Capitalism and everything else: existence and extermination 4/4

Triumph of capital

In its infancy as in its periphery, capitalism is a commercial phenomenon and a mode of production. It may even be subject of political debate. But in the postindustrial world where capitalism is firmly established, even taking it as a way of life is insufficient. It becomes indistinguishable from existence itself. Capitalist victory over society is so absolute the system is not even named, uttered, recognized, its triumph over people is so complete that the individual is unable to see outside ideology. He cannot point out the limits of capitalism or conceive the possibility of an alternative world. To him, there is no before, no after, no place that is not capitalist, alienation at its finest.

The alienated person is still a living organism that bleeds, breaths, feeds and totally depends on nature. She is still a social being placed somewhere in the complex of historical, social, economic and cultural relations that make up humanity. She is still a universe in herself, unique and ephemeral.

The alienated person knows nothing of this or doesn’t care. Capitalism as production system and way of life, its ideology, its technology, its propaganda and its subservient State control the interaction between the person and his world. The interference is Mephistophelian. For the price of everything necessary to live and live socially, the system offers the individual a world of toxic artifice, prefabricated thoughts, illusions of freedom and food that makes him hungrier. The freedom it offers must be paid and has mostly been taken by force from somebody else. In all of this, capitalism strips the individual off the miracle of his own existence, his time, his life, health, responsibility and volition.

Everything in the postindustrial world suggests emancipation and superiority over the world of life. You live under the impression that nature is a thing that might happen on Sundays. To find it, you have to look in your time off. The denaturalized individual fingers his phone and the world falls at his feet, he prefers water that comes bottled in refined hydrocarbon, human milk disgusts him and will see no problem if the air he breaths gets commodified.

Even though capitalist wealth is a world created and accumulated by the work and creativity of millions through generations, robed by the 1% and whose most important result is the destruction of the planet itself, when asked about sources of wealth, the alienated person thinks of cryptocurrency, Wall Street, Lionel Messi’s magic legs or Jennifer Lopez’ butt. The origin of value is hidden.

Where capitalism triumphs, society dilutes. When the system reaches its social plenitude, family, neighborhood, communitarian life and other kinds of associations dissolve. The signs of capitalist harmony in the space are beautiful empty streets, childless neighborhoods and nursing homes packed with abandoned elderly. Even malls are over.

Capitalism realizes the conservative nightmare of the destruction of the family. At least, it reduces it to a minimum. In the epicenter of the system, the word “neighbor” is as archaic as “solidarity”. When capitalism completes the appropriation, reification and commodification of the individual, the latter goes into reclusion, by all appearances he has ceased to exist in society and now lives in a world of artifice that surveils him day and night.

At the heart and top, they don’t even need cops; cameras, walls, dogs, private security and alarms but above all segregation, do the job. Years can pass without the citizen having to set a foot on the street; car and internet are no longer the tools of the individual, he is an extension of them.

At the bottom and on the outskirts, if the space is empty of people that is because people are gone for real, not because they are hiding. They must have gone in search for opportunities. Those who stay survive together because where the social and cultural forms of capitalism are yet rudimentary people still need each other to live. In turn, in the heart of capitalism people don’t need each other, a person is enough for a person. One can point at them from outside and say: they have lost their souls.

Consumption isolates more than working. Cars, Netflix, social networks and porn are more powerful than the cubicle and the working hours. The system needs compulsive consumers to buy what its competent and subjugated workers produce. Compulsive and domesticated because the ideal consumer doesn’t only upgrades and updates daily through shopping. The ideal consumer will purchase exactly that which the system is capable of giving in the ways and shapes it is capable of producing.

A spot in the tomato or a slightly out of shape banana is absolutely unacceptable. As consumer, the alienated person is fussy and picky but knows nothing about the origin of what he buys. Nothing scandalizes him more than an irregularity, he rejects the unconventional, loves buying perfect shiny spotless things, and adores the millimetrically mowed lawns of American suburbs and the fake gardens and landscapes of capitalist culture. That is the result of children who never knew the taste of dirt. It is also the result of the billions of dollars channeled from productive activities into advertising which is about people living to buy.

