Voting for millionaires who give tax breaks to the rich and lie shamelessly to start oil wars, not questioning the validity of the electoral college after Bush became president without the majority of votes and accepting the two-party system as though it were fate are indicators of poor class-consciousness

“How can there be laughter, how can there be pleasure, when the whole world is burning?” the Dhammapada asks.

Peace isn’t possible in a society divided into classes. It’s important to realize that even theoretically speaking, it is impossible to have a classless society under capitalism. How much less in historical reality! The capitalist mode of production presupposes a wealthy minority controlling the means of production at the expense of the majority of wage-laborers.

The difference between slaves and wage-laborers is that slaves are bought all at once while wage-laborers are bought by the hour. Superficially, it appears that wage-laborers are paid for their labor while slaves are not.

However, neither is paid for their labor, but only for their labor-power. Slaves are paid in subsistence, proletarians in wages.

The difference between “labor” and “labor-power” is not just a technical formality, but the basis of capitalist exploitation. If workers were compensated the full value of their labor, there would be no surplus-value (that is, profit) for the capitalist to reap.

Profit is unpaid labor and capital is the command over unpaid labor. This is rather easy to prove, using the most illustrative example.

Consider a rich man who inherited his wealth and never worked a day in his life. He lives off the interest on his invested capital. In other words, the capitalist uses money he didn’t work for to buy his commodities.

Who produced the interest and who produced the commodities the interest buys? The answer is the working class. Yet the capitalist wins both, just for having nothing better to do than apply his capital. Viewed in this sense, the capitalist class’s profit is essentially the working class paying for permission to work!

Even if “good” wage-laborers become capitalists and “bad” capitalists become wage-laborers (something increasingly difficult, owing to the growing economic inequality characteristic of capitalist development), the class-conflicts between capital and labor remain intact, institutionalized and structural as they are.

The interests of the exploiting bourgeoisie, coveting power and profit, are diametrically opposed to the interests of the working proletarians who want equality, freedom and peace.

Ernest Mandel, a Marxist theorist, once wrote, “One of the great mysteries of class society, based upon exploitation and oppression of the mass of direct producers by relatively small minorities, is why that mass in ‘normal’ times by and large tolerates these conditions.”

The answer to why Americans traditionally have a disastrously low sense of class-consciousness is multifaceted. Desensitizing educational systems, a sophist private media, the hysteria of materialism, economic coercion, politics of fear and weak labor leadership with a poor tradition of revolutionary theory top the list.

The result is that all-too-many Americans unconsciously suffer an identity crisis and in their confusion comply or lend their support to the bourgeoisie over labor. They are thus essentially castrating themselves. Voting for millionaires who give tax breaks to the rich and lie shamelessly to start oil wars, not questioning the validity of the electoral college after Bush became president without the majority of votes and accepting the two-party system as though it were fate are indicators of poor class-consciousness.

Joining and supporting unions and co-ops, viewing health care as a right instead of a commodity and realizing the corporate media cries wolf for the capitalist parties are examples of strong class-consciousness.

Those with a high sense of class-consciousness know how to channel their frustrations into positive energy. For example, those who feel righteous indignation at the sight of mansions and massive estates in River Hills and on Lake Drive know to take their jogging routes through such areas, knowing that their fury will not allow them to slacken their pace, cramp as they might.

100,000 people around the country had the class-consciousness to rally on Oct. 27 to protest the illegal occupation of Iraq. It’s funny: You never see pro-war rallies, yet Uncle Sam wages war nonetheless.

With the vast majority of the nation against the war, it is evident the unresponsive bourgeoisie doesn’t fear the majority until it mobilizes. History that teaches passivity is tantamount to complicity when it comes to war and the class struggle, which Marx rightfully called a “veiled civil war.”

Some Jefferson Airplane lyrics come to mind, which have several meanings when the punctuation is taken out: “Someone stood at the window and cried one tear I thought that would stop the war but someone is killing me.”

Political elitists aren’t moved by tears; they’re only moved by the organized resistance of class-conscious comrades bent on creating a classless society.

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