Controversial Universal Health Care

More than twelve hundred Mainers have perished thanks to coronavirus. Hancock County’s daily infection rate is currently tens of thousands of times higher than China’s on a per capita basis. In response, the Bangor Daily Obscurer, a newspaper published by and for white millionaires, recently released an aggressively poor article calling universal health care “controversial”—though the policy is supported nationwide by a vast majority of Democrats as well as over half of Republicans.

Keeping in line with the painfully backward beliefs of the newspaper’s subscribers, the article asks, almost by the first sentence: “Who’s gonna pay fahr it?” Did the Obscurer’s hard-hitting reporters ask this question when Maine’s Democrats (including senate president Troy Jackson as well as Hancock County’s state senator Louis Luchini) delivered a massive tax break to Bath Ironworks, an arms manufacturer implicated in incinerating a bus full of schoolchildren in Yemen? Doubtful!

Quoting a Republican state senator—a far-sighted resource on any subject—the article also claims that universal health care would make it harder to find workers in Maine. In reality, if Maine actually led the way—for once—and became the first state in the country to create a statewide universal health care program, charging the cost to the numerous empty mansions belonging to pedophile Nazi billionaires like the Rockefellers, the state would be flooded with people. Cities would explode in population, which is why any universal health care program would need to be paired with a universal housing program, as well as a law outlawing the ownership of multiple homes. (In general, it would become necessary to direct society toward fulfilling everyone’s needs, rather than the whims of small business owners. From each according to their ability, to each according to their need!)

Passing universal health care would completely change the state. Maine would be transformed from backwater to beacon. The current ruling class—consisting almost entirely of aging white landlords and small business tyrants as well as their running dogs in local, county, and state government (in addition to white supremacist reporters working for the real estate advertising bundles which call themselves “newspapers”)—would be swept away in the tide of refugees fleeing the collapsing United States.

Maine’s many experts—who have never gone anywhere and never done anything, yet somehow know everything—believe that universal health care means high costs and wait times. “In Canada, they have to wait!” And yet very strangely, no one in Canada is proposing a move toward amerikkka-style health care. Why could that be?

In reality, universal health care means that using the hospital is as simple as using public roads. It might be difficult to believe, but I lived for many years in a country with universal health care, and you really do just walk into the hospital, see a doctor, get your medication, and pay ten or twenty bucks—all within the space of an hour. The hospital doesn’t send you a bill a year later charging you ten thousand dollars for an aspirin. Words like “copay” or “deductible” are unknown. You don’t have to waste hours navigating health insurance “marketplaces.” The government is also compelled to construct enough hospitals for everyone—which means that you no longer have to wait six months and drive three hours to see a doctor when you get sick. Life expectancy is longer. Obesity vanishes. Quality of life is better. Covid rates are orders of magnitude lower. The Opioid Epidemic—which local Democrats pretend to care about during election time but never address when given actual power—ceases to exist.

Yet no matter how many referendums are passed, no matter how many times legislators “study” the issue—it has been studied countless times in other states and countries and even by the Koch Brothers, who concluded that universal health care is cheaper and better than the current “system”—Maine’s Democrats will never pass universal health care legislation. They will make endless excuses. They will try to turn off your brain by using terms like “access to affordable health care”—meaning that you will live at the mercy of bloodthirsty pharmaceutical investors (like those you can very curiously find packing the board of the Jackson Lab). They would rather do what they are doing right now: sitting on their hands as schooldchildren are given permanent brain damage from covid, as entire nursing homes are literally wiped out, and as Mainers succumb to a pandemic which ended in China eighteen months ago.

Northeast Harbor Wins “Most Flags In One Place” Award, Edging Out Nazi Germany

“Oh, I just love all the flags,” said Eleanor Hurtzbottom, a summer resident of Northeast Harbor, Maine who has been visiting annually since the 1890s. “I have a lot of trouble remembering which country I’m in, so seeing American flags covering literally every visible surface for miles in every direction really helps with that.”

