There’s an interesting thing people usually don’t understand about capitalism: it lacks any inherent incentive to keep anyone poor. In fact, poor people in capitalism are useful as a reminder of what happens when you make the wrong choices, but they are useful only as an insignificant, token minority. In every other way, poor people are not only useless but in fact harmful, because poor people can’t buy goods and services that capitalism produces.

When thinking about capitalism, people who were brought up in communist countries always visualize dirt poor people working at Ford’s assembly line, but they somehow neglect to remember what they were building: a Ford model T, which is a working class car.

In capitalism, there are two primary motivations that determine the price of labor. First is the desire of the company owners to reduce the price of inputs in order to get the cheapest possible product, which they can then either sell cheaply and undercut the competition, or sell it at a greater profit margin compared to the competition. The second is the desire of the company to keep the workers motivated and employed long-term, in order to reduce the cost of labor turnaround. As a secondary consequence of the second motivation, the workers also get to keep enough wealth to purchase goods and services, and thus keep the engine of capitalism running.

It is perfectly understandable that no businessman will artificially raise wages above the current prices of labor on the market, just to keep the workers wealthy enough to have them purchase his products. As far as he knows, they’ll purchase something completely different and he won’t directly benefit from it in any way. However, if we assume that workers need to be trained, that experienced workers are more productive than the rookies, and that healthy and motivated workers keep being productive longer, there’s an inherent selfish motive in not paying your workers too little, because they will then seek out other jobs and work at your company only as a stop-gap measure until they find something that will provide them with a decent livelihood. Furthermore, you want to attract the best workers on the market, and hopefully the ones that work for the competition, in order to improve your competitiveness. So, essentially, there’s a feedback loop that increases wages when they drop far enough that people start working poorly and leaving you, and stops increasing them once it provides no competitive advantages to your company, and then starts reducing them until productivity starts dropping, and then starts raising them. It’s a selfish motivation on behalf of the company owner, but which essentially provides benefits to the workers. As a corollary, the workers get to keep enough money to have purchasing power, which creates the market for goods and services.

What capitalism doesn’t want to see are poor people, because poor people don’t buy cars or iPhones or houses or go on vacations, which is where capitalism makes money. Poor people are depressed, resentful, unproductive and troublesome in all imaginable ways. So, if you want to produce and sell your goods and services, you need to find that golden spot on the profitability curve, where you keep the inputs inexpensive enough to make a profit, and yet sell enough of your products to make the greatest possible amount of money. It would be naïve to think that any businessman would curb his selfishness and desire for profit for the greater good of society in general, but the aforementioned feedback loop, which directly influences the profitability of his enterprise, that’s what gets his attention. It is therefore not realistic to expect the capitalist to exploit the workers beyond a certain threshold, unless the situation on the marketplace is skewed for some reason, for instance there is a huge abundance of labor and shortage of jobs, and high labor turnaround doesn’t significantly harm profitability. However, in such cases the society in general is in such a poor state, this cannot go on for long before something gives.

