4 Capitalism’s Effects on People
One day we must ask the question, “Why are there forty million poor people in America?” And when you ask that question, you are raising a question about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy…. And you see, my friends, when you deal with this you begin to ask the question, “Who owns the oil?” You begin to ask the question, “Who owns the iron ore?” You begin to ask the question, “Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that’s two-thirds water?”
—MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.1
DETRIMENTAL EFFECTS ON PEOPLE are built into the structure of capitalism, causing psychological and physical harm. How someone experiences the system’s effects is different, depending on where a person lives, one’s gender, sexual orientation, class or caste, perceived “race,” religion, nationality and mental or physical disabilities. But each of us falls into more than one of these categories, complicating the story. For example, effects of this society on African American working class women are different from those on white working class women and different from white wealthy women. While acknowledging and highlighting this complexity and the interaction of different forms of oppression and how they are experienced, we will discuss them separately in order to clarify the major effects on people as workers, those subject to racism, sexism, native peoples in colonial settler countries, and as people living in countries subjected to wars fought by leading capitalist countries for geopolitical or economic control.
EFFECTS ON WORKERS
The vast majority of people in capitalist countries need to work to make a living and are, by definition, subordinate to those that own and run businesses, the capitalist class and its hired managers. A fundamental impact of the system is alienation from one’s own labor and from nature. In addition, the threat and reality of unemployment, and for those earning low income or without jobs and living in poverty.
The Alienation of Labor
One central effect of capitalism—on all working people—is the lack of control over one’s own labor. Our labor power transforms nature’s resources into the wherewithal of our daily lives: we make tools, we gather or grow food, and we build shelters. In this we are little different from a number of other animals. But, unlike other animals, we act on resources consciously. And our ability to carry out free, conscious, and creative work is an inherent part of our humanity. But those who work for a living, as the vast majority must do in capitalist societies, have no say over what is produced, how it is produced, or what becomes of it afterward. Capitalists or corporate managers, utilizing the “logic of the market,” decide all of these questions. Our labor, so central to our life activity, ceases to be our own creation and becomes instead “a mere means to [our] existence.”2
Alienation from our own labor is not only or even primarily a psychological condition, but a feature integral to capitalist social relations, one that profoundly damages us. The repetitive, often pointless monotony of most work, the jobs in which people spend a large part of their waking hours, “is a … stifling of one’s urge to self-fulfillment in the most important segment of one’s life, the spending of vital energies at tasks one would never dream of freely choosing.” 3
Much human unhappiness and dissatisfaction comes from having to work at whatever job we can find that requires making things (including services) for someone else who profits from our labor and over which we have no control. Work, far from being the joyful fulfillment of our lives, becomes its opposite: a nightmare of stress and dissatisfaction as people try to earn enough money to survive or, in the United States, fulfill the “American Dream” we are cajoled to aspire to. Additional stress comes from the constant need to please the boss for fear of losing one’s job or actually becoming unemployed.
The goal of capitalism is to maximize profits, and one of the best ways to achieve this goal is to increase labor productivity by simplifying, routinizing, and automating work tasks so that workers can produce more in ever-shorter amounts of time. Workers who are forced to suppress their own abilities while working continuously at ever-increasing speeds experience both mental and physical exhaustion. Automation and de-skilling is thus one component that feeds into alienation.
The trend toward automation has been present since the earliest days of capitalism, but the newest wave of automation, involving increasingly sophisticated robots and software, has further implications for the future of work, as this 2013 AP study found:
Year after year, the software that runs computers and an array of other machines and devices becomes more sophisticated and powerful and capable of doing more efficiently tasks that humans have always done. For decades, science fiction warned of a future when we would be architects of our own obsolescence, replaced by our machines; an Associated Press analysis finds that the future has arrived.4
In earlier periods, machines were primarily substitutes for the performance of relatively simple manual tasks. Now, robots and computer algorithms are capable of complex tasks, including many aspects of service and skilled work, and even intellectual work, such as writing reports and news articles and examining X-rays:
… automation also produces quicker drug development, safer highways, more accurate medical diagnoses, cheaper material goods, and greater energy efficiency, to name just a few of its obvious benefits, [but] there have been a few cautionary voices … urging us to take stock, especially, of the effects of automation on our very humanness—what makes us who we are as individuals—and on our humanity—what makes us who we are in aggregate.5
What we should really be worried about is the system of capitalism, not robots or our humanity.6 What has been shown to give people true happiness—control over our own lives and creative and socially meaningful work, participation in community activities, and time with friends and family—has decreased through longer hours at work, less control over the workplace environment, always-on connectivity, more job insecurity, longer commutes to and from work, and an unachievable quest for satisfaction through ownership of consumer goods. (In another type of society automation could provide all people with the necessities of life as well as more leisure time and provide us with the wherewithal and time to engage in cultural, recreational, and craft activities.)
The source of our alienation is the lack of control in the workplace, and the unequal opportunities it affords for financial well-being as well as quality of life. Consumerism is a form of emotional compensation we use in a futile attempt to overcome alienation. Recognizing this can help us begin to constructively deal with our alienation. As Alan Roberts points out in The Self-Managed Environment:
It is that exploited, alienated and relatively powerless period, the working day, which reduces … [people to settle] for commodity satisfaction in their “free time.” The bargain … extends its influence throughout all levels and institutions, marking out the shape of the “consumer society.” It is this society which threatens the environment with its unlimited appetite—unlimited precisely because its objects are so unsatisfying.7
Moralistic appeals against consumption, such as “Buy Nothing Day” or berating ordinary people for wanting an easier life and seeking fulfillment through the acquisition of things they’re told they need, miss the heart of the issue. A more helpful approach is to encourage workers to empower themselves in the workplace. More control over the work process and countering attempts to worsen their conditions through constantly changing schedules and speedups or other means to increase exploitation will lead to workers who begin to see their happiness connected and expressed through better working conditions and engaging with others in the struggle rather than through more consumer goods.
