What is religion? It is impossible to define divested entirely of the concept of belief. The more apposite the word “religion” in any context will impart or insinuate a special and lasting intensity of belief. And the most intense belief is surely that which is steadfastly acted upon. Look at what we do every day of our lives and do out of a firm belief, and there you have religion most manifest. Usually we don’t call it by that name, because the candid description is unflattering: we’re routine worshippers of sport, music, literature, art, dalliance, desire, money, ego, etc., and we never want to admit it. Verily, the great majority of us, unbeknownst even to ourselves, worship at the conceit-altar of material gain. Our principal god is money.
It is taken as an article of faith by pseudo-scholars like me that back in 1776, when Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence and therein referenced three “inalienable rights,” he initially included property – “…life, liberty, and property.” While the first two survived the final draft of the historical arch-document, property was eventually nixed and replaced by something that had no discernable relationship to property – a vacuous and platitudinous “pursuit of happiness.”
That very same year, the Briton Adam Smith published his Wealth of Nations (An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations). It is the bible of capitalism. As part of my researches for this writing, and after I’d typed in that Smith’s work was “the bible of capitalism,” I Googled “What book might be called ‘the bible of capitalism?’” The results were precisely what I’d suspected: the first three matches referenced Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, while the next several listings referred to the Judeo-Christian bible itself.
The Declaration sought to establish a new and “independent” political entity, the United States of America. And the United States designed for itself, from the outset, an inuring legal protection of all that might fall within the scope of that familiar macro-taxon “private property.” It makes perfect sense that if the elite and prosperous political powers of that age of Experiment had the opportunity to enshrine property in their laws and declarations, they’d do it. They had every reason to. These were virtually all exceptionally wealthy landowners. It was never any secret that these men were members of the literati and the economic elite of their time. What the American Founders set up was, of course, a political system. But read perspicuously between the lines and appreciate the implications of their political persuasions, and you can see the beginnings of an economic system too. America gave birth to modern democracy and democracy promptly begat capitalism.
Before proceeding further, let us return to Jefferson and that unsettling word that had to be changed – or more accurately deleted. What happened in the spring of 1776, when the learned Virginian ended up deleting a term so obviously precious to his personal values? Thomas Jefferson grew to adulthood in a society where slavery was taken as normal and natural: the white was born categorically superior to the black, and that was that. But Jefferson was a kind of intellectual in his day, extremely well read and with a fascination, it seems, for all things artistic, literary, scientific and philosophical. It is not surprising then that he suffered serious misgivings about slavery – hence the unsettling semantic in ‘property’. Nonetheless, in his prosperous adult years he himself owned dozens of slaves. It is easy to deduce that “property”, as it was axiomatic that it applied to the iniquitous institution too, was difficult for this unwholesome association. Jefferson needed his Declaration to be compelling and non-hypocritical in its condemning judgment of the British monarchy, and any allusion to slavery in the English colonies – inured in the locus from which Jefferson animated his quill – however slight or implied, would diminish the righteous force of the whole document. The Declaration had to be morally suasive; it needed to pretend slavery did not exist, and this is precisely what it did. Note that, although slavery and slaves were a major reality at the time of writing the Declaration and the Constitution, neither makes reference to slavery directly. Even when a political sticking point – the counting of slaves among the politically represented “population”, thus a matter concerning greater political power – the Constitution makes reference only to “other persons.” It is obvious to modernity that the Founders had no intention of confessing their evil in any lasting legal document.
The Constitution’s silence rings a cacophonous indictment that echoes through all later ages, even after slavery was destroyed. Capitalism was silent on the matter of slavery because slavery is a moral offense and capitalism has no forthright, articulable relationship to morality, and it was this distance from morality that made it politically awkward. Capitalism is a purely economic doctrine, and its core principle is the inviolability or virtual inviolability (inviolability in principle) of private property. Capitalist doctrines have no opinions whatever on what the span of property and the practice of trade might include, no matter how despicable, no matter how odious, detracting and reproachful. Capitalism was born, and is, fundamentally nescient toward moral questions.
