How We're Put Together

Note: This blog was announced as a place to comment both about politics, society and the economic system, and about the themes of my book Demystifying Demons: Rethinking Who and What We Are . The following essay is the first post that relates to the book. On Condemnation In my book Demystifying Demons: Rethinking Who and What We Are , I argue that our thoughts, feelings, motives, and actions flow from a complex of external and internal factors that we do not really understand and cannot control. We were, each of us, shaped in infancy by the dynamics of the situation into which we were born, a situation that includes not only the immediate lives of our families, but the larger social order in which our families operate. We are all deeply affected by economic and political conditions and the ways they influence how people treat each other. What appear to us to be, and are assessed by others as, conscious, deliberate choices, are the products of forces in us and around us of which we...

Enslaved by Capital When Saidiya Hartman visited Ghana some years ago to follow the tracks of the slave trade in Africa, she was told by an African American who had lived there for many years, “Soon the Europeans will own all of it again. Do you think slavery is just some old buildings and dead folks? No, it’s when other people decide whether you live or die .” [1] American history is often presented as a long, upward climb towards freedom. The Declaration of Independence declared that “all men are created equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Originally, of course, “all men” was taken to include only white men who owned property, and of course that excluded all women, and all non-Europeans, especially native people and people of African ancestry.   Most of the latter were enslaved and were intended by the Founders to stay that way. But, so the story goes, over the next two centuri...

This brief comment was part of my introduction to the Old Mole Variety Hour on July 2, 2018 . It is part of my ongoing mission as an Old Mole to make capitalism look as bad as it really is, a task made necessary by capitalism’s never-ending capacity to appear neutral or even benign. Capitalism depends on the nation-state for many things, including organizing and defending its way of doing business in the world. Thus the State regulates and limits the ability of workers to organize to minimize their exploitation; it funnels profits to major corporations for the production of war and security materiel and for building and operating camps and prisons for the enemies of the state. The nation-state, of course, is only a social fiction, and yet it must command the loyalty and even the veneration of most of its people since it is in the holy name of the Nation that people are often required to lay down their lives on the battlefield for its preservation and honor. And it i...