His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
Walter Benjamin
Progress means a more comfortable decline · · · Advanced technology may comfort us for a time, but it always ends up crippling, exhausting, confusing, stupefying and enslaving us. We have now progressed to the point where human beings are redundant · · · Progress is entirely rational. Any call to reverse ‘growth,’ decrease our ‘standards of living,’ stop working or slow down sounds irrational, and therefore insane.
We are told that there is no progress without the system and that the system leads to innovation, efficiency, convenience and rising standards of living. This is why the poor old feudal peasant runs into the arms of the modern factory, and why turning away from capitalism would necessarily lead to Cholera, tb, the Bubonic Plague, forty-five hellish years behind a plough or brutalist architecture and Ladas.
Turning again to the real world we have progressed our way into a culture with all the durability and beauty of a flatpack, chipboard shed hastily erected on an asteroid that is hurtling into the sun. A shrinking minority, existing in a shrinking pleasure-bubble of artificial calm, can convince themselves and a few of their privileged employees that everything is fiiiiine, while a growing mass rapidly descend into an existential nightmare of schizoid horror.
Capitalism may be able to delay the coming annihilation of our ‘civilised’ systems for a few moments more by vastly inflating the value of assets owned by the hyperrich1 (official term: financialisation), gambling (official term: speculation), exponentially increasing usurious indebtedness2 (official term: extending credit), exploiting global labour to an unheard of extent (official term: outsourcing) and stealing from the poor (official term: austerity), but more and more people can feel that the shadow of death is descending on us all. With every terrorist strike, every horrendous famine, every punishing blow of nature’s fist, we feel the future-shocks ripple through us, and, as time goes on, more and more of us see these feelings for what they are: world dread.
Not that, over the past few thousand years, we haven’t discovered how to make a few things that can genuinely serve human beings — ploughs, printing presses, ball-bearings, morphine, galvanised rubber, tinned tomatoes and trumpets; but none of these things were brought to you by capitalism. It wasn’t capitalism, or any other ideological wing of the system, that built your house or produced your food, but nature and labour, the work of life and of ordinary people, upon which sits the swelling abscess of ownership and management, subordinating all activity to its own ceaseless, and, as the economy is now entirely dominated by speculation, financialisation and debt-bubbles, increasingly ephemeral ‘growth’.
‘Capitalism made your laptop,’ apparently. The dishonest fiction that a tiny class of exploiting owners is responsible for the work of nature and of labour, is not mentioned. The routine conflation of capitalism with production, by which the owners of land and labour — those people who use others to generate wealth — are always referred to as ‘producers’, cannot fit onto a car-sticker, or in a tweet. And the idea that perhaps we don’t need laptops, or the internet, cannot be heard outside of psychiatric hospitals.
Imagine if, using the technologies then available, the same efforts and resources had gone into giving the world what the internet and high powered personal computing now provide us with. Such a world might have a massively well-stocked library in every town connected, via an extremely efficient inter-loan service, to a national or international network (a slow one of course). Every town might have an equally well-stocked concert hall, with thousands of high quality instruments free to borrow, or use, or cheaply buy — and a veritable army of singing coaches, slap-bassists, barber-shop quartets, accompanists and music theorists hanging around. Each town might have easy access to three or four cinemas and a well-funded national film industry able to take all kinds of risks on new talent. We might have a postal service that collects and delivers five times a day. We might have improvised theatre groups, clay-pigeon shoots, playgrounds so fun adults use them, large areas of wilderness, local printing presses, a panoply of art studios, a veritable forest of vinyl and, strangest of all, actual social networks3.
Although returning to the world we recently left would need an unprecedented slackening of the capitalist imperative, and although it might not be capable of undoing the market, much less the system, completely, I put it to you that it would be a better place to live than the ‘connected’ virtual spaces which we are now forced to inhabit. The internet and high powered computing do not give us anything qualitatively new and they do not solve the problems of humanity. They solve the problems of the system.
