Capitalism Is a Crime Against Nature

My daily after-work zen routine used to be to retreat to my own little backyard nature sanctuary and sit as still as a statue in order to get as close as possible to the birds flocking to the multiple feeders I'd placed on the branches of our overgrown pussywillow tree.

One particularly fine afternoon as I was sitting and contemplating, a sudden shadow streaked across my peripheral vision. A hawk,with deadly and surgical and absolute lightning-speed silence, had swooped down and captured one of the hectoring bluejays fighting over sunflower seeds that had fallen to the ground. The  multiple species congregating in the tree in varying degrees of peace - finches, chickadees, nuthatches, other blue jays - did not fly away home in fright. To the contrary. They immediately sounded a deafening mutual alarm while pursuing the hawk back and forth across the yard for a good 10 minutes before at last settling back down in the feasting tree.

This memory has come back to haunt me as I've witnessed the predators of neoliberal capitalism and their political lackeys swoop down on the worst human catastrophe of our lifetimes, perhaps one of the worst of all time. But unlike the perfectly evolved hawk, our 21st century Ruling Class Raptors are nothing but grotesque, clumsy mutations. They destroy and they kill far more than they can ever personally consume in a million of their lifetimes. They seem to have lost the evolutionary ability to sneak up on their prey, as they did with varying degrees of success before this pandemic and economic collapse.

Now we can see and hear them coming from miles away in a toxic cloud as they screech out their greed and unsheathe their talons, in gross anticipation of wiping out entire flocks and destroying their homes and food supplies in the process. How long do we let this happen before we regular humans put aside our differences and rise up in solidarity to attack our mutual enemy in order to save ourselves?

As Russian polymath Pyotr Kropotkin argued in Mutual Aid, his 1902 treatise against the pseudo-science of Social Darwinism espoused by the likes of Herbert Spencer, the response of the multiple bird species in my backyard is the rule of all life on earth, rather than the exception. Far from what Thomas Hobbes called a constant war of all against all for bare survival, it is cooperation, not cutthroat competition, which really has enabled species to thrive.

Kropotkin:

In The Descent of Man he (Charles Darwin) gave some powerful pages to illustrate its proper, wide sense. He pointed out how, in numberless animal societies, the struggle between separate individuals for the means of existence disappears, how struggle is replaced by co-operation, and how that substitution results in the development of intellectual and moral faculties which secure to the species the best conditions for survival.

Then came Late Stage Capitalism, or free market neoliberalism, or corporatism, or the class war, or Social Darwinism on steroids and crack.

Kropotkin laid out in Mutual Aid the case that "we" were far more advanced and psychologically healthy in the Middle Ages. Nowadays, the neoliberal dogmas of personal responsibility, personal entrepreneurship and competition have been drummed into most of us right from birth. The medieval guilds, on the other hand, ensured justice for most, if not all, and protection from the feudal lords who ruled for centuries before they, too,  were finally destroyed by capitalism. Even the lowly serfs had their own guilds. So did virtually every trade and profession.

Fast forward to 2020, and Amazon warehouse workers organizing unions and wildcat strikes are fired by Jeff Bezos, who has personally accumulated an additional $24 billion since the Covid-19 pandemic began. Meanwhile,his vast monopoly engages in Orwellian surveillance of its workers in an effort to quash any incipient mutual aid and solidarity.

Fast forward to 2020, and President Trump insanely suggests that we inject ourselves with household disinfectant as a prelude to "re-opening" the country while building more walls to keep invisible enemies out.

Fast forward to 2020, and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo blames the jobless for their own plights because they didn't choose careers in "essential fields" - such as Amazon fulfillment and treating Covid-19 patients while denied face masks and forced to dress in plastic garbage bags because of a dearth of pandemic gear.

Fast forward to 2020, and presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden joins Trump in senile xenophobic rhetoric against our fellow human beings in China.

Fast forward to 2020, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell advises states to declare bankruptcy in lieu of helping their residents...and make it "legal" to loot public pension funds. 

Fast forward to 2020, and Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, in calling for the plutonomy to be reopened, states "there are more important things than living."

Fast forward to 2020, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi goes Marie Antoinette one better and brags on national TV about all the boutique ice cream she has stashed in her $24,000 freezer - before returning to Washington to give more aid and succor to billionaires in the cynically named Paycheck Protection Act. (And no, Marie Antoinette did not actually say "let them eat cake" before tumbrelling to her own ultimate reward.)

 "There is no alternative" and "there is no such thing as society" - the infamous quips uttered by Maggie Thatcher before her own devolutionary descent into drooling senility -  have become the official twin anthems of the Ruling Class Racketeers. They are being blared out of a bullhorn heard 'round the world.

George Carlin famously said you'd have to be asleep to actually believe in the American Dream.

Fast forward to the nightmare of 2020, and you'd also have to be deaf and blind and drugged and comatose not to be aware of the regressive mutated raptors swooping down upon you.

Kropotkin wrote, a mere 15 years before the French Revolution-inspired Russian Revolution:

More than that; not only many aspirations of our modern radicals were already realized in the middle ages, but much of what is described now as Utopian was accepted then as a matter of fact.; We are laughed at when we say that work must be pleasant, but "everyone must be pleased with his work, a medieval Kuttenberg (Germany) ordinance says, "and no one shall, while doing nothing, appropriate for himself what others have produced by application and work, because laws must be a shield for application and work."

There was actually once a law on the books that decreed happiness and forbade plunder and inequality! So isn't it long past time we all went medieval on Trump, Pelosi, McConnell, Cuomo and the whole perverted, mutated lot of them? We might not permanently defeat them, but like the multiple species of smaller birds in my one little backyard, we do have the innate power to annoy and harass them into beating one of their historical, cyclical retreats.

It's a law of nature. It's how we not only survive, it's how we thrive against all odds and against all predatory political oddities.