The Deadly Reign of the Animate Object: Capitalism and Sociopathy

Stephanie McMillan writes on The Deadly Reign of the Animate Object: Capitalism and Sociopathy.

Capitalism is not just an economic process, but it’s the whole way our society is arranged, an ensemble or matrix of social relations. These comprise three main fields: economic, political, and ideological.

The economic field is determinate; profit is the point, and everything else is set up to solidify the relations of production that keep it coming.

Capitalist ideology, centered on competition and individualism, is designed to make the way we live seem normal and inevitable. It’s forced on us by its institutions: school, the church, the nuclear family, media, and culture. Why would we need advertising, for example, if they didn’t need to convince us to participate? Ideological domination is unrelenting conditioning and indoctrination to naturalize capitalism, to make us compliant, passive, greedy and self-centered. To make us identify with it, instead of understanding it as the enemy that it is.

Political domination, the job of the state, has two main aims. The first, performed by the government and its laws, is to regulate the relations within and between classes to keep the flow of capital smooth and free of obstacles. The second is for when ideological domination fails: when we can no longer accept living this way, the state turns to coercion through terrorism. This function is performed by the state’s armed forces, its military and police. If we don’t comply, the guns come out.

The entire purpose of this set-up is economic: the accumulation of wealth for a small minority of people, those who own the means of production, namely factories, tools and land. This ownership was not ordained by a god. Nor is it because capitalists are smarter or worked harder than anyone else and earned this right. It is because they took it. They started with trading, which many societies understood as thievery since it’s the exchange of unequal values. This is still the way that mercantile capitalists accumulate wealth. They continued with land theft, backed up by war and genocide.

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Workers have to understand how Capitalism works. That is why Karl Marx wrote Capital. It was to make the laws of motion of Capital comphresionable to ordinary people.

Then Vladimir Lenin developed the Bolshevik party into a tool for the working class to overthrow a Capitalist country.

The fundamental contradiction of capitalism, reproducing it and driving it forward, is capital vs. labor in the production of surplus value for private accumulation. This process is what produces class divisions, class domination, and class struggle. It also uses oppressive practices like racism and patriarchy, and has terrible effects like ecocide and war, which we all have to deal with. It is a global system that dominates all of social life, and all the dominated classes and social groups struggle against it in their own ways.

But the core of this is embodied in the struggle of workers against exploitation. Workers are the ones who face capital in their daily struggle for existence, in an inherently antagonistic relationship. They are the only ones able to offer an alternative to capitalism; other classes can resist but can’t break its framework. So if we are to actually destroy capitalism, the working class needs to lead all the dominated classes in a revolution, to overthrow the capitalist class.

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In order for the working class to do so, workers have to identify with the working class. They will have to surrender their aspirations of joining the Capitalist class. They will have to overcome the indoctrination of racism, sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia, in order to see other people as human beings.

This requires intense personal and social development which is best achieved through self-education, reflection, participation in mass movements, and action on the streets. We cannot be instantly and flawlessly tranformed into the people who can overthrow this Capitalist system. We must endure the daily political struggle in our own lives, and with others.

We must accept that mistakes will be made. We must be ready to quickly identify these mistakes, own up to them, and rectify them. We must be able to forgive ourselves and others for making these mistakes.

There is no magic formula for this transformation. It requires what we workers have done all of our lives: long, hard work.