Karl Marx Would Be Apalled at American Capitalism by Edwin Young

I awakened coming out of that reverie state as I was thinking about how the .000001% views the world and it populace. I was thinking that it must be very much like Marx said it was almost 150 years ago. The wealthy elite in their gated mansions or remote islands must see the ordinary people in sociological levels with their value assessed in terms of what they can produce. They are commodities of varying measures of their productivity. The lowest levels must be seen as dispensable refuse and an expense burden.

That level can easily be controlled by police, religion, childish entertainment, the cheapest enticing toys, and the least expensive welfare system, all designed to prevent them from collective, anti-establishment rebellion at the lowest possible cost. To keep their wages at the lowest feasible level, foreign manual laborers can be allowed to illegally enter the US and therefore keep the indigenous 'migrant' workers’ wages as low as possible. A minimum of social services must be provided so as to keep these workers health up and keep them un-distracted from their jobs. If necessary, this lowest level may be recruited into military and basically used as front-line 'cannon fodder' that protect the technical, professional, and administrative services. The quantity of migrant workers must be kept regulated so that there is sufficient supply to create competition for the indigenous, unskilled work.

The next level consists of the skilled workers. Their value can vary with supply. Skilled job and lower level technical job training must keep the supply just a bit greater than demand so that they have to compete with others in this low wage category. Efforts must be made to prevent them organizing into unions for strikes as that would reduce the benefit-cost ratio.

To keep the engineering, scientific, and professional categories of the types and at the levels required by the manufacturing and research and development corporations, they must be incentivized to constantly upgrade their skills as corporate innovative projects advance. They do this through creating educational institutions and programs on a hierarchy of status in using scholarships to direct them into the avant-garde disciplines. If there are not sufficient indigenous recruits, foreign head-hunters and media advertisements must be used to import the most qualified foreigners into our universities and corporations.

The wealthy elite supply funds to foundations and non-profit organizations for positive image management to keep up a beneficent-patriarch status in the minds of the more educated public. They own and control the majority of the media and use them to promote their image and to incentivize the entire populace to work for the next higher quality goods and status symbols. Such incentives keep all levels of society ambitious and striving for higher level jobs and wages so as to keep our conspicuous consumption society and its corporate product provided as profitable as possible. As many among the well-educated tend to be cynical about the materialistic, manipulative, deceptive, shallow, rat-race society, the elites' media also provides cathartic movies, mass concerts, comedians, books published about bogus or real conspiracy theories, all with a bent toward the deprecatory, cynical, and ironic

These elites, of course, control the federal and state governments through lobbyists and the promise of plush, lucrative jobs when they leave office. They also do this through controlling access to judicial appointments so that only those favored by the elites may gain entry. School Board members with sufficient income and status are elected and, in turn, exert control over curriculum requirements and texts so as to insure that our materialistic, free-enterprise, capitalist system is well served and students do not learn how to think critically and figure how they are being shaped and used just like manufactured commodities.

This whole system of ours has been engineered, from the very beginning, by the elitists leaders who wrote our constitution, molded our press, formed our justice and military systems, financial systems, stock market, and, early on, was able to control foreign trade and treaties with indigenous tribes, underdeveloped countries, and eventually the rest of the Western nations, Russia, and the Oriental nations.

If you think you have free will and choice, think again. All of your beliefs and affiliations, style preferences and consumer choices, prejudices, moral conventions, forms of entertainment, attitudes toward institutions, what and how you learn, your view of the US and worldview, occupational choices, and your involvement in any of the various forms of protest or patriotism, all were being shaped for you long before you were born. Each of these aspects of your society and your personality have been changed and phased in as needed by the interests of the elites. To the extent to which you can grasp the extent of this shaping, by that .000001%, of your personality and behavior, that is the extent to which you may gain a small measure of mental independence and freedom of choice. Good luck!