Destitution

Capitalism, like all national mythologies, views itself as the natural, universal laws of nature. No different than the code of Hammurabi which laid out the structure of Babylonian society. I could give some interesting detail about what it said, but i think the fact that I would even need to already says enough about the longevity of Hamurabi's code. Economists make predictions based off of convoluted financial calculations and assumptions and investors react, the whole process having no more basis than a shaman advising an ancient monarch, except when it is intentionally manipulated by a cartel of politicians and businessmen. Realizing that money and economic laws are not the expression of eternal truths, the way the rules of football are not eternal truths, one sees that the economy is truly fueled by humanity's self-fulfilling schizophrenia and that the evils of capitalism are the result of some collective delusion. People starving, dying, and killing for something worse than no reason at all.

For most of humankind's existence, we lived off the land. By today's standards, everyone was poor, even kings and tyrants didn't have it as good as we do, living in their castles with no air conditioning. Disease, superstition, injury and countless other miseries plagued people, but they had the means to provide for themselves and their families more or less self-sufficiently. Many tribes still do, living basically the same lives as their ancestors did 100,000 years ago. Money was not the fundamental concern for most people, selling one's labor was not the default way of surviving. Those who claim that capitalism is human nature only think so (those that genuinely do think so) because they've lived their entire life within the cult of modern society. Not only was most of human life radically different (at the very least for the 90,000+ years of prehistory where humanity mostly lived in nomadic bands of foragers surviving through mutual-aid at) but the transition to capitalism had to be coerced and enforced wherever it spread. Only after the memory of life beyond the profit motive was erased did the new breed of homo-economicus walk the earth, like the mutant chickens in factory farms, bred and groomed until they could no longer survive outside of their cages.

Possibly the biggest difference between homo-economicus and our ancestors is employment. Work was always necessary, even for those living off the land to feed themselves and provide for their families. Selling your labor to some aristocrat, however, was not the usual way to eke out a living until enclosure. Peasants often refused to work in mines or towns or early factories, no matter how high the wages. They prefered to stay on the family farm, poor and happy. Money was relatively useless by today's standards, when you made everything yourself. People didn't see brands as symbols of status. Landlords and parliament, over the course of several centuries, privatized land and left many homeless and without the means to provide for themselves. People now had no choice but to accept wage labor in order to survive. This process incurred peasant revolts and rebellions which had to be put down by soldiers and mercenaries, killing millions in battle and leaving millions more to starve. Getting rid of all of these farmers yielded productivity gains for the lords which would eventually fund the industrial revolution. By looking at this process through the singular lense of profit, it all appears quite justified. Before, people had all of these resources, squandering them by merely living and extracting hardly any profit. The wealthy and the powerful, with their natural superiority utilized these resources, they turned the wheels of progress. They had true rights to the land.

Enclosure spread to Ireland, where farmers ended up with so little land that they could only survive by growing potatoes to meet basic caloric needs. In 1845, an epidemic of Phytophthora infestans, a fungus which killed potato crops, spread across the country, causing widespread hunger and devastation. It was the Great Famine. Ireland was producing a surplus of food at the time, but only within enclosed lands. Wealthy land owners and their companies shipped their food to England, since there was no money to be made feeding the disenfranchised peasants who had little choice but to die or immigrate to America. A similar situation played itself out again after the English had colonized India. El Nino droughts caused crop failure and livestock death, which in turn caused between 5 and 9 million fatalities. Before the British improved Indian civilization with free trade and agricultural privatization, it had made up 27% of global GDP at the time. Afterwards, the number fell to 3%.

