Some early capitalist theorists, such as Adam Smith, were curiously quiet about all of this, although they understood very well the need to remove all barriers to the recruitment of labour. Other influential writers of the time, such as William Temple, David Hume, Arthur Young and Joseph Townsend, openly extolled the marvellous benefits of hunger, poverty, taxation7 and the like8.
Impoverishment did not end with the pre-modern techniques of land-theft and economic deprivation. As capitalism got underway new methods of crippling people became available. Sophisticated forms of legal, ‘non-violent’ market transaction (capital flight, financial manipulation, speculation and investment) could reduce entire countries to dependent penury at a stroke. At the same time, the capitalist commodification and control of the material world gave way to the late-capitalist appropriation of immaterial cultural artefacts (such as ideas and songs), social spaces (via social media), the human genome, the electromagnetic spectrum and all the knowledge locked up in patents. This forced people to become dependent on the technology, energy, transport-systems, bureaucratic credentials, high-tech channels of information, ‘landlords’ of intellectual property and ‘consumer goods’ of the system, which further hobbled self-sufficiency and broke up traditional networks of mutual aid. While the impoverished pre-modern or third-world worker cannot grow food on his own land, raise his family in his own home or make his own clothes and furniture, the impoverished modern worker cannot use his feet to go where he needs to go — he needs a car — use his mouth to communicate with his fellows — he needs a phone — use his own intelligence and experience to propagate knowledge — he needs the correct qualification, or ‘a proven track-record’ in communications — or gain access to the artistic, scientific and cultural achievements of his fellows and forebears — he needs to pay patent and copyright owners. Now it is not just land that is owned by the wealthy, but every conceivable form of human capital. Every move we attempt to make outside the market forces us against the point of a spear which forces back into it.
In addition to wholesale appropriation of life, capital also developed powerful and subtle forms of propaganda and indoctrination which, through advertising, film, music, journalism and art, compelled people to put their faith in the modern system, to spurn ‘old-fashioned’ values, to ignore mass-theft and to embrace the work ethic. These had their roots in the earliest religion of capitalism; protestantism, but they reached new heights of psychological potency with techniques of persuasion developed by the new profession of journalism, designed to manufacture consent, and the new science of psychology, designed to tap into and exploit our desires.
For we are not just compelled into the market by external pressures, but internal addictions. The stick of planned obsolescence (soap that wears out in three days, washing machines that break ten minutes after the warranty runs out, operating systems that must be updated every year) drives us from behind and the carrot of perceived obsolescence (the ‘need’ to have the latest version, the newest style9) beckons us forward. From the beads, buckets, calico prints, firearms and hooch sold to pre-conquest people to tempt them into producing for the market, to the smartphones, luxury cars, electric blankets and box-sets that compel modern people into a need to earn and consume more; every step the market digs deeper into our addictive fears and desires; every conceivable weakness is exploited by capital, to draw us into the market. Whiskey-addicted speed-freak and closet psychopath? We’ve got just the thing, sir! Loquacious, luxury-addicted bimbo, who needs the constant validation of yearning stares from men? Step this way, madam!
We are now well out of primitive accumulation and into the ‘silent hand10’ that forces or compels us to consume the products of the market and sell our labour power to it for the credits to do so. Wage labour, as Michael Perelmen points out11, appears to be ‘a voluntary affair,’ and capitalists can ‘pretend that workers [are] willing partners in a mutually rewarding transaction’ because contrived measures to make people work, much less open violence, are now unnecessary. The impersonal market does it all automatically. There are no need for Orwellian techniques of control to keep us in place; the Huxleyan market forces us to keep ourselves in place. The explicit orders of the slave-owner have been replaced by the implicit compulsions of the contract ‘freely made’ between the worker and the employer. You are free to start your own company, grow your own food, walk to work, educate yourself, create free communities of mutual aid, work the land, do whatever you please. You’re free to do all these things… and yet, so few seem to want to, or be able to. Strange!
And there you have it, here we all are, living on the free, lawful, quiet, level-playing field of global democracy, a state of affairs called peace (and all military interventions employed to maintain it called defence). When capitalist academics (such as Stephen Pinker, Yuval Noah Harari and Rutgar Bregman), and the army of journalists employed to promote and normalise their ‘findings,’ make the claim that we have evolved from a war-like state of misery to a peaceful land of technological milk and honey,12 this is what they are referring to; a world of universal boredom, misery and poverty built on an ongoing history of exploitation, mass-theft and mass-murder, where clean, bloodless, pacifistic trade occurs in the highly visible centre fed by warfare, subjugation, private violence, extreme suffering and illegal drugs, arms and prostitution markets on the invisible periphery; and who but a communist, or a terrorist, or an enemy of democracy, could possibly object to this? Who but a madman even?
