Dispatches From Freedom Summer: Ghosts Of Greenwood …. And Capitalism’s Past Horrors.

I have to laugh at the endless nonsense of people who write and say the most ignorant things.  Like we haven’t had free markets in a long time.  And free markets would solve this current global depression.  Or, this isn’t capitalism, it’s corporatism.  Or, let the free market determine a minimum wage.   Frankly, these are all lies of the mind.   The delusions, denial and logical rationalizations of the ego are literally endless.  To sit and try to rationalize why someone should be paid $8 an hour or, oftentimes, even less is pure evil.    It truly is.   You will never find someone making $8 an hour advocating for such inhumane wage slavery.  And more, importantly, the meaningless life it creates.  It’s only the evil of disconnected ego and its perceptions of superiority that would ever deny anyone a living wage and the human worthiness that comes with it.  It’s no different than people who glorify war and and talk of it romantically with some kind of twisted affection for battle, violence and, really what war is- state sponsored murder.  These are all signs of a mind operating purely on the ego’s rationalism.  And, the disconnected ego can and does rationalize every evil it can conjure up.    

Anyone who is able to connect to the place inside of them where kindness, compassion and love reside, may have a few questions for the corporate capitalist apologists.    When exactly did we have free markets?  Was that during the time of slavery?  The free market certainly did decide the paltry value of a human life just as today’s disposable society where people are thrown away like the trash.  Or maybe we had free markets during the time of the Robber Barons?  Or murdering Pinkerton Guards?  Or, company-owned towns?  Or maybe the 20 year depression of the late 1800s?  Or, maybe around the time of World War I and the Ludlow Massacre?  Or, maybe during the Great Depression?  Or, maybe it was the mass violence against labor and race in the middle of the twentieth century that literally led to an unprecedented national revolt against this system?  Which then the state responded to by taking away our liberties and capitalism responded to by ultimately breaking the back of labor aka society.  Because it certainly hasn’t been since the mid 1970s, when as a child, I witnessed adult family members and friend’s parents suffer extreme and unnecessary anxiety, pain and loss due to mass economic dislocation and injustice.  And it hasn’t been any time since with wages for all but a very few  stagnant and, at the same time the state used its violence to literally steal everything on behalf of a very small number of state actors.  

So, when did we have free-market corporate capitalism?  Please, I really want to hear a plausible explanation.  I’m all ears.  Send me an email.  The reality is humanity has fought to keep from drowning under this system since its inception four hundred-odd years ago.  Every once in a while humanity appears on the verge of breaking through but the state and its invention of corporate capitalism, always use state violence to beat back and ultimately overturn those gains. 

All states have dark histories that are often rewritten and suppressed.   Because all states exist for one reason; violence.  ProPublica has an excellent personal account of a history often suppressed or sanitized in this nation; Ghosts of Greenwood.  It is hard to read this vivid account and not appreciate a substantial sense of total injustice and  pure brutality that Nikole and her family and relatives lived under.  Good useful idiots for capitalism and capitalists themselves often affectionately refer to these times as the good ole days.  Good for whom?  Women?  Minorities?  Poor whites?  Immigrants?  “Inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.”  Capitalism relies on state-enforced class to exploit people to survive.  So, there are always the exploiters and the exploited.   It’s the good ole days for the exploiters.  Not so much for the exploited. 

Anyone looking for some type of grounding in reality of why we are seeing so much unlawful immigration and so many refugees around the world only need this piece to get a context of how corrupt capitalism, private capital and this economic system have always been.   There may have been a small window of dynamics when corporate capitalists weren’t bringing in boatloads of immigrants to fill their factories, and that created a mass movement of black and impoverished white labor in this nation.  For black Americans, this meant instead of being exploited as sharecroppers, they were exploited as wage slaves.  For a short period of time black labor and impoverished white labor was finally allowed a small piece of the pie.  That didn’t last long.   Because soon the endless labor arbitraging of the corporate state was again in full swing through either cheap immigrant labor or corporate slave labor colonies around the world. 

This is the real dynamic behind the diaspora our nation is experiencing.  And once again it is both black and white Americans who are being exploited with immigrant labor.  And, interestingly, it is now a president with both a black and white heritage taking that exploitation to a new level.  Now asking for billions to deal with an immigration crisis he is largely responsible for while Americans on the receiving end continue to rot.  We are simply lathering, rinsing and repeating the same corrupt, unlawful process over and over and over again.  A process created by the corporate state.  Who wins?  The corporate state.  Who loses?  All labor, be that white collar, blue collar.   It doesn’t matter.  All labor is exploited whether it is physical labor or intellectual labor.  And now the repression is so great that white collar labor is getting a major dose of reality as doctors are told by capitalists they are allowed seven minutes to see a patient as just one of countless examples.   What decent human being wants to practice medicine under such violence?

I have written extensively of the how and why but this story is a prime example of why we need public capital in a democracy.  Because wage slavery, economic slavery and the associated subjugation to social injustice and human suffering are and always have been part of this system.   What does it matter that outright slavery was abolished if economic and wage slavery still exist?    What does it matter if you have basic human rights if they are not applicable to your place of work or the economic system that sets the tone for every aspect of your existence?   This is a prime reminder of why public capital is needed to actually stimulate private investment, public investment, human investment and investment in free communities.   And why Jefferson’s desire for government to literally give every American their own property (public capital) was and remains so important.  And, by public capital, no I don’t mean anything controlled by politicians as noted on here repeatedly.  Politics is going to disappear some day forever because it is an institution of the ego aka control that subverts truth and freedom.  

We have never, in the history of capitalism, had a free society or a free market.  What we should seek are fair markets that work on behalf of society and individuals rather than private, for-profit corporate interests, state actors or private individual interests stripping people of the vast majority of their fruitful labor for exploited surplus value.