mind reader

Dear friends,

What a week in the world. I wonder if there will be a time where we can say otherwise, though. We have seen the continued propagation of neo-imperialism backed by the traditional imperialists (this just cancels out to “imperialism proper” anyway) [1], the detention of a tech CEO over encrypted(?) messages [2], a waste of human life, sorry, Australian billionaire, urging the end of -coffee breaks- because mask-off slavery of the workers suits his personal agenda better [3], and research showing an >80% failure rate of “AI” projects [4].

It would also be remiss of me to not comment on the slow car crash of a purportedly “worker-focussed” party. The ALP has once again stooped to its lowest common right-wing denominator in making decisions about census, ejecting another member from the caucus [5]. At this point I am beginning to wonder if they will retain enough MPs to make any decisions before the next election, and while this may feel like hyperbole to sensible political observers but, I can feel in my bones a future where the labor right and the liberal left form a coalition to block independents and greens from power (not to mention with the “less radical” right-wing independents who will surely be elected too).

In a sentence, we are once again in a grim place. So, with the ever depressing scene set, let us begin an inquiry into an aspect of the contemporary capitalist phenomenon, an ideas favourite, the sociopath. Today, however, let’s look directly into the horses mouth ­— we’re going to examine the capitalist and some of the fundamental laws of economic organisation which enable both capital’s reproduction and the (re)production of sociopathy. Spoiler alert, capitalism is a sociopathic economic and social organisation system, and it’s not getting better for being less examined. Three components are of interest to us today: first, fundamental precepts of imperialist capitalism (yes, again, hello), second, the reciprocal (but ouroboros­) nature of capital’s reproduction through the working class, and finally the erasure of the petit bourgeoisie (a move documented as early as Gramsci’s time in politics towards fascism [6]).

Capitalism demands predation upon those with something to give. Or, those with something to give demand capitalist participation. Yes, by and large, the predatory nature of capitalism has been erased in culture because of capitalism’s onto-epistemic seizure. In literal terms, capitalism has rewritten the way we see the world so fundamentally that workers see no alternative to selling a portion of their time in order to exist in the other portion [7]. For how does one acquire shelter, food, and life without paying a landlord or supermarket (capitalist)? This social mesh, in which we are born, raised and exist, demands monetary transactions flow from the worker to the capitalist to keep the worker “off the street”. The same, simultaneously, cannot be said for the capitalist, whose existence equally demands the proletariat’s offering of labour to power their accumulated (surplus) capital which furnishes their leisure lifestyles [8].

For secret reasons the working classes, unless agitated, are more or less forced to accept these relations as “natural”. To be careful and clear here, one cannot blame the working classes for the promulgation of capital. Indeed, Gramsci’s theorisation of civil society and the institutions in it which channel the bourgeoisie thought into the mainstream (the civil sphere) helps us understand that all types of engagement with society in the west (at least, if not elsewhere) are engrained with capital and allow only capital. So the secret reasons are, as inferred above, that social conditioning reproduces capitalism as natural, necessary, and innate. It is, of course, anything but.

The natural world, the antithesis of capitalism, does not demand moneys for the purchase of property. Indeed, if they were a person, mother nature would likely laugh at you, or maybe cry with you, for attempting to render cash for shelter. The capitalist world, on the other hand, sees humans as the only species in the universe dumb enough to pay another human for land, materials, and shelter. Fundamentally the needs for shelter, food, and other necessities have been exploited by capitalists in order to create a wealth-skimming 1% ­— a leisure class whose lavish lifestyles are based entirely on the expropriation of work, through gruelling daily labour by the working class, and extraction from nature. The problem, or conflict if you like, in capitalism is its need for continual growth, the “line must go up” mentality to retain the comfort of the capitalists.

First this need for growth drove colonisation, the brutal and genocidal expansion of European capitalism across the globe. Next the double expropriation from workers, in that not only must you sell your labour power to the capitalist for a means of subsistence, but that in so doing you subsist only to serve the capitalist another day. In the more bourgeois parts of the world this is supposedly “fairly traded” for a “socialist” retirement — of course, more unethical lies have never been told. The products of your labour, be it the curriculum and pedagogy you produce and enact when teaching a class of students, or be it the coal you remove from the coal seam, are alienated from you (hello Karl) in exchange for an empty value — a wage, which you must spend on subsistence. What’s worse is that the capitalist class demand competition, and pit you against your colleagues and comrades for the lowest possible subsistence. But, let’s diverge from explaining Capital again and look at how political society (in Gramsci’s terms) also enforces this mode of human life.