See Harold Pinter’s nobel prize acceptance speech.
‘The visual sign of the well-managed forest, in Germany and in the many settings where German scientific forestry took hold, came to be the regularity and neatness of its appearance. Forests might be inspected in much the same way as a commanding officer might review his troops on parade, and woe to the forest guard whose “beat” was not sufficiently trim or “dressed.”… The more uniform the forest, the greater the possibilities for centralized management…’ James C. Scott, Seeing like a State.
Prior to capitalism the principle means by which states augmented and consolidated their power was mass-enslavement and domestication.
‘Stop to consider how the so-called owners of the land got hold of it. They simply seized it by force, afterwards hiring lawyers to provide them with title-deeds. In the case of the enclosure of the common lands, which was going on from about 1600 to 1850, the land-grabbers did not even have the excuse of being foreign conquerors; they were quite frankly taking the heritage of their own countrymen, upon no sort of pretext except that they had the power to do so.’ George Orwell; although as James C. Scott explains, ‘lawyers’, in the form of land-surveyors, often preceded or circumvented the use of force. By codifying land tenure — freezing the shifting, fluid, and infinitely diverse customs which governed land-use in a traditional society into static and ‘simplified’ laws of ownership — land could, and still can, be effectively — legally — stolen without calling in the heavies (ibid).
Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origins of Capitalism.
Marx summarises; ‘The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signaled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation.’
Taxation, in its purest form means stealing money-power from people. In its modern form it means stealing money-power from people, and then returning a small amount of that into an institutionalised, professionally-dominated system of education, health and transport. In both cases if you refuse the benevolent gift of taxation, your possessions are confiscated and you are put into a little cage.
Michael Perelman, The Invention of Capitalism.
A ‘need’ incidentally which fuels a significant part of the entire late-capitalist project, which founders upon the actual — and reasonable — needs of people, which can be met. This is why so much attention is paid to enhancing the symbolic value of goods; their coolness, sexiness, exclusivity and other incitements to unreasonable demand, which can never be satisfied.
In Adam Smith’s creepy imagery.
Ibid.
For demolition of Pinker’s fantasies, see R. Brian Ferguson’s Pinker’s List, Edward S. Herman and David Peterson’s Reality Denial, J. Lewis et.al, The Myth of Declining Violence, and Jeremy Lent, Steven Pinker’s Ideas are Fatally Flawed. See also my review of Bregman’s ‘Utopia for Realists.’
14. The Myth of the Law
The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose off the common
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from the goose.
The law demands that we atone
When we take things we do not own
But leaves the lords and ladies fine
Who takes things that are yours and mine.
The poor and wretched don’t escape
If they conspire the law to break;
This must be so but they endure
Those who conspire to make the law.
The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
And geese will still a common lack
Till they go and steal it back.
Anon
The purpose of the law is to prevent individual and collective intelligence, to justify elite theft, to pacify ordinary people and exclude them from power · · · These are all secondary to the essential purpose of law, which is to fix men and women into a written system of measurement, management and control · · · The law thereby creates the problems it is supposed to control.
The first purpose of the law is to extinguish intelligence. ‘Intelligence,’ in this case, means awareness of or sensitivity to the context and capacity to respond to it spontaneously or appropriately; which is to say justly. Justice is a threat and embarrassment to the law and to those who possess the class power — usually enshrined in property — that the law is designed to protect (see myth 4).
The law works by rigidly defining acts which are undesirable to power; theft, for example, murder, harassment or criticism, and then punishing all those without power who are deemed to fit the definition of wrongdoer. The outrageous injustice of this behaviour is masked by the fact that, just as a ‘stopped clock tells the right time twice a day,’ so the law occasionally defines and punishes powerful thieves, murderers, slanderers and liars. Should that same definition ever be applied to the class of thieves, murderers, monsters and machines who own and manage the world, it is immediately dispensed with or, through a legal system weighted in favour of such power, circumvented. Individual fraudsters and fiends are occasionally targeted and, with much media hoop-la, made an example of, in order to deflect attention away from the monstrous vice and pitiless iniquity of the owner and management class1 as a whole which, conveniently enough, can’t fit into the dock.
Professional law appeared at the same time and the same place as money (see myth 2), democracy (see myth 16) and professional science (see myth 23). All four work together to obliterate responsibility by ruling out, from moment one, context and consciousness, neither of which can possibly be admitted into either the bank, the diet, the laboratory or the law court. What is happening, and why, are inexplicable noise to the financial, political, scientific and legal mind, which can only see (and record2) descriptions, facts, theories, ideas and objects.
