Rigged

by Chase Tibbs

In “The Promises of God and Capitalism,” I said that many Christians today tend to think about God and capitalism in a similar way: both God and capitalism promise to reward us with material abundance and spiritual fulfillment in exchange for our obedience and never-ending trust.

Follow the rules and the blessings will surely come down. Refuse to conform to this God’s will and fail to re-shape our lives, behaviors, and values according to the teachings of capitalism, and we will not be on the receiving end of God’s/capitalism’s good graces. In fact, feelings of meaninglessness or emptiness, the presence of material need, and even the absence of material abundance reveal a flaw not of the goodness of God or capitalism, but within you.

And while it’s important that Christians question this God and its promises of material abundance and spiritual fulfillment, let’s pull back the curtain on capitalism in particular, and reflect upon the ways in which capitalism, rather than meeting needs, delivering riches, and offering meaningful experiences of life and work to all who work hard and are thrifty, is rigged—against the many and for the few.

Rigged

While everyone knows if you want something in today’s world you’re going to have to buy it, marxist analysis, I believe, is an excellent tool for helping us understand why.

Increasingly, everything that human beings need in order to survive has been privately and exclusively possessed. From food and water, to shelter and utilities; from healthcare and education to the materials and technology used at our places of work; the beloved creation and the means of survival have increasingly become someone’s property. And in order to access even the most basic things--like transportation or cooling in the summer--you have to exchange money for them.

However, contrary to what defenders of capitalism would have us believe, not all people make money in similar or equal ways: money-making in the game of capitalism is rigged. For example, the ways in which workers and bosses make their money is fundamentally unequal: workers are forced to give more than what they ever get back (they’re exploited), while employers receive more in return than what they put in (they exploit)!

Workers are people who primarily make a living by exchanging a bunch of hours of work and the fruits of all their labor with an employer for a paycheck. But the trick that all employers know about is this: during the work week, workers will produce more value than the sum of their paychecks. While the labor of baristas may produce a whopping $30,000 in a day, the sum of all their daily wages may only add up to $1,000.

Employers, on the other hand, make their money differently from employees.

Employers don’t work for others or give more than what they receive in return. Instead, they buy up the materials, technology, and land used at our workplaces in order to live off and govern the labor of others. And at the end of every month, every quarter, and every year, the capitalist ends up with more in their pocket than what they had initially put in!

Again, while workers produce more than what they receive, bosses get back more than what they put in. Yet being a major shareholder or a board of director of a corporation isn’t the only way in which one can live off and command other people’s labor.

Capitalism is a system that reaches beyond the workplace. The system’s privatization of property, logic of market competition, and drive toward endless profit-making compels capitalists to accumulate more and more wealth by extracting rent as landlords, interest as lenders, and profit as major investors—all of whom, like the employer, set out with one amount of money and end up with more. Over time, capitalism ends up concentrating not just a society’s wealth, but power over a society’s workplace tools and technology, lending capabilities, means of survival, and human labor into fewer and fewer hands.

There is no capitalism without these conflicts of interest. Everything about the system of capitalism is rigged in favor of the accumulating few at the expense of the accumulated many. The power and profit of the capitalist class always comes at the expense of everyone else, especially the subordinated and exploited class of workers.

Yet capitalism is not rigged against all members of the working class equally. It feeds upon the weapons of race, gender, and citizenship for its ultimate goal of profit. On one hand, capitalism wields white supremacy, patriarchy, and imperialism for the super-exploitation of persons racialized and gendered as inferior or born to a formerly/currently colonized region of the world. But on the other hand, whiteness, masculinity, and religious and national identities are used to keep the working class divided, because divided workers are conquered workers, and conquered workers are cheaper workers. While the vast majority of working people end up losing in the fight against their exploiters, some are guaranteed to lose more than others.

Add to this that the institutions and representatives of the state are brought to heel by the most powerful capitalists and corporations, and we can see that even politics and the law are rigged against the working masses!

So much for the system’s promises of material abundance and spiritual fulfillment.

Uncovering The Lies

Capitalism has continually failed to deliver on its promises to the world. And the system fails not because it hasn’t been allowed to work freely, but because it’s primary concern is profit, not the beloved community or creation.

Yet if we hope to one day see the liberation of labor from the rule of capital, the separation of human need from one’s capacity to work, and an altogether more life-affirming world, we will have to uncover capitalism’s promises for what they are and continue to name the ways in which the system is rigged.

Questions for Reflection

• What parts of your life have been made for-profit and commodified? How has that shaped your experience of that part of your life?

• What are some different ways in which people make money? How might capitalism’s different ways of money-making be rigged?

• What life experiences, quality of life, and things do you believe should be accessible to all regardless of one’s ability to pay for it?

• How is capitalism rigged against people of color, women, and people living in countries with less capital than nations like the US?

• How do governments uphold the rigged system of capitalism?