The current majority ALP government in Australia is interested in two main things, both of which are twistedly ironic for a party called “Labor”: the unrestricted accumulation of wealth for the capitalist at expense to the worker, friends and neighbours and environment; and the unashamed squeezing of the working classes to force basic subsistence living on a perpetually static wage. The first of these is an ipso facto necessity for participation in political society. I suggest, here, that to participate in the ruling and governing of any modern capitalist country in any capacity requires, at least, an acceptance of onto-epistemic capital. While there may be revolutionaries and resistors, the actual daily “work” (if you can call it that) of parliament requires belief in capitalism as vehicle for “momentum”, even if the momentum is anti-capitalist (vis-à-vis liberal reformism). The second of these, demonstrated time and again in a litany of anti-worker moves [see also 9], is a fundamental admission of adherence to capitalism over democracy (if there were such a thing). Political society, handmaiden itself to the bourgeoisie, not only perniciously enforces capital as model of operation for government, services, and so on, but sets the agenda for stasis and reproduction in civil society.

If political society both sets the tone for and inherits the tone of the media (murdoch), education (government curriculum), and social organisations (i.e., religions), we can begin to see where a capitalist onto-epistemology develops. Workers and capitalists alike consume media, education, and social fabrics which enforce capitalism. Naturally, the education and media a capitalist receives is vastly different from a working class person, right down to the sociopathic attitude modelled by their teachers. It is from this fundamental insertion of capitalist ontology into the minds of the young ­— the endless reproduction of political propaganda for capitalism’s reproduction — that capitalist reproduction springs forth. And knowingly the capitalists reproduce this, and their capitalist ideology (more recently popularly called neoliberalism).

So this cyclical “politics produces capitalism” and “civil society produces capitalism” just as “worker produces value which is alienated from them” and “capitalist sells the products of the workers labour for their own leisure” creates the conditions in which the working class must prostitute themselves for capitalists, and capitalists continue to fatten and brine themselves in stolen products. An ouroboros­ of human suffering, except for the 1%, their leisure time more than makes up for the massive and cripplingly anti-human “ethic” they employ to secure their fortunes and perceived favour. So finally we arrive at the erasure of the middle class, or the petit bourgeoisie both by government and institutions of civil society — because primary extraction/extracted relationships are simpler to maintain, and do not require the capitalists to cede leisure (a mega yacht, for example) if production is “down” or there is civil unrest over capitalist unfairness.

I’ve noted, -ad nauseam- at this point, the sociopathy of the capitalist class – the bourgeoisie. Importantly, this is not becoming more prevalent. The capitalist class is sociopathic. They foster and demand competition between their fellow human for literally just existing. There is no other species on the planet which enslaves and manipulates, undermines and attacks another in this way. The capitalist class and its remaining adherents among the petit bourgeoisie and proletariat are either sociopathic themselves, or subscribe wholesale to sociopathic ideas in a quest for “pulling oneself up by their bootstraps”. A more impossible, and torturingly accurate, statement about the nature of capitalism has not been said, except that some people in capitalism are born without even the boots to begin with, while the engorged capitalist screams at them about pulling their straps up. Ok, yes, one of my great past times is over-stretching metaphors.

The middle class, however, the petit bourgeois, is always being actively undermined by those above. In times of relative economic (a fake science, and a fake system) surplus the petit bourgeois may grow, and even some of the more privileged amongst them may become class ascendant. However, when economic conditions change, this class is stripped of its (surplus) accumulation and gaslight to believe it wanted to do that. The middle’s leisure time disappears, and their true nature as a fraction of the proletariat is revealed. However, in contemporary times we can add a semi-psychological analytical opportunity, because those petit bourgeois in this relation are both being controlled in the style of an abusive relationship while simultaneously acting as a propagandist mouthpiece for capitals reproduction. What a contradiction. Passing the abuse down to those around them. If it happens that a member of this middle class sits in management, they delude themselves to believe they are not replicating the extractive, expropriative, and malicious toll required to feed the capitalist class, and they pass on the moral guilt of the capitalists (notably, this is largely absent due to true sociopathy in a clinical sense [10] which is broadly known and lauded by the capitalists themselves) through a prism of their own treachery, self doubt and moral concern.

