In a capitalist
society, capital rules: the need of capital to maximize the return on its
investments, is preeminent. That need takes precedence, almost always, over
every other interest unless blocked by the concerted effort of ordinary people.
Capital on its own has absolutely no moral compass. It is inherently and
constitutionally blind to every consideration other than profits. It will stop
at nothing, no matter how morally odious, in the pursuit of its purely material
ends – slavery, conquest and genocide, large-scale theft and deception – all
these and more are the time-tested methods of capital.
The reason for
this is not any human moral failing, for capital, to put it bluntly, is not
human. It is not subject to moral feelings like empathy and compassion, for it
has no soul, any more than a volcano or a tsunami. It is useless to appeal to
capital to do the right thing, for it can hear nothing but the ka-ching of
money coming in.
Let me
illustrate with some examples. In spite of Germany’s innovations in green
energy which you may have heard discussed here on the Old Mole, 37 percent
Germany's electricity is powered by coal, and 23 percent of it by the dirtiest
form of coal, called lignite, or brown coal. According to a recent NPR
story,
seven of Germany's brown coal mines are among
the top 10 biggest polluting power plants in Europe. And yet, Germany still
aims to reduce its carbon emissions to 40 percent below 1990 levels by
2020.
But although Germany is investing heavily in a
transition to clean energy, it is not reducing its carbon footprint. There is a
commission charged with the task of phasing out coal, but one of its members,
Stefan Kapferer, “head of Germany's largest energy sector lobby, which includes
coal companies… says that for an industrial giant like Germany, …it could take
another 20 years to shut down coal use.”
“The coal plants belong to
companies who have ownership rights," he says. "So if you're going to
insist they shut down, appropriate compensation has to be awarded." [And,]
he adds, "We've got to ensure that our chemical, steel and aluminum
industries can access and afford the electricity they need."
So the economic weight of capital is a major political
obstacle to the survival of the atmosphere our lives depend on.
Here’s another example:
In South Africa, the Black population is still
waiting for the ruling party, the African National Congress, founded by Nelson
Mandela, to live up to its original promises of liberation. The ANC’s official
policy still includes ‘Radical Economic Transformation’. Yet, according to Michael
Smith writing in the journal Catalyst, the
newly installed president, Cyril Ramaphosa, once a man of the left, “must allay
the fears of local and international capital.”[1] Why
must he do this? Because a critical mass of the nation’s wealth -- resources, means of production, money to hire
and pay workers and to pay taxes, consists of capital, and capital must profit and grow, and to do so it
must do what it can to prevent anything like “radical economic transformation.”
Another example from the days when the engine
of capital accumulation in Western Europe was the brutally enforced, involuntary
labor of enslaved people captured in Africa. In her book about the slave trade,
Lose Your Mother: A
Journey Along The Atlantic Slave
Route, Saidiya Hartman tells of the horribly brutal
murder by a ship captain of two enslaved girls during the Atlantic crossing in
1792. The case caused a moral outrage in England, but the Admiralty Court could
be trusted not to convict the captain. Quoting from the book,
Were
two dead girls more important than the prosperity and commerce of Great
Britain? Were the fools and idiots ranting about abolition blind? The fruits
and majesty of the empire would be impossible without slavery. Prosperity had a
price. There was no getting around it—death was the cost of the Africa trade. It
was certain as the day was long. An iron hand was the only way to manage it.
[And] the judge said as much during the opening of the trial.[2]
Of course, the enslavement and deaths of
millions of Africans in the interests of capital was also justified by racism,
the idea that Africans were inferior. This is an idea that capital continues to
rely on. In a recent interview about his film, “Sorry to Bother You” Boots
Riley, asks (and I’m paraphrasing some),
Why racist ideas? Why are black folks imagined
as savage, or insufficiently cultured, or angry or lazy. The need for these
tropes is to teach that poverty is caused by the impoverished, not by the system we are living in. This
system needs poverty, it could not exist without it. If there were full
employment, wages would be what workers demand, no one could be fired with
nobody to replace them. There’s a direct correlation between unemployment going
down and wages going up. And when wages go up, the value of stocks, which are
capital, goes down. The Wall Street Journal
openly worries when the unemployment rate goes down because of the impact on
wages and profits. They have to have an army of unemployed workers to make
employed workers willing to settle for whatever capital is willing to pay – or
as little as possible. How do you get the people to accept a system that
requires poverty? That’s where the racist trope come in. To convince the white
working class that they are not at risk because they are not black, so white people
can regard themselves as middleclass because they’re not in the lower class
signified by blackness.[3]
The evils of capitalism are not produced by
the immoral choices of owners, managers, and partisans of capital. Such people
have lost their souls to capital, and insofar as they serve capital, they have
no moral compass other than the sanctity of private property. Liberals who
appeal to the moral consciousness of business and political leaders to put
people over profits are sending messages into the void where no one hears them.
Moral reasoning is powerless against the imperatives of capital. You might as
well ask the lion not to eat the lamb. But we can make a moral argument, over the heads of capital, to each
other, affirming the obligation we
have to each other to do our utmost to organize together in the project of
challenging and replacing the power of capital with the power of the people
united to share equally in the work of building a world that works well for all
of us.
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