Unemployment
Unemployment, whether temporary or for long periods, is a reality of capitalist economies. There are a significant number of workers who are described as “marginally attached” to the labor force, members of the reserve army of labor described in chapter 2. But even those who are normally employed are affected by the constant loss of jobs as businesses automate, downsize, or go out of business. Many studies have shown that unemployment is dangerous to your health. Heart disease, high blood pressure, and diabetes are more common in the unemployed than among people who have jobs.8 The psychological impact of not being able to earn a living is especially damaging for a species that gains a sense of fulfillment from productive activity and must obtain and manipulate what we need from the external world in order to stay alive, healthy, and happy. In a study across sixty-three countries, researchers estimated that approximately 20 percent of suicides were the result of unemployment.9
And when unemployment overtakes whole neighborhoods or cities things get even worse. Workers and communities are devastated when corporations pull out, as they have done since the 1970s with the deindustrialization of the so-called Rust Belt, or automate and reduce their labor needs, as with coal mining in Appalachia. High levels of unemployment end in marginalization and hopelessness in white communities and those of color.
The playwright Lynn Nottage interviewed people in Reading, Pennsylvania, hit hard by closures of steel and textile factories, gathering material for her play Sweat, which opened in 2015. In an interview in Fortune, Nottage observed the similarities between devastated white and African American communities: “When I sat in rooms with middle-aged white men, I heard them speaking like young black men … they were feeling angry, disaffected, and in some cases, they actually had tears in their eyes.”10
There are never plans for new jobs for displaced workers or more than perfunctory assistance when large-scale job losses occur. People and the communities are left to fend for themselves, leading to generations that are “angry, disaffected,” and living without hope for better lives.
The Corroding Effects of Poverty
In 1770, the English poet Oliver Goldsmith wrote of the land enclosures and deserted villages “where wealth accumulates, and men decay.” Poverty and great wealth go hand-in-hand in capitalist economies. Regardless of how quickly or by what amount the economy grows, inequality is essential to the successful operation of the system, with poverty normally present.
In class societies there have always been people at the bottom, living a more difficult existence than those in the upper strata. But what is it about capitalism that poverty persists no matter how much wealth accumulates? In the United States, the perpetual lack of jobs for those wanting to work, weak unions, an elite that refuses to pay their fair share of taxes, and a blame-the-victim ideology all combine to maintain poverty as an accepted reality.
In the United States, the “land of plenty,” about 43 million people have incomes below the poverty line, most living in households considered to be “food insecure.” Migrant workers who harvest much of the country’s fruit and vegetables can’t afford to buy the crops they harvest.11 Half of the poor live in families with a working head of household—working, but not earning enough to lift them out of poverty.12 In addition to those living in poverty, another 56 million are classified as “low income,” but not poor. This means that about one-third of the population (around 100 million people) live in families that are, at best, one paycheck away from economic crisis.
As any poor person knows, it’s expensive to be poor, making it even more difficult to live. Poor people are taken advantage of in numerous ways and pay more than the better-off for almost everything: services and food, auto insurance, borrowing money, cashing paychecks.13 Poor neighborhoods are often “food deserts”: fresh produce and nutritious food is commonly unavailable, and nearby stores charge higher prices than elsewhere.
Housing is another major issue, as Harvard sociologist Matthew Despond points out:
Landlords … aren’t making money in trailer parks or ghettos in spite of their poverty but because of it. Depressed property values offer lower mortgage payments and tax bills. In poor areas of the cities, rents are lower, too—but not by much…. Landlords renting to poor families can charge slightly reduced rents but, owing to far lower expenses, still command handsome profits…. Poor families are stuck. Because they are already at the bottom of the market, they can’t get cheaper housing unless they uproot their lives, quit their jobs and leave the city.14
Poverty is a cause of illness and early death as well as a barrier to receiving needed health care. According to pediatrician Tom Boyce at the University of California at San Francisco, “Socioeconomic status is the most powerful predictor of disease, disorder, injury and mortality we have.” 15 Malnutrition, exposure to toxins, psychological stress associated with being poor, lack of regular access to health care, and not being able to afford prescribed medicines all contribute to ill health. Conditions of poverty may drive people to borrow money, hoping to do better and pay back the debt. But this can also lead to even greater problems. For example, farmer suicides in portions of India, resulting from debt peonage that they cannot escape, have reached epidemic proportions.16
Poverty and unemployment are endemic to capitalism and have severe human repercussions, with many living short and stunted lives because of the conditions created by the normal functioning of capitalist economics.
One way that capitalism’s elites maintain their power is by fostering divisions throughout society. These social divisions are not accidents. They act to prevent people from uniting, to keep them fighting to stay one rung higher up the ladder by stepping on those below. That is why racism and the systematic oppression of women are endemic to capitalist societies, varying only by degree. They encourage groups to align their interests with the ruling elite rather than with the people they work among. They stoke prejudices, which leads to further divisions.
Racism is aimed at a number of groups of people in the United States—especially Americans of African, Native, and Hispanic backgrounds. In this section we’ll focus on racism against African American community because of its widespread and insidious nature and the part it plays in the continuation of their suppression since the end of slavery. Today’s systemic racism was created and continually reinforced during the development of capitalism. From its early days, white supremacy provided the ideological justification for colonialism and slavery. The people who were subjugated were deemed to be of a different, and inferior, race than their European conquerors.