For the remainder, the ALP is working hard to ensure that the working class primarily and the petit bourgeoisie as a happy coincidence are forced back on to subsistence wages through use of inflation to drive down the value of a wage to the worker. These are the terms with which economists speak, and the fundamentally anti-human nature of the language, the approach, and mentality of these traditional “intellectuals” is so infectious that they even believe themselves to be socially liberating others. So, what? We are seeing increasingly sociopathic behaviours in the workplace, from politicians, and across media not because of some new phenomenon. So, cheerily, I say...

Capitalism is run by sociopaths. Capitalism creates sociopaths. Capitalism is slavery.

Can we please wake up and smell the ashes before the planet is gone?

Your comrade,

Aidan

[1] https://mondoweiss.net/2024/08/harris-says-she-wont-stop-bidens-policy-of-sending-weapons-to-israel/

[2] https://edition.cnn.com/2024/08/28/tech/pavel-durov-telegram-custody-released-intl/index.html I have mixed feelings about this

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/business/article/2024/aug/29/australian-billionaire-boss-coffee-breaks-office-chris-ellison-perth-mineral-resources

[4] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/research-shows-more-than-80-of-ai-projects-fail-wasting-billions-of-dollars-in-capital-and-resources-report

[5] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-08-29/albanese-governemnt-lgbti-census/104280744

[6] Gramsci, A. (1977). Selections from political writings (1910-1920) (Q. Hoare & J. Mathews, Trans.). Lawrence and Wishart; Gramsci, A. (2007). Selections from the prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (Q. Hoare & G. Nowell-Smith, Trans.; Reprinted). Lawrence and Wishart.

[7] Marx, K. (1976). Wage-Labour and Capital & Value, Price and Profit. International Publishers. Marx, K. (1990). Capital: a critique of political economy (B. Fowkes & D. Fernbach, Eds.). Penguin Books in association with New Left Review.

[8] Yes, the very ones that tell the working classes to eat less avocado on toast.

[9] Literally pick any link about the ALP from https://aidan.cornelius-bell.com/bookmarking/

[10] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/08/the-science-behind-why-so-many-successful-millionaires-are-psychopaths-and-why-it-doesnt-have-to-be-a-bad-thing.html what an absolutely fucked up article, though.

Dear friends,

Do you remember the glory days of Apple as the underdog? From early scrapes with Microsoft, through years of struggling management, the triumphant return of Steve Jobs, and the iPod boom. For decades of its existence Apple had been, and held closely its title of, underdog. Microsoft, IBM, HP, Dell, and other “big players” in the personal computing arena held majority market share. Apple envied the position of those with more market share. Not because it was the creative underdog – but because it was greedy [1].

As a marketing strategy Apple cornered creatives. Offering software with particular affordances to a limited set of creative professionals, and emphasising lock-in. Little to no Apple software had been successful outside of Apple platforms, and barring iTunes, little has remained available on other operating systems. The prototyping of control, ownership and entitlement starts here with the Mac – and it has festered into the pinnacle of entitled, greedy, and overbearing techbro bullshit that dominates silicon valley, the Fortune 500, and most of American capitalism today.

The process, though, of slowly gaslighting creatives to drag their friends to Apple’s platforms was gradual. Apple knew, above all else, that building decent software, selling overpriced commodity hardware in nice chassis, and fostering an ecosystem of devices would serve their profit motive. But they knew one thing above all else. Build a brand on the underdog status. Sell “premium” consumer hardware. Monopolise on services. This is the post-iPod Apple. And it has only metastasised with its explosive growth over the last ten years.