The same can be said of cars, planes, high-speed rail, containerships, electric blankets, air-conditioning units, central heating, anti-depressants, power-brooms, lawnmowers, smart-phones, microwave ovens, professional toothbrushes, and supermax 3 elite razors; none of which we need and most of which have been a curse to humankind. As soon as a tool, or a network of tools, passes beyond a finite limit of complexity, power or speed, it ceases serving its users, who must expend more time, energy or attention in maintaining it, than they save through its use. Thus high-speed transport slows us down, labour-saving devices make us work harder, smart-phones make us more stupid, hospitals make us sicker (see myth 28), centralised agriculture enslaves us4, human skill gives way to, at best, operative competence and the closer the virtual world gets to reality, the more the real world becomes unreal.5
But even aside from what progress actually means in the world we actually live in, it is quite possible for ‘standards of living’ to rise while exploitation worsens. Standards of living rose during slavery6, Hitler’s Germany (which was why he was so popular) and Stalin’s Russia. ‘Rising standards of living’ doesn’t justify slavery, fascism and communism, yet is routinely presented as the reason why we must accept hyper-dependence on our disabling, monomaniacal, technocratic system.
The concept of ‘rising standards of living’ conceals a number of unspoken assumptions which never quite make it to the teevee. Could ‘higher standards of living’ end up obstructing or harming our physical health, mental well-being, conviviality, access to nature, autonomy or life-purpose? Can we live happily, well, with no rise in ‘standards of living’? Did pre-civilised people have a high standard of living? Have the nature of our ‘standards’ changed over time? Do the benefits of antibiotics, plastics, televisions, smartphones — or even alphabets, ploughs and optical lenses — outweigh the costs they inevitably conceal? Does a rising standard of living in one part of the world entail suffering elsewhere? Have we become ‘the tools of our tools’? Are human beings becoming superfluous to requirements? The answer to all of these questions is likely to be yes; but serious investigation of them is well off the agenda. We are progressing, the past was evil7 and that’s that.
Capital prefers to tell us only of the short, brutal lives lived by medieval peasants and pre-civilised tribes, and of the marvellous benefits of modern technology (particularly professional medicine8) which, it is continually asserted, saved us all from the pox. Somehow we never hear that pre-modern people had enormous amounts of free time, free access to common resources and a healthy attitude towards death, madness, work and nature, and we never hear that pre-civilised people were healthy, happy, long-lived and free and their societies egalitarian, non-coercive and peaceful, and we never hear of the impoverishment, sickness, stress, violence, inequality and seismic discontent that the agricultural and industrial ‘revolutions’ brought to men and women — unless the victims are those of official enemies. We hear one crude, brutalising narrative; that history is a ladder, that education is a ladder, that career is a ladder, that technology is a ladder, that knowledge is a ladder… and there is only one sane direction; up and up and up and up, infinitely. With every new rung we get a little more power or a little more dopamine, and a lot more dependence on the ladder which provides us with these things, which is why less or lower are greeted with such horror. Who but a madman would suggest less schooling? less energy? less speed? less education? less medicine? less technology? less growth? less money? less knowledge? A lower score!? The sane progress, develop, grow, build, learn, innovate and invest; they are forward-looking, forward-thinking and forever, and ever, in their own words, ‘going forward’.
The same can be said of cancers, which also put ‘progress’ above every other concern, but connecting the two is in the diabolic realm of the irrational, the childish and the ‘utopian’ for defenders of the system. Imagine though how a university educated cancer would justify its priorities to a healthy cell, even as it consumed the body it depends on for its existence.
Just as cancers are bound to the destruction of the body, so markets9 which run society are bound to the destruction of that society. First of all by rigidly controlling commodified land and labour (see myth 13), then, in the spirit-world of late-capitalist financialisation, transferring every aspect of nature and society into business concerns. Immense sums of financialised ‘easy money’ (easy for the rich, that is) incentivise the hyper-wealthy to invest in speculative, or rent earning, rather than productive, creative or convivial activities, to plunder state assets without having to worry about paying any kind of price for destroying the lives of the now helpless unrich and to engage in outrageous, stupendous, levels of fraud and corruption (money laundering, shadow banking, tax evasion, etc.). In order to deal with the chaos which results, markets attempt to eradicate all ‘non-rational’ elements in society; all dissent, all independence, all wilderness. The system, in other words, is bound to what we would now call ‘totalitarianism’ and ‘fascism’ (see myth 31). This is why the most rational supporters of the market immediately take up with ‘fascists’ as soon as they gain enough power, and why rational ‘liberals’ and ‘moderates’, after the initial uproar, end up uprooting their principles and, while complaining of being overwhelmed by public stupidity and the poor taste of megalomaniacs, toeing the line.
Likewise modern fascists and the far-right always criticise ‘the system,’10 while embodying its quintessence, which is why the system always does so marvellously well under dictatorships. Sure minorities are exterminated, dissidents vanished and the natural world reduced to dust, but these are all small prices to pay for stability, strength and progress.
