Capitalism is the first economic system to ever be fundamentally imperialistic. It is the first that must grow or die, engulf, control and consolidate and unify markets (into one), subsume them. It is the first to turn every transaction into a zero sum game. It operates always on a zero-sum methodology.
First off, it takes its cue from slavery in the way it is set up. Workers do not own their own production. All of it is the property of the capitalist, the employer. It’s as if you were to give birth at work, and rather than taking home your baby, it’s now legally, by right, the property of your employer. And that is the first step in alienation and “making people stupid.”
The second step is that this process is reproduced all over the globe, billions of times a day, and the capitalist system has, for nearly two centuries, been expanding its baby-snatching to the four corners. You lose, they win. Billions of times a day, week after week, year after year.
The third step being the process and the effects of competition, both within a company and between them, and between the past and the present, and the present and the future. The laws of competitive capitalist motion guarantee additional zero sum results, and more and more alienation, as workers are not just stripped of their babies, but they have to fight each other for scraps paid them in exchange for their babies, and to keep getting those scraps, and to keep getting a bit more of those scraps to keep up with inflation and so on. Alienated from the work we do, from our fellow workers — so we don’t come together in solidarity — and alienated from any possibility that we can find someplace that doesn’t do this, because capitalism is everywhere now.
Fourth: We’re alienated from the earth, because capitalist production has produced more and more layers between us and the land, gadgets, appliances, metaphorical and literal concrete blocking us from touching land, and the portability of capital and consumer products makes us stupid with the possibilities, and ads and marketing make us further delusional regarding our supposed “choices,” of which we have few. Different colors and packaging, but the same old same old shit.
Capitalism: The totality of alienation and competition with ourselves and each other, all via zero sum machinations which only benefit the few.
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