Decision after decision about the approach, marketing, and practices of the Company are now so clearly driven by an entitled greed that many “creatives”, intellectuals, and core platform users (from the “real” underdog days) are abandoning ship [2]. With Apple’s treatment of developers over the last 10 years [3] much of the innovative force of new software, tools and artistic expression has left the platform for greener pastures. Unsurprisingly, the newest platform entry has been an abject failure, and yet shamelessly still sells for basically the going rate of an uninsured MRI in the US [4]. However, this is only symptomatic of a much deeper issue.

There continues to be developers working on Apple platforms. Indeed, many large corporations develop for Apple’s platforms now, at minimum for iOS and iPadOS, and accordingly many large corporations support, at minimum through BYOD policies, the use of Apple’s tools in workplaces. If you went down the cultural studies line of reasoning, you might argue that ever since Apple climbed into bed with corpos, the cool, creative and indy folks jettisoned – think digital hipster (with neither configuration being particularly “cool”). But this is a well-covered gripe – indy devs, small startups, and -people with ideas- are, mostly, not welcome on any “platform” today. The best app in the world might be on the Google Play Store right now, but without a million dollar marketing budget, a pocket full of hegemonic “content creators”, and more fair-weather friends than one billionaire could reasonably count, you’ll never find it.

The contemporary “marketplace” of apps, media, “content” and so on have gone the way of television. I mean this in the sense that what was once an open internet, open “marketplace” if you will, has been replaced with broadcasters – or, perhaps more fittingly, narrowcasters. Instead of the limited role of discovery that was stumbling upon niche Mac apps on websites far and wide, has been replaced with App Stores and mainstream channels. With the rise of the Play Store, App Store, and Microsoft Store, software distributed ‘elsewhere’ is increasingly less visible – and it was rarely visible to begin with. Even on smartphones which are -allowed- to sideload (i.e., install applications from somewhere beside the Play Store or App Store) the practice has barely taken off.

Instead, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and a small handful of other players control the platform. They have become the Channel 7, 9 and 10 of apps. If you want to sell an app, an electronic interactive art piece, a song, a movie, whatever – you go to the only market in town. And the companies behind these markets are like Apple, and worse. Freedom of choice? Not on corporate America’s watch. Anyone reminded of neoliberalism at this juncture?

The problem deepens, however, as corpos are regulated (by countries and unions that still have something vaguely resembling teeth for being pro-consumer) and then fight back against nations. Yes, these companies, often acronym’d to FAANG, bring their revenues higher than most countries GDPs to employ lawyers to fight against the very consumers they purport to supply and “love”. When they fail to comply, they keep belligerently snubbing their noses at government bodies until they might incur a fine large enough to be worried about their profit margin [5]. Between this and paternalistic, monopolistic, and flagrantly anti-human AI practices [6] the technosphere has only become a more toxic mess. Not to mention the corporate lobbying in support of privacy-invasion, slave-trade and extractivism. Somehow, though, I’m not able to finish here.

If you develop, sell, buy, interact with, or in any way engage with Apple’s platforms, any transaction you conduct through anything but the web browser [7] you are giving 30% of your transaction to Apple. Giving to charity? No worries, Apple will take 30% of that for their bottom line. Doing some online shopping? No worries, Apple will take up to 3% through Apple Pay. These massive marketplaces move billions of dollars a day – and Apple, Google, and Microsoft (amongst others) are there to take most of your pie. The justification is that they “made the tools” thereby entitling them to 30% of your revenue, forever, no questions asked. Just what in the fuck is -free market capitalism- that the corner-store vanguards of capitalism continue espousing, I guess its just code for “shilling for billionaire and trillionaire corpos”. But the plot thickens…

In the last week both Apple and Patreon have been up to some shady business. Patreon, another kind of marketplace for content creators and creatives, were, for some reason or other, initially exempt from Apple’s “30% of your profit goes to us” extortion. Patreon has grown massively over the last few years, with most YouTubers, bloggers, artists, developers and so on having some kind of vague involvement in the platform. Here you can sell your art – publish a piece, and subscribers can pre-sign to say “yep, give them $5 for every creation”. Write a monthly blog? Yep, $7.99 a month. This micro-economy of subscriptions and gate-kept content has proliferated, but really only between Patreon and OnlyFans – the rise of new marketplaces? Well of course, if they’re controlled by a capitalist. Talk about everything being a subscription, ey. Well, Apple, like the mafia, have decided that the rent is due – they want content creators, creatives, programmers, bloggers, and more to yield 30% of their bottom line to Apple [8]. Alongside this, Patreon has decided that it will end per-creation payments, effectively forcing everyone into a subscription model, and ending the ‘slow’ creation of art – -sigh-, capitalist work intensification at its finest.