The other side of the compulsive domesticated consumer is the well behaved and discreetly naïve citizen who enjoys highly sophisticated State institutions which offer him, no lines needed, as much justice, health, education and culture as he can afford. Indulged and spoiled, this citizen enjoys the freedom that has been stolen from others. In his presence, the State’s brutality and authoritarianism withdraw. The brutal face is only for the immigrants, the hoods, overseas possessions and territories, and other peripheries of capitalism. The first class citizen easily turns the blind eye towards the crimes, past and present, that make his way of life possible. Most of the time, high consumption and comfort are enough to maintain a morality dormant. But there is also chauvinism and racism tirelessly hammered by the most sophisticated propaganda apparatuses.

The heart of capitalism is the heart of brainwashing. Advertising doesn’t only sell products. Along with culture industry and liberal mythologies, it sells government lies, the lies of its criminal forces, sexy ways of walking and looking afar, and the moral values that allow the reproduction of capitalist society. Egotism, stupidity and my mind on my money and my money on my mind are blatantly praised. A best-selling doctrine is the I am white-collar busy, super busy person, so much work, I am such a workaholic, I sleep five hours, I can do with three, meetings, callings, the agenda to the full, I am so important, I do important things like having a meeting, I am Dr. Very Much Important.

To the captive of capitalist ideology, not having a life means status. Compared to the vulgar blue-collar worker who needs to be pushed and humiliated, the white-collar worker is highly sophisticated. On his own he can stay up all night, sleep in the office, not sleep at all, sacrifice love, destroy his own body, and work to death.

People say this way of life, which we can openly call western, modern and capitalist is individualistic. Nothing farther from the truth. Individualist is someone with attitude. And subjection is contrary to attitude. On the contrary, in the heart of capitalism the individual is more interdependent and his consciousness more intersubjective than any other in human history. He lives in a dense world of social relations and technological interconnections. Capitalism is not an individualistic way of life. It is rather isolationist and antisocial. The system is a machine that produces isolated, sick, stupefied and submissive people.

What is left for the individual who doesn’t even know where he is? The ultra-processed food megacorporations stuff him with make him sick, the medicine he needs will not cure him because big pharma wants big money, and the political system and its propaganda need him dumb. He doesn’t even have the capacity to understand his own anguish; if he gets exasperated, he takes it out on somebody more vulnerable. Not even his desires belong to him because others desire for him. He has lost himself.

But he thinks himself free and in control. He is not. He is at the mercy of the powers that be. In captivity he works, in captivity he goes shopping, watches TV and votes. He is a victim in a world he has been either seduced or forced to build. A world as any other world, with laws, trends and singularities, which belongs to the elite, a privatized world that functions for the infinite profit of that elite and ruled by big-tech, big media, big pharma, big agribusiness, big oil, and all the rest of it.

To survive, the capitalist world needs to conquer all, enshroud all, destroy non-capitalist worlds. The blue green world of life, landscapes and sentient things must be sacrificed in the sixth mass extinction so that a few people can have outrageous fortunes they are utterly unable to enjoy. And the world of human things as we know it, terrifying and amazing, the miracle of our consciousness, our histories and cultures, our shocking contradictions and differences must be standardized and put under the control of the few; humanity itself must be either commodified or annihilated.

Maybe it is too late for us and maybe we shall survive. Shall we? Will the existential triangle nature humanity individual survive all of this? In many ways capitalism annihilates all three. Therefore, there is not, neither has ever been a more urgent and threatening a problem for mankind than the destruction of everything we call life and nature, everything we call culture and society, the individual and his freedom. Thus, no effort is more important for humanity than a breaking with capitalism.