Which is to say, printing money.
Which is to say, printing money.
The internet brought us two things which we didn’t have before, both of which, like so many ‘innovations’ of the system, were solutions to problems that the system itself created. The first was cheap video calls, which helped ameliorate — for the wealthy West — the destruction of local communities, and the second was access to independent, dissident and subversive media, the kind which, as the history of independent newspapers, radio and television demonstrates, the system itself destroyed or restricted.
Plants and animals were domesticated around 4,000 years before we became dependent on agriculture. The theory used to be that we domesticated grains because the environment had become less productive, there were more people to feed and anyway we preferred a sedentary life. Now it is clear that nomadic self-sufficiency had become more difficult and populations had exploded because we had become dependent on domestication, as we had become dependent on the tool ego before it and as we were to become dependent on every other complex tool or system since. See James C. Scott, Against the Grain.
‘[There is a] strange internal definition of ‘neutral,’ which is that a thing is ‘neutral’ if you can tell a story about how it can do good and another story about how it can do bad. When do we ever use this definition in real life? Do we say a serial killer is neutral because in addition to raping and killing women he pays taxes and is sometimes nice to people? If you work in a factory by day to learn how to sabotage it by night, are you neutral to that factory because you both help and hurt it? If my nation sells weapons to two other nations that are at war, so they will destroy each other and my nation will come out on top, does that count as neutral? Of course not! But these are the same kinds of ridiculous arguments people use to declare technologies neutral: Television is neutral because it not only makes us passive consumers of a uniform culture subject to central control, but it can transmit useful information. Dams are neutral because while they submerge ecosystems and block fish runs, they also make electricity. Even atomic bombs are neutral if we can think of some cockamamie story about doing good with them.’ Ran Prieur.
See George Fitzhugh for a robust defence of ‘rising standards of living’ under chattel slavery.
Except for that of our favourite empires.
Conveniently omitting the fact that changes in public health occur through changes in the environment and that where technology improves general health it is nearly always implemented despite the medical profession, not because of them.
Or any other self-informed system.
Or ‘the establishment’ or even sometimes ‘capitalism.’
13. The Myth of Peace
To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.
Calgacus, barbarian chieftain of the Caledonian Confederacy who fought the Roman army in AD 84, as recorded by Tacitus
The system depends on mass-murder, mass-slavery and mass-theft · · · Mass-murder, mass-slavery and mass-theft are not very popular, so they must concealed. This is done through ideological management; producing books, movies, magazines, academic papers, newspapers, laws and institutional structures in which the unbelievable violence that went and continue to go into making the system does not appear · · · There is, however, no need for the system to kill, enslave and steal as it did in the past, as people are trained to automatically hand over their labour, their intelligence and their love.
Capitalism was born through something like a gentleman’s agreement to put this damn silly feudal business behind us and start bloody-well knuckling down. The colonial massacre, enclosure, usury, criminalisation of poverty, curtailment of self-sufficiency, punishing taxation and despoliation that were necessary to impose the market system are illusions. They didn’t happen; and even while they were happening, they weren’t happening.1 There might be the occasional colonel who mysteriously makes his fortune before retiring to one of Jane Austin’s manor houses; there might be knowing talk of the ungrateful natives in the latest episode of ‘Victoria’ (‘what beastly racists those old fashioned types were!’) or a socialist in Downton Abbey; there might be the odd glance at our crimes in the paps, or some sad, sad accounts of the bad, bad factories of yesteryear (‘factories today? we don’t still have those, do we?’); or a suggestion that good old Churchill could be a bit of a rotter, or that we shouldn’t judge mass murderers of the past by today’s standards; or there might be a movie about the ‘tragedy’ of Vietnam or the ‘mistake’ of Iraq… but how the upper classes actually thought and behaved, what the English actually did in India, or the Americans in South East Asia, or why, or Churchill’s litany of horrendous crimes, or Kennedy’s, or Obama’s, or the structural necessity of a military-based market to invade resource rich countries, or how Israel has come to enclose Palestine in a massive prison camp; none of this makes good teevee. It’s too ‘simplistic’, too ‘angry’, a naive ‘caricature’ of a ‘complex’ past.