As silver reserves in England ran low, merchants needed to expand to new markets. Strong economic growth means that investors make money and companies create more jobs. Weak or nonexistent growth means investors hold on to their money and companies will likely lay off employees. To ensure growth, corporations often go to foreign markets to exploit natives with low wage jobs, escape competition, or buy goods at cheap prices. Without the constant influx of new markets and new resources, employers can only make profits by cutting wages, protections, and benefits for their workers, which runs the risk of revolution. Usually these deals are enticing to locals because either their leaders (who tend to make decisions unilaterally) profit off of trade or because, despite violating universal human rights, it's the best option available to workers, especially in later centuries when colonialism had devastated natural resources, trade relations among neighboring countries, or when colonial taxes are imposed. China, in the mid 1800s, was basically self-sufficient and refused to trade with European merchants. Lacking any legal means of seeking profit, Europeans began selling opium on the black market which caused major disruption in Chinese communities. Thankfully, governments and corporations have since learned that purposefully disrupting non-compliant communities by flooding them with drugs is wrong and have never done it since. The Chinese government cracked down on opium trafficking and banned importation of opium. The British responded by invading China and the Opium wars began. China, being for most of its history a land based empire, was unprepared for naval warfare and was overwhelmed by French and British forces. Fighting ended only once China entered into free trade agreements with Europe. As with India, China's contribution of global GDP fell from 35% to 7%.

The late 1800s were a time of economic recession and civil unrest in Europe. This was the original Great Depression, but was later renamed the Long Depression. Predictably, without the influx of new markets and resources to exploit at low costs, the fundamental inequities of capitalism reared their ugly heads. Many workers found unrestricted inequality, pollution, and hazardous working conditions intolerable and organized. Strikes and social unrest led to some positive reforms. As human rights increased, profit margins decreased, capitalists had to fund these concessions to the working class be either taking cuts in their profits, or finding more vulnerable populations to exploit. So Europeans colonized Africa and gained access to sorely needed raw materials, land and resources. This was the impetus for what historians call "The Scramble for Africa." After the Berlin Conference, Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden-Norway, Turkey and the USA had carved up African countries and agreed not to step on each other's toes. Despite being geographically close, many African states to this day have trouble trading or communicating with each other, despite having direct access to their previous colonizers. This is due either to the rules of particular trade agreements or, sometimes, simply to the way infrastructure was developed. In 1870, western powers controlled 10% of Africa, by 1914: 90%.

In the Congo, they found Landolphia owariensis, the rubber plant. This vine was cultivated by African workers who had their hands cut off as punishment for not meeting daily quotas. Congolese companies were only permitted to sell to Belgium, to whom they also owed tax. Tax enforcement, corporal punishment and direct aggression in response to uprising was necessary. No matter how high the wages the Congolese were offered, few considered working in the plantations worthwhile. 10 million died, which was half the population, due to failure to pay taxes and participation in uprisings. The pattern played out again in South Africa, where Dutch and British colonists imposed taxes and the Native's Land Act of 1913 enclosed land that African farmers had lived on. Historically, this is what classical liberals are referring to when they claim that wage labor isn't slavery, since individuals are free to choose whether or not they want to work. Conditions are much less brutal for those in developed countries, but the same sort of freedom still exists. Either work or starve, if you own land you have to pay taxes or it can be taken from you and if you're homeless you will likely end up in jail. Domesticated as we are, cutting of hands has largely become a thing of the past.

All of these colonized (or in China's case, partially colonized) countries make up what is today known as the Global South. The only area not mentioned yet is Latin America, which was protected from Europe by America. In the early 1800s, president James Monroe decreed that any attempt at colonization by Europe on South America would be seen as an invasion. The US didn't have the means to enforce the decree until about the 1900s. Unbridled capitalism led to 3 US corporations (Chiquita, Dole, and Cuyamel, though the first 2 had different names at the time) basically owning several, small countries. This period of history is known as the banana wars and is where the term "banana republic" comes from. Governments would give land grants to these companies in exchange for funding basic infrastructure, which was also owned by these companies. Much like corporations today, governments had very little real power and were beholden to their corporate masters. In 1910, Honduras gave a land grant to Dole in exchange for railway funding, which effectively stole land from Cuyamel. In response, the owner of Cuyamel hired death squads to overthrow the Honduran government and install a leader more favorable to their company. This happened throughout Central and South America and everywhere it did, inequality was rampant. As you can guess by now, rampant inequality lead to social unrest and the need for state power to quash any and all uprising. A democratic revolution in Guatemala led to social reforms such as minimum wage laws, land redistribution, and universal suffrage. In response, the owner of Chiquita (which had bought out Cuyamel) lobbied president Eisenhower to intervene. This led to operation PBSuccess, otherwise known as the 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état, which resulted in Guatemala being ruled by military dictatorship until 1996.

