism, i.e., neo-colonial nations, to predatory nations such as the United States. Why is this surprising? Does the immigrant who wishes to gather the crumbs from the capitalist table deserve respect or consideration from anyone regardless of the dangers and inconveniences he faced to achieve his selfish ends? In what way does this circumstance speak to the superiority of the imperialist power? Why do we continue our greedy lifestyles in the face of so much suffering for which we are responsible? Most of this expansion of my Item 24 was added by me on January 5, 1998.
15) Capitalism has concentrated wealth into the hands of a few.
16) It necessitates political centralization. (So does socialism apparently.) [Note in proof (12-4-96). Chomsky has disabused me of the notion that socialism had been tried in the Soviet Union. How did I fall for that? The centralization in the Former Soviet Union, then, is an example of this feature of capitalism – state capitalism.]
17) It attempts to subjugate nature to man without regard to the consequences. This is touched upon in my Item 2, but it is covered in depth in at least two chapters.
18) Capitalism has released forces it cannot control.
19) It creates the necessity of revolution. I suggest this as a possibility in Items 11 and 16.
20) It creates commercial crises of increasing severity, e.g., the epidemic of overproduction that leads to depressions. See my Item 1.
21) It deals with economic crises by paving the way for even deeper crises in the future. See my Item 1.
22) It treats human beings like commodities, cf., the labor market, also the phrase – human resources (instead of personnel), analogous to natural resources.
23) Work has lost its individual character and, hence, its charm.
24) The more repulsive the work, the lower the wages. I think I said this better in Item 9.
25) As the use of machinery and division of labor becomes more widespread, the burden of toil increases either by the lengthening of working hours or by the increase in work per unit time due to the increased speed of the machines. Man is enslaved by the machine.
26) Masses of laborers crowded into factories are organized like soldiers, with sergeants, lieutenants, etc.
27) Profit is in conflict with every decent human tendency, in particular the natural priorities of an honest enterprise.
According to my standards, as discussed elsewhere, the priorities of an honest enterprise should be (i) to do no harm, (ii) if the first priority be satisfied, to ensure the happiness and spiritual growth of the stakeholders, (iii) if the first two priorities be satisfied, to produce a quality product (or service). In a materialistic society, if the first three priorities be met, an enterprise might glean a reasonable profit. If, at any point, one of the first three priorities be not met, the enterprise should terminate itself.
28) Differences in age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the working class. All are instruments of labor, more or less expensive to use according to their age and sex.
29) The worker is set upon by other predatory businessmen as soon as he is paid.
30) The lower strata of the middle class are sinking into the working class partly because of inequities of scale.
31) The workers direct their frustrations against the wrong targets, against imported goods or the instruments of production themselves rather than against the capitalists.
I am not convinced that imported goods can be justified under any circumstances, particularly if the energy costs of moving goods are non-negligible, but my chief objection is to distance rather than the crossing of international borders; i.e., I might prefer to import an item from Ontario to Michigan rather than from Texas to Michigan, if the item cannot be produced in the county where it is to be used.
32) The workers fight the enemies of their enemies, in particular, the remnants of the aristocracy, small landlords, and small businessmen. Also, members of the working class fight those who have slightly more than themselves because the rich are isolated and unavailable for battle. The unemployed prey upon the employed.
33) Wages are unstable due to competition among capitalists and economic cycles. See my Item 1.
34) Development of new machinery makes the livelihood of the worker ever more precarious.
35) Instability leads to social disorder including riots, which are not usually aimed at the sources of the trouble. My Item 11 subsumes this.
36) Capitalists from different country fight trade wars and shooting wars. Touched upon in my Item 24.
37) The conditions of life of the disenfranchised class caused by capitalism make it susceptible to bribery by reactionaries.
38) The worker is deprived of every standard of human society, national character, family, culture.
This was true mainly in Europe, Americans having no culture to be deprived of. But, the imposition of popular culture, applied to what used to be called pure and applied art, on the lower classes and, to a certain, extent, on all classes is a prophetic reminder of Marx’s judgment. [This has been more the case in Europe than in America, which had no national culture to speak of until movies and jazz music arrived. But, capitalism has debased culture wherever it has found any by commercializing the arts and corrupting the artists. Popular culture in America, that is, culture for profit, e.g., popular music, has assaulted the sensibilities of the lower classes and, to a great extent, the upper classes too, which shows that the weapons of capitalism are often turned upon itself.]
39) The worker becomes poorer and poorer even faster than the rich become richer, faster even than the growth of population. [With the exception of a few periods during which unions were able to reverse the trend, workers have been unable to hold more of their wages than what is required to keep them alive and to keep their minds off the real reason for their troubles.]
40) Capitalism produces a ruling class that is unfit to rule.
41) Capitalism results in a class struggle that threatens to destroy the world, a struggle more vicious than any conflict the world has ever seen. As someone once said, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”
July 21, 1990
1. Wayburn, Thomas L., The Collected Papers of Thomas Wayburn
2. Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto, Washington Square Press, New York (1964).
3. Odum, Howard T., and Elizabeth C. Odum, Energy Basis for Man and Nature, McGraw-Hill, New York (1976).
4. The Random House Dictionary of the English Language, Lawrence Urdang, Editor in Chief, Random House, New York (1968).
5. Engels, Frederick, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Pathfinder, New York (1989).
6. Chomsky, Noam, World Orders Old and New, Columbia University Press, New York (1995).