So I was looking for economics papers I had written during college and just found this piece in an email to a professor.
Adam and Eve used to live happily in the Garden of Eden, with all resources in pristine and abundant condition. However, one day, Eve was tempted by Lucifer (just another “angel” who has nothing better to do and bored with the peace on Earth) to pick a fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and eat it.
Eve was struck with an epiphany upon eating it; she realized that since she used her labor to pick the fruit, it belonged to her and thus, became her possession and private property. The original sin by Eve established the concept of private property and the Lord could not stand such an act of defiance by a woman. Angry at the disobedience that Eve had shown to Adam, the Lord decided to punish humankind by making humans (and especially those with a darker skin tone like Eve and Adam) toil hard for their subsistence and be exploited for their labor by a ruling class. The Lord was also mad at Adam for his effeminate behavior and inability to control his woman, therefore he decided that Adam did need some punishment, and thus, Adam was re-casted as a white man, stripped of his rich African heritage.
Since Eve was the one who sinned originally, all women were thereafter meant to bear children that would be reduced to mere commodities and women would not be paid for the work they did in the households. To make women especially obedient, the Lord made sure that if women were to realize their ultimate pleasure by sleeping with other women and not (RE)producing more labor for profit, they would be barred from holding any property together and their social relations would be unrealized. Even men were disallowed from sleeping with each other; they were supposed to be competitive and aggressive, out to conquer and acquire, not love and nurture. In other words, both the oppressor and the oppressed were in fact, oppressed (and dehumanized) by the superstructure of the Lord’s creation.
But there was a way out. Redemption meant going through the different modes of production, which would seemingly create new social relations after bloody revolutions, while retaining the same old system of exploitation time and again. Redemption meant the suffering of everyone, but especially that of women and people of color the world over. Clashes would take place over time; between master and slave, lord and serf, capitalist and proletariat, and yes, between men and women (and other), straight and gay (and other), till the Lord would take pity and make the working class realize themselves as one–not gendered, sexualized or racialized–but as the oppressed fighting the oppressor who insisted on mediated relations of class, race, sex, gender etc.
In the Last Judgment, the oppressors would be given a last chance by the now politicized and ruling proletariat to repent all they had done over history. Some capitalist oppressors, who are now in a state of advanced schizophrenia, will insist falsely that Lord is on their side and tells them what to do, yet it would be futile. The seven years of trials and tribulations will take place. Human relations would once again be unmediated and everything in nature will belong to everyone, owned collectively.
And if we add Hinduism to the whole mix, the world will be destroyed in the last stage of capitalism (monopoly capitalism), so the Gods will just say “whatever” and give birth to the cosmos all over again with a specific kind of big ‘bang.’
Now who wants to take the fruit from the tree and call it their own?
Alright, I wrote this when I was 20. If I had to write this now, Eve would probably be a transsexual Steve and there would certainly be a shift from the structural meta-narrative of Marxian economics to a more post-structuralist approach to economics.
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