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Education is Elevation and I know a lot of us are lost in the sauce of capitalism. I know a lot of us are so deep in how this system has commodified our human relationships that we can’t even see the water we’re swimming in. But I need y’all to sit with me on this one, because the question I’m posing today isn’t hypothetical. It’s not academic. It’s the most material, most practical, most urgent question facing every single person reading this right now.

Is socialism the answer?

Now, before you have that knee-jerk reaction — before the programming kicks in and you start typing “but Venezuela” or “who’s gonna work the factory?” — I need you to breathe. I need you to sit in the discomfort. Because that discomfort? That’s the system working exactly as designed. That emotional response you’re about to have? Capitalism put that there. And if you stick with me through this piece, I’m going to show you exactly how.

The Monstrous Critique: What Capitalism Actually Is

Let me start here, because I think before we can even talk about an alternative, we need to be honest about what we’re living in right now.

Socialism is not the government just doing things. It’s not just free healthcare and free childcare. Socialism is an entire restructuring of life around human needs. Right now — and I need you to really hear this — life is structured around profit. Around money. When you say “I need a house,” you don’t actually go get a house. You say, “I need enough money for a house.” When you say “I need a car,” you don’t go get a car. You say, “I need enough money for a car.” Capitalism bars your access to the things you need to survive, and to get access, you have to slave. You slave for the factory, you slave for the corporation, or you slave for yourself as a small business owner, sacrificing meals and health and time to attract enough currency to justify your existence.

For others to have more, you must have less. That is exactly how this system works.

And here’s what people don’t understand: what I’m describing when I talk about socialism is how human beings lived for 95% of our existence. This idea of one person hoarding everything while the rest of us fight over scraps? That’s a brand new thing. Because in the past, when humanity first emerged, if we did not share what we had, we all died. Survival was cooperative. That wasn’t idealism. That was biology. That was the default state of humanity — surviving collectively.

From Farming to Fascism: The Historical Architecture of Exploitation

Then we started farming. And we started having surplus. And to protect that surplus, you needed patriarchy. You needed violence. You needed separation. This is where we see the nuclear family born — not out of love, but out of property protection. This is where we see the subjugation of women to the household. And that household? One of the first prisons.

Sylvia Federici documents this brilliantly in Caliban and the Witch. We learn in school that the witch hunts were religious hysteria. That’s the sanitized version. The truth is that the witch hunts were the centralization of power. Women held communal power in their communities — power that didn’t arise from money. It arose from fertility, from veneration, from spirituality, from a connection to land and culture. There were common lands where people farmed, lived, gathered. The church sat on common land. During the witch hunts, they took those common lands. And the women who were called “witches” were the influential community leaders whose power threatened the emerging capitalist order.

This is where we see domestic labor — reproductive labor like raising a child — treated as non-work. You could take care of a baby all day and under capitalism they’ll treat you like you never put in an hour of work. Because under this system, your purpose as a human being is to reproduce labor. You become a machine. Everything the system does is designed to extract from you. Even having fun. Even joy itself is commodified and used to extract from you.

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Socialism Defined: A Transition, Not a Fantasy

So what is socialism? Let me be precise, because precision matters.

Socialism is a transition. It’s a transition toward communism, which is a kind of endpoint — a society where there is no race, no class, no money, no state. Just human beings living among each other as we once did. And to get there, we need socialism because there is so much extraction embedded at every point of this system that you have to dismantle it piece by piece.

The way you dismantle it is by first identifying the contradictions. A contradiction works like this: the slave owner needs me to build his house, but I have no house. That’s a contradiction. We work every day, yet we can’t pay our bills. That’s a contradiction. We work every day, yet we don’t have medicine. That’s a contradiction. We work every day, yet we’re undereducated and can barely read. These contradictions are not bugs in the system. They are the system.

Karl Marx talked about this using the terms “lower communism” and “fuller communism.” Communism is both a process and an endpoint at the same time. The same way a square is a rectangle, but a rectangle is not a square. We have to get to a point where we’re not worried about money, about race, about the thousand divisions capitalism manufactures to keep us from seeing each other clearly. And to do that, people need to not be worried about survival first.

Under capitalism, for you to get food in America, you either have to slave at CVS, slave in a prison, slave for the system, or steal it. Under socialism, for you to get food, all you’d have to do is be alive. That is the difference. Socialism is allocating the resources we already have — taking the factories that capitalism built through exploitation and turning them into production systems that serve human needs. As simple as that.