When I took economics courses in college, I recall being surprised at how economics viewed the human person so indifferently, with such callous disregard; the person, in the capitalist scheme, was only a speck of nothing with no accounting of it at all until it was massive – hundreds or thousands of workers – and then those animals, aggregated, were called “labor” by the insouciant discipline.
Though it may abuse us, we play along. And we play along for observable, articulable reasons.
We all need to confess that we are, regardless of our want of innocence, abettors in capitalist inculpation, sycophantic players in an overweening and irresistibly manipulative culture of selfishness, waste, inequality and exploitation. I presently recall a conversation I had with my grandmother around 1978 at her home in Westminster California. I had just discovered that the upscale mobile home community where she lived was racially discriminatory; she had asked “permission” to have an African American close friend stay with her for a while. (Her request was assented to.) My grandmother witnessed my ire at the outrage, and she became extremely defensive. She was obviously ashamed of cooperating with something so despicable, and she angrily rejoined that she “did not make the rules.” That sort of irate defensiveness is exactly what one might expect if any American in the United States spoke or wrote words straightforwardly disparaging of capitalism. Americans are so beholden to the “economic side” of life that they are commonly upset at the mere discussion of wrongs or shortcomings of capitalism as it plays out. I do not here propose or even hint at any special superiority of another unlike or contrasting economic doctrine, but only to illuminate the widespread and enduring faults in capitalist dynamics. (And my contempt for communism, by the way, is far greater!)
We Americans are all abettors. We become thus consequent to the continuing threat of subjection and suffering that follow from any sustained unwillingness to play the capitalist game. H.D. Thoreau’s was an extremely rare case where he felt such a strong dissenting impulse but had no ready way to remove himself from the corrupt political and economic system short of virtually exiling himself from a nation that unconscionably supported slavery. A close friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson, swayed by Thoreau’s sincerity, allowed Henry the continuing use of a small cabin in a wilderness a few dozen miles from Boston, at a place called Walden Pond. Thoreau lived there in isolation and demonstrable dissent, remarkably, for five years.
But far over 99% of us, regardless of our claims, opt to play the less difficult game of abetting. Life in a capitalist culture is unceasing pressure to play along. You’ll quickly suffer the tortures of ostracism and privation if you don’t.
Many years ago, I lived in a small house in a suburban town on Long Island, New York, about forty miles from New York City. The house had a substantial yard surrounding it. There, I had to deal with several dismaying occurrences where the trash, kept outside in a secluded area next to the house, was strewn around the lawn by the visit of some nocturnal animal(s). Eventually, I developed strategies for keeping the trashcan secured in place and the lid firmly fixed thereupon. But one day, about a week after my clever bungee-implementing strategy had been employed, I noticed a large gouge in the plastic lid. An opossum, cat, dog, squirrel, or some other toothy animal had gnawed into the lid for what may have been hours, and without apparent success (unless it were as tiny as a mouse, in which case it could’ve gone through that hole that was only about an inch wide). The animal did this obviously in an effort to relieve the physical pain in its belly. In the moments after that witness, I felt palpably greater sympathy for the experience of almost all animals all over the world.
I’ve lived my life without ever experiencing actual pangs of hunger; I come from a wealthy society of abundance, and we simply eat when we’re “hungry” and always satisfy ourselves long before anything like pangs arrive. But it is not this way with animals in the wild. They have no stores to venture into, no money, no bartering talents to use to obtain what they need. Hence, they are victims in an unrelenting existential torment. And they have not even the avenue of effectual dissent by suicide if they find their predicament insufferable. Almost all animals know not the wily craft of self-extermination, and, beyond unlikely fortuity, their agonies are never completely removed.
Capitalism functions the very same way. We are daily offered the option to play along in the economic order or quickly suffer the consequences. Much like the addict at his slot machine, our efforts pay off just frequently enough to keep us (metaphorically) there in front of the baiting bandit, expectantly pulling the play along lever.
If you want to conscientiously serve a communal, all life value, and not yourself alone, you’ll be effectually tortured by a culture – not unlike that of the jungle – that insists you attend only to “Number One.”