William Blum, author of "Killing Hope" often gives lectures on the ungodly things Americans have done in the name of protecting US interests and skeptics tend to disregard his arguments as exceptional events. He cuts right to the point, "What would a government have to do that was heinous enough for you to consider them evil?" To which he often gets no response and suspects this is because his interlocutor fears that whatever they say, the government has at one point or another done it. You can read any account of the CIA's history and the facts are all the same, destabilizing democratic countries, propaganda campaigns, lying to the american people, assassinating leaders who want to help their citizens. They tell the same story, they just add that it was necessary for American interests. And, in a way, it's true. Many 3rd world countries want economic independence, just like America won from Britain. This means protectionist trade policies, strong social safety nets, worker's rights, and democracy, investment in education, healthcare and infrastructure. Independence for these countries, especially those of South America, means the west is cut off from its supply of cheap materials and labor. It also means more competition on the global market, which threatens the west's current monopolies. These policies are invariably labeled as communism and immediately seen as a force of evil that must be stopped by all means.

Naomi Klein starts off her history of neoliberalism, "The Shock Doctrine" in 1970s Chile. Then, democratically elected leader, Salvadore Allende was successfully pushing for progressive policies, investing heavily in health, education, and industry. Allende was of the mistaken opinion that a government should support its citizens. In 1973, the US had spent more money trying to get Augusto Pinochet (their preferred Chilean candidate elected to replace Allende) than it had in it's 1964 presidential race between Goldwater and Johnson. When this failed, US corporations like ITT (which owned Chile's phone company Allende intended to nationalize) approached the American government. According to a New York Times article from July 3, 1972

"I.T.T. proposed an “economic squeeze” on Chile through denial of international credit, a ban on imports of copper and other Chilean products and on vital exports to Chile so that sufficient “economic chaos” would develop to convince the armed forces to “step in and restore order.” It suggested that the C.I.A. could help in “the six‐month squeeze,” urged a deliberate interruption of fuel supplies to the Chilean navy and air force to precipitate the crisis"

Henry Kissinger, in conversation with the US ambassador to Chile, explained that social democracy (he called it communism, but that is simply not accurate,) if allowed to succeed in Chile, would spread to other countries. No one was concerned that Chile was going to invade other countries and force the state to invest its tax money back into its tax payers, rather than its corporate elite. The concern was that if other countries saw Chilean developmental policies succeed, they would want to follow suit. Hence you have capitalist apologists to this day who claim that socialism always fails. It does so only because of the contingent fact that Western powers, usually the United States of America which boasts the world's largest military, put so much effort into ensuring that it fails. On the original 9/11, that is, September 11, 1973, CIA backed rebels bombed the presidential palace and Allende, who had refused offers of safe passage and chose to go down with the ship, as it were. Pinochet took office and held supreme power as the Junta. 1000s of political dissenters were arrested and tortured by methods from the CIA's KUBARK Handbook. Pinochet removed price controls, privatized industries, removed import barriers and cut state budgets. These policies are the hallmarks of neoliberalism. Inflation rose to the highest across the globe at the time. Inequality ran rampant and bread cost the average family 74% of their wages. According to Orlando Letelier, Chilean ambassador to America, under Pinochet,

"The economic plan has had to be enforced, and in the Chilean context that could be done only by the killing of thousands, the estab­lishment of concentration camps all over the country, the jailing of more than 100,000 persons in 3 years, the closing of trade unions and neighborhood organizations, and the prohibition of all political activities and all forms of free expression."

In 1976 Letelier was assassinated via a car bomb that had been planted by a member of Pinochet's secret police, Micheal Townley, who entered the US with fake identification and with the knowledge of the CIA.