The United States began as a settler colonial state, forcibly taking the land from its indigenous inhabitants and stealing the labor and lives of enslaved Africans. This double theft, of land and labor, is embedded in the nation’s very creation. In two rarely quoted passages of the Declaration of Independence (1776), the founding fathers accuse King George III of thwarting the expansion of settlements farther west into Indian lands and inciting “domestic insurrections” of slaves and “merciless Indian Savages” against the settlers.17 It is more widely known that slavery was written into the Constitution: enslaved Africans (referred to as “all other Persons”) were counted as three-fifths of a person, for purposes of calculating the number of representatives to Congress from the slaveholding states.18
To a significant extent there is a zero-sum game in capitalist societies and economies: if someone wins, someone else loses. The system functions in such a way that there is a scarcity of jobs, let alone well-paying ones, and spots in college for everyone who wants to attend. Thus when a person of color gets ahead, they are perceived by some as intruders “cutting in line” to attain the good life. This helps to explain how a significant number of whites have come to believe that discrimination against them is a bigger problem than discrimination against African Americans, despite all evidence to the contrary.19
The overt racism of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign made it abundantly clear that systematic racism continues to be a central force in the United States. It is pervasive and, as sociologist David R. Williams explains, even “normal”:
As an American raised in this society with negative implicit biases against black people, you are not a bad person. You are simply a normal American. We have to come to grips with the reality that this racism is so deeply embedded in our culture that it shapes how we see the world, it shapes our beliefs, our behavior, our actions toward members of other groups.20
However, racism is much larger and deeper than individual whites harboring racist attitudes. By carving out some parts of the population and portraying them as different, inferior, and less worthy, businesses and governments can keep labor divided against itself.
With respect to how racism shapes our actions at the systemic level, in The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander contends that the U.S. criminal justice system operates in a way that inevitably leads to social divisions and disproportionate incarceration rates based on race.21 People of color are incarcerated at much higher rates than whites; it is part of the system of racial violence that has been instituted throughout U.S. history. The system is set up so that racism is an unavoidable and entirely predictable outcome.
The U.S. criminal justice system is a “growth industry” and the U.S. is the world leader in incarceration. According to a 2015 report by the Sentencing Project, there are “2.2 million people currently in the nation’s prisons and jails—a 500% increase over the last forty years. Changes in sentencing law and policy, not changes in crime rates, explain most of this increase.” The report indicates that 67 percent of the prison population is composed of people of color, whereas they make up 37 percent of the overall U.S. population. The report also outlines that more than anything else, it is racist sentencing policies, implicit racial bias, and socioeconomic inequity that accounts for these figures.22
The past few years have given us a spate of high-profile incidences of police targeting and killing of mostly unarmed black people in the pursuit of “justice”: in 2014, Eric Garner in Staten Island, New York was killed for selling loose cigarettes; Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, was fatally shot after a verbal confrontation with an officer; Laquan McDonald in Chicago, Illinois was shot sixteen times for allegedly carrying a knife; and Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Ohio, was killed while playing with a toy gun. In 2015, Walter Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina, was pulled over for a broken brake light; Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Maryland, was arrested for carrying a knife and put into the back of a police van unrestrained yet handcuffed, which resulted in fatal injuries to his neck and spine; Sandra Bland in Prairie View, Texas, was arrested after a traffic stop and allegedly committed suicide in her cell. In 2016, there was Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, who was killed after being falsely accused of carrying a gun; Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, was killed for driving while black.
By no means were these cases exceptional. According to the site mappingpoliceviolence.org, police killed more than 100 unarmed black people in 2015, at more than five times the rate of unarmed whites. In most if not all of these incidents, their deaths go unpunished.
In 2014, when a white police officer shot and killed an eighteen-year-old black teenager, Michael Brown, and left his body lying in the street in Ferguson, Missouri, the country erupted in street protests and anti-racist organizing. A subsequent Justice Department inquiry into the Ferguson police department revealed that African Americans constituted 70 percent of the city’s population, but 85 percent of those had been stopped in their cars, 90 percent of those given citations, and 93 percent of those arrested. An investigation by USA Today found that over 1,500 police departments around the country arrest African Americans at even higher rates than in Ferguson.23
The Justice Department investigation into the Ferguson police department revealed that the city was augmenting its revenue stream through “aggressive enforcement of Ferguson’s municipal code.”24 According to U.S. attorney general Eric Holder Jr., the police and court system were “primed for maximizing revenue.”25 Political scientist Henry Farrell phrased it more bluntly. He wrote that the Department of Justice report “depicts a system in Ferguson that is much closer to a racket aimed at squeezing revenue out of its population than a properly working democracy.”26
What happened in Ferguson is happening all over the country. National and state funding to local municipalities has been steadily cut over the last forty years as taxes on the rich and corporations have been systematically reduced. As a result, cash-strapped cities and municipalities attempt to make up for revenue shortfalls by issuing fines for minor infractions, often to those least able to negotiate the court system and least able to pay. Using traffic stops and ticketing, the police often act like an armed and violent state-run collection agency. Numerous fees are added to a person’s fine, escalating the amount owed and making it even more difficult to pay.
