The Exploitations of Capitalism

Maybe it my continued attempts to finish John Dos Passos' U.S.A. trilogy with its Leftists awaiting the Revolution or my having Henry David Thoreau's Walden with its comparisons of Northern wage slaves to Southern chattel slaves, but I have never understood how no acknowledges capitalism's defects. Racial justice snd feminism may be changing that.

Consider Capitalism, Racism, and Misogyny in Natasha Brown’s Assembly as reviewed by Elizabeth Gonzalez James:

In his bestselling book, How to Be an Antiracist (2019), Ibram X. Kendi writes about what he terms the “conjoined twins” of racism and capitalism. “The origins of racism cannot be separated from the origins of capitalism,” he says. “The life of capitalism cannot be separated from the life of racism.” Capitalism emerged alongside the growth of the transatlantic slave trade and thrived during colonialism, and the two institutions have grown together and solidified over the last four hundred years.

I agree with Kendi. I’d arrived at a similar conclusion years ago, around the time I stopped identifying as a Libertarian, started to see the lies upholding many of my beliefs about the free market, and realized that subjugation and exploitation undergird capitalism as much as racism. But I would add a third component to Kendi’s twins, as I see instead a tripartite monster of three equal faces: capitalism, racism, and misogyny. Living inside a capitalist system that thrives off of “global theft, racially uneven playing fields, and unidirectional wealth that rushes upward,” women have been and continue to be exploited, often providing free or cheap labor, working in sexually violent conditions, and working without many of the basic rights afforded to men. None of this is news, especially if you are a woman who has ever held a job. But rarely have I seen a novel address these three evils so powerfully and so head-on as Natasha Brown has in her debut novel, Assembly, released in the UK in June and in the US this fall.

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 Search for “internalized capitalism” and “grind culture” and the top results are all articles on how both are detrimental to mental and physical health, how linking personal identity to material success and productivity can have disastrous effects. Dread is the word Brown uses.

Capitalism is to serve the general good. Failing to do so requires intervention by that entity tasked with protecting the general good - the government. 

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12/14/21