[D66] Chris Hedges | The Implosion of Capitalism

[Antid Oto]

Chris Hedges | The Implosion of Capitalism
Monday, 30 April 2012 09:08
By Chris Hedges, Truthdig | Op-Ed

When civilizations start to die they go insane. Let the ice sheets in the Arctic
melt. Let the temperatures rise. Let the air, soil and water be poisoned. Let
the forests die. Let the seas be emptied of life. Let one useless war after
another be waged. Let the masses be thrust into extreme poverty and left without
jobs while the elites, drunk on hedonism, accumulate vast fortunes through
exploitation, speculation, fraud and theft. Reality, at the end, gets unplugged.
We live in an age when news consists of Snooki’s pregnancy, Hulk Hogan’s sex
tape and Kim Kardashian’s denial that she is the naked woman cooking eggs in a
photo circulating on the Internet. Politicians, including presidents, appear on
late night comedy shows to do gags and they campaign on issues such as creating
a moon colony. “[A]t times when the page is turning,” Louis-Ferdinand Celine
wrote in “Castle to Castle,” “when History brings all the nuts together, opens
its Epic Dance Halls! hats and heads in the whirlwind! Panties overboard!”

The quest by a bankrupt elite in the final days of empire to accumulate greater
and greater wealth, as Karl Marx observed, is modern society’s version of
primitive fetishism. This quest, as there is less and less to exploit, leads to
mounting repression, increased human suffering, a collapse of infrastructure
and, finally, collective death. It is the self-deluded, those on Wall Street or
among the political elite, those who entertain and inform us, those who lack the
capacity to question the lusts that will ensure our self-annihilation, who are
held up as exemplars of intelligence, success and progress. The World Health
Organization calculates that one in four people in the United States suffers
from chronic anxiety, a mood disorder or depression—which seems to me to be a
normal reaction to our march toward collective suicide. Welcome to the asylum.

When the most basic elements that sustain life are reduced to a cash product,
life has no intrinsic value. The extinguishing of “primitive” societies, those
that were defined by animism and mysticism, those that celebrated ambiguity and
mystery, those that respected the centrality of the human imagination, removed
the only ideological counterweight to a self-devouring capitalist ideology.
Those who held on to pre-modern beliefs, such as Native Americans, who
structured themselves around a communal life and self-sacrifice rather than
hoarding and wage exploitation, could not be accommodated within the ethic of
capitalist exploitation, the cult of the self and the lust for imperial
expansion. The prosaic was pitted against the allegorical. And as we race toward
the collapse of the planet’s ecosystem we must restore this older vision of life
if we are to survive.

The war on the Native Americans, like the wars waged by colonialists around the
globe, was waged to eradicate not only a people but a competing ethic. The older
form of human community was antithetical and hostile to capitalism, the primacy
of the technological state and the demands of empire. This struggle between
belief systems was not lost on Marx. “The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx”
is a series of observations derived from Marx’s reading of works by historians
and anthropologists. He took notes about the traditions, practices, social
structure, economic systems and beliefs of numerous indigenous cultures targeted
for destruction. Marx noted arcane details about the formation of Native
American society, but also that “lands [were] owned by the tribes in common,
while tenement-houses [were] owned jointly by their occupants.” He wrote of the
Aztecs, “Commune tenure of lands; Life in large households composed of a number
of related families.” He went on, “… reasons for believing they practiced
communism in living in the household.” Native Americans, especially the
Iroquois, provided the governing model for the union of the American colonies,
and also proved vital to Marx and Engel’s vision of communism.

Marx, though he placed a naive faith in the power of the state to create his
workers’ utopia and discounted important social and cultural forces outside of
economics, was acutely aware that something essential to human dignity and
independence had been lost with the destruction of pre-modern societies. The
Iroquois Council of the Gens, where Indians came together to be heard as ancient
Athenians did, was, Marx noted, a “democratic assembly where every adult male
and female member had a voice upon all questions brought before it.” Marx lauded
the active participation of women in tribal affairs, writing, “The women [were]
allowed to express their wishes and opinions through an orator of their own
election. Decision given by the Council. Unanimity was a fundamental law of its
action among the Iroquois.” European women on the Continent and in the colonies
had no equivalent power.

