The Tyranny of Capital and the Gilded Cage
This is part five of a six-part series in response to the lies propagandized by our capitalist society. Part one, The Capitalist Lie — Welcome to the Slaughterhouse, part two, Shop ’til You Drop — the Unsustainability of Capitalism, and part three, The Myth of the Meritocracy and the Palace of Thieves have been followed by part four, Endgame Competition — Heads We Win, Tails You Lose that can be found here https://medium.com/coping-with-capitalism/endgame-competition-heads-we-win-tails-you-lose-74c2c6831e0b
Irresolvable Contradictions
Does capitalism make people more free?
This is a question we have touched on, but that might deserve a few more words since it is such a strong part of the purported rationale backing up this form of economy.
As we have mentioned, there are political systems and there are economic systems. Capitalism, as we have asserted, is an economic system and not a political system.
Political systems, in their laws, address political and personal freedoms.
The capitalist argument seems to be that economic freedom is an important aspect of the personal freedoms that people either enjoy or crave. After all, with capitalism, one can, for the most part, buy or sell whatever one wants as long as one has the money or credit for it.
Certainly, there are exceptions.
This may actually be the heart of the matter. The architecture of the complicated world we’ve constructed intertwines and interconnects with a support system built to protect and perfect the sources of power. Economics have staggering impacts on political freedom as we’ll see.
These forces can work in opposition or in more or less a harmony. In a capitalist nation like the current USA, economic freedoms trump political and individual liberties.
How this works at the most basic level is one requires capital to survive much less thrive. In this way we become enslaved by capital.
The core, and admittedly often abstract, truths about these issues are often starkly simple even as how they play out is maddeningly complex.
Freedom really is the central aspect of this particular digression. Even those grasping for wealth and power find that they have become enslaved, so in this way there is a sense of commonality.
The reality is more damning, of course. Today, as the wealthy elite throughout the world perceive the existential threat to human life, they recognize their own vulnerability.
The response from power is always the same. The rich man reaches his arms around his pile and pulls it towards himself. This is what Naomi Klein called the Security Age. This is when the US President calls to build “a great, big, beautiful wall” around his nation.
The neoliberal bifurcation of the global economy has inflamed this tumor of a contradiction. The tight rope walk of capitalism has been thrown into imbalance with the dismantling of the welfare state and commodification of labor.
This clashes with the idea of people governing for themselves. Too many of these “ruled who rule” have been left out of the capitalist economy as it is practiced today.
Power is openly conspiratorial. These cats, and only these cats, run in the same circles. It is another “natural” process for the “fittest”. At its endpoint, neoliberalism forces the hand of power.
Given a choice, power will jealously retain all its wealth and all the power this wealth provides. Power, we should be very aware, will most likely wish to remove this notion of “democracy” instead of giving up any of their wealth and power. Nothing really changes from their perspective, except to ensure this reality stays the same or that they remain in charge.
The results of this experiment have metastasized right before our eyes with the rise of fascist tyranny among formerly “liberal democracies”. It is the only way for the powerful to remain in complete control. Of course, this is no insurance. After all, it turns out, the elite have miscalculated their entire schemes up to now.
We are in unprecedented crises and should expect unprecedented responses.
One striking example should alarm the American public. When the highest executive of the land, the one person most responsible for enforcing our laws, attempts to subvert and ultimately overturn the will of the citizenry in the full light of day, each of us should be concerned. Note how we continue to enable this treachery. If we value our liberty and our agency, our concern should be unprecedented.
In Mammon We Trust
Capitalism by its very nature concentrates power through the force of capital. In this way, power is nested within wealth like a Russian doll. As wealth is unevenly distributed, power becomes unevenly distributed.
The freedom to accumulate wealth most often from a position of privilege, serves the few able to attain this wealth who in turn gain the power that capital brings.
In this way, once again, capitalism trumps democracy.
When wealth and freedom come into conflict, as will happen when the economy bifurcates at our contemporary levels, wealth comes out on top as wealth equates to power.