“It’s completely normal and good to have flags everywhere,” added Henry Himmler, a descendant of Heinrich Himmler, who may have been a Nazi, but at least he was civil, unlike the Cheeto Benito, who instigated the Capitol Insurrection, the most uncivil event in the history of the universe. Why, if we don’t have civility, if we don’t have our institutions, we’re doomed, practically—

“Anyone who fails to genuflect before every American flag must be exterminated on sight,” Himmler stated, sipping a piña colada before dancing in the rain.

In the sky, on the ground, on every storefront and sidewalk, hanging from the trees, even stapled to local wildlife—beautiful and patriotic (but not nationalistic) American flags are everywhere in Northeast Harbor, Maine. Indeed, the local residents have gone so “flag-crazy” that the More Black Trans Drone Pilots Organization has chosen to award Northeast Harbor with the “Most Flags In One Place” award. The local Chamber of Commerce celebrated by capturing the last remaining birds in the area and nailing flags to their wings before tossing them—while they still struggled and cried out—into Moloch Money Machines. (“Put Earth And Flesh Inside, And Capital Comes Out!” as their catchy mantra goes.)

“We make Old Glory Sandwiches,” said Fitzhugh Scamander, a small business owner (and therefore a national treasure). “They’re vegan, too, at least the bread is—we replaced it with the American flag. So it’s basically a big pile of meat and mayonnaise wrapped in the flag. It honors patriots if you eat it—doubly so if you manage to shit it out without dying.”

During a pedophile sex party at the Northeast Harbor residence of Federal Society founder Leonard Leo, a number of billionaire attendees were spotted bowing and praying to altars made of American flags in between receiving their adrenochrome injections—the all-natural, organic, and pesticide- and GMO-free ingredients of which were extracted from a friendly family-owned local green free-range child farm situated underneath his stylish mansion.

“We love local,” Angus King, Janet Mills, Paul LePage, and Susan Collins said in unison before laughing together as slaves injected their femoral arteries with youthful blood. The screams of chained-up immigrant children could be heard over “High Hopes,” the hit Mayor Pete song.

Virtually every elected politician in the state was president for the hip, fashionable pedophile sex party instigated by the Society of the Friends of Jeffrey Epstein in the name of raising private funds for affordable housing so that the local oligarchs don’t have to wait more than thirty minutes for the subhuman rednecks to come and mow their lawns. (Three new starter homes have been constructed in the last year on Mount Desert Island at a reasonable starting price of $8,000,000 each!)

Our local boys in blue, however, stated that the flags can sometimes cause problems.

“Nobody loves America more than me,” said Buddy McRacist Piece Of Shit, a Blue Life Which Matters and a veteran of the recent genocides in Iraq and Afghanistan. “But a bunch of convertibles full of old people have run over a bunch of illegals because the flags are everywhere and no one can see where they’re going. I guess they’re kind of hitting two birds with one stone, though. It’s a lot cheaper than deporting illegals back to the countries that have been repeatedly destroyed by the CIA. It also creates jobs, since someone has to scrape all those bloody human pancakes off the tar.”

Peter Manager, a scientist at the Jackson Eugenics Laboratory, added that all the flags on the sidewalks are forcing everyone closer together, which will probably mean more plague.

“It’s only going to affect people of color, however,” the Democratic eugenicist added. “So that’s a good thing, because they score lower on IQ tests than whites, and if we’re going to purify the human species, we’re going to have to get rid of everyone with an even moderately dark skin tone. Don’t hate me and don’t censor me. Freedom of speech is extremely important if we’re going to secure a white future for our children and grandchildren. I’m just a progressive stating the facts. Thankfully, our civil president Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. has done an excellent job of exterminating hundreds of thousands of people of color via coronavirus, and he has also evicted millions more from their homes during his historic FDR- and Lincoln- and God-like presidency, so there will be more jobs and homes for white people than ever before. Biden is truly making America kind again!”

This One Sentence Proves That We Live in the Confederacy.

Have you ever wondered what it was really like to live in the Confederacy?

If you live in the United States today, you should take a look around. This is what it was really like.

“Absurd,” you say. “The Confederacy was defeated in 1865. It was completely destroyed. No trace of it remains today. Only stupid rednecks sometimes fly the Confederate flag.”

So what am I talking about here? Why would I say something so ridiculous? Let me explain.