Peruse any high school history textbook and you’ll see steam ships, gold rushes, factories, wars and railroads. What is treated therein lightly and with repeated euphemisms is the disrespect capitalism has shown toward the human person. We’re only labor to capitalism, and it respects our humanity no more mindfully than Siri does. The slave of old combines in capitalist exploit with the ‘labor’ of the present, and we then have the contemporary tantamount slave labor of sweatshops in third world nations, as well as other teeming masses eager for the crumbs of the capitalist world. A dollar an hour is better than nothing, it is commonly asserted. But what have we sunken to when rank nothing is the standard we self-servingly and self-assuredly measure our capitalist enterprise against?
It seems utterly fair that if we’re going to blame the Communist USSR for it’s “communist” deeds, and we’re likewise going to blame North Korea and China for their “communist” deeds – as we surely are – we ought to take a fair accounting of what capitalist nations have done in the last 150 years. In the decades immediately following the American Civil War and the destruction of slavery, what were the methods and agendas of capitalism? What did capitalism do? Let us be fair; let us treat capitalism widely, in its global manifestation, for this is the manner in which we’ve appraised and condemned communism.
The French, British, Belgians and Germans took their technological advantages to all the corners of the globe, and killed and maimed untold thousands (indeed, surely millions!) in their colonization efforts. These Western capitalists pointed their maxim guns and their bayonets at peoples in Africa and South Asia because Latin America had already been afforded a hands-off status by the Monroe Doctrine of the early 19th century. This does not diminish the wrongs done to millions of human beings by Europeans eager to exploit native peoples and their lands.
A horrible victimization of children occurred under the auspices of capitalist enterprise too. Between 1865 and 1910 literally millions of children in the United States and in Europe were exploited for their labor. Additionally, so obliged to moneyed interests was the West that thousands of people died every year from spoiled food and faulty medicines and snake oil treatments. It wasn’t until the president of the United States, Teddy Roosevelt, had his sausage breakfast rudely intruded upon by Upton Sinclair’s prose in The Jungle that the U.S. took decisive action to stop money-hounding enterprises from selling things (nameless here, in the interest of tact) harmful to them. This was the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act. It was a political act aimed at stopping one of an infinite number of capitalist abuses.
And there is also the story of a coal mining labor dispute during Teddy Roosevelt’s term as president. The capitalists – not unlike the Wal-Mart of today – including J.P. Morgan, were recalcitrantly against recognizing any labor union. The labor unions took the crumbs that they could, and exploitation continued.
Abuses continue to the present day. Capitalism does not readily assent to financial losses. Very recently, the president of the United States stated frankly to the press – too frankly, actually – that the government of Saudi Arabia would not pay any substantial price for dealing in wanton murder of one or more journalists. This was consequent to the famous Jamal Khashoggi incident of October 2018. The American president made clear to everyone in the world that the United States would not take action against murderousness if that same offense conflicted with American economic interests.
Communist China is a nation without human rights. It is properly categorized by Freedom House as “not free.” Yet countless hundreds of millions of iPhones are gleefully manufactured in Communist China by capitalist enterprises beholden to the impassive optimization of “shareholder value.” Capitalist doctrine does not care at all how much blood and abuse and insult has gone into the production, but only what corporations and their “labor” produce, and the profits obtained.
Today, as I am writing this blog post, I had a large desk system delivered to my home on Long Island, New York. It was purchased from Costco. It was raining when the delivery truck arrived. The “delivery” of several extremely heavy boxes, some far over 100 pounds in weight, consisted of the driver dropping the pallet off at the curb, right there in the rain. The delivery procedure and administrator-approved completion of the purchase process – the “delivery” – did not enquire, and does not care, whether the recipient is elderly and feeble and thus unable to venture, as a regular 20 year-old man might, outside in the rain and haul the boxes indoors with his youthful strength. I signed for the boxes without complaint, as I am not an argumentative person, and then spent nearly an hour struggling with boxes far too heavy for one human being to handle. Why did this happen? Answering that question is not difficult. It happened because full, competent, respectful, aware, considerate delivery would require two workers – as some of the boxes cannot be safely and sensibly carried by a single worker.