The policies of deregulation and privatization were handed directly to Pinochet by a group of economists educated by Milton Friedman and Arnold Harberger, known as the Chicago Boys. These were the original crusaders of neoliberalism, which is the resurgence of liberalism after the New Deal Era. This new liberalism differed from the old philosophy of capitalism in that it directly equated personal freedom with the free market. In other words, when politicians today talk about freedom, what they're referring to is unregulated free trade between corporate titans and the atomized individuals who have little to no bargaining power. The exception to this freedom is that governments have a duty to promote free trade by cutting taxes for the wealthy (job creators) and opposing protections for workers. Regulations are desirable when they hurt small businesses while supporting whichever major corporations are funding government officials and to ensure this is done properly, the regulators themselves should often times be stakeholders or former high ranking employees of the companies they will regulate (Milton Friedman may not have himself actually supported that, but in practice that is what we see.) The Chicago Boys went on to sponsor economic policies in Uruguay (where President Juan María Bordaberry was installed after a 1973 CIA backed coup) and Brazil (then a military dictatorship since the 1964 coup), which were met with open arms by the wealthy elites of the countries. Another coup was thrown in Argentina and Chicago Boys held key economic roles in the new government. William Blum records similar US involvement in Nicaragua, Cuba, Vietnam, Bolivia and more in "Killing Hope." Any time a leader in a developing country chose to put his people's interests ahead of corporate interests, America was there to fight off the threat of communism. During this time it is estimated 100-150,000 prisoners were tortured, 10,000s of which were ultimately killed (Lisa Hajjar, "CIA: KUBARK’s Very Long Shadow".)

The rapid application of these neo liberal reforms caused dramatic shocks to the economies in which they were introduced, hence the term "shock doctrine" or "Economic shock". The comparison plays on the original purpose of shock therapy, which was intended by the CIA scientists to be a method of erasing and rewriting someone's personality through extremely traumatic procedures. Shock only worked in military dictatorships because it was too unpopular among the masses of ordinary people. In a democratic society, anyone who tried to implement these vulgar policies would be immediately vilified and impeached. Friedman himself denounced military dictatorships and, at least publicly, never saw any connection between his ideology and the cruel, South American fascism that supported it. Nixon, it seemed, was less naive and when it was time to run for reelection, had promised price controls to fight inflation. The problem of trying to implement neoliberal policies in a democratic country became apparent under the administration of Margaret Thatcher, in the UK. Thatcher promised to cut government spending, deregulate industry, cut tax rates (for the wealthy), and privatize government services. As inflation and unemployment rose, Thatcher's poll ratings dropped.

Things changed when Argentina invaded British territories known as the Falkland Islands. A small neo colony that most Britons had never heard of suddenly became the stage for a war that threatened the UK's very existence, somehow. This is where the now familiar pattern of media fear mongering, followed by people willingly surrendering their rights in exchange for a sense of safety was born, at least in its modern form. Economic hardships brought on by Thatcher's policies were considered to be the harsh realities of civilian life during times of war. In her new role as protector of the people, the Iron Lady enjoyed massive support from the very people she was squeezing dry. Thatcher busted the coal miner's strike and sold the public industries of steel, water, electricity, gas, telephone, air, oil, and public housing to her private industry cronies. CEO wages under Thatcher increased from 10x that of the average worker to 100x. Terrorism and mass paranoia was the missing ingredient needed to apply shock to democratic societies.

It wasn't until the Bush administration in 2000 that we would see the same story play out in America. Secretary of defense under George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, had declared war on the bureaucracy of the pentagon, claiming it was the last bastion of central planning and communism. The very next day after he gave that speech, 4 US airliners were hijacked and the world trade centers fell. 2,977 Americans died and somewhere between 6,000 and 25,000 were injured as a result. The US military, since 1991, maintained bases in Muslim holy lands, aided the expansion of Israel onto Muslim territories and imposed strict economic sanctions meant to starve Iraqis. Economic sanctions are often the first step in trying to influence foreign leaders to bend to US interests. The terrorist attacks on US soil were the ideal pretext for Rumfeld's military privatization. Rumsfeld couldn't literally privatize the pentagon, but he could encourage ongoing ties between the pentagon and private defense contractors, essentially reducing the pentagon's role to signing blank checks for private industries. On a completely unrelated note, the Pentagon has never passed an audit and every year it has billions of dollars unaccounted for.

Homeland security handed out $130 billion to private military contractors. We began bombing Afghanistan and taxpayer dollars went from the hands of the American public into the arms industry. Bush, who had previously held some of the lowest ratings of modern presidents, became one of the most popular presidents in recent memory. Techniques from the KUBARK Handbook were employed in Guantanamo Bay. Chaos, looting, and destruction of infrastructure were seen by US politicians of both parties as "opportunities for a clean start." Something that most people fail to appreciate is that the majority of USAID programs actually funnel money to American companies doing work in foreign countries and Afghanistan was no exception, save for the high degree to which this was accomplished.