Although federal imprisonment for unpaid debt has been illegal in the United States since 1833, and is specifically barred by the U.S. Constitution, it is now common practice in a third of U.S. states. A report by the American Civil Liberties Union showed that people were jailed even when the cost of imprisoning them was greater than the amount of the original debt.27 Jail time can sometimes mean loss of a job or housing, and in some cases, like that of Sandra Bland, it means death.28
Of all the outrageous incidences of racial violence committed by police in the recent past, what was revealed in Chicago is perhaps the most shocking. The city has a long history of racially abusive policing and holding suspects in secret sites where torture was common. Cook County Commissioner Richard Boykin likened the tactics used at Homan Square—one of the secret “black sites” uncovered in 2014—to the Gestapo.29 “Violence and the use of illicit violence against people of color, particularly African Americans and Latinos, is as routine in Chicago as traffic lights,” observed lifelong civil rights activist Prexy Nesbitt, himself a victim of police abuse as a teenager.30 Some indication of the extent and severity of police brutality in Chicago is that during the last twelve years, the city paid out over a half billion dollars in settlements with victims, money that could have funded “5 new state of the art high schools, 33 new libraries or countless mental health facilities and community development programs.”31
Government Complicity in Unequal Opportunity
Discrimination is present in almost all government interactions with people of color. Segregated housing kept in place by governments, real estate interests, and banks is one of the many factors that have prevented African Americans from advancing economically. Unsurprisingly, when African Americans are able to move to unsegregated neighborhoods with better resources, their children generally perform better scholastically than those not able to move.32 But in an editorial that came out after the 2015 killing of Freddie Gray in Baltimore and the demonstrations that followed, the New York Times noted:
The century-long assault that Baltimore’s African Americans have endured at the hands of local, state and federal policy makers, all of whom worked to quarantine African American residents in ghettos, making it difficult even for people of means to move into integrated areas that offered better jobs, schools and lives for their children. This happened in cities all over the country, but the segregationist impulse in Maryland generally was particularly virulent.33
But discrimination in housing—“Housing Apartheid, American Style” is the way a New York Times editorial put it34—is not the only problem with respect to government. As for education, a 2013 report on public schools in the United States found that they were more segregated today than they were forty years ago. It found that “28 percent of African American children live in high-poverty neighborhoods, compared with 4 percent of white children.”35
In 2013 the U.S. Supreme Court gutted Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This section of the law required certain states and counties with histories of discrimination against African American voters to receive preapproval from the Justice Department for any changes in their voting laws.
The arguments for overturning parts of the Voting Rights Act revolved around three spurious assumptions: that we have transcended the legacy of racism and therefore the federal oversight of voting rights is no longer needed; that there is significant voter fraud (which, for all practical purposes, is nonexistent); and that the new state laws don’t especially hurt potential black voters.
Immediately after the Supreme Court decision, eight states passed laws that significantly restrict African American voter access. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, North Carolina’s 2013 law is one “of the most restrictive laws since the Jim Crow era.”36 In July 2016 a federal court struck down one of the North Carolina laws, declaring that its provisions deliberately “target African Americans with almost surgical precision.”37 However, regulations making it more difficult for African Americans to vote in fourteen states during the 2016 elections, including the shortened early voting period and reduced numbers of polling places in North Carolina, may have influenced the outcome.
Additionally, governments have caused and/or prolonged environmental damage in predominantly African American communities. In 2011, after the local economy tanked and jobs were outsourced to more profitable locations, Michigan appointed an “emergency manager” to run the city of Flint, an impoverished city of 140,000 people. The appointed manager ordered the city to disconnect from the Detroit water supply and instead use the polluted Flint River as its water source, saving about $1 million a year. However, more chemicals were needed to purify the dirtier water, resulting in higher levels of organic carcinogens. The extra chemicals also made the water more corrosive, causing lead and copper to leach into the drinking water. As a result, Flint’s water contained close to seven times the amount of lead allowed by public health standards.
Despite many complaints from Flint residents, state officials ignored mounting evidence that the river water was corroding the city’s old lead pipes and leaching lead into tap water. The number of children with high levels of lead in their blood doubled; rashes and other illnesses developed. If it were not for independent researchers from Virginia Tech, the people of Flint—a city that is 56 percent African American, with high levels of unemployment and widespread poverty—might have remained uninformed about the toxicity of their tap water. Virginia Tech research scientist Marc Edwards testified at subsequent congressional hearings in Washington:
Agencies that are paid to protect us from lead in water can get away with anything…. It’s part 1984 and part Enemy of the People. I’m begging you, please: fix the EPA lead and copper rule, and fix the EPA…. The only thing I can conclude is that the EPA doesn’t care about children drinking water with lead in it. You’d have to ask them why they don’t do the job they are paid to do. Had it not been for people completely outside the system, children in Flint would still be drinking that water today. That is a fact.38
Yet Flint was only the tip of the iceberg. “Data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that over 40 percent of the states that reported lead test results in 2014 have higher rates of lead poisoning among children than Flint.”39 According to a Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) report, some 18 million people in the United States drink water from sources that have violated federal drinking water standards.40
Detroit water is once again flowing to Flint. But contamination from the corroded pipes continued to occur into 2017, although at lower levels. The children affected by lead poisoning may well suffer a lifetime of adverse health effects as a result of their exposure.