Alienation: How Capitalism Captured Your Mind

Frantz Fanon was an author, a psychologist, and a revolutionary who studied colonized peoples in Algeria during the civil war. He realized something profound: the colonized wanted to become the colonizer. They had their own language but wanted to speak the colonizer’s language. They had their own culture but wanted to adopt the colonizer’s culture. And yet, on the other hand, the colonizer would never accept them. So as a colonized person, you exist in a limbo. This is why we have these desires. This is why we carry a hatred for communism and socialism that we can’t even explain rationally — because the system cannot survive without that hatred.

Karl Marx calls this alienation. He outlines it in Das Kapital. Capitalism alienates you from four things: the people around you, your labor, what you make, and eventually yourself. This alienation makes us feel like we’re in constant danger, like we’re not safe, like we need the system. And the system plays daddy — it comes along and says, “It’s gonna be okay. Just let me do the exploitation and you’ll get your bag of chips and your DoorDash.”

I saw this playing out in real time during a live conversation. People in the comments were asking, “Who’s gonna work the factory?” and “Who will you sell the products to?” and “Who’s gonna learn how to operate everything?” Every single one of those questions is framed through the perspective of alienation. They can’t imagine a factory existing to provide products for people. They can only imagine a factory existing to generate transactions. That’s how deep the programming goes.

But think about this: is anyone getting paid to read this article right now? No. You’re here because you chose to be. People go to school for hours studying subjects that capitalism says have no market value — that’s proof that human beings are motivated by more than profit. The very people who mock “worthless degrees” are conceding that people pursue knowledge for its own sake. You’ve already disproved your own argument.

Late-Stage Capitalism: The System Is Crumbling

The German economist Werner Sombart coined the phrase “late-stage capitalism.” It describes the current, often absurd phase of the modern economy, characterized by extreme income inequality, massive corporate influence over government, and the commodification of daily life. If you’re in denial that this definition describes exactly where we are right now, you’re confused about which country you live in.

Look around you. People have three, four jobs in a household and can’t afford to live. My friend spent $10,000 on his son’s Little League baseball at a public school. Just for a kid to go have fun outside, they extract from you. Just for you to get food, medicine, to drive down the road — they extract from you. Every single moment, they are extracting from you.

Every seven to ten years, we see a stock market crash. 2008 was the housing crisis. 2020 was COVID. And they could have operated the economy in a way where COVID didn’t completely destroy it. Instead, they operated in a way where they could shut your business down and buy it. They destroy the economy for people like you and me so the ultra-rich can buy everything we have until we’re all debt slaves. This is what they want with techno feudalism. Elon Musk wants to own Texas and have you buying things with Tesla coins. The American dollar is crumbling, and they know it. The end is coming because they don’t pay you enough, they won’t invest in the infrastructure to keep society running, and they don’t care if the world ends as long as they can fly away and preserve their power.

And then you see fascism. Fascism is capitalism defending itself. It’s an animal backed into a corner, scratching and clawing. The industrial factory owners put Hitler in power because communists and socialists were demanding better pay and more rights. To preserve their power, the capitalist class will always turn to fascism. You don’t even have to reach for historical examples — everybody watching American politics right now understands we’re dealing with fascism, and it exists solely to protect the capitalist interests of corporations. Every war America has fought since World War II has been in the interest of corporations. You’re not fighting for American freedom if you’re blowing up Iranian schools or going into Iraq to steal oil.

Commerce Is Not Capitalism: The Lie You Keep Repeating

Here’s the homework I’m assigning y’all, and I need you to take this seriously.

A lot of people conflate commerce with capitalism. Commerce is defined as the activity of buying and selling, especially on a large scale. That’s it. Commerce predates capitalism by hundreds and hundreds of years. The Aztec empires traded. The Inca empires traded. The Silk Road existed centuries before anyone conceived of capitalism. You don’t need slavery, rape, murder, pedophilia, or a military-industrial complex to buy and sell things.

According to Britannica and the Harvard Gazette, capitalism began to emerge between the 16th and 18th centuries in Europe, particularly in England, through the transition from feudalism via market practices and agrarian changes. That means capitalism is not even 500 years old. Human beings have been here for approximately 300,000 years. The claim that the whole world has always practiced capitalism is empirically false. It’s historically wrong.

And here’s the contradiction that should keep you up at night: capitalism tells you it breeds innovation and that we should always be advancing everything. But when it comes to the economic system itself? Suddenly we’re stuck at what Europeans came up with in the 1500s. You believe we should innovate everything — technology, medicine, transportation — but not the system of governance that organizes all of it? That’s not logical. That’s programming.

