Protesting about Henry Ford’s links with the Nazis in the 1930s

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Capitalism is first and foremost a mindfuck!

by Richard Steinhardt

Through the historical lens, the core argument is that the fundamental causes of the current war in Central Asia, the Gulf, the war conducted against the Russian Federation, and the potential war over Taiwan are the result of systemic aspects of the capitalist system. Israel and the Zionists are not behind everything.

Let’s not behave like the forgetful blue fish in Finding Nemo. We need historical memory and historical understanding. Once upon a time, Marxists, socialists, and progressive liberals clearly understood the nature of the society they lived in and its operation. They did not deflect blame away from the true causes of war, destruction, and poverty: global corporate capitalism. What Ray McGovern called the MICIMATT: the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think Tank centred in the USA.

“Israel has been the most significant asset placed in America’s position by historical forces… What Joe Biden repeatedly stated: ‘If Israel didn’t exist in the region, the United States would have to invent one to protect its own interests.’… US public intellectual Noam Chomsky, in a 1977 interview, said the Israeli regime ‘functions as a useful base for ensuring US control over the region’s vast oil resources, and that is its primary function in the grand strategy of imperialism.'”

“Israel performs the tasks that Americans prefer not to undertake directly. One can now confidently assert that justifying the means by the end, while exploiting the Jewish people, constitutes the greatest betrayal the Americans have ever committed against any religion or ethnicity.”

Y. P. Rāzi (Tehran-based journalist and commentator)

It is a system of corruptors and corrupted that operates above and beyond the mask of democracy. It was President Woodrow Wilson of the United States who said: ‘An invisible empire has been set up above the forms of democracy.’

The system hoards resources and launders the criminal appropriation of land and property through the state, which powerful economic forces have captured. The capitalist system legitimises conquest, theft, and mass murder in the name of profit. Capitalism as a society is a system of production and ownership. It involves employing people and paying them as little as possible. It means that more and more of the wealth of the world is concentrated in the hands of a tiny minority, the 0.1%. It means that the resources that exist on the periphery of the metropolitan centres of global capitalism—in Russia, the Middle East, Latin America, and elsewhere—must be made to flow towards the centre: resources such as minerals and energy. It is a system that uses and exploits labour wherever it can find it.

“Behind the visible infrastructure of barrels, tankers, ports and shipping lanes, lies what might be called a carbon-industrial complex—not her formulation, I am borrowing from Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex—that binds together energy producers, governments and financial institutions. The result is a system that concentrates wealth in the hands of a few even as its costs are borne by the burgeoning working class.”

Laleh Khalili (Professor of Gulf Studies, University of Exeter)

José Goulão, a journalist and geopolitical analyst, writes: “The ‘law’ on which the global West is based does not exist; it is not legitimate in the international legal system: it is proof of the fraud that what is still called the ‘Rule of Law’ has become.” And he expresses it well when he says: “We live in ‘the hour of monsters.’ The sociopaths give vent to the genocidal vocation, of which the actions of extermination and ethnic cleansing carried out by Zionism in ‘defense of the West’ are flagrant examples.” But all this war, genocide, and manipulation is carried out not because individual actors are uniquely ‘mad’ or ‘bad’, but because these actors faithfully serve the interests of the global capitalist system, which is solely concerned with wealth extraction and is piratical, risk-taking, and utterly ruthless.

There is a core contradiction, according to Karl Marx. Capitalism, in the long run, is unsustainable because the rate of profit extraction must increase, and that means less pay for workers, which leads to a crisis of overproduction, impoverishment, and growing organised resistance. Ultimately, capitalism is both unstable and unsustainable.

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The international capitalist system functions by exploiting the labour of ordinary people, which requires the people who provide the labour to agree to being exploited, either through force and necessity, or through persuasion. The unity in opposition of people working to produce all the wealth for the capitalist class requires workers to be disunited in opposition and to be either unaware of or dissuaded from using their collective power to rearrange and restructure society into something more humane; to take over the means of production and control it themselves. In addition, the capitalist system requires large unemployed labour reserves to break strikes and force down wages. Misery is an essential part of the combustion engine of global corporate capitalism, and so are various severe forms of corruption.

In the first place, the corruption of key sections of society in the capitalist core: the supervisors and skilled workers must be fully on board. For example, you need the cooperation of the kind of people who will work on a nuclear submarine without ever worrying about the fact that its purpose is to threaten to fire nuclear weapons in a modern version of Palmerston’s gunboat diplomacy. Comply or else! So long as these workers get their money, whoever they are, in whatever sector they work in, they will collaborate. They will work in companies like Elbit Systems and Palantir without too many qualms. In the second instance, there is corruption of the state, which is captured and controlled by those with the most economic power in society, so that the state acts in the interests of the wealthy. A system of revolving doors is set up between companies and the government. In third place, corrupt comprador elites are installed and supported in countries on the periphery that have resources or are of strategic importance.

The slightly better-off class in capitalist centres and the stooges working for them on the periphery will forgo solidarity with their fellow human beings to fight for our masters. To help with this process, divisions are intentionally accentuated wherever they exist. All the complex stratagems are designed to prevent opposition to the status quo; to prevent the natural response, which is collective forms of resistance to exploitation. The system uses divisions like sex, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and religion to divide opposition and weaken people’s power.

