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Socialists Don’t Divide Us by Class. Capitalists Do.
When I talk about class, defenders of capitalism complain that socialists want to divide us. They don’t understand that socialists are universalists who want to unite everyone by ending the class system that capitalists maintain.
When capitalists say talking about class divides us, they’re refusing to admit there’s a difference between who we are and what we own. Terms like rich and poor or bourgeois and proletariat are only descriptions of our relationship to wealth. If you lose or gain a fortune, your life changes, but your social identities of race, gender, religion, and nationality stay the same.
When capitalists complain that sharing wealth is “punishing the rich”, they admit that the rich are punishing us. In a world where wealth was shared, the people who had been rich would be treated as well as everyone else—which would be far better than they have treated us. But to the rich, being treated as equals is punishment. They talk about meritocracy, but the idea of a true meritocracy where everyone competes with the same resources terrifies them.
The socialist desire to unite people is so obvious to us that it’s hard to believe capitalists are not lying when they say we’re the dividers. But hypocrisy is powerful. The rich have to rationalize being rich, so they give money to priests and psychiatrists…
