America’s not perfect - 68,000 Americans die every-year because they can’t afford healthcare, 530,000 file for bankruptcy annually due to medical debt, 42.5 million Americans owe an average of $39,075 for student loans, and the U.S. holds 2.42 million humans in prison, more than any other nation including Russia and China, accounting for 24.7% of the world’s prisoners.
But at least we’re free, unlike Communist China with their mass surveillance! Just ignore that Flock has 80,000 cameras across the country and Palantir is embedded in every branch of the government including the IRS, DOD, and DHS. At least we’re free to protest our government! Just ignore the news that 15 Prairieland ICE protestors were sentenced to over 500 years in prison because the federal government convicted them under terrorism laws for being part of “Antifa” and for possessing left-wing zines.
Thank god we don’t have to worry about the military killing citizens in the streets. Except that at 4am on July 6th National Guard soldiers deployed to Memphis chased down a man holding a pistol and then shot him dead after he “turned toward” them.
What Shall We Do
There’s many obvious reasons that we’re not free but in his philosophical treatise What Shall We Do Tolstoy illustrates a more insidious oppressor that shackles modern humans. A prison whose walls are invisible and whose prisoners believe they’re free.
Below I’ll summarize his historical account of the Fiji islands, the whole passage is well worth reading and begins at chapter 8.
The Fiji Islands had an indigenous population of 150,000 with 1,500 white colonialists in the mid-19th century. The economy of Fiji was based on barter and cattle ranching was the largest industry.
In 1859 the U.S. demanded $45,000 indemnification(compensation) from king Kakaboa after oppressed Fijian natives violently rose-up against American plantation owners and destroyed American plantation property. American warships seized some of the best islands as collateral and threatened to massacre Fijians and destroy their towns with cannon bombardment if the sum wasn’t paid.
The sum of $45,000 was incomprehensible to Fijians who barely used money at all. They appealed to Britain for aid and in the meantime the American demand doubled to $90,000.
Desperate, Kakabo turned to merchants in Melbourne, Australia, who formed the “Polynesian Company” to pay off the American debt. In exchange, this company received hundreds of thousands of acres of the best land, permanent tax exemption, and exclusive banking rights with unlimited note issuance. This arrangement gutted Kakabo’s revenue, since his best land and customs income now belonged to the company. To compensate, his European advisors suggested a poll tax—payable only in money, which Fijians did not possess.
In order to pay this tax native Fijians had two options: to sell their harvests to foreign merchants or to sell their labor to plantation owners. The foreign merchants and plantation owners naturally exploited this need for currency. Fijians were given pennies on the dollar for the value of their harvests, and the Plantation pay was so abysmal that a man would have to work for half a year just to earn his own poll tax, and then continue to work to earn the poll tax for his family.
The results were predictable: only a fraction of the tax was ever collected, and brutal enforcement followed. Courts sentenced non-payers to imprisonment, which in practice meant being handed over as forced labor to whichever plantation owner paid the fine. An effective system of debt slavery.
Corruption quickly took hold and sentences grew from six months to eighteen months and beyond with bribes from plantation owners seeking to secure cheap labor. Within a few years, whole districts were depopulated of able-bodied men, agriculture collapsed, and much of the population fell into servitude.
In 1874 the Fijians again petitioned Britain, and this time Britain intervened by annexing the islands. Sir Hercules Robinson took over as administrator of the islands and abolished the hated poll tax. Instead the British collected and sold native products directly in order to secure their colonial profits. Tolstoy describes England as a “more clear-sighted enslaver” who does “not kill at one blow the goose with the golden eggs, but feeds her in order that she may continue to lay them.”
They do not behave like the former company, whose conduct we may liken to the first coming of savage invaders into an uncivilized land, when they want only to take as much as possible and then decamp; but England behaves like a more clear-sighted enslaver; she does not kill at one blow the goose with the golden eggs, but feeds her in order that she may continue to lay them. England at first relaxes the reins for her own interest that she may hold them tight forever afterwards, and so has brought the Fiji-Islanders into that state of permanent monetary thraldom in which all civilized European people now exist, and from which their chance of escape is not apparent.
How Free Are You?