Capitalism was born out of the enclosure movement, where common lands were privatized and worked by tenants for market production. It was born out of slavery, out of colonialism, out of the most abhorrent violence imaginable. It was born out of unsustainability — European feudalism was collapsing, resources were depleted, and colonialism was a desperate, violent expansion to steal what they couldn’t produce. And the democracy we practice now? That didn’t come from Greece. It came from the Six Nations, the Iroquois Confederacy. The native nations already had democratic governance. We stole it, exploited it, and erased it so we could tell our own origin story.

Socialism vs. Capitalism vs. Communism: What Black Academics Have to Say

Now let me take a moment to address this directly, because this is a conversation that Black scholars have been having for over a century — and it’s one that mainstream discourse consistently ignores.

Cedric Robinson, in Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, argued that Marxism alone was insufficient to explain the experience of Black people under capitalism because capitalism itself was always already racial. Robinson coined the term “racial capitalism” to demonstrate that capitalism didn’t just exploit labor — it required the invention of racial hierarchy to function. For Robinson, communism as Marx described it was a necessary intervention, but it needed to be filtered through the Black radical tradition that predated Marx — through the maroon communities, the slave revolts, the quilombos of Brazil.

W.E.B. Du Bois, in Black Reconstruction in America, documented how the formerly enslaved carried out what he called a “general strike” — the largest labor action in American history — and attempted to build cooperative, socialist institutions during Reconstruction. Du Bois argued that it was not the failure of socialism that ended Reconstruction but the violent reassertion of white capitalist power through the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow. Later in life, Du Bois became an open socialist and eventually joined the Communist Party, arguing that capitalism and white supremacy were structurally inseparable.

Angela Davis has consistently argued that the prison-industrial complex is the logical extension of plantation capitalism — that mass incarceration is not a failure of the system but a feature of it, designed to warehouse surplus labor and generate profit from captive Black bodies. For Davis, abolition is inherently a socialist project because you cannot dismantle the prison without dismantling the profit motive that sustains it.

Walter Rodney, in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, demonstrated that African economies were systematically dismantled by European capitalism, not because they were “backward” but because their destruction was necessary for European capital accumulation. Rodney argued that socialism was the only viable path to genuine African development precisely because capitalism’s relationship to Africa was always extractive by design.

And Claudia Jones, the Trinidad-born activist and intellectual, argued in her foundational essay “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman” that Black women occupied a position of “super-exploitation” under capitalism — exploited by race, class, and gender simultaneously. Jones was a committed communist who understood that no amount of reform within capitalism could address the interlocking systems of oppression that defined Black women’s lives.

The throughline among these thinkers is consistent: capitalism was not built to include Black people. It was built on our exclusion, our exploitation, and our dehumanization. Communism and socialism, while imperfect in their historical applications, represent the only theoretical frameworks that demand the total reorganization of economic life around collective human needs rather than private profit. The question for Black communities is not whether capitalism has “worked” — the racial wealth gap alone answers that — but whether we have the courage to imagine and build something entirely different.

There Is No Ethical Consumption Under Capitalism

And for the people who love to say, “How can you be against capitalism if you’re wearing capitalism?” — I need you to think about what you’re actually saying. That’s like asking a slave how they can critique the plantation while eating the master’s food. We don’t exist outside the system. That’s the whole point of the critique. A lot of us criticize capitalism precisely because it forces us to survive within it.

You make the iPhone. You make the shirt. The worker creates the product. Capitalism just exploits the labor that creates it. The things you think wouldn’t exist without capitalism — technology, art, infrastructure — all of it existed before capitalism. The pyramids were built before capitalism. The Indus Valley civilization had sewers, grid roads, temples, and what we’d call fast food restaurants. Pottery, art, music, language — all of it predates the 1500s. Things are not made because of capitalism. Things are made because of people. And people have always created, always innovated, always built — because that’s what human beings do.

If something can be built, it can be destroyed. And capitalism was built. Not out of necessity. Out of greed, unsustainability, and violence. And if it was built, it can be replaced with something better.

The Call to Action: Unplug, Organize, Build

So where do we go from here?

First, reject their reality. Unplug from the matrix. The first step is understanding that the world as it’s been presented to you is not the world as it actually is.

Second, get into your community. Real life. Capitalism alienates you from real life, so you have to go out of your way to read books, to learn trades and skills that are valuable to your community. If you know electricity and your neighbor’s lights are messed up, go help. If you’re a mechanic and you hear grandma’s car struggling every morning, go fix it. This is the first step.

