Mass Defection & the End of Capitalism
Why removing fear and financial coercion from the equation can rapidly multiply our allies
At the community film screening of Invasion yesterday that some friends and I put on (about neo-colonial intrusions into indigenous territory to build multi-billion dollar fossil fuel infrastructure) I was struck by something that I hadn’t noticed in my first couple views of it. The white man with glasses offering the pathetic, poorly thought-out “offering” of bottled water and packaged cigarettes looked truly ashamed of what he was doing. The moment occurs 12 minutes in (see below). He looked humiliated. It seemed apparent to me that even he understood that it was just theater and he was just a pawn being forced by corporations and governments to go to the front lines of antagonizing and victimizing indigenous people on their fertile, living lands.
The police officers in the opening shot of the short film have a similar feeble, sheepish look to them — a look of understanding that they feel they have to do this, but that they don’t really want to.
Actually, in looking at a lot of the images of this invasion, it really does not look like the vast majority of the law enforcement officers are enjoying what they’re doing. No, it looks like they’re ashamed. It looks like they know they’re on the wrong side of history and that they feel that they have to do what they’re doing.
But why?
The systems of domination and exploitation that they live in — and that we live in — are “winning” right now, if we’re to be honest. But they continue to win at a time when the vast majority of people know this system is collapsing largely because they get people to show up. The current exploitative economic system we live in proceeds at full speed — despite only serving an ever-shrinking few — mostly because those at the front lines of advancing it are feeling the economic pinch as much as you or I, and are probably not financially free to decide that they no longer wish serve the colonial masters. In fact, for certain professions, there may be very few options.
Yes, of course there are racists and white supremacists in law enforcement. But it seems that our anger and cognitive inertia have made us blind to the reality that these systems are also failing many of those who appear to be our enemies, and that it is these systems which pit us against many potential allies.
If our goal is to creatively and strategically bring about the death-knell of systems of capitalism, patriarchy, and neo-colonialism, then it would do us well to remember the possibility — the likelihood — that for many of these “bad” men, there is a good man underneath, desperately waiting for the opportunity to cast off the shackles of his own uniform.
Most of us have had jobs where our bosses have told us about a new protocol or project that we know is badly thought-out, counterproductive, systemically destructive, or downright unethical. But in how many of those instances did we feel so financially un-free and squeezed that we couldn’t just leave our job or even dissent or disobey because it might result in getting fired?
That’s probably the calculation that tens of thousands of law enforcement officers are feeling as the rise of authoritarianism around the world has led to the increasing abuse of the most vulnerable populations.
If we can communicate to these ones that if they defect from their posts as defenders of the invaders, predators, and the world-burners, that they will be respected for their defection and cared for, then we can reduce the ranks of our opponents while multiplying our allies.
But to be able to do this, we will need to create the social and economic conditions that allow that to happen. There was a small “Quit ICE” initiative that the nonprofit Never Again Action started to help Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) quit their jobs and find other jobs by offering ”free and confidential career advice from professionals.”
But this is not enough. Capitalism gets people to show up by doing two things: first it steals and jeopardizes every single security net that we used to have by dispossessing us of those things and preventing access — from destroying public transportation, making nutritional food inaccessible or expensive, privatizing the commons and public spaces, making healthcare prohibitively costly, poisoning the abundance of nature, etc. Second, it offers us these things back at a cost — gas, fees, repairs for your car, paid social events and gatherings, privatized healthcare — but to pay those costs, we have to serve the masters with the money.
It’s a system, but it is also a mafia boss. It tells us that if we want to have a nice life, we better stay in line. We better do our jobs. It’s no accident that the most horrendous acts of humanity were precipitated by masses of people bureaucratically “doing their jobs.”
So to really drive a mass defection from capitalism, patriarchy, and neo-colonialism, we have to de-fang those systems first. Individually, we have to let it be known to our friends, neighbors, and community members that they will be taken care of if and when they defect from these systems. After all, it’s not just law enforcement officers that advance these systems.
When we take home, car, or credit card loans with “better rates” from banks like JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo who vehemently fund these neo-colonial intrusions, we pay them to advance these systems of domination and exploitation. When we say that locally-produced food is too expensive so we buy “affordable” food that’s produced through methods that more resemble warfare than farming, we advance these systems. No one can act perfectly in a system like this, but we can help each other slowly defect from these systems, little by little, day by day.
This requires doing more than voting with our dollars, and extending to the creation of parallel institutions that give our community members access to essential goods without being forced to pay — food, clean water, land access, community finance instruments, communications platforms, and non-exclusive community gathering spaces.
This is not a new idea at all, in fact most successful resistance movements in the past century have included basic needs provisions like food and access to land, along with access to non-exclusive gathering spaces, and do so at no cost to the communities they exist in. Yet doing this properly will require organizing, rather “entrepreneurialism.” It will require trust in others, rather than contracts. It will require living a life filled with struggles and many lost battles and no riches or spoils of war.
As Nadya Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot puts it:
“Any given system of power is built on an assumption (which of course is trying to portray itself as an axiom) that to receive joy you need to pay or obey. The ultimate act of subversion is thus finding joy in a refusal to pay and obey, in an act of living by radically different values.”
We must take away the fear of not being permitted to live if we don’t obey the systems of domination and exploitation and earn money to pay for life. By taking away that fear for others, we give them the space to be free to do what they probably want to do in the first place. Essentially, this gives people the space to stop serving these world-destroying systems and instead, to become our allies in emancipating others from those systems and in creating the world of tomorrow together.