The war was obviously not because "they hate our freedom." Neither was it about WMDs or nuclear missiles, reports of which have since been found fake and besides, had that been the true motive, we would have gone after Pakistan, which had developed nuclear missiles and had close ties with the Taliban. Our leaders, those elected in the public sector and those unelected in the private sector, saw the death of nearly 3000 Americans as a business opportunity. They capitalized on the crisis and used it to justify killing 176,000 Afghans, nearly 50,000 of which were civilians. This lasted through both Republican and Democratic administrations and whatever rhetoric was used, was actively supported by both parties. By the time we finally pulled out of the war in Afghanistan it had become the longest war in American history and the US spent approximately $2.3 trillion and that total is expected to be $6.5 trillion by 2050 after accumulated interest. We're told that we don't have the money for universal Healthcare, that we can't modernize our grid or our infrastructure, that we don't have the money to fund education, house the homeless, or public health services. As it should be obvious by now, this is a complete lie. There's no other way to look at it. If it were true, how is it that we can afford to consistently cut taxes for the wealthy? If we already can barely afford what pathetic services we have, surely we can't shrink our budget by collecting less in taxes.

"Opportunities for a clean start" aren't only limited to military disasters. In the wake of hurricane Katrina, 10,000s of the poor in New Orleans were left stranded. Politicians bragged that they had been meaning to clean up public housing and God had finally taken care of it for them. Corporate lobbyists came to the region looking to negotiate lower taxes, cheap labor, few regulations and the cheap real estate that was formerly public housing. The same contractors Homeland Security handed billions of dollars worth of taxpayer money to in Afghanistan were sent in to rebuild and provide security personnel. One contractor, Ashbritt, was awarded $500,000 to remove debris and they contracted the entire job out to another company. $5.2 million went to an organization known as Lighthouse Disaster Relief to build headquarters for emergency workers and only did as much as organize a youth camp for their church. These mismanagements of funds were the same as had happened in Afghanistan and Iraq. In these same years, congress had to cut $40 billion from the federal budget, including to welfare services, because, they claimed, they could not afford it.

In a 2022 paper, "Imperialist appropriation in the world economy: Drain from the global South through unequal exchange, 1990–2015" Jason Hickle finds that Western countries appropriate $10 trillion worth of resources from global south countries a year.  That same year, OxFam estimated that donations of $37 billion a year, for 8 years, could eradicate poverty below $1 a day. 8 x 37 billion is 296 billion. In other words, if we simply stopped exploiting poor countries, they could end poverty (at under $1 per day) in a single year and have over $9.5 trillion left over. Jason Hickle's book, "The Great Divide" covers how global organizations like the UN and the World Bank are constantly manipulating statistics to give the impression that inequality and poverty are on the decline. Even using arbitrary metrics and biased samples, almost all elimination in poverty disappears when we remove China from the data, which is coincidentally the only country that managed to evade neoliberal restructuring and, for the most part, colonialism. Many charity organizations have to avoid raising political issues because it will scare off their major donors, who benefit from the current economic system.

While it may seem like things are better now than they have ever been, this is only true for a shrinking proportion of the human population. Where it is true, it is only true because of an unimaginable exploitation that leaves billions starving and driven into perpetual slavery. As big business continues to destroy the environment and humanity lives in excess, our ability to right these wrongs is slowly becoming more unattainable. While it will always be true that no matter how bad things are, we can always stop them from getting worse, it is also true that we've been caught in a negative feedback loop that has forever sealed off the long forgotten times of our ancestors. What remains of the earth is increasingly becoming a wasteland where mindless zombies roam, slaughtering each other and feeding on irradiated flesh. However dramatic this sounds, the reality of our situation is far more dire. This world will one day be humanity's graveyard, extinction is not optional. How many more generations of still innocent beings are we going to subject to the cruelties of fate and human avarice before the inevitable finally comes to pass? Can we justify our sins in the hope that someday a technological messiah will put an end to evil? Is it not more likely that as humanity grows and as our power over the natural world increases, so too will our domination over the weak and the exploitation that inevitably results from it? What crimes of war do we have to perpetrate, how far beyond the point of no return must we drift, before we finally realize the true nature of humanity?