the socialist should be the atheist/materialist who after finally recognizing the absence of any moral teleology or purpose for man’s existence, sets before himself the task of creating a morality from the bottom up. so he’s basically attempting to do a missing god’s work; finding and establishing a foundation for any possible complete morality to follow. this is to say, if there is going to be a morality, it has to start here, or it cannot become anything substantial. as long as the class conflict exists between bourgeois and proletariat, they are morally incompatible because they are enemies at the most fundamental level. so i don’t think most really fully understand the implications of what capitalism creates in terms of deeper, more philosophical problems.
now i’m okay with all this, but i’m afraid that most others who would also claim to be okay with this, would in fact be horrified by some of the things that might rationally follow the logic of this problem taken to its greatest extreme. they don’t quite understand what it means to say ‘we are fundamental enemies who can have no moral obligations to each other’, and it is not enough to get around this by simply saying ‘ah but that’s what we have laws for’. fuck those laws. let me repeat: THERE IS NO MORAL CONTRACT between bourgeois and proletariat, regardless of what artificial rules society comes up with (to preserve the present order of things). this conflict precedes any of this law making and invalidates all of it.
so usually a capitalist is someone who hopes these artificial and ethically exempt civil laws will stall the proletariat’s violent revolt long enough for him to make a little money for free before he dies. and the proletariat is the one who is looking blankly at all the other proletarians and asking himself ‘why are we still allowing this to happen?’, to which the other proletarians respond ‘because we can’t seem to get organized, get our shit together yet’.
but you can’t understand the logic of the socialist unless you are able to switch perspectives and observe the capitalist from the point of view of the worker. only then will the thesis begin to make complete sense… something so obviously true that it needn’t even be called philosophical. you don’t need an IQ of even 100 to be able to ask the question; what is this guy doing here, and what is he needed for? forget the fact that he can be here… we’re asking why does he have to be here… and we find, after some closer examination, that he couldn’t be less important in the chain of production. but not only that. in addition to being nothing, he’s actually something like a black hole that sucks in and consumes all energy around it without giving any return. in this sense the capitalist is a negative balance. not just useless in the way of just ‘being there’ and not affecting anything. this guy actually absorbs the productive life force of everyone around him and depreciates the value of all of it. like a metaphysical parasite that creates nothing and consumes everything.