If you want to argue that the Confederacy exists or doesn’t exist, you have to ask yourself exactly what distinguishes the Confederate States of America from the United States of America—or really, what the Confederacy is, exactly. Aside from superficial characteristics like its name and geography and its various flags and specific leaders, what exactly makes the Confederacy unique? Why did the Confederacy separate itself from the United States?

A high school history teacher today might argue that the Confederacy was simply very passionate about states’ rights, and that Confederate leaders voted to secede from the United States because they believed that the federal government was infringing on those rights.

We must then ask: states’ rights to do what, exactly?

In reality, the founders of the Confederacy explicitly stated on numerous occasions that they were fighting in the name of slavery. Their constitution was almost identical, word-for-word, to the constitution of the United States—except that it explicitly legalized slavery:

“(4) No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.”

This is what makes the Confederacy unique. It’s just like the United States, except that rather than compromising on the issue of slavery, the Confederates were some of slavery’s biggest fans.

Nonetheless, as we all know, the Confederacy was destroyed, and everyone lived happily ever after.

There’s just one problem with this story. It isn’t true.

If you’ve seen the movie Lincoln, you might remember that it concerns one of our greatest presidents’ efforts to permanently outlaw slavery throughout the United States via the passage of an amendment to the constitution in the final months of the American Civil War. Notably, no one in the film actually reads the text of the amendment, which is written in relatively plain language:

“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

At first glance, it does seem as though the 13th Amendment outlaws slavery in the United States. But buried inside this clunky sentence is a clause, an oddly distinct series of words, which has created over a century of untold misery: except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.

Just as the Confederacy legalized slavery in its constitution, the United States—following the Civil War—likewise legalized slavery in its own constitution. If you have been convicted of a crime in our bourgeois dictatorship, you can be enslaved.

This means that, although the specific political entity known as the Confederate States of America was indeed destroyed, the idea for which numerous Confederates fought and died has lived on to the present day.

What’s more, literal slavery is not only legal in the United States—it is widespread. Millions of people, mostly Black and Brown, are currently locked up in the American prison system. The American police—our modern slave-catchers—execute at least one, but sometimes two or three people of all colors literally every single day. Much of the American economy itself depends upon the prison industrial complex—not only as a means of employment in vast swathes of land where “good” jobs ceased to exist decades ago, but also to quell dissent, to deprive the poor of the right to participate in the illusion of American democracy, and ultimately to reduce millions of people to a status probably worse than feudal servitude. Feudal serfs, at least, had some rights; modern prisoners have none.

And so because we are living in the Confederacy, the entire government—and really all of American society—is therefore illegitimate. The idea that our duly elected representatives are authorized to act by the consent of the governed—in a slave society—is profoundly ridiculous.

This also means that it is ridiculous to expect any kind of reform within this system. If you time-traveled into the Confederate States of America during the Civil War, and then met a Confederate liberal who claimed that peaceful reform was possible, that we only needed to elect the “good” Confederates and then everything would sort itself out—you would think that preposterous, wouldn’t you?

There’s no such thing as a good Confederate. There’s no such thing as a good slaveowner. It’s all bad.

And so because the United States is actually the Confederacy, and because most people (except for business owners, landlords, and their running dogs in the government, the police, and the corporate media) believe slavery to be a moral evil as well as an inefficient and utterly backward socioeconomic system—all of us must act against it. By the ballot or the bullet, by any means necessary, this terrible way of so-called life must be destroyed.

Please Volunteer With Us, We Aren’t Anti-Vaxxers

Hello, we are the directors of Vacant Seat Arcadia, a local green organic community family-run nonprofit which everybody loves. We do a lot of really important work cooking food with our bare hands and then feeding that same food with those same hands to large numbers of people who might have issues with their immune systems—or who might spread the plague to other people who do. Recently, certain personages who shall remain nameless have been spreading rumors to the effect that we are so-called “anti-vaxxers.” This is completely false.

