William Heath
Capitalism 101
​
The market has no conscience,
no concept of value. If you
want to save the planet or pay
workers a living wage don’t
pretend the market cares or can
solve your problems. The basic
purpose of capitalism should not
be to ensure that owners make
a fat profit, but that workers
receive a living wage, since
without sufficient cash they
cannot become consumers
and keep the game going.
True value is measured by
the work put into a product
and the worth of the product
to its purchaser. Work is not
measured only in muscle
and sweat but also in brain
power and social utility.
​
​
Marx 101
He reverses medieval views,
underdog over top dog,
left better than right,
conflict better than peace,
a set hierarchy, everyone
in their ordered place,
the major evil. When Marx
laments that everywhere men
are in chains, he means
the Great Chain of Being,
substituting instead a belief
that history simply as history
is a Good Thing ensuring,
down the road, a blissful future,
working class the chosen people,
their only begotten voice
a vanguard of the party,
an all-powerful State will
wither away, vanish in a poof
of dialectical smoke. Though
our era is dying, some twilights
linger. As D. H. Lawrence said,
from the beginning of the end
to the end of the end may
take a few hundred years.
​​
William Heath, born 27 June 1942, has published four poetry books: The Walking Man, Steel Valley Elegy, Going Places, and Alms for Oblivion; two chapbooks: Night Moves in Ohio and Inventing the Americas; three novels: The Children Bob Moses Led (winner of the Hackney Award), Devil Dancer, and Blacksnake's Path; a work of history, William Wells and the Struggle for the Old Northwest (winner of two Spur Awards and the Oliver Hazard Perry Award); and a collection of interviews, Conversations with Robert Stone. He lives in Annapolis. www.williamheathbooks.com
The New Man
The revolution loves a man not yet born.
—Camus
The license to criticize is
a bourgeois luxury—once
the revolution takes place
no need for such a function.
The North Vietnamese are
the gentlest people she
has ever seen. Everyone
in Vietnam feels free to weep,
it is so beautiful. All over
the world she travels in search
of socialism’s new man.
In China she finds high morals,
a sense of mission, a feeling
of being caught up in a cause
much greater than herself,
the children say Chairman Mao
is the man they love the best,
all the girls vow they wish
to marry a man with correct
political thinking. She is told
that the workers surrender
their three-week vacations out
of socialist enthusiasm—
no need, everyone agrees,
for happy workers to strike.
thistles stretch their prickly arms afar
Militant Thistles