Real freedom is contained within this power.
This isn’t anything new for people of color. Those placed into the weakest positions in our society are bell weathers to political freedoms. Ask a poor, Black trans woman if she feels free in this society.
The systemic economic reality places power in the hands of the wealthy and does not distribute it equally among the democratic stakeholders. So, America’s “democratic” power is no longer in the hands of the citizenry, but in the hands of the wealthy.
This is the plutocracy that has dominated American politics at least since 2010 and the momentous decision of the Supreme Court in Citizen’s United vs. FEC. This was a major lurch towards tyranny that the courts will continue to propagate as they too prioritize deregulated economics over personal liberties.
This freedom that stems from wealth and power is anything but democratic. It accumulates power among the very few. This becomes the freedom to exploit and to control and manipulate. By providing this freedom and power to the wealthiest few, freedom and liberty is snatched from the very many more of us who are simply citizens, workers, and consumers.
In essence, our economic system invites anyone with the capacity to grab wealth and power to use it to their greatest personal advantage even if this compromises the political system that is designed to empower the citizenry in an equitable fashion.
Because the economic system grants power to wealth, this erodes democracy and the freedom of its citizenry.
So as power brings exploitation and abuse across the economy, this abuse becomes politicized through fascism and authoritarianism.
What rights do we lose next? Who are the next victims of marginalization, exploitation or worse?
These are the questions we should ask as this is the ground upon which we walk.
Freedom? Free for whom?
In reality, freedom, like so many of our systems, is like an old, eccentric machine. You open one valve and 2–3 others close, flutter or stop operating altogether. Freedom is something that can be as open as the sky and the clouds. It is an umbrella of factors each with its own elements of liberty or constriction.
One simple extension of this is to ask if one person exploits their freedom to the fullest and gains power above and beyond that of his fellow citizen, does that entitle him to suppress the freedom of another? One might reflect that when one expands their own power, that they do this at the expense of the agency of others.
Capitalism quickly settles into a sort of “soft fascism” that one may experience working in the corporate environment. A world where true freedom only really exists in the corporate boardroom.
With the evisceration of the labor movement, like with economic power, this power of and over labor has also “bifurcated” into a tiny ruling elite and the near powerless masses.
Workers end up working longer, with less “free time”, making lower wages, and enjoying a dwindling skeleton of meaningful benefits.
Meanwhile, the accelerating trajectory of the inflationary spiral increases the costs of goods and services further strapping the working/consumer class forced further into debt and peonage while further enriching the monied class or producers, bankers, investors, and corporate leaders.
The capitalist system easily slips into the duality of master and of slave.
Property, especially the ownership of one’s own home, has long been a marker of the American Dream. Consider how the progeny of America’s middle class view the possibilities of this dream and marker of our society’s success. This dream, that has eluded so many in previous generations, has now become little more than a fantasy for most of us.
From the capitalist perspective, freedom starts with property. In reality though, this is the beginning of tyranny.
When white Europeans first began to exploit native peoples in America, they claimed Manifest Destiny as they murdered, enslaved, tortured, diseased and raped throughout the peoples of this land.
After all, isn’t this where all personal property in America really comes from? This sort of violent theft?
Or should we take this more literal? This property has been passed along the generations until today we see these stewards of the land, often those with ancestors capable of colonial exploitation, bringing us to the brink of extinction by befouling the land for which they retain these claims of possession.
Should we actually be asking a question never historically posed by European invaders in the frontier days or “who is it that owns this planet Earth”?
Do property owners who have brought our species to the brink of extinction “merit” this ownership inherited from the very ones who murdered and enslaved and stole all in an effort to capitalize on these crimes?
It seems that property and its possession can be called into question. When one is exploring this facet of freedom and liberty, doesn’t this have more than one side to it? Isn’t there some validity in the claim that this planet actually belongs to a collective and not a person?