Racism and Health
People of color are routinely exposed to more environmental toxins, suffer discrimination in the health care system, and are unemployed in greater numbers than whites. The title of an article in The Nation put it bluntly, “Race Best Predicts Whether You Live Near Pollution.”41 Coal mines and coal-fired power plants continue to have an immense detrimental impact on water bodies, air quality, and the health of the people who live nearby. The NAACP’s “Coal Blooded: Putting Profits Before People” reported that 6 million Americans live within three miles of a coal plant.42 This makes them prime targets for the variety of toxic pollutants, some of which are neurotoxins, emitted by coal plants. The average per capita income for those 6 million is significantly lower than the U.S. average. Of the 4 million people within three miles of the 75 (out of 378 total) dirtiest, oldest, most polluting coal-fired stations in operation, 53 percent are people of color. Compared to the rest of the population, people of color are more likely to be living near toxic waste sites (56 percent of those living nearby are people of color); twice as likely to live without clean water and modern sanitation facilities; they are thirty-eight times more likely to be exposed to nitrogen dioxide, which causes respiratory problems.43 Throughout the country, African Americans go to the ER with asthma attacks at nearly 350 percent the rate for whites.44
As discussed above, poverty results in more health problems and lower life expectancy than those more advantaged. However, the health of African Americans is especially damaged by poverty and racism. A 2014 article in Social Science & Medicine concluded: “Institutionalized white socioeconomic resources, discrimination, and racialized framing from centuries of slavery, segregation, and contemporary white oppression severely limit and restrict access of many Americans of color to adequate socioeconomic resources—and to adequate healthcare and health outcomes.”45
Although the environmental conditions of African Americans are severe, it also is important to note the horrible situation for many Native Americans. The air and water pollution on tribal lands in the United States by uranium and coal mines and coal-fired power plants continue to have an immense detrimental impact on the environment and the health of the people. “It is Native Americans—from Navajo uranium miners to tribal communities targeted with atomic waste dumps—who have borne the brunt of both the front and back ends of the nuclear fuel cycle.”46 In Canada the tar sands are being excavated and partially processed on First Nations land, with toxins such as heavy metals and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) contaminating people, wild animals, plants, and water. Furthermore, “these environmental declines contribute to a change in diets as community members shift from healthy country foods to expensive and often nutritionally deficient store-bought foods, a shift that is only accelerated by concerns regarding the quality of and safety regarding locally sourced country foods.”47
THE IDEOLOGY OF POWER: BLAME THE VICTIM, “THE OTHER”
Most people up and down the economic ladder become socialized to unequal conditions and the mistreatment of people and see these policies as normal and natural—which they are under capitalism. To ensure that the system itself is not held responsible, politicians, capitalist ideologues, and the corporate media create an alternative explanatory framework. One form this takes is to blame the victim. If only they made better choices, they wouldn’t be in their situations. Irresponsible personal behavior or lack of motivation is the cause of their troubles. Considering “them” to be “the other” makes it easier to assign blame.
Inherent in the blame-the-victim ideology is the myth of equal opportunity for everyone. If you work hard enough and make the right choices, you will succeed. But a child conceived and born into poverty, with its associated stresses and limitations, does not have the same opportunities as a child born into wealth. The continuing belief in the falsehood of equal opportunity and the equally false notion of easy upward mobility, as well as the widespread acceptance of racist and sexist ideas, help to explain many people’s acquiescence to gross inequalities in society and continuing discrimination. This ideology sanctifies wealth and greed as reward for good behavior and good decisions and helps to explain, as W. E. B. Du Bois wrote, “the fact that so many civilized persons are willing to live in comfort even if the price of this is poverty, ignorance, and disease of the majority of their fellowmen.”48
Much of the white male chauvinistic and racist ideology that was developed under capitalism casts those of other ethnic backgrounds, religions, other classes, and even women as “the other.” They are considered different from, and inferior to, white males, especially wealthy white males. Categorizing so many as “the other” combines with blame-the-victim ideology to make it more acceptable not to provide adequate assistance for the poor, the single mother, for African Americans, for Native Americans, for the long-term unemployed, for women suffering oppression, and so on. According to W. E. B. Du Bois, capitalism is the primary cause of systemic inequalities, including racism. This is how Du Bois described being “the other” as an African American:
It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.49
For many, the internalization of this dichotomy can be psychologically damaging and stressful. Many of the struggles for full equality, such as the Black Power movement as well as the contemporary Black Lives Matter movement, have revolved around attempting to re-identify away from the “twoness” Du Bois described, to being recognized as complete and equal human beings,
to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost…. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face … to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and use his best powers and his latent genius.50
The government uses racially coded rhetoric to control the narrative of inequality and guide policy decisions. Think of former president Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” of sympathy and support for anti-integration racist whites, President Reagan’s chastising of “welfare queens,” always accompanied by pictures of African Americans made to appear to be living the high life at public expense. There’s also former first lady Hillary Clinton’s 1996 reference to a segment of youth as “superpredators … [that have] no conscience, no empathy.” These all serve to encourage racist attitudes and make them more respectable. Racist and anti-immigrant policies are prominent in the Republican Party, as was made abundantly clear during a 2016 election campaign that has made open expression of prejudices more acceptable. Anti-immigrant and neo-fascist politicians in Europe such as those of the Golden Dawn in Greece and the National Front in France play a similar role.51 The 2016 British vote in favor of leaving the EU was partly a result of racist anti-immigrant sentiment.
The force of racism is made even stronger by blaming the victims instead of blaming the system that relies on discrimination to control a portion of the population and does not supply everyone with reasonably paying jobs. The prevalence of racism means that there are feelings not far beneath the surface that can be exploited by right-wing political movements during stressful times.
OPPRESSION OF WOMEN
The oppression of women is not unique to capitalism; it goes back to the development of class-structured societies that arose with the transition to agriculture. Beginning about 10,000 years ago, human society began to shift from the general equality of semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers to settlements based on animal husbandry and agriculture. This shift in obtaining food also required a change in social relations, taking different forms in various parts of the world, resulting in oppression of women. The subservience of women occurred in ancient city-states, empires, and in the feudal societies of Europe. (Societal changes brought about by agriculture are discussed in more detail in chapter 6.)
With the rise of capitalism, the relative position of women began to change again. Among free peasants in early modern England, women frequently inherited property to the same extent as men. But in the late 1600s, as the inheritance of property and wealth increasingly became a source of capital accumulation, inheritance by the firstborn male spread from the nobility to the yeomanry and filtered down to the rest of society.
By the mid-1800s, wealthy landowners, using the power of the state to increase their holdings, had enclosed so much common land that most peasant families could no longer graze cows, keep chickens, or plant kitchen gardens. There was little to fall back on in difficult periods, and families were forced to sell their labor for wages in order to survive.
Before the enclosures, peasant women contributed greatly to the subsistence household economy, spinning and weaving cloth, sewing garments, tending kitchen gardens, gathering wild rushes for light, and cresses, nuts, and berries for food. In addition to subsistence contributions and domestic work, including childcare, they also earned income through selling handicrafts and agricultural products.
