Hey friends, just trying to get an idea of how people think of capitalism in different communities. What first comes to mind when you think of that word? Is it your national or international retail giants, resource extraction, or logistics companies? Or perhaps your local diner, hardware or convenience store? The black market? Or something else?
Rape.
It is rape, in every possible sense, in many different contexts or layers of complexity.
Coercive, forceful and subtle, manipulative and brash, extraction and destruction, that gaslights and lies and normalizes itself.
It never asks for consent, it either assumes it or demands it, and escaping it is often quite difficult and very risky to attempt.
But it rapes everything.
The land, the environment, people’s bodies and minds and their time and their thoughts, language itself, etc.
The more technical details of how and why this metaphor is apt… the various aspects of complexities of different systems or aspects of subsystems… at the end of the day, the nature or character common to any specific instance of capitalism is that of a rapist.
When I used to call capitalism and colonialism rapacious I got a lot of finger-wagging and handwringing from people calling themselves leftists… so I guess this means progress?
Maybe in five years’ time we could get leftists to actually start referring to capitalists as parasites.
Those kinds of ‘leftists’ largely turned out to be an idpol flavor of shitlib, in at least my personal experience.
They really just wanted rainbow capitalism with approximately 25% more welfare state.
Ask any of those people, back then, to attempt to formulate a political strategy that… you know, might actually achieve that?
They either got offended by the question, or their answer was somewhere between ‘just keep raising awareness (via wholly corporately owned communication platforms)’ and ‘manifesting’.
Wow, this is easily the most extreme response I’ve received on the topic. What led you to feel this way?
There is no response extreme enough when it comes to this topic.
I have degrees in both econ and poli sci and have worked at multiple Fortune 500 companies as a high level data analyst / software dev / db admin.
I got those degrees during the GWOT and GFC, and argued against bailouts without jailing those responsible…
…and got called a conspiracy theorist by a Poli Sci professor when I wrote a paper on ‘conflict goods’ about the US military guarding opium fields in Afghanistan.
Despite me citing my sources and even linking to an on the ground Fox News interview with a soldier who just straight up said that is what his unit was doing.
I also have studied the history of the industries I worked in, as well as just human history in general, in my spare time.
… I have also been homeless for a year or two.
I have lived a life of the extremes most people only ever come close to one of, stuffy and cocky corpo wealth and entitlement and social status jockeying mind games, and immense deprivation, near constant direct physical and mental trauma.
But if you would like maybe a more formal argument that capitalism objectively is raping the planet to death:
Here’s London’s Society of Actuaries, they’ve run the numbers and determined that our capitalism-driven, collective inability to stop climate change…
… is going to destroy the world, and thus future GDP projections.
https://actuaries.org.uk/media-release/current-climate-policies-risk-catastrophic-societal-and-economic-impacts/
My own guesstimate models point at something like 1 to 3 billion people dying in the next 25 years from the chaos that will result from increasingly extreme climate and climate disasters.
But those are roughly in line with more updated versions of MIT’s old World 3 / Limits to Growth model.
tl:dr;
Why do I feel this extreme way?
Because I know what I am talking about, theoretically, practically and personally.
Thanks for the write up my friend. Was that Fox news report with Geraldo Rivera? I remember seeing something like that back in the early or mid 2000s. I couldn’t believe my eyes.
I… don’t remember if it was Geraldo.
I want to say it was a less well known reporter, who actually made the trek all the way out to… I think Helmand Province (sp?)?
But… yeah.
That was almost 20 years ago now lol.
Found it, fucking wild - https://youtu.be/AUATfLDiwVA
I still can’t believe it. I’m watching it and it feels like I’m currently experiencing a fever dream.
Same here bud… its all gone so utterly, thoroughly wrong.
But hey, nice work finding that!
The Marines weren’t ordered to protect the poppy fields, they were ordered to not destroy them. Big difference
Most of the Afghanistan vets who I’ve heard talk about this doesn’t seem to place much importance on that distinction.
Thank you for putting to words what I’ve been feeling for a while.