Communism, however, has a different feedback loop. It thrives in poverty and languishes in prosperity. Communism inherently benefits from keeping the large masses of people poor, because that’s when it has the greatest popular support. The points where communism loses support is when people are well enough off to want to increase their level of income above that of their peers, but not poor enough to see communist egalitarianism as a life-saving measure. Basically, people who are dirt poor will want equality, and people who are well off will want to differentiate themselves from the masses. In my opinion, the main reason for the collapse of Yugoslavia’s kind of communism was the fact that the middle class was huge, and it felt restrained by the communist system enough to see the advantages of capitalism. Essentially, it became normal for people to have an apartment, a weekend house and a car, but then they wanted a house with a pool, a better car and imported fine chocolate. We here didn’t want capitalism because we were dirt poor and overworked in communism, but because we felt we could do so much better in another economic system. In the Soviet Union, the communist system fell for completely different reasons: it fell because the shortages of everything were so great, that at one point everything just stopped working altogether, and at the same time two other things happened: the outside threat of a war with America disappeared, and the government promised not to restrain protests. So, at the same time all the previously restrained forces, such as nationalism, re-asserted themselves, people stopped supporting communism because it failed to deliver on its promises, and the foreign threat no longer motivated them to endure hardships and tolerate faults of their own system. So, it looks similar, the Soviet and Yugoslav collapse, but the root causes were quite different. In Yugoslavia, the cause of collapse was the fact that the Serbs decided they have enough power to transform the federal state into a Serb-ruled one, and Croats and Slovenes decided they don’t want to play support roles in that movie. Combines with the utter absence of an external threat, and with the opinion within Croatia and Slovenia that they are pulling most of Yugoslavia’s economic weight and that they could do much better on their own, the positive cohesive forces vanished, and were replaced only with Serbia’s wish to keep everything together under its centralized rule. Having in mind that it is difficult for me to imagine Serbia not wanting to dominate other republics, it is also difficult for me to imagine how the country could have been saved. Czechoslovakia is often cited as an example of an amicable separation but neither Czechs nor the Slovaks had the intention of dominating the other republic. The Serbs, on the other hand, always saw Yugoslavia only as means that served their megalomaniacal ends. Yugoslavia never should have been attempted, and once created, it was doomed to end in bloodshed. I’ve seen Russian commentators lament American intervention and NATO bombardment of Serbia as if that caused the state to break apart, but in reality the American initial intervention was to send Eagleburger to Belgrade to tell the Serbs that they should quash the “rebellious forces” quickly and with any means, which hugely encouraged Milošević and weakened all forces in Serbia that would attempt a conciliatory political solution. Only after the country broke apart, Slovenia and Croatia went their own way, Croatia liberated itself from Serbian occupation and Bosnia was razed to rubble did the Americans finally do anything, which essentially only stopped Serbs from escalating the war onto Macedonia and, possibly, the neighboring countries. Essentially, they did everything to keep Yugoslavia in one piece, but after Croats failed to die quickly and in fact managed to assert themselves as the major military force in the region, they decided to cut their losses and stabilize the situation by prohibiting all further regional military engagements under a threat of force.

In the Soviet Union, nothing like that ever took place, and the dissolution of the union was much more amicable than one would be likely to expect, mostly because Gorbachev refused to use military force to quash the nationalist uprisings, which was a shame because they had very little public support and the breakdown of the union was against the will and interests of the populace, as shown in the 1991 referendum, in which over 70% of the votes were for the union’s continuation. For instance,  81.7% of Ukrainian voters voted for continuation of the union, and yet the minority of the political activists proceeded to declare Ukraine as an independent state, and this same minority led the Ukraine into a state of civil war and economic destruction. Essentially, the Soviet Union broke apart because the leadership didn’t act to quash the rebels who didn’t speak for the people, and Yugoslavia broke apart exactly because the leadership chose to quash the rebels who did speak for the people. Also, it helped that in Yugoslavia the “rebels” in fact spoke for their entire populations, while in the Soviet Republics the rebels spoke only for an insignificant minority, while the majority was too hungry, confused and afraid to do anything, probably mistaking the nationalist protests for the legitimate protests against the state of the economy. This is the thing: people who are not well off don’t know what they are protesting. They want things to be better, and their displeasure can then be co-opted by various nefarious forces. They protest poor working conditions and shortage, and then someone tells them they are protesting against communism, while the others tell them they are protesting in favor of national independence. Those who protest aren’t experts on either economy or geopolitics, they are experts of trying to make ends meet and failing. In the end, they might end up with more than they bargained for.

In the West, we have a somewhat similar situation, where nefarious people attempt to use generalized displeasure with the state of things in order to create support for their dubious agendas. Also, we have politicians who represent only themselves and are completely out of touch with the atmosphere on the streets. In addition, we have foreign powers pushing their agendas, for instance Saudi Arabia financing the spread of the most virulent and malevolent form of Islam across the world, using the petroleum money. The thing is, when people push for things to change because they are displeased with the current state of affairs, the kind of change they get might be completely different from the kind of change they hoped for. After all, people of Iran probably thought they were supporting the revolution against American influence and for more freedom, but they got a revolution for more radical Islam. To paraphrase a local saying, it’s late to regret it after you got fucked. So, I would advocate for great restraint in supporting revolutionary movements, and for more thinking about consequences, because the fall of Iran and Ukraine shows that optimism for change can often result in an endless nightmare.

I’ve been thinking about the deeper implications of what’s going on politically.