But the real point of attack against ordinary people who actually create the wealth has always been through the capture of people’s minds and through controlling the way people think in a variety of different ways. The mechanism of control to obtain consent and convince ordinary working people that the people who steal the products of our labour have some mystical right is as sophisticated as the machinery the capitalist centres design and manufacture to fight their wars. And all this sophistication has one simple aim: to convince people that a certain class should be allowed to accumulate millions and billions; to harvest the fruit of the world population’s surplus labour.

The workers don’t even have toilet breaks in places like Amazon, while Jeff Bezos has hundreds of billions, buys mega-yachts, and takes joyrides into space on the back of other people’s suffering. To be allowed to do all this with alacrity, requires consent which needs a vast underpinning system of brainwashing to hold everything in place. Capitalism is first and foremost a mindfuck.

These systems of exploitation must become normal to be accepted. Historical normalisation: slavery was normal 200 years ago and a pillar of US agricultural production, and those who opposed it were considered radical and evil, and were persecuted, punished, and killed.

In feudalism, serfdom normalised abject servitude and loyalty to the feudal lords and, through them, loyalty to the chief brigand, the capo di tutti capi, the robber king himself. Heretics were the opponents of social and mental control, and they were crushed. Utopian visions of egalitarian societies were crushed by the state and church.

Capitalism pays its shills to blot out effective criticism of the status quo that might lead to concrete action and measures being adopted to replace it. Human consciousness is manipulated in a thousand different ways to achieve this end. The manipulation of racial mystique and nativism, fabricated histories, mass media manipulation, subsidised films, artistic works, social sciences, economics, music production, literature, history, drug-use, and so on can all help bolster and justify capitalism, and consequently extreme inequality. You will find a thousand films about brave bank robbers before you find one about a socialist revolution.

Fascism arose in response to crisis. The 1920s/30s crisis of capitalism unleashed fascism. Fascism was supported by the bourgeoisie, by small farmers, small business owners, professionals, teachers, office workers, and some skilled workers who refused to identify capitalism itself as the enemy.

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Instead, the fascists’ trick was to provide the majority of the people with a minority scapegoat, a whipping boy who would not fight back, for the extortions of the capitalist class, and to co-ordinate the opponents of collective ownership: the bourgeoisie, the lumpen proletariat, skilled and privileged workers, and the military and police—to oppose collective action, ownership, and demands.

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The fascist trick was to deflect the blame for exploitation, state violence, and poverty away from themselves and to point the finger at the communists, socialists, progressives, and people who opposed imperialist wars. In the thirties, the easy targets were Jews, Roma, Muslims, and Russians. Mystical nativism and carefully fabricated identities were deployed to deflect anger away from capitalist robbery and to accuse people who were clearly outside of those core identities, and blame them.

We see the modern parallels and need to understand the role of settler colonialism, which is not independent of the stratagems of the capitalist imperial core. On the periphery, in the empire, the capitalists at the core use extremist groups to impose their designs: from the Azov Battalion to ISIS to the Zionists.

Israel was constituted as a forward base for Western capitalism in an energy-rich region and is made up first and foremost of settlers from Europe and the USA. It is not a separate entity from US and European capitalist interests. Israel is the armed wing of capitalism: a hermetically sealed ideology acting as a weapon for Western capitalist interests, with only a very thin, implausible veneer of deniability. The justification for its actions, weirdly, centres on the crimes the West carried out against Jews and other minorities during WWII.

Without US weapons, Israel would be forced into a South Africa-style solution where everyone must get along or leave. When Israel is no longer viable as a point of projection of Western power into the region, it will be absorbed peacefully into the region.

“The 12-Day War crystallizes the role of Israel as a vehicle of primitive accumulation in West Asia. Through colonial settlement and dispossession and its role as a military and economic outpost, Israel advances the imperatives of global capitalism, exacerbating the persistent contradictions of imperialist competition… Until these fundamental global contradictions of a dying US imperialism are addressed, the cycle of open conflict is likely to continue.”

Roohollah Kohanhoosh Nejad & Seyyed Mahdi Pakzat (University of Tehran)

A case in point: London was, and still is, at the centre of the empire of Western corporate capitalism. The real beneficiaries of exploitation at home and on the periphery are polite, well-dressed people with houses in London and the surrounding home counties. The true enemy class is not the extremist shock troops on the periphery. They merely work for the capitalist class. The true enemy class are well-coiffed, cultured, educated, pleasant-sounding, well-mannered bourgeois. And it is they who profit from the horror of global capitalist hegemony and the bloody domination of the planet. It is this well-dressed and fed and Glastonbury-attending class that is the root cause of global poverty and violence. To quote Amal Chatterjee: ‘If you want to find an Indian billionaire, go for a walk in Hyde Park. He is more likely to live in Mayfair than in Chanakyapuri.’

The contemporary reality is that it is for these polite, vegetarian, charity-organising people that the IDF soldier puts a bullet in a child’s head. Batista, Pinochet, Suharto, and all the other stooges of Western capitalism did the same, and they were not Jews. The person you sit next to on the train from Tonbridge Wells to London—that well-dressed, carefree gentleman or woman in first class. It is in his name and her name that wars, atrocities, and genocides are carried out.

It is not Israel. It is not the Jews. It is capitalism and geopolitics, stupid.

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