Apple’s domineering: “we made the tools, you pay the price” argument has gone out the window in this new low. It has been replace with: “you exist on the internet, we’ll extort you”. Patreon already takes between 4-18% from creatives’ proceeds. But, at least, Patreon provides billing infrastructure, web hosting, customer support, and profile management services. In this instance, all that Apple is doing is … making smartphones (which they overcharge consumers for like nobodies business). But, if you want to be in this marketplace, well, you’ll pay – or you’ll leave. I know which I’m doing (and I’m not even on Patreon - ew!).

The corporate greed, entitlement, and fighting over unconscionable quantities of money speaks to the fundamentally unethical nature of capitalism. This anti-human, anti-creative, and distinctively oppressive ideology and political apparatus has truly devolved into a corporate-hegemony of infantile narcissism. Who is leading the charge in the technosphere? The “underdog” Apple. And what a shame, because knowing the struggles of “indy” developers, makers, and creatives, Apple could have chosen a better way – an inclusive way. Instead, like so many others, they hoist the ladder up behind them as they climbed to the very top of the NASDAQ. And now they spend all their time “enshittifying” (as the internet is obsessed with calling it) their platforms and services to extract as much profit as possible. Sick.

I’ve posted before about transitioning to open source software where possible, barring what is needed for employment. Indeed, since that last post, allegedly Linux market share has risen above MacOS on desktop and laptop deployments [9]. Personally, I’m still daily driving Linux, Firefox, LibreOffice, and more – and I’m more than tempted to get a GrapheneOS capable smartphone next time I break something. But this is only the beginning of the reason that I find Linux and open source software compelling. Unlike its corporate counterparts, it is fundamentally based on the idea of transparency, visibility, skilled contributors, and, as much as humanly configurable, meritorious contribution. In fact, it is anti-capitalist by the license agreement. I’ve been GitHub and OpenCollective sponsoring a range of indy projects, contributing to the Linux Foundation, Open Document Foundation, and Mozilla (org, for Thunderbird, Firefox is a subject for another day). In the process of doing this, I’ve found increasingly that software, solutions, creativity and expression in these communities is passion driven and infinitely cooler than any marketing image Apple ever deployed.

Indeed the “cool software”: the tools, tweaks, gadgets, and fun stuff that Apple has slowly sanitised from the App Store, all seems to have moved over to Gnome and KDE. Brilliant. Once Microsoft transitions Office to a PWA (and it’s getting very close) there will be little, beside perhaps the Affinity suite, keeping me dual-booting. And barring an -actual- Linux phone (yes AOSP is Linux powered, but it’s not -Linux-; the same way iOS is BSD-powered lol) my transition to an open source lifestyle will be complete – and I will gladly financially contribute as much, if not more, to these communities than I ever have to Apple, Microsoft and others.

It’s a sad day when you feel ethically as though use of a tool required to do your work – intellectual, creative, fun, freedom, whatever – is fundamentally opposed to your way of life. Either I’m getting more radicalised (lol, jk, of course I am) or Apple and the rest of capitalism has really gone to shit. Probably both. Who cares – get FOSS.

Much love,

Aidan.

[1] https://aidan.cornelius-bell.com/idea/14/

[2] https://www.adnews.com.au/news/dissecting-apple-s-crush-ad-controversy this ad truly fulfilled its underlying tone – “crush the creatives, who cares?” – Apple.

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27385314 https://www.kotaku.com.au/2024/08/devs-say-working-with-apple-arcade-is-frustrating-like-an-abusive-relationship/

[4] https://www.macrumors.com/2024/07/11/apple-vision-pro-under-500000-sales-this-year/

[5] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_24_3433

[6] https://www.macstories.net/stories/ai-companies-need-to-be-regulated-an-open-letter-to-the-u-s-congress-and-european-parliament/

[7] even then, Apple is likely taking a cut on Apple Pay, or another lock-in scheme.

