>>2370784Depends on where you're starting from but the following might shock people:
In America more money is lost to wage theft than robberies. The brutal struggles that organized labor had to endure to get what we consider basic rights and hours. All kinds of trivia about global inequality. Imperial Britain extracted 45 trillion dollars from India. The rarely talked about late Victorian holocausts. Planned obsolescence and overproduction, mass goods thrown away in landfills. Planned economic recessions to destroy worker power. How war isn't so bad from the capitalist POV because it helps restore profitability by destroying vast amounts of capital.
If you went through Marx/Engels/Lenin picking out truth bombs we could be here all day even ignoring the technical stuff.
- Products of human labor seem to control us and have a will of their own; socialism is in part a project to reverse this so we're in control. Think of when people talk about "the economy" or "the market" like it's a God that must be sated or else it will punish us.
- It doesn't matter if you replaced all the "greedy rich people" with saints. They're just representations of capital, an amoral social relation. It must seek the greatest return on investment or perish.
- Capitalism trends towards centralization and monopoly.
- The demand for equality is incoherent beyond the abolition of classes.
- People, morality, laws, culture, and other things are products of the economic forces of their time.
- As socialists there's no point in demanding people to be more selfless, or selfish, both are necessary expressions of the human will.
- If you can't get rid of wage labor you won't get rid of capitalism.
- Liberals always yammer on about democracy, but you should always ask: for which class?
This passage from the fictional work Red Plenty is a poetic summary:
"Marx had drawn a nightmare picture of what happened to human life under capitalism, when everything was produced only in order to be exchanged; when true qualities and uses dropped away, and the human power of making and doing itself became only an object to be traded. Then the makers and the things made turned alike into commodities, and the motion of society turned into a kind of zombie dance, a grim cavorting whirl in which objects and people blurred together till the objects were half alive and the people were half dead. Stock-market prices acted back upon the world as if they were independent powers, requiring factories to be opened or closed, real human beings to work or rest, hurry or dawdle; and they, having given the transfusion that made the stock prices come alive, felt their flesh go cold and impersonal on them, mere mechanisms for chunking out the man-hours. Living money and dying humans, metal as tender as skin and skin as hard as metal, taking hands, and dancing round, and round, and round, with no way ever of stopping; the quickened and the deadened, whirling on."
…
"And what would be the alternative? The consciously arranged alternative? A dance of another nature, Emil presumed. A dance to the music of use, where every step fulfilled some real need, did some tangible good, and no matter how fast the dancers spun, they moved easily, because they moved to a human measure, intelligible to all, chosen by all."