Why the chintzy policy?
It is because capitalism begrudges any respect that does not immediately improve the bottom line. My experience is the daily experience of countless millions all over the world! If a million people died miserably because of a capitalist corporation’s policy, and that corporation took account of the factor previously, it would only have been a matter of legal and PR fallout, not anything resembling decency, honor, or morality.
I recall an episode when I was young and interviewed for a driving job in Southern California in the early 1980s. The interviewer confessed – obviously honestly – that he expected his drivers to proceed on the highways at a speed of at least 60 miles per hour, when he knew the speed limit was 55. When I asked him if the company intended to pay the speeding tickets that might result from this speeding expectation of the drivers, he said “no”, they had no intention of doing anything reasonable or honorable that could be legally avoided (or that they figured they might likely get away with).
Was capitalism at all blamable for the exploitation of factory workers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? Did capitalism play a part in the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911? Were the Anglo-French Opium Wars of the late nineteenth century essentially capitalist (conducted in response to capitalist economic interest)? Was the Great Depression brought on by the mistakes and ignorance of capitalist economics? Were the German Nazis of the early twentieth century capitalist? (Hint: they weren’t communist.) Was the Savings and Loan Scandal of the 1980s and 1990s, where $160 billion was lost due to players’ irresponsible and self-serving conduct, an outcome of capitalist enterprise? When, in early 1961, Dwight Eisenhower warned his nation about a worrisome military-industrial complex that might incline the nation to wars in an effort to produce profits for a section of the American economy, was his concern related to capitalism? With the Great Recession of circa 2008-09, where the “unemployment rate” rose sharply to over ten percent and suicides increased, we saw the misdeeds of money interests in the housing, banking, and mortgage industries. What does this say about capitalism? In very recent years, the fossil fuel industries have lobbied intensively for the United States government to halt any initiatives aimed at reducing greenhouse gasses that would simultaneously (certainly) impact the immediate profitability of huge multinationals such as BP, Exxon-Mobil and Chevron. They have been successful in getting their candidate elected president of the United States in 2016, successful in their support of House candidates and Senate candidates in 2016 and 2018. Their lobbyists have been successful! Note that the corporations that extract oil and coal and natural gas are all well familiar with the science which explains where these originate; they understand evolution fully. But they have strange political bedfellows in the ‘religious’ right that disparages evolution science utterly. This is no problem at all for the fuel industries. They have no qualm whatever if tens of millions of American support policies that collect to form a hopelessness for generations future. Theirs is financial gain above all else, and if the United States itself is dissolved, and the whole earth destroyed, it is nothing to them, so long as their calculus estimates that they’ll personally be dead by then. Dollars got now is all that matters.
Was corrupt Bernie Madoff a capitalist? Was Theranos founder and scoundrel Elizabeth Holmes a capitalist? More to the point, was the capitalist ethic – profit above all, profit only – integral to their misdeeds? The American industrialist Henry Ford doubled his factory employees’ wages from $2.40 per day to $5.00 per day in January of 1914. But, although this seems like an obviously magnanimous act of a practicing capitalist, it is nothing of the sort. The company could easily support the raise in wages, and it made Ford a “hero” with the American people. Ford’s workers were more devoted to the company and were more diligent, reliable workers as a consequence of receiving, for the very first time, a living wage.
When you look carefully at the economic history of the capitalist West, you cannot help but conclude that probably the very most important reason that capitalism survives into the twenty-first century isn’t that it is so very “profitable”; no, not due to its excellent productivity, but because governments have been able to (eventually, after countless offenses) rein in capitalist excesses and abuses. Capitalism survives healthily in contemporary times not because of what it is, but because of how democracies have been able to restrict and penalize its most egregious insults and exploitations and atrocities.
And humankind, under capitalist predominance? How has humankind fared in this? How will the people of the world themselves fare in the near future?
If the past is any hint at developments to come, a purely capitalist future is objectionable. But fortunately, governments will continue to fetter the indurated beast.