(Originally published on June 30, 2023) The Western world is fond to claim it wears the mantle of enlightened democracy while it seeks to spread, or impose, its gospel of free markets and voting rights, on other nations. Democracy, as we understand it, or define it, has, after all, paved the way to our own crumbling success.
But there is a tyranny in the West equal to the oppression found in the eastern authoritarian regimes. It’s called capital. Capital dictates the terms of our lives in ways not always obvious, but which definitely shapes our values, our relations with others, and virtually every other aspect of our lives. It requires a material return with no account of the spiritual, psychological, social, or environmental impact of its demands. The self-obsession and expansionary requisite of the capital order leads us to war.
We become unwitting mechanisms in the capital machine which requires the production of profits: to this we conform our ways in order to meet the profit making demand. There is little choice in the matter.
Capital imposed the conditions of our existence long before we were born, we did not vote for it, we seldom question it, capital rule seems to be the natural order of things.
Some will counter that capital authoritarianism has benefited us, as similarly claimed by the authoritarian rulers in Russia, China, the Middle East, North Africa, the east European states and elsewhere. They cling to this argument despite the rapid social collapse underway in most capital accommodating democratic western states.
Rule by capital has led to our state of economic and social decline. In the United States, capital demands a continued capital migration away from the U.S.’ Northern and Midwest regions, to the U.S.’ South, then to: Mexico, China, Indonesia and Vietnam.
The same has happened to industrial portions of the South but with a somewhat different path of capital exodus. It’s a process which has been going-on for nearly 50 years, during which we seem to have suffered a cultural decline.
This is fine for the recipient nations of fleeing capital, at least for the time capital resides within its geographic space, as people in these nations also want to feed and house their families, which they have struggled to do during the preparatory stage of capital development, when land is privatized among a select group which leaves those outside of this group, oftentimes, hungry and homeless.
As capital continues its non-stop quest for lower cost labor and resource markets, a necessity within its very structure, established labor and resource markets are abandoned, left in a wake of receding capital flows which destroy jobs, wages, property values, and creates the inherent social pathologies associated with such reductions in capital flows.
Democratically we seem unable to stop the capital exodus probably because capital also controls the corporate press which espouses the benefits of submission to the capital imposed social order, and we believe them.
Meanwhile, the working poor, probably, roughly, the bottom 40% of U.S. workers, are divided among conservative and liberals who point to the other as the cause of their social demise. This, the result of power struggles among the elite who divide-and-conquer the working classes, in order to develop the political base needed to advance their self centered objectives—well intended or not. The managers of capital are also victims in this greed based system which requires intensive efforts at self-preservation in a non-cooperative, very competitive, world.
Capital is a tough taskmaster. It requires maximum returns. Capital, an abstract concept, rules with an authority common to all gods: through coercion, fear, pain, and reward. . .. Its demands are not much subjected to democratic manipulation, but might be subject to democratic defeat; if we can find it within us to take control over that which currently controls us.