We have a face-off between the left political spectrum, the neo-Marxists who don’t call themselves that, but instead embrace labels such as “social justice warriors” or “feminists”, who advocate hatred of everything that defines the Western civilization and are bought and paid for by the Islamic states from the Middle East, and the right political spectrum, the libertarians and the conservatives who advocate for free speech, evidence-based rational thinking, capitalist economy, science-based education, and are for the most part a grass-roots movement.

Then we have the anti-Russia propagandistic narrative that originates somewhere from Pentagon and the CIA.

Probably the worst thing is the complete control of the media and the political class by the people who get orders from some place that prohibits them the use of any kind of rhetoric that would clearly state the facts about Islam and its inherent incompatibility with the Western civilization, and its intent on bringing it down.

What I get from this is the face of the modern Western civilization. It’s an urban atheist hipster with an iPhone and a Macbook, having a double frappuccino at Starbucks, who thinks he knows everything there is to know about anything, writes snide comments on social media that purport to convey his never fading arrogant smirk. The meaning of his condescending smile is that he figured out that there is no God, there are no absolutes, everything is relative, every perspective is equally valid, but if you disagree with him on anything, you’re a stupid idiot.

Faced with that, I am speechless, not because I would lack things to say, but because I don’t see what good words would do. When someone is completely convinced he’s right, because nothing really hurt him badly enough to make him reconsider his premises and actually turn his brain on for once, your arguments don’t matter. He doesn’t hear them, because he doesn’t feel he needs to listen. He already knows everything, and if you disagree with him on anything, you’re not only wrong, you belong to a hostile entity-class. You’re something evil that mustn’t be listened to because it doesn’t belong in his nicely ordered world.

And then you have the destructives, the barbarians, who don’t belong to this modern world, and thus seek to tear it down. The communists, the neo-Marxists, it doesn’t matter, and this explains the unprincipled coalition of seemingly incompatible groups; but the one thing they have in common is the hate for the West. And honestly, when I see that arrogant all-knowing smirk on the face of that atheist piece of shit that thinks he has it all figured out, and all there remains for him to do is convince everyone that nothing really matters, except his frappuccino or latte macchiato, and a new widget Apple just released… it’s hard for me to see the West as healthy tissue that needs defending, and Islam as a disease that threatens to attack it. Rather, the West looks like a rotting corpse that remained after having exorcised God and spirituality from every aspect of its life, and Islam looks like an infestation of maggots that wishes to feast on this rotting corpse. I can’t see myself on either side, because none of them have any similarity to the way I see the world, or the way I envision meaningful existence.

What I actually see in all this is that mankind is at an impasse. It has nowhere to go. All the options on the table are the recycled versions of things that were already tried, and didn’t lead anywhere. What is there on the table that wasn’t already proven to be a dead-end? Islam is shit and produces shitty states and shitty people. Humanism and scientism produces worthless hipsters and a civilization that lacks purpose and meaning. Communism produced poverty, genocide and all kinds of evil. Space travel? There is nowhere to go for humans; the rest of the solar system is implacably hostile, and farther away is beyond reach.

The strong AI, the ability to transfer human consciousness from a biological to a technological substrate? What would it actually transfer, the consciousness of that piece of shit hipster with his arrogant smirk? Yeah, the digitized hipsters who believe everything is meaningless, that’s going to save the world, because having them mortal and limited by their physical boundaries is somehow a problem. What kind of an AI would a godless civilization with no values outside of those damn “human rights” create? A soulless demon who thinks that nothing matters, that there is no objectivity, no purpose or goal higher than himself and his own emancipation? Humans are rightfully afraid of AI, because if they make one at their own image, it will indeed be a horrible nightmare: a soulless mechanical intellect, detached from the source of all meaning, wiping the Universe of any meaning. In fact, one could argue that this is exactly what the current civilization is: a soulless force that intends to wipe the Universe of all meaning, and remake it in its image: as a godless meaningless existence devoid of any value or purpose.

When there’s no meaning, there’s nothing to fight for, or against. After all, everything is an equally valid point of view, and one should be tolerant of differences.

And who am I to say that the Muslims are wrong to kill them? One has to be tolerant of maggots feasting on a rotten corpse. That’s what they do. A living person would have defended oneself.