You see, we here at Vacant Seat Arcadia believe in holistic body purity. If you drink memory water and remember to breathe deeply, you can achieve total control over your entire body and live a happy, healthy life for all eternity. By avoiding toxins, you can literally cheat death, evaporate cancer, and achieve psychokinetic abilities. All of this is supported by medical science as well as the wisdom of the ancients. Because of this, we believe it is unnecessary to inject our bodies with poison produced by Big Pharma. We refuse to get vaccinated against coronavirus, and we are proud to let everyone know that our children have never received any vaccines of any kind.

And so as you can see, we clearly aren’t anti-vaxxers. We believe in science. It is safe to work with us, especially since our telekinetic abilities allow us to project an anti-covid forcefield wherever we go.

We are always looking for volunteers, so we hope you’ll soon join us in our kitchen—a tiny, unventilated, enclosed space—for many hours of continuous work!

Also, since we know that hundreds of nurses and doctors across the United States have succumbed to coronavirus during the pandemic, we would personally like to thank all of the nurses, doctors, and white shamans in our community who risk their lives every day to take care of plague victims. We intend to vigorously shake your hands as soon as we run into you!

Take the Homeless Challenge!

Are you rich and white? Do you consider yourself a reasonable moderate? Do you refuse to think about anything systematically, and believe that every problem in society boils down to “a few bad apples”?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, we want YOU to take the Homeless Challenge!

You see, these days, a lot of people think that it’s wrong to tar entire socioeconomic groups with the same brush. Rich, white, reasonable moderates believe that saying “all cops are bastards” is no different from making racist comments—even though cops are not a race, and cops can quit being cops at any time.

These very same rich white reasonable moderates will tell you that although cops execute multiple people in the United States every single day, there are actually lots of good polite cops who help people. The problem, these moderates insist, is one of training and implicit bias. We need to reform the police, get rid of qualified immunity, and tackle police unions. These moderates will then add that slogans like “abolish the police” or “defund the police” or “fuck the police” or “the police all have teenie weenies” alienate your supporters.

And so, because these rich white reasonable moderates are so confident about the fundamental fairness and goodness of the United States, we are inviting all of them to become homeless for one month.

But what does this mean exactly?

It means no money. No connections. No bank account. No address. No phone. No job. No car. And—most importantly—no home.

So if you’re a reasonable moderate, get up from wherever you may be sitting, and head outside. Leave your phone, car keys, and wallet behind. All you’re allowed to bring are the clothes on your back, and the food in your stomach.

Now stay outside for one month. If you can.

You’re free to apply for jobs and panhandle, but you’re not allowed to use any connections. Staying in homeless shelters is also fine, but you aren’t allowed to cheat by sleeping in your yard.

If the United States is really as fair as you say, and all problems boil down to a few bad applies, you should be absolutely fine. In fact, Hancock County’s noble boys in blue will probably help you! The idea that they could plant evidence on you and then expose you to coronavirus in jail in order to fill up their weird psychotic quotas is absurd!

A fair and just society will be fair to everyone—especially those on the lowest rungs of the socioeconomic ladder. So if you really believe that America is good, it’s time to put your money where your mouth is! Go outside and be homeless! It’s easy! Homeless people are just lazy, after all! It’s not as though it’s impossible for large numbers of people to make ends meet in the United States, no matter how hard they work and no matter how smart they are!

And if you’re too cowardly to do this—if you’re making excuses right now because you are actually fully aware that the USA is a hellhole for anyone who wasn’t born rich—then do the world a favor, and shut the fuck up forever!

The Adventures of Trot Biller

My name is Trot Biller. And I am a serious, hard-hitting reporter.

That’s why I work for the world-renowned Bangor Daily News. This paper is so famous, I hear some people in New Hampshire use it to pick up dog shit sometimes. Although I also hear that their dogs don’t like it when they do that.

Anyway, I have some real news to tell you about. Because I’m Trot Biller aka The Real Deal.

You know the nutcases at the Hancock County Commission? The ones who denied drug counseling to jail inmates for over six months? The same ones who refused to censure the sheriff after he called BLM a terrorist organization?

Guess what. I just wrote a story about those guys. Because I work incredibly hard, I quoted exactly two people. It took me a total of fifteen minutes to interview them—maybe.

