"I, Pencil" response:

The article, "I, Pencil" by Leonard E. Read is mainly about the simplicity of a pencil, or what seems to be simple about a pencil actually relates to many controvercies that we see in our own lives. Read begins the article by talking about how most people take pencils for grated, no one knows how its made even though it is so simple. Then he goes back and talks about the ancestory of the pencil speaking from the point of view of the pencil itself, "My family tree begins with what in fact is a tree, a cedar of straight grain that grows in Northern California and Oregon..." describing how the pencil came to be and what is involved when making it. He then got into the fact that "Actually, millions of human beings have had a hand in my creation, no one of whom even knows more than a very few of the others." sugesting that none of these millions of people understand how to make a pencil completely, they just know a portion of it. Read then talks about the natural resources needed to create a pencil, still speaking from the point of view of the pencil, "I, Pencil, am a complex combination of miracles: a tree, zinc, copper, graphite, and so on. But to these miracles which manifest themselves in Nature at even more extraordinary miracle has been added: the configuration of creative human energies..." then getting into religious ideas of how we got here as human, how we were made and so on, Thus proving how something as simple as a pencil can suggest or imply a controversey such as religion.
The idea of a pencil, where it comes from, how its made, and ideas that come along with it can be related to capitalism, the different aspects of it, and how it works. For example, a portion of the article talks about how the pencil is made, briefly talking about the machinery used which costs $4,000,000, the machine being the capital in the process of selling and buying of pencils and the profit wealthier people get is based on the money they spend on machinery and other costs to make the pencils, their profit has to be at least one cent more than they spent to make the profit in order to stay in the market. Then there is the fact that millions of people have only had a hand in the creation of a pencil, no one really bothers to understand how to make the pencil as a whole, people are only concerned with the part they are getting paid to make. This holds true in capitalism, most workers are not concerned with the work they are doing at all, their main focus is what they are getting paid to do and what will help them make a good amount of money to survive. People working with machines in factories is part of capitalism as well, rich people who own these companies hire people to work the machines for a small amount of money so they can get a good amount of profit from selling pencils. Relating to Andy's definition of capitalism being, "we work for their profit," those who are in the middle or working class work for rich people who get more money from the work the lower classes do. There is also the natural resources brought up in the article which relate to capitalism as well, the natural resources used to make products are considored "land" in the process of capitalism. The article simply talking about pencils can be related to capitalism and how the system works.