Depending on whether the science
is materially based religious or religiously based immaterialist, we’ve been
around for more than 100,000 years originating in Africa and in a form close to
our current bi-pedal carbon based creatures of hopefully advancing
consciousness. Some estimate capitalism may have roots in biblical times,
though most agree that the industrial form from which present reality evolved
began in the 17th century and came to full domination of the globe
in the 19th. Clearly, humans have been through a multitude of social,
anti-social, communal, anti-communal, organized and disorganized methods of
species continuity as can be imagined since our origins. That recent capitalist
history of maybe 500 years, a very tiny fraction of the time we’ve been around,
based on a foundation of private profit motivation can represent the highest
point of human progress attainable is most obvious to confused people with
objectively opposing thumbs but subjectively empty heads, even while possessing
overstocked arsenals of the most murderous weapons ever created.
Such people – sadly, all of us who allow a rich royal minority to rule – have reached a point of
endangering our race in the most menacing way known, at least to recorded
history under whatever system of domination controlled the history writers. It
is likely a frozen earth that became a watery earth that became a drier earth and
cradle of something called civilization experienced many cataclysmic disasters,
but most of those happened l0ng before humans were around and certainly not in
our present form. But our supposedly highest developed animal ruler of the planet status
has brought us to a crisis which demands the race and the place we call home no
longer tolerate minority rule of the royal rich and take on the emancipating
burden of creating a system of democratic rule dependent on as many of us as
possible before all of us suffer catastrophe. We may survive for many more
millennia, but without radical change in the organization of our lives, that may
be as something other than the human race as we know it now. And good, sublime,
bad or worse, that’s all we know and what we ought to care about saving for
just that reason. Transforming capitalism into a humanitarian democratic system
previously unknown to humans may not solve all our problems but it will
definitely solve most of them, especially the most threatening to our only-one-in existence race.
America recently celebrated a
great leader but organized by our rulers to narrow the broad scope of his social
criticism and fit it into a non-threatening form which has reduced him to an
almost mythic figure celebrated for only one aspect of his charge to the nation
by exclusion of his larger message. When Martin Luther King began publicly
expressing his criticism of the capitalist system by saying things like this he
may have signed his death warrant.
“…the evils of racism, economic exploitation and
militarism are all tied together…you can’t get rid of one without getting rid
of the others…Why are
there forty million poor people in America? When you ask that question…you are
questioning the capitalist economy.”
These days it isn’t as dangerous to make such statements but
sadly no public figure with the stature of a King is yet offering leadership
for system change. Bernie Sanders struck some fear into fundamentalist
capitalism with his call for a return to the social democratic capitalism of
the post world war two “new deal”, but the owners and operators of the nation
were far more concerned about one of their own taking power. Thus the ongoing
assault on Trump, deemed far too unbalanced and outspoken in his egotistical
dedication to the greed and disregard for humanity that must be smothered in
platitudes such as offered by the Clinton- Bush-Obama servants to empire in
order to be accepted by the people under a wealthy minority’s consciousness
control apparatus of mind managed surreality.
But the short comings of an
anti-democratic system ruled by a minority but passing for a democracy among
those subdued into calling junk food a gourmet diet and mass murder a
humanitarian policy are piling up faster and in such deadly fashion that many
are beginning to act in opposition like a united race and not a divided group of market
clones programmed to think that people who have different skin tones or sexes
are actually members of a race other than human. That large divisive force
among people, created by their rulers to keep them apart, continues to menace
but as King and others long, long before him understood*, it cannot be changed
in isolation but only as part of a larger change in the system that created
that lie – and many others - to separate us from one another.
*“The emancipation of the
producing class involves all human beings without distinctions of sex and race”
Karl Marx
There is no race but human, with
cultural, physical, genetic, geographic and national differences among us but
none as significant as those between the sexes which are absolutely necessary
for the perpetuation of the race, present marketing standards to the contrary.
Same sex love is probably as old as humanity, but the perpetuation of the race
demands opposite sex coitus, even if reduced to purchasing anonymous sperm or
renting an unknown womb. Capital has reduced all human relations to market forms
of commodity consumption, including birth, death, marriage and divorce, which
all play a major shopping-buying-selling role in happening and un-happening.
Love can – and should -be beautiful but just as love for a pet cannot produce a
human, love for the same sex can be poetic and spiritual, but no more capable
of producing new life than a man falling in love with a refrigerator or a woman
having an affair with a can opener. It can be said that the capitalist market
has advanced humanity in this area by making same sex love a product-commodity
now finally in the open, but it can also be said that capitalism played a, if
not the, major role in forcing such love into the shadows in the first place.
It is highly doubtful that our
earliest ancestors were much concerned about who loved whom and how or why,
given the far more important survival needs for food and shelter. The need
for those things are still absolutely essential, and they are becoming more
difficult for many to acquire in a world where a handful of billionaires own
and control more wealth than several billion of us put together. And whether
those billions are light or dark skinned, male, female, tall, short or other,
we are all members of a human race which must come together to transform reality,
not just for some of us but for all, with much less regard for real, implied or
frequently imagined differences between us. The ocean on which we sail is
dangerously poisoned by capital and our crippled ship is in danger of going
down into that muck, whether we are among the minority profiteers or majority losers. We sink
or swim together or not at all. That means confrontation with, and
transformation of the system that is the major cause of the pollution of that
ocean and our minds. And as someone once said long ago, Das Kapital.
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