Third, educate yourself and others. Paulo Freire wrote in Pedagogy of the Oppressed that the system trains you to be passive about your oppression — and not just passive, but active in oppressing others by training you to accept information without question. Instead of learning through conversation and challenge, you’re taught to shut up and memorize. That’s the first step in training docility. So read. Question. Challenge. That’s how we get free.

And fourth — and this is the one that really matters — organize. The Bolsheviks didn’t have a majority of their country. They had 30%. All we need is the people who see the truth to come together, get organized, strategize, and build. Because as my man the Chain Slayer said: to leave you powerless, they will leave you knowledgeless. And knowledge is power.

Capitalism has a lot of y’all lost in the sauce, and you don’t realize how much it impacts how you value learning and what you value learning. The Heritage Foundation that created Project 2025 employs people with degrees in Women’s and Gender Studies — the very discipline they tell you is worthless. They build think tanks to defund and discredit the same ideologies they use to consolidate their own power. They know the value of this knowledge. They just don’t want you to have it.

So I’ll leave y’all with this: capitalism has a lot of us lost in the sauce. It impacts how we value learning, how we value knowledge, and how we value each other. The racial wealth gap has only widened over the past 70 years. No matter how many Black billionaires or Black millionaires you can count, the system wants you to sensationalize these individualistic examples to distract from how the collective is suffering. Any Black man with a billion dollars — his billion is making a hundred billion for a white man. That’s math, not emotion.

I don’t care if you disagree with me. I don’t care if you say f**k me. Whether you hate me or love me, I believe education is elevation. And that discomfort you feel? That’s not weakness. That’s growth. That’s how you start to push yourself into action and build on your understanding.

5 KEY TAKEAWAYS

* Socialism is not “the government doing things” — it’s a complete restructuring of society around human needs rather than profit. Under capitalism, your access to housing, food, medicine, and education is gated behind money. Under socialism, access to those things requires only being alive. That’s not a utopian fantasy — it’s how humans organized survival for 95% of our existence.

* Capitalism is not even 500 years old, and commerce predates it by millennia. People conflate buying and selling with capitalism, but markets existed long before the enclosure movement privatized common lands in 16th-century England. The Silk Road, the Aztec trading networks, the Indus Valley’s urban economies — all of this predates capitalism. You don’t need exploitation to have exchange.

* Late-stage capitalism is not a theory — it’s a description of right now. Coined by German economist Werner Sombart, the term describes extreme income inequality, corporate capture of government, and the commodification of daily life. When people work 80 hours a week and still can’t eat, the system’s own promises have been broken. The cyclical crashes — 2008, 2020 — aren’t accidents. They’re features designed to consolidate wealth upward.

* Fascism is capitalism defending itself, not an alternative to it. Every historical instance of fascism — from the German industrialists backing Hitler to the current corporate capture of American politics — represents capital choosing authoritarian violence over sharing power with workers. Understanding this connection is essential to understanding why “reform” within capitalism consistently fails.

* The emotional resistance you feel to this analysis is itself a product of capitalist conditioning. Marx’s concept of alienation, Fanon’s analysis of the colonized mind, Freire’s critique of banking education — all describe how the system programs your responses before you even encounter the argument. The discomfort isn’t a sign you’re wrong. It’s a sign the programming is being challenged.

EXPLICIT PAID SUBSCRIBER ASK

I’m fighting to fill a critical void left by the retreat of public education media. I document and teach the histories, legal frameworks, and cultural knowledge that are being systematically erased or distorted. With no corporate backing or wealthy sponsors, this work depends entirely on readers like you. As a Black educator and researcher my work depends entirely on a community of readers, not corporate sponsors. If everyone reading this became a paid subscriber, we could build a full-time digital sanctuary: a new, independent source of PBS-depth reporting and curriculum, centered on Black expertise. But right now, less than 1% of my followers are paid subscribers.

Think about what we just broke down together — the history of capitalism from the enclosure movement to techno feudalism, the way alienation programs your emotional responses, the scholars like Cedric Robinson and Angela Davis who’ve mapped the architecture of racial capitalism for decades.

Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

BIBLIOGRAPHY / RELATED READINGS

* Marx, Karl. Das Kapital, Volume 1 (1867)

* Marx, Karl. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

* Federici, Sylvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (2004)

* Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks (1952)

* Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth (1961)

* Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970)

* Robinson, Cedric. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983)

* Du Bois, W.E.B. Black Reconstruction in America (1935)

* Davis, Angela. Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003)

* Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972)

* Jones, Claudia. “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman” (1949)

* Mills, Charles. The Racial Contract (1997)

* Varoufakis, Yanis. Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (2023)

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