[8] https://www.engadget.com/apps/patreon-will-have-to-use-apples-in-app-purchase-system-or-be-removed-from-the-app-store-192631471.html

[9] https://itsfoss.com/linux-market-share/

Dear friends,

Not a day goes by where the direct affects of “line may only go up” capitalism doesn’t destroy another part of the human soul. Every single day in the anglosphere workers are robbed. Every single day in the rest of the world workers are tortured. The dual processes of exploitation and extractivism for capitalist ends are not only the infatuation of the capitalist and political classes, but have so deeply infected the psyche of the worker that new values have taken root in civil society. These are perpetuated by the bourgeois in the vain hope that they will now be saved by the bourgeoisie as the planet burns.

There are a few dimensions of interest to our inquiry today. Let’s get cracking!

First, greed as a notion historically. From the 15th century, Europe’s leaders leant on desire for wealth, resources, and power amongst other bourgeoisie to leverage brutal globalist expansion. Indeed, even religious “values” de-centred greed from the working masses, but as increasingly profitable genocide and colonisation grew, the values around prohibiting greed fell away. Even with a small handful of enlightenment philosophers (and 99% of the inhabitants of the “colonised” world) questioning the drive to capture, capitalise, and extract the world over, the ruling class was far more interested in profits.

We went from a primary driver in society nestled in “power” to one nestled in “resources”. Increasingly European nations pivoted from monarchical societal organisation, through to proto-capitalism, and eventually to full scale extractivism for the sole benefit of the already wealthy. During this process, the working classes were removed from their land, women were vilified (as witches and various other “sorceress” labels), and nature was discarded as the source of life, power, mystery, fear and opportunity. Instead the reign of “man” dawned – in a gendered and literal sense, at the expense of “mother” nature and any woman who dared look sideways at an insecure male ego.

The infectious nature of this “anti-feminine” (relevant theorists will have far better ways of explaining this than I) gripped and drove expansion, extraction, and arguably the emergence of the thin but hyper masculinity now manifest in the Barbie-style endowment of Andrew Tate. This rewrite of values, as Marxist feminists advance, saw the de-centring of women from societal leadership, knowledge, and power [1]. But it was also one of the first in a long line of excuses for radically rewriting (European) human values towards “profit first”. In essence, modern day “line must go up” is just an intensification of proto-capitalism and the stripping of relational, ecological, and human values from society.

Second, the inherent nature of capitalist exploitation. Who didn’t see this one coming, really? When we take anti-nature, anti-woman, anti-worker, and anti-sustainability as core values of even proto-capitalism, the obvious manifestation in what some call “late stage capitalism” is likely a deep intensification of this value set. Everything is polarising. Everything is fractious. Everything is serious. Everything is -now-. And it’s always a fight. When you nest your societal values in the negative, “anti”, a deep and festering hatred and bitterness grips that social order. We can see this all around us: growing impatience, frustration, xenophobia, racism, extremism and overt misogyny. At this juncture, perfectly “reasonable” people are moved to extreme, violent, and often unprovoked action to fight back against some great unknown.

Though, and literally the extent of my horror knowledge, “the call is coming from inside the house”. As we know, particularly with xenophobia and racism, the hatred fuelled perspectives of a small group can lead to exponential increases in daily “normalised” violence, lateral violence, and extremist violence from the dominant social group against the “other”. What value drives this? Negative “difference”? Lack of understanding? Just generally shitty humans? Possibly all of the above. In addition, however, we cannot ignore the value set of capital as an extractive, othering, and divisive economic system. The values inherent to capital require civil society, and importantly the proletariat, to divide on the basis of any difference – blak/white, gay/straight, neurotypical/autistic, Norwegian/English, manager/worker, beer/spirits, you name it, capitalism can divide you over it.

