“They refused to listen, and did not remember
the wonders you performed among them.
They became stiff necked, and in their rebellion
they appointed a leader to return to their slavery in Egypt.”
Nehemiah 9:17 430 BC
When President Nixon removed the burden of gold from backing greenbacks in 1971, a ginormous tsunami of fiat money circled the planet. Today’s small business, entrepreneurial pursuers of higher income are held up as the friendly face of free market capitalism. They are dories on a deep ocean of wealth that sloshes around the planet, seeking resources to scour bare. When that beast’s mask sheds periodically, those boats are splintered in the backwash.
Two hundred plus years after his birth, I salute Karl Marx as a burning prophet of a new age. Simply mentioning capitalism, much less trying to define it, triggers a reflexive charge from converted captives of being an ungrateful beneficiary of its fruits. Scolded as an addled proponent of totalitarian socialist forms of political exploitation. Suspected of darker motives than economic justice, tarred by the same brush as Stalin and Mao, Lenin and Castro, Marcuse and Che.
Contrary to popular belief, Marx did not create communism, but after he joined the Communist League in 1846 he transformed a hole in the corner conspiracy club into an organization for spreading the new religion of communist principles to the workers. He wrote The Communist Manifesto with Friedrich Engels in 1847, which shook the world with ongoing aftershocks to this day. In a document not much longer than The Declaration of Independence of 1776, they described how the property owning class or bourgeois used the production of the working class or proletariats to transform feudalism and serfdom.
Estate owners of slaves were replaced by factories filled with wage slaves using concentrated capital, industries securing loans from fractional reserve lending banks charging compound interest, insurance backing it all with a twist. Capitalists investing in corporations was legally protected theft. Communists called artisans and shopkeepers the petit bourgeois because their precarious livelihoods were dependent on supplying the rich, or fleecing the poor.
At that time, industrial capitalism was virtually enslaving domestic workers and literally enslaving conquered colonies to extract surplus value from their land and labor. Using their stolen wealth to revolutionize production through the development of industrial machines, profits increased exponentially, and changed everything about society except the living quality of nine-tenths of the population.
“But their most revolutionary production was the production of the working class, whose very conditions of existence compel it to abolish the entire system.” Marx’s rallying cry, our “ends are only attainable through the violent overthrow of all existing conditions of society. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Proletarians of all countries unite!” reverberated around the world, terrifying the ancient and new aristocracy.
In his later books, Marx described the rise of merchants and lords accumulating capital from the late 1400’s into the 1700’s by robbery, enslavement and outright seizure of property. Capitalist economists euphemistically refer to this as primary accumulation. Marx called it forced dissolution, with the enclosures of commons and theft of peasant holdings by the “gallows, pillory and whip.” Capitalists “re-enslaved” women, reducing them to unpaid domestic labor or lower paid workers. The men were subdued through “extirpation, enslavement, and entombment in mines.”
Marx called the merchant class, “a vampire that sucks out [peasants] blood and brains and throws them into the alchemistic cauldron of capital. Whole series of plundering parasites insinuate themselves between the actual employer and the worker he employs.” Peasants were reduced to selling their labor or their bodies, nature was reduced to a “free gift to capital”, both abused at will. And these were their own people and countries. There were no rules when barbarians and New Worlds were discovered.
The rapid ballooning of capital emerged, “dripping from head to toe, from every pore with blood and dirt.” It was served by violent theft, commercialized soil, enslaved peoples in colonies, amassed by corporations which could live forever and shelter its owners from legal or moral responsibility.
When the limits of human labor slowed the growth of profits, wealth metamorphosed into new forms, as industrial innovations added excess value, magnitudes greater than agricultural abundance. The systematic exploitation of labor and efficiency of production extracted maximum profits, with externalized costs borne by all from eroded societies and their common wealth.
