Every Breath Taxed

On Capitalism's Resolution

Morning Comrades.

I am not entirely sure our brains were meant to have access to this much information all at once and mine has a tendency to remember every interesting tidbit and create little reference maps that I tap into when I need to. I woke up, feeling like shit, exhausted from the manual aspect as well as the social capacity needed to cater to 100s of regular customers on the daily and a video clip of Fidel Castro popped into my mind - logically - in which he started an interview with the question “What has Capitalism Resolved”, and well, here we are.

There is no waking moment untouched by the violence of capitalism. It grinds into our joints, eats away at our time, and stalks us into the grave. We wake not to life, but to work. We ache not from exertion, but from unrelenting theft, of our time, our joy, our dreams. We live one medical bill away from disaster, one paycheck from eviction, one bad month from annihilation. We are told to be grateful. For what? For starvation with Wi-Fi? For painkillers in place of public care?

This system has taken our youth and fed it into machines. It has hollowed out our bodies and called it productivity. It poisons our food, charges us to heal, and puts cops between us and bread. And then, just when the despair feels too great to name, it dares to tell us we are the problem. We’re not working hard enough. Not hustling correctly. Not investing smartly. Not manifesting our fate.

But our wounds are not accidents. They are engineered. Our alienation is profitable. Our exhaustion is efficient. Our fear is a product line.

If we in the imperial core are bleeding, the global South is being dismembered. While we bury our parents under mountains of medical debt, they bury their children under rubble from drone strikes, sweatshop collapses, and floods caused by emissions they didn’t create. In the Congo, children mine cobalt so we can check our notifications. In Palestine, families are bombed with weapons funded by the same Western tax structures that defund our own public schools. In Bangladesh, textile workers stitch the clothes we throw away, only to die in fires so fashion brands can meet quarterly profits. In Haiti, Chile, Nigeria, Indonesia, their resources, their sovereignty, their futures are carved open by the same economic logic that keeps our bosses rich and our lives short.

Fidel Castro’s question “What has capitalism resolved?” is not outdated. It is more relevant now than ever. And the answer is still nothing. Not hunger. Not homelessness. Not war. Not sickness. Not alienation. Not inequality. Not even its own crises.

Capitalism has resolved only how to disguise a death cult as civilization.