A politics of division, hatred, fear and anger underscore capitalism. Notions of fairness, comradery, respect, compassion, and so on are utterly alien to this system. Moreover, they are antithetical to capitalist -production-. After all, it only cares about the NASDAQ line going up – profit at any cost. While “democracy” rests precariously as our system of social organisation, so powerful is the capitalist class, and the infection that is the capitalist ontology, we now sit in a world where capital controls the social order, where money buys votes, where companies destroy the planet and people for the benefit of less than 500,000 people.

Third, the normalisation of greed. Sadists amongst us may think of the frog in the pot of slowly boiling water. But we would have to stretch this euphemism generationally, such that the frogs had created an entire ecosystem of life and experience inside the pot, with decades of reproduction and the water slowly heating for it to fully capture the scope and scale of the capitalist project. In 2024, a CEO buying yet another yacht, yelling at their employees about eating too much avocado toast, and offering no raises (even to match inflation, which they have manufactured themselves) is just par for the course. But it is not the CEOs with whom we need to be concerned. Indeed, CEOs are going to CEO. Vice Chancellors are going to Vice Chancellor. Stock market eggheads are going to promote line go up. It is those who should be peers and comrades to whom we must take the magnifying glass.

It is my assertion that equal first in the harms of capitalism, yes – equal, is the rewriting of values. This is equal first with the violent murder, exploitation, and expropriation required to fuel globalist expansion. Because we could not have the latter without the former. This is anything but a slow process. We have seen capitalism ravage the world. Our only home. The only home we are yet aware of in this universe. While science, medicine, philosophy, ecology, spirituality, and many more have evolved globally, leading to, for some, a rise in standards of living and opportunity, this has come at a violent, deadly, and ravaging cost to other humans and the planet. Furthermore, this cost already affects those who were initially robbed, exploited and expropriated from once again. The repeated intergenerational destruction of livelihoods, families, relationships, places, ecosystems, and more can only come from a value system fundamentally incompatible with human life. So while violence is a quintessential value of capitalism, the bundle of values are inseparable and offer nothing of value to humanity or the planet.

In my daily life, I see more and more advocating greed, violence, division and misanthropy. Instead of, historically, a performance of care, community, and collaboration by the bourgeoisie, now we see a normalisation of violence. This is not a change in the capitalists, political society, or other ruling apparatuses. Rather, it is a departure amongst the bourgeois (qua “middle class”) from pretending to care, into abject phlegmatic sociopathy – allied with their bourgeoisie masters. By and large the remaining bourgeois, at least in Australia, were exposed to a brief analytical impulse in the 1960s and a revolutionary interest spanning almost 1940-1985 in certain quarters. The values of compassion, comradery, and shared human endeavour – apparently – were just a convenience to the middle class, now replaced with unbridled narcissism. What a world.

Fourth, the synthesis of malignant values, capitalist exploitation, and expounders of greed.

Well, I suppose I could leave it there. But this is the world we are living in. And people like you, and people like me, are told we are “justice sensitive”. We are pathologised. Caring about compassion, empathy, holding respect and reciprocity as central, looking to nature and ecology to solve everyday challenges – this, now, dubbed “disorder”. The corporate-patriarchal-capitalist-psychiatry complex has found a way to say that “giving a shit about people and planet” is a condition [2]. The corporate-capitalist-political complex has found a way to say that protest in this vein is unlawful and “disruptive” [3]. Our social order is so deluded, misguided, and tortured that we are now medicating those who care – god knows, I suppose, we need it, surrounded by a void of care.

So it is in the everyday act that we must find and foster compassion and care. And no, I do not mean lick the boots of the sociopaths. They are too busy climbing up the ass of the capitalist who leases them power. I mean building comradery and solidarity with other working and expropriated peoples. This is where we reassert value – and a value system of care, compassion, value, equality, egalitarianism, and so on – a positive value system, one which feeds humanity – not destroys it. Go on, then, find a friend and share some human values with them. They need it as much as you do.

“We were right, we were giving
That’s how we kept what we gave away” – Young, 1978

In solidarity,

Aidan.

[1] Federici, S. (2014). Caliban and the witch (Second, revised edition). Autonomedia.

[2] https://www.verywellmind.com/what-to-know-about-autism-and-justice-sensitivity-8631234

[3] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-06-02/south-australia-public-obstruction-laws-explainer-/102418400