Been reading Capital lately and I’m on Chapter 10, Section 3, where Marx describes the practices of capitalist industry where no regulation exists. I knew it was going to be bad, but somehow, for all my cynicism toward and awareness of capitalism, it was even worse than I expected. One of many examples Marx gives:

In the last week of June, 1863, all the London daily papers published a paragraph with the “sensational” heading, “Death from simple over-work.” It dealt with the death of the milliner, Mary Anne Walkley, 20 years of age, employed in a highly-respectable dressmaking establishment, exploited by a lady with the pleasant name of Elise. The old, often-told story, was once more recounted. This girl worked, on an average, 16½ hours, during the season often 30 hours, without a break, whilst her failing labour-power was revived by occasional supplies of sherry, port, or coffee. It was just now the height of the season. It was necessary to conjure up in the twinkling of an eye the gorgeous dresses for the noble ladies bidden to the ball in honour of the newly-imported Princess of Wales. Mary Anne Walkley had worked without intermission for 26½ hours, with 60 other girls, 30 in one room, that only afforded 1/3 of the cubic feet of air required for them. At night, they slept in pairs in one of the stifling holes into which the bedroom was divided by partitions of board. And this was one of the best millinery establishments in London. Mary Anne Walkley fell ill on the Friday, died on Sunday, without, to the astonishment of Madame Elise, having previously completed the work in hand. The doctor, Mr. Keys, called too late to the death-bed, duly bore witness before the coroner’s jury that “Mary Anne Walkley had died from long hours of work in an over-crowded work-room, and a too small and badly ventilated bedroom.”

And reading this, I got to thinking: so many liberals - excluding the ones at the top who knowingly lie to further their interests - defend capitalism as “the best system there is” without having any idea of just how horrific it is for those not at or near the top. These liberals work cushy office jobs on 8-hour days that workers fought and died for, enjoying the spoils of a globe-spanning empire, and they just do not even begin to comprehend the sheer scale of misery and killing that the system they champion perpetuates. Imperial genocide across five continents, mass killings of communists and socialists, country-destroying wars for profit, the slow and grinding annihilation of workers by overwork, hunger, pollution, treatable illness…

…and then they turn around and accuse us of not knowing what real suffering is or how bad things can be. They regurgitate gross exaggerations or complete fabrications of communism from half-remembered Cold War propaganda, but not even these fantastical horrors can compare to the reality of capitalism. It’s something that I think is unimaginable - literally unimaginable - to them.