At the present moment, we are witnessing a phenomenon that to many people appears bizarre and inexplicable: the phenomenon of wealthy capitalists supporting socialism/communism.
Capitalists, we have been taught, are supporters of
capitalism, indeed, the only supporters of capitalism, because they are
allegedly the only ones who gain from capitalism. Everyone else is assumed to
be a victim of capitalism’s alleged exploitation of labor.
The actual significance of this phenomenon is that it constitutes
a living refutation of the doctrine of “identity politics,” according to which
people’s ideas and actions are determined by their group membership in terms of
economic class, race, or gender.
The truth is that what people advocate is determined by their
ideas and values, not their membership in this or that group. This includes the
fact that the policies that actually serve an individual’s self-interest is a
matter of economic science, not group membership.
The beliefs associated with the alleged interests of this or
that group, such as labor and social legislation, confiscatory taxation of the
rich, and government ownership, being in the interest of the wage earners, turn
out to be nothing more than unchallenged, frozen ignorance.
They are a bundle of errors. In contrast, a wage earner who
understands economics knows that his material well-being is served by
capitalism and capitalists. For the capital of the capitalists is the source of
the supply of the products that he buys and of the demand for the labor that he
sells.
This, of course, means that the greater the number of capitalists
and their average wealth, the higher are wages and the lower are prices.
Just as wage earners who understand economics, support
capitalism, businessmen and capitalists who don’t understand economics but instead
have accepted the nonsensical theories of Marx, stand with the enemies of capitalism.
This has been true from the very beginning, starting with Marx’s
collaborator and personal benefactor Friedrich Engels, a wealthy cotton mill owner.
Indeed, it goes back even earlier, to Robert Owen, a leading “utopian socialist”
textile manufacturer early in the 19th Century.
An interesting question for psychologists and psychotherapists
is how anti-capitalist capitalists are able to live with themselves. They
believe that what they are doing is robbing their workers and making them
suffer, but they go on doing it.
Is it really sufficient for them to be able to say they are financing
the ultimate overthrow of the capitalist system, while on the basis of their
beliefs, they think they are causing massive suffering every day, while they themselves enjoy all kinds of luxuries?
I’m tempted to coin a couple of names for this condition: “double
inverted schizophrenia” and “capitalists’ socialism syndrome.” The schizophrenic
element is a socialist belief-system in opposition to one’s every-day capitalistic
behavior.
