When Capitalism Won't Pass the J

According to Karl Marx’s capitalist theory, capitalism is flawed and therefore doomed. Because of the bourgeoisie, or upper class, holding control over the “free market”, the proletariat, or working class, is stifled. Eventually, monopolies are created within the market which ultimately cause a revolution of the proletariat class. Those in the bourgeoisie are those who privately own the means of production, separate from the proletariat, working class. Marx describes how the division of labor causes alienation: from the production, from the process, from other people, and from one’s self. He emphasizes the working class’s creativity being stifled, and the problems that causes within society. Ultimately, Marx believed that this leads to a revolution that will overthrow the market monopolies held by the bourgeois.

In the early 1900s in America, capitalism took hold of multiple huge markets essential to the economy and created monopolies that pushed out of these markets a little plant called cannabis. Before this, “cannabis hemp was one of history’s most widely used plants,” dominating large global markets such as medicine and textiles (Bud Fairy).

Some important markets growing and changing at that time were the fuel industry and the synthetics industry, both coming out with new and exciting products derived from fossil fuels. At the time, fossil fuel products were a promising new economic idea - not running out quite as fast as they are now. The elites who had control over this new industry wanted that to become control over the entire market, to completely overtake the means of production.

A man named William Randolph Hearst was the one who was eventually able to help his fellow bourgeoisie. He used anti-cannabis propaganda to get rid of the economic threat weed posed on their plans for monopoly. Another of these markets headed for a bourgeois monopoly, the paper industry, was changed by Hearst, a publisher with a huge investment in timber. He owned a bunch of land covered in trees, readily available to make lots of paper (and make Hearst lots of money), and felt threatened by the existence of hemp paper. Its cheap, highly sustainable growth could easily replace timber to make paper. But because of Hearst’s influence as a publisher, he was able to use propaganda to make his way to the top and create a monopoly of timber in the paper market. At the time, the cannabis plant was mainly harvested for its many uses in the form of hemp, though there were a few tokers here and there. Hearst knew he could take advantage of the multiple uses of marijuana to demonize it, creating ads talking about “reefer madness”, “drug-crazed abandon”, and “weird orgies, wild parties”.

one of William Randolph Hearst's anti-marijuana advertisements

Because Hearst's advertising worked so well on the American people, marijuana was a drug feared by society. It became an illegal substance, and later in the 70s when the War on Drugs was declared by the American government, it was highly criminalized. This benefited another market run by elites: law enforcement. We see the effects of this now with an almost military-like police force in so many places around the country, and the highest rate of incarceration in the world by a large margin.

Before the discovery of aspirin, and after that other heavy painkillers like opiates, cannabis was used often in medicine. As we see today with the huge growth in popularity of medical marijuana as it becomes legalized in more and more states, cannabis is a ‘wonder drug’ of sorts. It can be used in many different forms to treat a multitude of ailments, anything from chronic pain to mental illness to cancer, etc.

Back to Marx’s theory of the doomed nature of capitalism and the eventual revolution that will stop it: the anti-capitalism revolution is coming to the American economic system. And it begins with the legalization of marijuana. This versatile plant, with its uses as a fuel, as a medicine, as a textile, and even as a recreational substance, can solve so many problems created by the monopolizing of means of production by American elites.

Sources:

Fairy, Bud. "How Marijuana Became Illegal." Ozarkia.net. Accessed April 25, 2016. http://www.ozarkia.net/bill/pot/blunderof37.html.