The official reasons for war are 1) compassion for the weak; to defend them against being bullied 2) to spread the good; democracy, civilisation, etc. 3) justice, law, or fighting the bad; terrorism, communism, ‘them’ 4) self-defence or security, and 5) honour, glory, love and, the all-time favourite, duty.
The actual reasons for war are 1) pouring money into the military-industrial economy, profitably using up its products and opening up new markets; which includes destroying everything so that it all needs to be rebuilt, controlling areas of strategic importance and stealing resources 2) annihilating the threat and embarrassment of a square millimetre of the globe being free of state control or private ownership 3) groupthink (attachment to the known) and groupfeel (fear of the unknown) 4) boredom, sadism and primal, egoic anxiety, and 5) eviscerating dissent at home by turning the nation into a police-state and restructuring society and nature2 so that they mimic an army barracks or a laboratory. Much the same reasons apply to work (see myth 21).
Because, firstly, the system cannot operate without constant warfare and, secondly, because it is not very popular, journalists, academics and other opinion shapers must continually drum up support for war by ignoring context, suppressing or denouncing dissent, distorting history, exaggerating threat, uncritically ‘reporting’ official pronouncements, eulogising ‘our heroic boys’ and their marvellous ‘team spirit,’ and normalising a military society. The horrendous systematic crimes of the system must be downplayed, glossed over or misrepresented, because to investigate them throws light on the purpose of warfare, along with the nature and origins of the capitalist phase of civilisation and the true source of its wealth and power.
Although elite wealth is sometimes augmented by people voluntarily leaving pre-capitalist societies, selling up their land or heading to the big city to rent themselves to industrial capital so as to gain money and independence from slave-owners and feudal gangs, the most common tactic by far for gaining control of land, resources and labour power was, and remains, straightforward mass-theft (also known, in Marxist literature, as ‘primitive accumulation’), the foundation of capitalism3.
Capitalism originated in massive centralisation of power in England, and the consequent need to commercialise land in order to extract taxable revenue from it, rather than through the previous tactic of plain extortion. Central power began to lease land for profit and appropriate surplus through property tax, rents and accessory tariffs and tolls on commerce, which compelled landowners, and their wealthy tenants, to steal more land from ordinary people (‘enclosure4’), steal people to work it (‘employment’), steal the products they produced (‘profit’) and develop techniques to augment this production (‘industrialisation’). An entire country — everything living within it — thus compelled to produce for profit and consume from the market — transformed into things to be grown, harvested, refined, transported, packaged, sold and consumed — inevitably led to extraordinary suffering, massive over-production, depletion of resources and unheard of financial power for the new wealth-generating class of centralised industrialists, which in turn led to both the power and the necessity to subjugate domestic peoples, expand markets into (i.e. steal resources from) overseas territories, and go to war with competing nations which, in order to keep up with England, all had to do the same.5
For the most part stealing land and labour has been a straightforward case of simply taking it; what we might call direct mass-theft. The earliest ancestors of the noble families of Europe initially gained their power in this way, taking (or ‘clearing’) the land of their own country’s peoples, and then, during ‘the great work of subjugation and conquest,6’ taking that inhabited or used by other peoples, a practice which has continued for hundreds of years and continues, in various forms, today; in Brazil, Ethiopia, Papua New Guinea and elsewhere.
Direct mass-theft however is, wherever possible, avoided. It’s unpleasant work, exhausting and it’s just not good for business to have blood dripping from your hands. In earlier days, at the ‘rosy dawn’ of capitalism, such crude tactics were necessary, as they still are in many parts of the world. Land cannot be compelled or tempted; it must be simply taken; or ‘privatised’ into ownership by forcibly establishing private-property rights and then buying it all up. Labour, on the other hand, is another matter. While pre-capitalist and Orwellian states enslave and press-gang their people, capitalist mass-thieves have always understood that to gain control of people it is vital, not to mention easier, to use indirect mass-theft; impoverishment (the stick) and addiction (the carrot).
Techniques of pre-modern impoverishment included, and still include, usury, taxation, raising prices on food, capitalising on disasters and enacting laws that curtail self-sufficiency (that make it illegal for people to collect firewood, hunt, ‘poach’ and mill their own flower) and vagrancy (along with taboos against ‘lolling’, ‘idling’ and so on), all of which combine to force people into a state of dependency on the owners of capital and the issuers of money. With no land or access to it, unable to buy the necessities of life, or make them, forced into debt and compelled to give away what little they do have, men and women become poor and hungry, the prerequisites for wage slavery and indentured servitude.