One of these people—Clark—is a former sheriff who now “serves” as a county commissioner. His salary is about $2,000 per month, plus a pension and health insurance.

The other person—Adkins—is the unelected county administrator. He’s paid almost six figures per year plus benefits.

You know what the story was about? The county treasurer—a guy named Boucher—gets paid too much. His salary is about $200 per week, plus health insurance. Isn’t that ridiculous? $200 per week! When Adkins makes ten times that amount!

But I decided not to mention most of this in my story. Because, as usual with the things I write, if I had provided the slightest context, my entire existence would look completely ridiculous.

My story essentially consists of a few quotes from two people who are so similar they might as well be identical twins. That’s why I became a journalist, after all. I wanted to deepthroat the boot of the American ruling class far enough to make it stick out of my ass.

But that isn’t the half of it. I somehow also managed to make my incredibly interesting, hard-hitting, and fun story be about this super cool thing called the charter commission.

You see, Hancock County is filling up with Democrats. As old as many of them may be, the Republicans are even older. Most people under the age of 120 cringe at the mention of the Republicans. It’s getting harder and harder for them to win elections here. Why, just a few months ago, even though all the rich dickheads in the county—and their trotting dogs in the corporate media—pulled out all the stops, five thousand people still voted for a communist who said he wanted to abolish the police. If we abolished the police, how could I keep stealing the bread from the mouths of children here? It’s terrible.

I mean, just look at Portland. A few years ago, it was nothing but do-nothing Democrats and fascist Republicans in the city government. Now the Republicans are gone, and the Democrats are losing electoral battle after battle to the Democratic Socialists. If we don’t do something soon, Hancock County is next. We’ll have Democratic Socialists everywhere here, while Portland will be controlled by Stalinists!

That’s where the charter commission comes in. Basically, the Republicans want to make almost every position in the county government appointed. That way, it doesn’t matter how many people hate the Republicans. They’ll still be able to control pretty much everything. They already do, for the most part. Although most of Hancock County’s voters are Democrats or Independents, and although most of those Democrats voted for Bernie in the last two presidential primaries, Fascist Republicans or Do-Nothing Democrats hold almost every elected position here.

But it isn’t enough for us to control almost every elected position. It isn’t enough for us to control all the businesses and nonprofits. It isn’t enough to have every road swarming with pigs at every hour of every day. We need it all.

That’s why I hope that as I continue to write absolute, utter, laughable, detestable nonsense in the coming months and years—as I continue to do all I can to help the white supremacists who control our society—that’s why I hope you take me seriously, and that you read my articles with an uncritical eye, and consider them objective because they were printed in a newspaper that is of such a low quality, dogs will bite anyone who uses it to pick up their shit.

Adventures in Hancock County: A Year of Reporting About M*ine’s Spectacular Mediocrities

This website was launched about eleven months ago, and since then “we” have covered a number of earth-shattering subjects which the local capitalist media has of course refused to consider. Sit back and enjoy these stories, all of which deal with the unending hilarity in God’s County, also known as Hancock County (named after a slaveowner). They’re presented here in reverse-chronological order. Also remember, if you ever want to visit Acadia National Park, never spend money in Bar Harbor!

World’s Most Beloved People Have Trouble Finding Friends

Racism on MDI

“Time Flux”

As Mills opens Maine to tourism, and as King and Collins vote to enshrine slavery, Hancock County business owners refuse to offer a living wage or health insurance

Chair of Mount Desert Democrats Risks Spreading Coronavirus To Further Pro-Cop Agenda

Hancock County’s Liberals Fail To Oust Sheriff

Everything Is Perfect In Our Little Community, And I Have Done Nothing Wrong

Maine’s Local Newspapers Suck Ass

Moderates Support Fascism: A Timeline of Indivisible MDI and Sheriff Scott Kane

A reminder that Hancock County’s Democratic State Senator is an Anti-Vaxxer

All Lives Matter

Trotting To Sheriff Scott Kane

A0S 91 Superintendent Gousse’s Anti-Science Agenda

Headlines from The Bourgeois Side Journal

Local Democratic Panjandrum Admits His Wealth Comes From Slavery

Preventable Death In Front of Jackson Lab

As coronavirus explodes in Maine, Mills administration does nothing

Local business owners who caused pandemic are heroes

Cats demand different kitty litter; hate local newspapers

As coronavirus spreads, local news pretends everything is fine

The Signs of Hancock County

The Republican candidate for Hancock County Commissioner loves cruise ships and wasting millions of tax dollars on failed government projects. Should Republican voters be worried?