With the move from a subsistence economy to a wage economy home production of goods was converted to piecework organized by middlemen. They set up workshops or provided home workers with raw materials and skimmed off profits on the finished articles. Women were invariably paid less than men in the new money-wage economy and therefore could not contribute on the same basis as men to the family income.
When the population shifted from rural villages to cities, traditional ways of life and culture were transformed. The extended family of the village was replaced by the nuclear family in the urban center, and women of all classes found themselves confined in a more rigid system. Men were the “breadwinners”: they controlled the money and the power. Former peasant women (and children) worked in the industrial labor force, but at lower wages than the men. For the middle class, a non-wage-earning wife “at home” became a mark of social class. As they lost economic power, the burden of domestic labor and social reproduction fell mainly on the woman, who also lost the protection they’d had as daughters and sisters living with their families of origin.
Raising and caring for the next generation of workers is critical for the continuation of any society, including capitalist ones. Though this work has very high use value to the family and to society, it has no exchange value—that is, it does not produce a service or commodity that can be sold for a profit. Hence, this essential and time-consuming “women’s work” is not considered part of the economy, and is therefore not compensated. In 1995, the UN Development Program estimated that women’s unpaid labor—the “invisible contribution of women”—amounted to $11 trillion. This was equivalent in monetary terms to approximately half of the global economy at the time.52 Relying on unpaid work done primarily by women instead of provided by social programs, means lower taxes on the wealthy and more profits for capitalists.
Simone de Beauvoir once commented that a woman is not born: she is made. This starts early in life and continues into adulthood in myriad ways that encourage and reinforce particular interests and activities.53 The hypersexualized society we live in—strengthened and encouraged throughout the media with gendered toys, activities, and education, rituals such as beauty pageants, and gendered dress codes and behavior—straitjackets young girls and boys to see themselves as different from each other from birth; the damage and negative ramifications echo through every sphere of life.
Fashion styles that restrict women’s activities such as uncomfortable and unhealthy high-heel shoes have been encouraged by advertising and enforced by convention and competition. The policing and control of women’s bodies is taken to extreme lengths. One of the more absurd examples of fashion constraints is that the wearing of trousers by women was strongly discouraged or forbidden (in U.S. public schools) or actually outlawed. At the height of the French Revolution in October 1789, the working-class women of Paris marched on Versailles sans-culottes, wearing trousers, not skirts. To curtail this dangerous precedent, France passed a law in 1800 barring women from wearing trousers. Although exceptions were made later in the nineteenth century for women riding bicycles and horses, and subsequently not enforced, the law remained on the books until 2013.54 In the United States there was also the same belief that women wearing pants somehow promoted radical, even revolutionary, actions. In an article titled “The Cult of True Womanhood,” Barbara Welter describes a didactic passage that appeared in a women’s magazine from the mid-1800s:
The girl expresses admiration for the bloomer costume—it gives freedom of motion, is healthful and attractive. The “Professor” sets her straight. Trousers, he explains, are “only one of the many manifestations of that wild spirit of socialism and agrarian radicalism which is at present so rife in our land.” The young lady recants immediately: “If this dress has any connexion with Fourierism or Socialism, or fanaticism in any shape whatever, I have no disposition to wear it at all … no true woman would so far compromise her delicacy as to espouse, however unwittingly, such a cause.”55
Restrictions on women’s dress may seem like something from the past, but in 2016 a temporary receptionist in London was sent home on her first day on the job. She had worn flat shoes and refused to adhere to the policy that women should wear shoes with 2- to 4-inch heels. This was for a job for which she needed to be on a 9-hour shift and do a lot of walking. “Discriminatory dress codes remain widespread,” concluded a 2017 report on the issue of dress codes for women in Britain. The report committee received complaints that women had to “dye their hair blonde,” “wear revealing outfits,” or “constantly reapply makeup.” 56 And on the U.S. side of the Atlantic, President Trump, obsessed with superficial images, apparently wants his female staffers to “dress like a woman.” Women who worked in local campaign field offices “felt pressure to wear dresses to impress Trump.” 57 (This, of course, pales in significance compared to Trump’s self-confessed assaults on women.)
Why so much effort to distinguish men from women and establish such clear gender demarcation that one sex is always treated worse than the other? These also play into the oppression faced by people identifying as LGBTQ who want to express themselves, look and dress however they want. Lack of workplace equality for women and people of color is profitable for business, which can then pay them lower wages. Additionally, there are financial gains to be made by the objectification of women in movies, magazines, and on the web as well as by the sale of differentiated toys for girls and boys rather than simply for all children.
Despite hard-won progress in some areas, a deep-seated and constantly reinforced oppression continues to exist against women. “Differences in biology” is still trotted forth as justification for lesser job opportunities and wages. Women in leadership are frequently criticized for being too bossy or pushy, while men exhibiting the exact same behavior are considered appropriately assertive and ready for promotion. Ingrained stereotypes influence decisions of all kinds.
For example, when women audition for symphony orchestras, they are more likely to be accepted if the selection committee is unaware of their gender. Women software developers are considered better coders than their male counterparts if “their peers didn’t realize the code had been written by a woman.”58 And students judge a professor teaching an online course more favorably if they think that she is a he. Over a century since the birth of the first concerted movement for women’s rights, with a mere 17 percent of the House of Representatives female, the United States ranks 77th out of 190 countries on gender parity in national parliaments.59 To break gender inequality down by race would reveal further disparities, as racism alters and reinforces the dynamics of sexism.