The U.S. government doesn’t care if you can’t pay your rent, buy groceries for your children, or afford your medication. They will send men with guns to find you and throw you in prison if you don’t pay your taxes. So how free are you?
Before the serfs were free, I could compel Iván to do any work; and if he refused to do it, I could send him to the police-sergeant, and the latter would give him the rod till he submitted. But if I compelled Iván to overwork himself, and did not give him either land or food, the matter would go up to the authorities, and I should have to answer for it.
But now that men are free, I can compel Iván and Peter and Sidor to do every kind of work; and if they refuse I give them no money to pay taxes, and then they will be flogged till they submit: besides this, I may also make a German, a Frenchman, a Chinaman, and an Indian, work for me by that means, so that, if they do not submit, I shall not give them money to hire land, or to buy bread, because they have neither land nor bread. And if I make them overwork themselves, or kill them with excess of labour, nobody will say a word to me about it; and, moreover, if I have read books on political economy I shall be quite sure that all men are free and that money does not create slavery!
When I opened my CrossFit gym in 2015 I quickly realized how enslaved I was. The first half of the month all of the revenue I earned went to paying off my landlord. The next week’s revenue went towards city, state, and federal taxes and utilities. My last 7 to 10 days of revenue went to me. Of that money over half went straight back to rent to my other landlord, for my apartment.
That’s why I quit and went off to live in the woods and hike the Appalachian Trail. Without two different landlords to pay it was actually easier to come out ahead, even though I earned much less money.
It is by design that the average worker is always on the brink of insolvency. The capitalist will only and ever pay the minimum to maintain the existence of the worker. Any less and they’d be “killing the golden goose.”
Thus, the cost of production of simple labour-power amounts to the cost of the existence and propagation of the worker. The price of this cost of existence and propagation constitutes wages. The wages thus determined are called the minimum of wages. This minimum wage, like the determination of the price of commodities in general by cost of production, does not hold good for the single individual, but only for the race. Individual workers, indeed, millions of workers, do not receive enough to be able to exist and to propagate themselves; but the wages of the whole working class adjust themselves, within the limits of their fluctuations, to this minimum.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/wage-labour-capital.pdf
Again I ask you, how free are you? If your very survival depends on the money that you earn from your job, then your boss and the owners of your company have an unprecedented degree of control over your life. It’s crazy to me that we think we’re free when we spend the majority of our waking hours under the tyranny of one petty boss or another who can dictate when you need to wake up, what is and isn’t appropriate for you to wear, what time you’re allowed to eat, or even how many minutes you’re allowed to spend in the bathroom.
The entire system is designed so that you have no-choice but to sell your labor for capitalists to exploit. If the choice is to be exploited or to die in the streets then that’s no real choice at all. Hell now even existing without a home is criminalized, 350 cities have passed bills criminalizing homelessness since 2024, where the Supreme Court ruled in the Grants Pass v. Johnson case that it’s legal to punish a person for sleeping in public even if they have nowhere else to go.
I spent three years sleeping in the woods and two years sleeping in a van to find a small-degree of escape from wage-slavery. The capitalist class wants to close even that loop-hole in their system. They want to own you completely, from birth to death.
And since this post was inspired by the 4th of July I’ll end it with this piece from the Declaration of Independence: That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.
You can support my work with a one-time gift using the button below or this link. My work is entirely supported by readers, I receive no money from advertisers, politicians, or dark-money funds.
Capitalism has to go and the current regime, whom are squatters that didn’t win the election in 2024, have to be removed one way or another. We were never free. Thiel has even moved to Argentina because he sees a possibility of shit going sideways for them. The orange shit stain is trying the McCarthy playbook but Americans aren’t buying it. They like the idea of Medicare For All and taxing wealth instead of income because they use all the loopholes to not pay any tax.
Fuck this system. I’ve always said it needs to be burned to the ground and started over.
How much love do you have for your country & freedom? Are you willing to step up & fight, starve, suffer, bleed, & die for it?
When a government of the People, for the People, and by the People turns against the People, it's name is Tyranny. That's how you know. We the People have a duty & an obligation to exercise our Rights & Liberty to overthrow those traitors, & abolish their treason by any means necessary.
Liberty is the American way.
Revolution is the solution.