One popular misconception is that capitalism equals freedom and free societies. In order for capitalism to work, capitalists needed a pool of cheap, surplus labour. Countryside workers were forced off the land and into the new urban centres and the factories from the enactment of so-called Game Laws that prohibited peasants from hunting to the destruction of the peasant productivity by fencing the commons into smaller lots.
Daniel Defoe, the novelist and trader, noted that in the Scottish Highlands “people were extremely well furnished with provisions. … venison exceedingly plentiful, and at all seasons, young or old, which they kill with their guns whenever they find it.’’
Thomas Pennant, a botanist, this self-sufficiency was ruining a perfectly good peasant population:
“The manners of the native Highlanders may be expressed in these words: indolent to a high degree, unless roused to war, or any animating amusement.”
If having a full belly and productive land was the problem, then the solution was obvious: kick them off the land and let them starve.
John Bellers, a Quaker “philanthropist” and economic thinker saw independent peasants as a hindrance to his plan of forcing poor people into prison-factories, where they would live, work and produce a profit of 45% for aristocratic owners:
“Our Forests and great Commons (make the Poor that are upon them too much like the Indians) being a hindrance to Industry, and are Nurseries of Idleness and Insolence.”
Arthur Young, a popular writer and economic thinker respected by John Stuart Mill, wrote in 1771: “everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious.” Sir William Temple, a politician and Jonathan Swift’s boss, agreed, and suggested that food be taxed as much as possible to prevent the working class from a life of “sloth and debauchery.”
Temple also advocated putting four-year-old kids to work in the factories, writing ‘‘for by these means, we hope that the rising generation will be so habituated to constant employment that it would at length prove agreeable and entertaining to them.’’ Some thought that four was already too old. John Locke, often seen as a philosopher of liberty, called for the commencement of work at the ripe age of three. Child labor also excited Defoe, who was joyed at the prospect that “children after four or five years of age…could every one earn their own bread.’’
David Hume, that great humanist, hailed poverty and hunger as positive experiences for the lower classes, and even blamed the “poverty” of France on its good weather and fertile soil:
“‘Tis always observed, in years of scarcity, if it be not extreme, that the poor labour more, and really live better.”
Reverend Joseph Townsend believed that restricting food was the way to go:
“[Direct] legal constraint [to labour] . . . is attended with too much trouble, violence, and noise, . . . whereas hunger is not only a peaceable, silent, unremitted pressure, but as the most natural motive to industry, it calls forth the most powerful exertions. . . . Hunger will tame the fiercest animals, it will teach decency and civility, obedience and subjugation to the most brutish, the most obstinate, and the most perverse.”
Patrick Colquhoun, a merchant who set up England’s first private “preventative police“ force to prevent dock workers from supplementing their meagre wages with stolen goods, provided what may be the most lucid explanation of how hunger and poverty correlate to productivity and wealth creation:
“Poverty is that state and condition in society where the individual has no surplus labour in store, or, in other words, no property or means of subsistence but what is derived from the constant exercise of industry in the various occupations of life. Poverty is therefore a most necessary and indispensable ingredient in society, without which nations and communities could not exist in a state of civilization. It is the lot of man. It is the source of wealth, since without poverty, there could be no labour; there could be no riches, no refinement, no comfort, and no benefit to those who may be possessed of wealth.”
As Karl Marx pointedly said in Capital....."Capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”
The revolution must be willing to look beyond constraints of capitalism and stop looking for ways to put bandaids on it and find ways to replace it instead. Without empowering workers to own their own labour, capitalists will find new ways to exploit that labour and beat the working class back into submission. The class war on the working people is growing through attacks on workers’ rights and the unions. These are the conditions predicted by Marx and Engels, and the far left has noticed. Activists need to be talking to fellow-workers to build a real resistance that no longer is willing to be trampled on by the capitalist elite. It is time for workers of the world to unite and realise they don’t actually have anything to lose and do, in fact, have the world to gain. It’s time to think beyond capitalism. Capitalism is not a form of government. It is an economic system. It does not create wealth, but only allocates it. It is indifferent to the welfare of people. It has no social purpose. Private profit is everything.
The process of immiseration and impoverishment of the 99% is ongoing and accelerating and the parasite caste has NO intention of allowing it to be reversed. In fact, through mechanisms like the TPP, TTIP, TiSA etc, austerity policies and rapid automation, computerisation and robotisation, they are preparing to intensify the process. So a situation where 1% rule over a 99%, in the midst of ecological collapse, is intensifying.
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