Capitalism's social graveyard

Abstract

The present essay explores the biographical effects of a capitalist social structure and its implications for human sociation, consciousness and ‘belonging’. A rapidly changing economic structure built as a house of cards for the purpose of accumulation by the few eventually leads to human relationships built on foundations of sand and through social selection to the ‘survival of the ficklest’. Through a ‘politics of consumption’, the bourgeoisie have obfuscated the true source of social power, which is the private ownership by a few of the means of life for the many. This power is exercised implicitly through bureaucratization of the social structure, through an alteration of (what can be termed) historical ‘human nature’.

Keywords:

• capitalism
• poverty
• humanity
• society
• community

Notes

¹ The use of alcohol as ‘escape mechanism’ provides an outlet for chemically pacifying feelings of alienation that exist within a capitalist mode of production. Alienation is the driving force behind social change. If you get rid of alienation through chemical intoxication, similar to the use of psychiatric drugs, you kill the ‘motor’ that drives social revolutions. Alcohol is therefore an ‘opium’ more effective, explicit and not requiring any cognitive manipulation, compared to the legitimizing function played by religion in capitalist societies.

² Revealed also by the public's attitudes towards immigration (see http://pewresearch.org/pubs/20/attitudes-toward-immigration-in-the-pulpit-and-the-pew, accessed September 27, 2009).

³ In terms of the evolutionary history of the species.