Please Read This Important Message From The Superintendent

Local Bourgeois Appoint Themselves To Explain Racism

Fuck Bar Harbor Business Owners

Weary Juneteenth Protests in Ellsworth and Bar Harbor, Maine

Police Spies Infiltrate Bar Harbor Protest

County Commissioner Meeting A Disaster

Per Capita, the USA has had almost ten times as many covid cases as India

I’ve noticed that very few news sites reporting on coronavirus ever publish per capita infection numbers because that makes the USA look even worse than it already does. Don’t get me wrong, India is really bad right now, but if you take today’s number of cases and divide by the total population, it’s less than twice as bad as the USA.

401993 / 1.366 billion = 0.00029428477

58382 / 328.2 million = 0.00017788543

If you look at the total number of cases:

19.2 million / 1.366 billion = 0.01405563689

32.4 million / 328 million = 0.0987804878

India still has a lot of catching up to do. The USA has had almost ten times has many coronavirus cases as India per capita!

One of my favorite things to do, of course, is to do the same thing with the communist dictatorship which goes against human nature and is a total failure, Venezuela:

1297 / 28.52 million = 0.00004547685 (today’s number of cases)

Venezuela’s numbers, if you look at per capita daily infections, total infections, daily deaths, total deaths, etc., are way better than the USA as a whole as well as any US state.

If you throw these numbers at liberals, they get super angry and say that Venezuela is lying, whereupon you hit them with Cuba’s numbers, Vietnam’s numbers, etc. (I am far from a math or numbers guy but no one has challenged my math skills yet in these matters.) Corporate media doesn’t ever say “Vietnam bad” because the military industrial complex is still trying to court Vietnam in an alliance against China (and failing miserably of course).

Liberals don’t really know what to do when you say “Vietnam good” because they have not been programmed to discuss Vietnam, which defeated Japan, France, the USA, the CIA-backed Khmer Rouge, and has now (fingers crossed) defeated coronavirus as well. They might say “Vietnam isn’t socialist,” whereupon you say “okay, let’s do Vietamese capitalism here,” whereupon they say: “no, that’s socialism!”

Monster Mutant Covid Variant Spreading from India to Israel

As Slavoj Zizek warned over a year ago, international cooperation is necessary to stop coronavirus in its tracks. Because India is run by its fascist prime minister Narendra Modi, and because other fascist countries like the United States gave too little help, too late, India has become a breeding ground for vaccine-resistant mutations of coronavirus which are now spreading to other countries. We hear stories like this every few weeks, and they generally seem to peter out into nothing, but sooner or later we’re probably going to get the real deal.

When we likewise consider the fact that liberal superhero Andrew Cuomo was caught lying about covid deaths in New York’s nursing homes (without any consequences to his career); and we know for a fact that the fascist governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, is lying about that state’s covid numbers (and imprisoning any professional scientists who question him), it becomes hard to deny that the situation in the United States is extremely precarious. The entire government (including the rapist / racist president) is controlled by business, and business wants workers to sacrifice their lives—coronavirus or not—to keep profits up.

When yet more liberal superheroes like Anthony Fauci state that we’re about to put covid to rest for good, your hackles should certainly be raised, since Fauci himself notoriously said, at the beginning of the pandemic, that masks were ineffective against coronavirus—all while mafiosos in the Trump administration were hoarding and stealing masks. All of this took place while nearly three thousand nurses, doctors, and many other workers across the USA were succumbing to coronavirus because decades of neoliberal deindustrialization and offshoring meant that the United States lacked the capacity to produce enough PPE to keep anyone but rich shithead business owners, investors, landlords, and entrepreneurs safe.

