I find that no one, and I do mean no one, really enjoys living under capitalism. Every liberal is aware that things have not shaken out in an optimal manner for the majority of people. Rather than offering alternative ways of organizing society and a plan for how to build said society, the vast, vast majority of liberal sophistry amounts to justifications for why things must be this way, why there are no alternatives. It is nothing but a long list of excuses for a system which works only for bastards and thugs, and sometimes fails to work at all.

Part and parcel to this hasty defense is that capitalism has always necessarily existed, that it must exist in all contexts. Liberals, taking this absurdity to its logical conclusion, tell us stories about neanderthals trading coconuts and fish around in what apparently constitutes primitive capitalism. It is an utterly laughable conception of human history and pre-history driven by an idealist worldview. They are reciting fairy tales.

This thinking has consequences. Since communism is the opposite of capitalism, and capitalism must exist, communism cannot exist. There is no ideological struggle, no competing interests, and no dialectics. Defying capitalism is like defying gravity. This is what is meant when it is said that “communism only works in theory.” People who pursue the abolition of class, a social construct, are in fact struggling vainly against not just human nature, but natural law.

The irony, of course, is that all of liberal thinking is dominated by a purely theoretical understanding of capitalism. Thankfully, we live under capitalism, and can directly observe its injustices. There is no need to speculate about the unforeseen problems that capitalism might cause. We’ve been doing this for over two hundred years.

This is a lot for liberals to deal with. Thankfully, the cognitive dissonance produced by the asynchrony between the promises of capitalism and what has actually happened under capitalism is alleviated when one remembers that since capitalism must exist, and that every social system is necessarily capitalism, there is no point of reference for what the world would look like without capitalism. Therefore, everything unpalatable can be dismissed as either a necessary outcome of a necessary system, or a purely distinct phenomenon entirely.

Consequently, when a communist says something along the lines of:

“The fact that European and American capitalism are made possible by the exploitation of the third world through slavery, genocide and other violence, as well as having produced the most massive inequality in human history, not to mention the climate crisis it also created, may indicate that it’s worth considering how we might abolish this system rooted in the social fictions of class and private property.”

A liberal’s first impulse is to immediately fall back on theoretical frameworks:

“Capitalism is unrelated to the bad things you said because capitalism is based on voluntary transaction and consent.”

But there is a problem here. It goes something like this:

1.) Capitalism must exist; everything is capitalism; anything opposed to or contradictory to capitalism is impossible. 2.) Slavery happened, so either slavery is capitalism, or the above statement is incorrect.

Oops.

This is the drawback casting such a wide net causes. The knife cuts both ways. It works really well for claiming credit for the PRCs poverty alleviation programs, but it does a terrible job of pretending that slavery is a completely extant phenomenon in relation to capitalism. If capitalism is so simple and basic as to encompass all trade, why is it suddenly not capitalism when the traded commodity is a human life?

Capitalism cannot be so necessarily and so conditional at the same time. Someone should really tell them this.