Rebuilding this older vision of community, one based on cooperation rather than
exploitation, will be as important to our survival as changing our patterns of
consumption, growing food locally and ending our dependence on fossil fuels. The
pre-modern societies of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse—although they were not
always idyllic and performed acts of cruelty including the mutilation, torture
and execution of captives—did not subordinate the sacred to the technical. The
deities they worshipped were not outside of or separate from nature.
Seventeenth century European philosophy and the Enlightenment, meanwhile,
exalted the separation of human beings from the natural world, a belief also
embraced by the Bible. The natural world, along with those pre-modern cultures
that lived in harmony with it, was seen by the industrial society of the
Enlightenment as worthy only of exploitation. Descartes argued, for example,
that the fullest exploitation of matter to any use was the duty of humankind.
The wilderness became, in the religious language of the Puritans, satanic. It
had to be Christianized and subdued. The implantation of the technical order
resulted, as Richard Slotkin writes in “Regeneration Through Violence,” in the
primacy of “the western man-on-the-make, the speculator, and the wildcat
banker.” Davy Crockett and, later, George Armstrong Custer, Slotkin notes,
became “national heroes by defining national aspiration in terms of so many
bears destroyed, so much land preempted, so many trees hacked down, so many
Indians and Mexicans dead in the dust.”

The demented project of endless capitalist expansion, profligate consumption,
senseless exploitation and industrial growth is now imploding. Corporate
hustlers are as blind to the ramifications of their self-destructive fury as
were Custer, the gold speculators and the railroad magnates. They seized Indian
land, killed off its inhabitants, slaughtered the buffalo herds and cut down the
forests. Their heirs wage war throughout the Middle East, pollute the seas and
water systems, foul the air and soil and gamble with commodities as half the
globe sinks into abject poverty and misery. The Book of Revelation defines this
single-minded drive for profit as handing over authority to the “beast.”
The conflation of technological advancement with human progress leads to
self-worship. Reason makes possible the calculations, science and technological
advances of industrial civilization, but reason does not connect us with the
forces of life. A society that loses the capacity for the sacred, that lacks the
power of human imagination, that cannot practice empathy, ultimately ensures its
own destruction. The Native Americans understood there are powers and forces we
can never control and must honor. They knew, as did the ancient Greeks, that
hubris is the deadliest curse of the human race. This is a lesson that we will
probably have to learn for ourselves at the cost of tremendous suffering.

In William Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” Prospero is stranded on an island where
he becomes the undisputed lord and master. He enslaves the primitive “monster”
Caliban. He employs the magical sources of power embodied in the spirit Ariel,
who is of fire and air. The forces unleashed in the island’s wilderness,
Shakespeare knew, could prompt us to good if we had the capacity for
self-control and reverence. But it also could push us toward monstrous evil
since there are few constraints to thwart plunder, rape, murder, greed and
power. Later, Joseph Conrad, in his portraits of the outposts of empire, also
would expose the same intoxication with barbarity.

The anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, who in 1846 was “adopted” by the Seneca,
one of the tribes belonging to the Iroquois confederation, wrote in “Ancient
Society” about social evolution among American Indians. Marx noted approvingly,
in his “Ethnological Notebooks,” Morgan’s insistence on the historical and
social importance of “imagination, that great faculty so largely contributing to
the elevation of mankind.” Imagination, as the Shakespearean scholar Harold C.
Goddard pointed out, “is neither the language of nature nor the language of man,
but both at once, the medium of communion between the two. ... Imagination is
the elemental speech in all senses, the first and the last, of primitive man and
of the poets.”

All that concerns itself with beauty and truth, with those forces that have the
power to transform us, are being steadily extinguished by our corporate state.
Art. Education. Literature. Music. Theater. Dance. Poetry. Philosophy. Religion.
Journalism. None of these disciplines are worthy in the corporate state of
support or compensation. These are pursuits that, even in our universities, are
condemned as impractical. But it is only through the impractical, through that
which can empower our imagination, that we will be rescued as a species. The
prosaic world of news events, the collection of scientific and factual data,
stock market statistics and the sterile recording of deeds as history do not
permit us to understand the elemental speech of imagination. We will never
penetrate the mystery of creation, or the meaning of existence, if we do not
recover this older language. Poetry shows a man his soul, Goddard wrote, “as a
looking glass does his face.” And it is our souls that the culture of
imperialism, business and technology seeks to crush. Walter Benjamin argued that
capitalism is not only a formation “conditioned by religion,” but is an
“essentially religious phenomenon,” albeit one that no longer seeks to connect
humans with the mysterious forces of life. Capitalism, as Benjamin observed,
called on human societies to embark on a ceaseless and futile quest for money
and goods. This quest, he warned, perpetuates a culture dominated by guilt, a
sense of inadequacy and self-loathing. It enslaves nearly all its adherents
through wages, subservience to the commodity culture and debt peonage. The
suffering visited on Native Americans, once Western expansion was complete, was
soon endured by others, in Cuba, the Philippines, Nicaragua, the Dominican
Republic, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. The final chapter of this sad
experiment in human history will see us sacrificed as those on the outer reaches
of empire were sacrificed. There is a kind of justice to this. We profited as a
nation from this demented vision, we remained passive and silent when we should
have denounced the crimes committed in our name, and now that the game is up we
all go down together.

This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license.

http://truth-out.org/news/item/8808-when-civilizations-die