Capitalism never had the plot

When profit runs everything

Image by arcanebullshit

A few weeks ago, I pulled my autistic daughter out of school and started homeschooling her. When the world is not designed for you, sometimes you must create your own.

Public schools in the United States groom children according to white cultural values: independence, self-reliance, hard work, goal orientation, and rigid time schedules. Thus, schools prepare students to be “successful” in a capitalist economy.

My daughter is disabled, so she doesn’t doesn’t win races, conform, or live in the future, and transitions are not her jam. Living on crip time, she’s not a strong contender for capitalism.

See, that’s the thing about capitalism. It works for those who can bring in capital. It does not work for those who don’t/can’t or who work their assess off doing unpaid, invisible labor.

Why? Because “the essential feature of capitalism is the motive to make a profit” (source: International Monetary Fund).

And because capitalism is “a system designed by the owning class to exploit the rest of us for their own profit” (source: The Democratic Socialists of America).

Suppose you don’t turn the hamster wheel because you are chronically ill, disabled, caring for others, suffering from inherited/ongoing trauma, lacking connections and/or resources, or you are a child. In that case, you are at risk of exploitation.

Considering corporate profits have driven more than one-third of inflation since the pandemic, anyone who doesn’t own stock in a major company making record profits is being exploited.

pretty palate cleanser

The problem of for-profit healthcare

Healthcare insurance, like many things here, is for-profit. Last year, UnitedHealthCare's revenues increased from $8.5 billion to $100.8 billion.

Guess what? UnitedHealthCare also denies more claims than any other insurer.

Also, healthcare-related debt is the top cause of bankruptcy in the U.S. On average, Americans are denied coverage 1 out of 5 times.

If UnitedHealthCare sounds familiar, it’s because its CEO was murdered last week. The words “deny,” “defend,” and “depose” were written on shell casings from the shooting, terms industry critics use to describe how insurers deny claims.

Teachable moment?

Yesterday, I wanted to educate my daughter (and myself) about the history of capitalism. I spent at least an hour searching for a kid-friendly video about it.

But all I could find were videos that:

• compared capitalism to socialism

• explained why capitalism is common sense

• were written by Ayn Rand

• framed capitalism as a great way to sell more t-shirts and make more money by hiring people — and don’t get me wrong, I love a Regulated AF tee as much as the next person

The only video I found sounded like it was narrated by Lewis Black and looked like a PowerPoint my teacher made in 1994.

Why was it so hard to find unbiased videos about the history of capitalism? What does that say about how we were taught as children when all the educational sources imply that capitalism is just as common sense and a no-brainer as making squirty cheese the main food staple for American children?

Eventually, I gave up my search and did some reading on it, and this is what I found. If anyone can turn this into a kid-friendly cartoon or a video with puppets, I will write you into my will—which, at this point, will probably only consist of 32,000,000 Google Docs.

History of Capitalism for Dummies:

1. Capitalism began with the start of feudalism

2. Feudalism marked the separation of lords from serfs

3. The lords held all the power, but they didn’t know anything about working the land

4. So, the lords relied on serfs who had connections and knowledge of land for agriculture

5. By exploiting the serfs, the lords got more power

Sound familiar? Maybe because it is:

Source: Frank Paul Green

That’s how it started. How it’s going:

1. Oil companies are bringing in record profits while continuing to be some of the biggest polluters of the planet

2. Insurance companies are bringing in record profits while denying coverage (1 out of 5)

3. Yesterday, my daughter and I screamed at each other because she wasn’t doing her schoolwork on time, and I had to leave to go to “work” because #idocapitalism,too

4. Cruise ship companies are also bringing in record profits, and now we have more cruise ships in Juneau than ever. Our town has again lost its community. The whales and porpoise have again left the channel. Helicopters fly through here instead of birds. Ship-Free Saturdays were voted down. Aaaaaand studies show that very little cruise ship money stays in Juneau, so the record profits are basically going straight to cruise ship companies.

During the pandemic, capitalism took a breather, and we hoped we had learned our lessons. But… profit.

Profit keeps the score. Profit greases the wheels. Profit lays down asphalt over dirt so we can drive as fast as possible. No checks no balances no speed bumps just go hustle get as much profit as you can.

I mean, really, what did we expect when we made profit our core value?

From Antonia Malchik who writes On the Commons: “One great lesson is hidden in the game Monopoly. I don’t like Monopoly because I’m not competitive and also it’s capitalism, but the original inventor of the game, Elizabeth Magie, was a follower of economist Henry George, who believed that land should not be private property, and if it became so, it should be taxed to benefit communities, who create its monetary value. Those who profited from the game erased most of those aspects, but the part where you pass Go and collect $200? That’s Universal Basic Income.” Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash

Back to the whole serf/lords thing:

To recap, these were your choices in medieval Europe:

1. Power meant disconnecting from land

2. Connection to land meant no power

Except it wasn’t a choice, and most everyone fell on #2:

I believe that this disconnect is where the problem arose. When we disconnect from nature, we disconnect from our roots. We disconnect from our bodies. We disconnect from truth. We disconnect from each other.

As you can see, white people have been disconnected for a long time. This is evidenced in how white culture values the mind over bodily intelligence and how we focus on the blooms over the roots (see the Scientific Method and how Western medicine treats symptoms rather than the causes).

But even the powerful owning class and exploiters pay a price, although they don’t see it. They disconnect from each other. They disconnect from themselves.

Bayo Akomolafe calls white people “orphans of a crowded sky,” seeking our indigeneity, our “place on earth.” Throughout my childhood, I felt this loss, this hole, not knowing my indigeneity or roots. Because of this disconnect, I was always trying to fill this hole with over-eating and men who treated me like bong water.

The good news, Akomolafe points out, is that we are all indigenous. “Decolonization is not about reclaiming a preexisting given,” he writes, but “intimacy with where we are. It is accounting for and opening up to our embeddedness.”

Liberation begins with reconnecting to ourselves, our nature, each other, and our environment. Becoming feral again, like this girl who can’t help but sing when in the beauty of nature.

feral.in.alaska

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Everything I write is about trying to course-correct and right the imbalance in this culture that rewards power and domination so that even “betas” like me can not only survive but thrive. I can only do this with support from readers like you. If you can, please upgrade your subscription to less than a coffee per month. Paid subscribers receive access to all posts, thread discussions, and bonus beginning-of-the-week content featuring a piece of original poetry or satire, depending on how frisky/feral I’m feeling at the time.

Now, I must away and tend to my wolves… Xo,

Summer

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