Thursday, August 30, 2012

The Other Path to Liberty

Any man of liberty should never stop seeking the heart of liberty itself. It is a journey which is deep in understanding; in the mind, body and spirit. This mostly hidden blog of mine has so far expressed a libertarian journey to liberty. A path which I have come to understand as having major contradictions of which I have spent many years trying to work out in my head. As a member of the so-called `Generation X` pure hardcore libertarianism  had always seemed to be a perfect fit for the times I live in. The fat days of our parents, for my parents those days were never so fat, seemed to be forever out of my reach. I simply had the hardest time seeing how I could enjoy a comfortable life in this post-modern age without having to be a brutal capitalist bastard willing to do just about anything to get ahead. I even tossed away my own father`s socialist/coal miner union roots in order to chase something which would never be my own. I did everything I could in an effort to escape the hardship of my parents.

It is important, at this point, to touch on my parents for a bit. My parents comes from the working class. My mother`s life is complex due to the divorce of her parents when she was very young. Her father(RIP) came from a very strong Scottish working class background. Her mother(RIP) was full blood Cherokee native American. Sadly, the marriage did not last and my mother was brought up by her uncle on her father`s side. My mother has always been very in touch with her emotions. She has always told me that I am a unique boy and that I should never let people knock me down. She made a fighter out of me.
My father(RIP) came from a hard working, hard drinking miner union family. My Father`s father(RIP) was a tall strong American-German with a heart of gold and a liver designed for massive abuse. His mother(RIP) came from a Irish background. She was a strong women who gave birth to many children. In their early days they ran a sandwich shop in Virginia. From what I was told, they mostly served working class men who worked too hard for very little pay. For some reason the shop was unable to make enough money, so they moved to West Virginia and into the mines Grand dad Smith did go. The rest is a history of striking minters, guns and a history of the Smith family which is better told another day.

Those are my roots. Something which took me a long time to come to terms with. After leaving the world of the privileged west and traveling to several unique nations and cultures, I have come to accept my background more fully than I ever have before. I spent all that time trying to escape things which were my foundation; the things which have shaped me if I like it or not.

Yet, even as I struggled from job to job and found myself taking on the debt of college tuition, I still had not realized what was going on around me. Until the past two years I was totally fixed on the idea that if I worked hard enough that comfortable life would be waiting for me. Even when I was a dish washer and living in a one room apartment I still thought that if I just kept on pushing forward good things awaited me. All that time I was unable to really see that certain material conditions were preventing me from ever fully escaping working class status. No matter how brutal I played the capitalist game, I was still just spinning my wheels.

All these years later I have come to realize what the problem is; The majority of the benefit from my labor is handed off to those who control the majority of the capital. That situation is not only true for me but for the majority of the people. As long as a minority controls the benefit of the majority`s labor, how can anyone really hope to achieve that picture perfect `comfortable life` we are all promised if we just work hard enough? It appears to be a pipe dream meant to keep everyone working themselves to death for a tiny fraction of the benefit from their labor. How can those who preach the Chicago School and Economics and glory of free market libertarianism justify this clear contraction of material conditions? I tried for years to justify it in my head and I simply can on longer defend the `morals` of no holds barred take no prisoners Capitalism. There is little humanity in it and it leads to the majority of people not fully benefiting from the output of the economy.

The common person deserves to get more benefit from all those profits from their own labor.

There are people who work really hard and never taste any of that comfortable life the capitalist class talks about all the time. I have seen people work like dogs before and get almost nothing for their efforts. There are countless people who are doing the majority of the work and getting little in the way of a return. There are people who work 10+ hours a day and get a tiny little paycheck which only barely keeps them alive. I find very little morals in such a situation.

For everything I just mentioned, and many other reasons, I cannot no longer call myself a libertarian. It is something many people ID me with and it has not been true about me for a while now. I feel we need a fully mixed system. A system in which the needs of common person will never come before profit. A system in which the people who are actually doing all the production have more control over the means of production. What we need,  now more than ever, a more socialist system.

The exact kind of socialist system I am not sure of yet. Which is why I have decided to use this blog in a two fold manner. One: To serve as a log of the my past thoughts on libertarian ideas(some of those may be revisited). Two: To explore the kind of socialist system which would best serve modern society.

This should be interesting to say the least.

2 comments:

  1. great writing, bro, and even better thinking. ~LT xoxooxox

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    1. I have been thinking this way for a while and ever made my thoughts public before. I plan to develop my socialist theory more in the future here on this blog.

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