Marx claimed that the historic arc of capitalism had already reached its descending form in Europe in his time. He meant markets were captured by monopoly profits, with a stagnation in corporate accumulation, (compared to conquest and industrial capitalism) so the reigning oligarchs had shifted back towards monopolized profit from concentrated theft, coercive and legal. Mark Twain called the unfolding of this early hypercapitalism in the United States, The Gilded Age.
On his death in 1883, Marx’s works were called a “splendid failure” by the Daily Alta California, because “nationality was a vital principle that swayed the world with a thousand times more power than the social philosophy of Marx.” Nationalism would become the bulwark of capitalism, resisting working class revolts or revelations. Increasingly deadly world wars and regional rivalries followed.
Marx’s prophetic call for international working class unity was drowned out by the sirens of military/state leaders trumpeted by increasingly influential newspapers, then through electromagnetic frequencies to reach the masses, all owned or giving voice to the ruling classes guiding popular opinions. Nationalism spawned new tribes requiring unprecedented armaments to defend against internal and external threats.
Industrial innovation developed from military needs, feeding improved technology back into society as consumer capitalism grew stronger in the 20th century, fed by financial capitalism requiring expanding markets for unceasing growth. This Information Age of a digital economy is a Hall of Mirrors, disguising the misery and fear that it thrives on.
Nature was reduced to a ‘free gift to capital’ from the beginnings, abused at will with no resistance, a slave. Commercialized soil, clear cut forests, overgrazed lands, poisoned waterways and air define the logic of the system. The costs of accumulating wealth from environmental destruction are borne by people, their social relations and the web of ecology.
In its maturity, capital developed more efficient means of Industrial Production than slavery, using “formally free labor.” The new peasants, wage workers paid for their own food, medicines, shelter and clothing or took on debt from the company store. The non-monetized support web that sustains a poor workforce is taken for free like nature.
Hegel boldly asserted the “absolute right of appropriation which man has over all things, without which existence is impossible. Property is nothing but the right of such appropriation.” John Locke described private property emerging out of a state of nature in isolation from society, a ‘gratuitous gift”, where all men had consented to the claiming of property by a few.
David Hume admitted in 1741, “The soldan of Egypt or the emperor of Rome might drive his harmless subjects like brute beasts against their sentiments and inclination, but he must have led his marmalukes or praetorian guards like men, by their opinion.” The police state must reward its armed forces. It claims sole right to violence and coercion.
Ayn Rand wrote “the masses are mud to be ground under foot, fuel to be burned for those who deserve it.” She was eager to sacrifice millions for the sake of “those few who are best” in We the Living, her 1936 book.
There have been many unheeded prophets visioning a transformation of capitalism in its exalted lust for profits. The Mill Girls declaration of 1845. “Those who work in the mills ought to own them, not have the status of machines ruled by private despots entrenching monarchic principles on democratic soil as they drive downwards freedom and rights, civilization, health, morals and intellectuality in the new commercial feudalism.”
John Dewey in 1930, “It would be ludicrous to believe that an appeal to the unregulated activities of those who have got us into the present crisis will get us out of it. The magic involved in the belief that those who have privilege and power will remedy the breakdown they have created is immense. As long as politics is the shadow cast on society by big business, the only remedy is new political action based on social interests and realities.”
Franklin Delano Roosevelt told Americans during the Great Depression. “The test of our prosperity is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much, it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”
Martin Luther King, Jr. preached in the 1960’s, “When you begin to ask why there are so many poor people in the world’s wealthiest country, then you begin to question the capitalistic economy. We are called up to help the beggars in life’s marketplace. We must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars, needs restructuring.”
Corporate capitalists have fought back both openly and covertly. They hold all the cards, and command the table with house odds. Edward Bernays infamously wrote in1928, “Those who manipulate the organized habits and opinions of the masses constitute an invisible government, which is the true ruling power of our country. Is this government by propaganda? Call it if you prefer government by education to regiment a vast, heterogenous mass of voters to clear understanding of important issues.”
Understand, boys and girls?