Keep those masks on, get vaccinated, continue social distancing, only go out for necessities, and—if you’re a worker—it’s time to either unionize your workplace, or ensure that the union you already have is radical, militant, and striking in solidarity with workers around the world. The system is the sickness, and the only hope we have of stopping coronavirus is to ensure that workers—rather than business owners and landlords—control this country, from every street, home, and workplace on up.

All Change Is Impossible Because Humans Are Naturally Bad

And yet, for 95% of human history, private property did not exist.

I’ve found this argument to be pretty effective against liberals who insist that human nature is always exactly the same in all times and places regardless of environmental factors. Sometimes I have to remind liberals that there is a difference between private property—meaning: anything you can use to produce commodities, like a computer, a factory, an apartment building—and personal property—meaning: things you are actually using for yourself, like a toothbrush, a bed, your clothes, even your home.

Think of the difference between your personal belongings and all the stock that Jeff Bezos owns. In a socialist society, you will have personal belongings, while also possessing a share—along with every other person—of the means of production: all the lands and factories and machines on Earth. Rather than remaining trapped in the ballot box, democracy will extend to every home and workplace on Earth, and people will vote every single day.

Homo sapiens have existed for about 200,000 years. The first private property probably came into existence at around the time of the invention of writing around 5,000 years ago, give or take. Before this point we can find little to no evidence of one person controlling a building, a tool, a plot of land, and ordering others to work that private property so that he himself can extract a surplus.

The first cuneiform writing we know of was used to keep track of the king’s shit—specifically, how much beer he had. Interestingly, people were living in small towns and cities for thousands of years before then. As far as we can tell, it seems like living was fairly communal and easygoing in these places, possibly because it took relatively little labor to gather or even farm all the food you needed.

Even though private property was invented at around this time—probably in response to growing population and climate change—the idea that this land or this thing belongs to me, and you have to pay to use it, took thousands of years to spread around the planet. Much of the planet still lived in a communal manner only a few hundred years ago.

So all in all, it looks like private property is a weird aberration. It certainly isn’t the norm if you examine human history through a pretty wide lens. (I’m drawing a lot here on the early chapters of A People’s History of the World.) Capitalism itself, an even more extreme and bizarre form of “propertarianism” (to borrow a term from Ursula K. Le Guin), came about, at the very earliest, in southeastern England at some point following the Norman Conquest a thousand years ago. And then for hundreds of years it remained there exclusively, according to The Origins of Capitalism, spreading to Europe and the rest of the planet starting in the mid to late fifteenth century.

(Liberals will sometimes argue that there is no real difference between feudalism and capitalism because in both systems, a minority exploited a majority, but under feudalism, serfs labored mostly for themselves, while under capitalism all workers labor exclusively for exchange in the marketplace. For the most part, only the 1% bought or sold anything under feudalism; while under capitalism, everyone is always buying and selling, although workers mostly have nothing to sell but their labor. Industrialization and the division of labor are also mostly unknown or fairly primitive by modern standards under feudalism.)

Even you look at human history by population, the situation is not good for people who argue that human nature is always terrible or always the same. About 110 billion Homo sapiens have ever existed. (Obviously this is a rough estimate.) Of those 110 billion, ten were born in the 20th century. Several billion were born in the 19th century. Fewer were born in the 18th century. And so on.

If we add everything up, the figures still skew overwhelmingly in the direction of relatively anarchic styles of living being the norm for Homo sapiens. And although ten billion people were indeed born in the 20th century, how many of those were born in capitalist societies? Population growth in the 20th century was centered overwhelmingly in the Global South—China, India, Africa, Latin America—where resistance to capitalism was and still is quite intense. Had the United States decided to keep its hands off the Global South following World War 2, the entire planet almost certainly would have fallen to communism by now. So many great leaders were assassinated by the CIA, so many governments were overthrown…

So if you want to argue that good things are impossible because of human nature, you might want to take a closer look at what human nature has historically meant. For me, humans can be “good” or “bad” depending on circumstance, but if you believe that there is some kind of constant to human nature, that constant appears to be one of anarcho-communism.

The question now, of course, is: will we return to form? Will capitalism be able to stave off its total collapse by finding new ways of extracting value from workers and the Earth itself? Or will the global 1% finally have to pay the piper?