It seems, under all these terms, that the existential crises we collectively face give ownership of the entire planet Earth to the responsible and loving hands of all the people of this planet Earth who rely on it to live and prosper. Not exclusively to the few who have exploited this land and through their power fully display their culpability for the mess we find ourselves in.
A Parting Clue
A striking example of freedom in America is revealed in global incarceration rates. In 2023, Iran incarcerated 228 out of every 100,000 citizens. Russia had 326 out of this number. Cuba 510. Rwanda had the second most incarcerated with 580. The USA has led these statistics for years and in 2023 had 629 out of 100,000 citizens incarcerated (a total of 2,068,800 leading the next highest gross number incarcerated in China by over 378,000 prisoners).[i]
Yet, we claim to be the “freest nation in the world”.
As Michelle Alexander pointed out in her book The New Jim Crow, continuing a history of the exploitation of black and brown citizens today we have laws that restrict many of our personal liberties.
Alexander reminds us that the 13th Amendment of the Constitution of the United States that “ended slavery” actually secured the enslavement of the incarcerated. Post-restoration Jim Crow laws enabled the continued exploitation of black citizens by creating a variety of laws intended to lock them away and put them through the convict lease system. Through vagrancy laws, for example, blacks were forced into compromising labor contracts to avoid jail and this convict slavery in our prison institutions.
Not only do we use drug laws to enslave black and brown people, but America has, for all intents and purposes, criminalized poverty. Our society “deals” with poverty and a homelessness crisis exacerbated through the bifurcation of the neoliberal economy using the violently coercive tools of law enforcement and the judicial/carceral system.
The amount of services available to those without means is slim and dwindling. Virtually all transactions in a capitalist economy involve the transfer of money. Requiring poor defendants to post cash bail is a stark example of how poor people lose their freedoms due to a lack of financial resources.
As we explore these issues in our current “free society” we should remember that, from its beginning, America promised that “all men were created equal” and made claims of “liberty and justice for all”. Yet, during its complicated history, this nation of purported freedom has enslaved millions and created systems of domination and subjugation through class, gender, race, and other arbitrary modes.
One might argue that slaveholders were desirous of a sort of economic freedom to secure other humans as their personal property thus removing any modicum of freedom from the enslaved person.
Slaveholder’s justification literally became America’s justification up to the Civil War. We should be able to see that similar contradictions may still exist in our exalted society today.
One might consider if this ownership of another can be a type of “partial ownership” or that we may dictate to another how they carry their person, how they behave and how they may or may not treat an unborn child they may carry in their womb.
The ordered American state uses regulations (laws) to enforce the “will of the state” on the individual. This is intended to reduce or eliminate entirely undesirable behaviors such as murder, theft, rape, assault, and the like.
Among the more recent regulations is this stricture against owning another person (unless, of course, that person is incarcerated).
One might ask, who owns us? Who decides how we live, dress and behave? Who decides who we love? Who decides how we identify ourselves?
Pay close attention to the laws being passed for purported “moral”, “cultural” or social motives. Do they make people freer or less free?
When the state makes these decisions purportedly to repress anti-social behavior that is destructive or oppressive to other citizens can the state actually become the oppressor itself?
The criminalization of “vice” crimes like gambling, prostitution and drugs is an arguable example of the overreach and subjugation by the state and as Alexander pointed out the war on drugs is the primary tool for the “new Jim Crow” that has been so successful at incarcerating black and brown Americans at an obviously tyrannical rate.
This is designed to subjugate entire portions of our population — mostly black and brown men in America.
Again, who is next? Importantly though, is America becoming more free or more oppressive when it targets the weakest among us?
One can not simply ignore the economic pressures that have opened this valve and capitalism can not simply wash its hands of this suppression of personal liberties either. We see economics once again intertwined with politics and personal liberties.
In Part Six: A Call to Unite for Revolutionary Change we will conclude our examination of capitalism and its lies and consider the task before us.
[i] <https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/incarceration-rates-by-country>
