When I volunteered with student clubs and non-profit organizations in high school, I stumbled across many contradictions between capitalism and human rights. We are taught that the U.S. is the richest country in the world and that anyone who works hard enough can achieve financial success. This made me wonder: Why are some of the hardest-working people the poorest? Why does half the world live on $2 a day? Why do thousands of children die every day from disease and starvation?

When I learned that almost everything I owned was the product of the exploitation of another human being – through poor working conditions and sweatshops – I began to look at the economic system itself. I understood that capitalism could not survive without the violation of human rights in poorer countries.

Nor can capitalism provide for the needs of every person, because capitalism produces commodities for corporate profits rather than for human need. When society values food, housing, and medicine as commodities rather than fundamental human rights, then human beings are treated as commodities. Capitalism dehumanizes us and reduces us into laborers and consumers — cogs in the capitalists’ machine.

I knew that there had to be a better way to organize society. After I read Marx, I realized that common people have the right to control what we create, and to make a new society truly under the power of its people.