Just like with any other segments of rock music, doom rock wasn't really spared of leftist or Marxist influence. If you think about it, it makes all the sense in the world because, for the longest time, to be a rebel in college or in high school, you have to be of the Marxist persuasion.
In the minds of these people, there's nothing more revolutionary than advocating that the means of production should be taken away from capitalists or people who exploit other people and be given to the people. It's all about freedom. It's all about living in a world with no class.
And I'm not talking about class in terms of knowing how to respect people and carrying yourself the right way. I'm talking about class in terms of upper class, middle class, lower class, and their relationship to the means of production which Marxists say is the source of all wealth.
Well, you don't have to be all that experienced of a person to know that Marxism is a dead end.
First of all, let me drop some unfortunate and inconvenient truths while we're at it. Karl Marx, believe it or not, did not even come up with an accurate idea or definition of price. This is a guy who keeps saying, "To each according to his needs, and from each according to his ability."
The problem here is pricing mechanism. How do we know the value of what we're getting from other people and how do we arrive at the value of the stuff that we're going to get to other people based on their needs? How do we set our priorities? How do we budget this stuff?
Karl Marx drew a blank on that because it was only after a few decades that somebody came up with a mechanism that actually predicted and defined how prices work.
I raise this because this really gets to the core of Marxism. It's based on false economic science. It doesn't work. It's great literature, it has all sorts of amazing advice on how people should live, but if you try to live your life based on the science of Marxism, it's a dead end street.
That's why socialism continues to fail. Whether you call it communism or socialism, it fails.
But unfortunately, a lot of kids never got the memo. In their minds, Karl Marx has always been the epitome of rebellion. And unfortunately, this is a rebellion that ends up impoverishing people and destroying lives.
And this is why doom rock is so refreshing to me because a lot of the early pioneers of this musical genre have turned their backs on that whole leftist-socialist orientation. Instead, they look at the world from a very dismal perspective. They view it, really, as a place that is always on the verge of falling apart because people themselves are fallen.
Now, you may be thinking to yourself, "Wow, this is really depressing stuff because Karl Marx doesn't talk about things that way. Karl Marx actually views people as good." And that's precisely the reason why socialism fails. Seriously.
Because if you look at people as essentially good and it's only the system that corrupts them, then you're going to be placing all your faith onto a small group of people who are self annointed prophets. For some reason or another, they think they know how you should live your life.
This is very dangerous territory because every time it's been tried, two things have happened. Either there's a tremendous amount of economic poverty and misery, or there's a lot of killings. Often times, they go hand in hand. This is inescapable. And that's why it's a dead end.
And doom rock, for lack of a better word, philosophers have really turned their backs on this. They know that it's a dead end. So now, their focus is on the fact that people are fallen, and it's perfectly okay to distrust. It's perfectly okay to insist on rights because these rights are what prevent us from killing each other.
And it is this grand superstructure based on doubt and mutual distrust that actually leads to social progress.
Believe it or not, capitalism is built on the fundamental belief that people are bad and self interested. Accordingly, when people are bad, you have to protect yourself, and this means a voluntary exchange of value. This means pricing mechanisms and generating a profit when there is actual demand for whatever it is that you are producing.
Believe it or not, because people pursue a greedy self interest, they end up producing more social goods for others because they're looking for the almighty dollar.
The food that you're eating was not put there because the person who produced it really cares about you. That person cares about money. So they produced food to get money and you benefitted.
Similarly, you're going to school and you're providing services not because you really care about the end user of your products, but you want to make money. And this all goes back to a flawed definition of the human condition. Thank goodness.