Women in the workplace still earn less than their male counterparts, and they are expected to be more submissive and not to ask for increased salaries, while that is an accepted practice for males. They rarely receive paid maternity leave and lack of quality childcare limits the possibilities for many women. They work longer hours in the home—up to ten times longer, depending on the country.60 As a consequence, men’s total work time is two-thirds financially compensated, whereas for women, the figure is only one-third.61
Violence against women occurs in epidemic proportions, and is largely accepted all across the world. Capitalist societies are not willing to commit the resources needed to stop the violence, and objectification of women’s bodies for commercial gain and precarious family economic conditions actively encourage it. The threat of violence is always present and controls women’s activities and lives even if they are not directly experiencing verbal abuse and physical violence.
The most vulnerable women, in poor and indigenous communities, suffer the most, but women from more prosperous backgrounds are not immune. In the United States, some 25 percent of college-educated women report surviving rape or attempted rape during college.62 The World Health Organization estimates that about one-third of all women have experienced either physical or sexual violence, commonly at the hands of their intimate partner.63 Gender violence is more of a threat to women’s health than the sum of all traffic accidents and malaria.64
IMPERIALISM AND WAR
We have previously discussed the detrimental effects of being a worker, a woman, and “racial” minority in capitalist societies. Entirely different dimensions occur with the damage done to conquered native peoples and to those in countries on the receiving end of military and covert interventions by the most powerful leaders of the capitalist world order. Imperialism with or without colonies is integral and essential to capitalism; the accumulation of capital propels the constant need for new markets, resources, cheap labor, and geopolitical advantage. Whole continents have been stolen and millions of people killed, directly through military means or indirectly by disease, starvation, and slavery. Large regions of the world have been pillaged of their natural resources and repeated attempts have been made to eradicate alternative cultures, all to fuel the engine of capitalism. Wars and occupations carried out by wealthy countries are not confined to the early period of capitalism, but are just as much a feature of the present. Earlier we discussed how essential colonialism was to the growth and development of capitalism, providing much of the wealth that began and propelled its rapid growth, and the brutality of the colonial powers as they occupied land and subdued the original inhabitants (see The Rise and Growth of Capitalism in chapter 2).
Capitalism operates so as to destroy ways of life that are at odds with its priorities of having a docile population and pursuing profits. In settler colonial states such as Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand the occupiers stole almost all the land and forcibly disrupted the economies and banned native cultures’ ways of interacting with the land, leaving natives uprooted and disenfranchised. To this day, many of these people continue to fight for the retention of their culture, the return of their land, and equal rights.
Of countless possible examples in settler colonies, the offenses to the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, and its impacts on a people, a culture, the land, is a standout for its recurrence.
Beginning in April 2016, thousands of Native Americans from hundreds of tribes formed an occupation site on the banks of the Cannonball River to try to stop or reroute the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), a $3.7-billion-dollar project that would transport crude oil from the Bakken oil field in North Dakota to a refinery to Patoka, Illinois, near Chicago. The 1,720-mile pipeline, roughly thirty inches in diameter, would carry 470,000 barrels per day and is a project of Energy Transfer Partners.
The young people of the local Standing Rock Sioux tribe were joined by thousands of supporters, including a group of military veterans, to protest an undemocratic decision, one that skirts the law by claiming that the huge pipeline project is really just a number of small projects. Doing so eliminates the need to follow the regulations of the Clean Water Act and the National Environmental Policy Act.
In the 1960s, the U.S. government stole hundreds of thousands of acres from the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in order to build dams in the Missouri River watershed. In the process, “hundreds of Indian families from various tribes were forcibly relocated and their way of life completely destroyed. The staggering poverty that resulted from the program lives on across the Dakotas today.”65 According to Kelly Morgan, an archaeologist and member of the Standing Rock Sioux, the land theft “completely stole our burials, our resources, our woods and a lot of the traditional plants…. A complete lifeway degradation and families completely uprooted.”66
David Archambault II, chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, explained:
It’s a familiar story in Indian Country. This is the third time that the Sioux Nation’s lands and resources have been taken without regard for tribal interests. The Sioux peoples signed treaties in 1851 and 1868. The government broke them before the ink was dry….
Whether it’s gold from the Black Hills or hydropower from the Missouri or oil pipelines that threaten our ancestral inheritance, the tribes have always paid the price for America’s prosperity.67
What makes the situation even more egregious is that a portion of the disputed pipeline route is slated to go through land that was never ceded. It was stolen by Congress despite treaties signed by the Sioux in 1851 and 1868, during the years of the Gold Rush, which granted them “absolute and undisturbed use and occupation” of a vast area outside the formal reservation.68 The fact that the pipeline had already been rerouted away from white communities illustrates the racist nature of the decision-making process.
Under great public pressure, the Army Corps of Engineers announced in December that they would not grant an easement for the pipeline in southern North Dakota. However, with the company refusing to consider rerouting the pipeline and the Trump administration approving its final phase, ongoing resistance is needed against building other oil and gas pipelines.
Land theft from indigenous peoples persists in many countries, as private capital and sovereign wealth funds carry out twenty-first-century land grabs.69 Those fighting land theft and environmental degradation around the world are in the cross-hairs of capital—an estimated 185 environmental activists across the Global South were assassinated in 2015.70 The 2016 murder of Berta Cáceres, a leader of the Lenca people of Honduras in the struggle against the flooding of land to build a dam, followed by the assassination of two other members of the group, is an indication of the bravery and fortitude needed by those trying to protect the land of indigenous peoples.
Creating Antagonisms in Colonies
The legacy of colonial rulers’ universal practice of inventing or exacerbating differences in ethnicities and cultures to divide and rule continues to torment the world. Deliberately fostering tensions between different groups, such as the Tutsi and Hutu in Rwanda (a former colony of Germany, then of Belgium), is a common technique of colonial powers, making it easier to rule. Hindu-Muslim antagonisms in India and the Pakistan-Indian hostilities after the creation of Pakistan, with literally millions killed and the largest forced migration in history occurring during the partition of India, were products of societal changes brought about during British colonial rule and forced retreat from the Indian subcontinent in 1947. The Muslim Shia-Sunni antagonism was given social force by colonial rule and the drawing of arbitrary borders following the First World War.
Death and Destruction by Imperial Interventions
Numerous imperialist interventions have been carried out by the United States and its European junior partners, covertly as well as by direct military force. They continue to have dreadful social consequences, causing enormous numbers of deaths, population dislocations, and environmental havoc. More than fifty countries were bombed, invaded, or destabilized by overt and covert U.S. interventions after the Second World War. The list includes overthrowing governments in Iran and Guatemala, fomenting and aiding counter-insurgency campaigns in El Salvador and Nicaragua, and outright military interventions in Vietnam, Grenada, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria. The discussion below is far from an exhaustive treatment of meddling, invasions, and bombings, covering only some of the consequences of selected interventions occurring since the Second World War. But the examples provide some idea of the death and disruption they have caused over the last 50 years.
In the mid-1960s, the United States assisted in the slaughter of hundreds of thousands, perhaps as many as a million, suspected Indonesian communists:
The United States provided the special radio system so the Army could coordinate the killings over the vast archipelago. Bob Martens, who worked at the United States Embassy in Jakarta, compiled lists of thousands of names of Indonesian public figures who might be opposed to the new regime and handed these lists over to the Indonesian government.71
The United States played an important role in the 1973 coup against Salvador Allende, the president of Chile, for the offense of being a democratically elected socialist. To this day, the people of Chile are still fighting for justice from the repression and killings of thousands of Chileans and hundreds of thousands forced into exile, orchestrated by the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet and supported by the U.S. government. According to Peter Kornbluh of the nonprofit National Security Archive, Henry Kissinger was “the singular most important figure in engineering a policy to overthrow Allende and then, even more, to embrace Pinochet and the human-rights violations that followed.”72
After the Second World War, France fought viciously to try to maintain its colony in Vietnam, passing the imperial baton to the United States to stop Vietnam from becoming a united independent country. After decades of war, Vietnam won, but it suffered deaths estimated in the millions and the country was left in ruins by the bombings, assassinations, and ecocide from widespread use of the herbicide Agent Orange. The Vietnamese people continue to suffer casualties from unexploded ordnance (the United States dropped more high explosives on Vietnam than all countries combined during the Second World War) and suffer ongoing contamination from the aftereffects of chemical warfare seeping into land, water, and genes.
As part of the war in Indochina, for years the United States secretly (because it was illegal under U.S. law) bombed neighboring Cambodia and Laos, supposedly to stop its use by Vietnamese fighters. The ensuing social dislocation caused by the carpet bombing of Cambodia created the opportunity for the barbarism of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge. William Shawcross has written that the “Khmer Rouge were born out of the inferno that American policy did much to create…. It was American policy that engulfed the nation in war…. Cambodia was not a mistake; it was a crime.”73
Although the United States was the primary support for Iraq and Saddam Hussein during the Iraq-Iran War in the 1980s, it turned against the regime in the 1990s. After the international sanctions orchestrated by the Clinton presidency (estimated to have caused over 1 million deaths, half of whom were children), there were the later killings and torture following the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq (over half a million people died), and the destruction of vital infrastructure. These facts, plus the U.S. sponsorship of an Iraqi government composed of Shia Muslims, which quickly began to oppress the Sunni minority, created all the necessary conditions for the rise of a militant resistance against U.S. intervention.
In 2015 and 2016, Saudi Arabia carried out a brutal war against Yemen, one of the poorest countries in the world. “This rain of destruction was made possible by the material and moral support of the United States, which supplied most of the bombers, bombs, and missiles required for the aerial onslaught. (Admittedly, the United Kingdom, France, and other NATO arms exporters eagerly did their bit.) U.S. Navy ships aided the blockade.”74
By support for every outrage of the colonial settler state of Israel, the United States continues to destabilize the Middle East and foster more violence. But a part of the stage was set when the United States and Saudi Arabia colluded to foster “political Islam” as an alternative to the rise of nationalist and socialist-oriented regimes in the 1950s and 1960s, especially in Egypt and Syria. According to a U.S. State Department memo of a 1957 meeting to discuss countering Soviet influence in the Middle East: “The President [Eisenhower] said he thought we should do everything possible to stress the ‘holy war’ aspect.”75 As Samir Amin has written, “Political Islam would have had much more difficulty in moving out from the borders of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan without the continual, powerful, and resolute support of the United States.”76
The focus above on the cruel history of U.S. overseas military and economic interventions is merely a reflection of its global economic and military dominance since the Second World War. Martin Luther King’s words ring as true today as in 1967 when he referred to the United States as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”77 As we noted earlier, imperialism and war are as integral to capitalism as class exploitation and racism. Also pointed out earlier, colonial powers such as Britain, France, Belgium, and Germany were just as brutal as the United States, and many of these countries cooperate today in U.S.-led interventions or attempt their own imperial interventions. Following the debacles in Afghanistan and Iraq, United States dominance is beginning to be challenged by small countries that no longer automatically back U.S. policies as well as by China and Russia, each jockeying for geopolitical advantage.
IMAGINE CHANGE
Capitalism is an economic system in which businesses strive to do everything possible to maximize profits in the shortest period of time—even if it means destroying a habitable planet. A system that does not meet the basic needs of the mass of humanity, a system that continues to harm so many people, a system in which countries use force to promote their perceived geopolitical and economic interests, unable to stop itself from destroying the biosphere it depends on, is a system that desperately needs to be superseded by a different system: one that has completely different goals, logic, and ways of operating, a society based on substantive human equality and that regenerates and then maintains a healthy ecosystem. But given our relationship to nature, our own behavioral characteristics, and the supposed innate differences among different groups of people, is such a society even possible? This is to this question that we turn in Part Two.