Interpreting David McNally’s, Another World Is Possible: Globalization and Anti-Capitalism.

US 500 2, FA09, Yuen, sfai

Private corporate interests use political techniques, associations, and disease to economically pigeonhole or otherwise supersede societal structure in order to enslave the population of the world for the sake of their profiteering. Greed, ignorance, regional exploitation, and xenophobia are often the cause for genocide and ecological degradation. The propagation of redundant sanctions such as taxation, subsidies and their laws, with the help of propaganda continues the cause of capitalism. Capitalism has never been fair, impartial, or balanced and is related to government corruption that amounts to global economic totalitarianism. There is no such thing as a free market. Everything is a consumer commodity and there is no free space left on earth. With alienated labor, Taylorism, and conformity, capitalism teaches us that it only has two goals; Enlistment by way of media propaganda and commodity production. Although a sadist Orwellian reality, capitalism enslaves, and creates genocide. The Ten Principles of Anti-Capitalism by David McNally create freedom against the belief in an oppressive political structure.

McNally begins by citing elements of revolution since the mid 1990s as an example of elements leading up to the 2001 World Trade Center Attacks. 40,000 indigenous uprising in Quito, Equator, January 15-20 2000. Hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans protest against privatization. In April 2001 thousands of students and poor protests the I.M.F. (International Monetary Foundation) in Papua New Guinea, In June 2001 one million strike Columbia against the I.M.F., in July it’s 200,000 in Genoa, Italy.

“A favorite pastime of the globalizers has been to label their opponents “anti-trade…What they criticize is the framework in which global production and trade takes place: the way it empowers a few and exploits so many.”¹

Tracing capital as the source of exploitation starting with slavery in the 16^th and 17^th centuries McNally continues by acknowledging that Marx and Engels recognized the Bourgeoisie ethos as the cause of capitalism and world exploitation in 1848. A lead it is then suggested that economists gauge this global exploitation by closely studying the Gross Domestic Product, (GDP). Using a GDP comparison from 1913 to 1973 from the June 1987 Journal Of Economic Literature it is then remarked upon that in the early 1900s passports were not required, and governments imposed no contracts on currency movements, so whatever turn to manage to create free trade we should disregard it’s effect on an integrated world economy because there have only been gradual restrictions not freedoms that have been set in place. He cites the rise in tariffs between 1975 and 1992, which rose from eight (8) to eighteen percent (18%). With “non-tariff restrictions, quotas, production and export subsidies, international strategic alliances, local-content rules and import limiting agreements…”² McNally further cites experts who would estimate only fifteen percent (15%) of global trade actually might be considered “free-trade.” From managing the world economy, “trade becomes more managed the more globalization firms becomes.”³

“Stallman notes, with some degree of sympathy that other expressions have been suggested which are less burdened with prejudice and confusion, as such as IMP (Imposed Monopoly Privileges) or GOLEM (for Government-Originated Legally Enforced Monopolies). These expressions have the merit of making clear that we are dealing with privileges that are by nature distinct from rights to material property; nevertheless they still cannot avoid the reproach that they cover very different legal provisions and thereby contribute to their undesirable convergence. He therefore suggests to his readers that they should try to do without any one expression to denote the different kinds of exclusivity that creators might be granted in respect of their creations.”⁴

The race is fixed. Half of trade is not free. Inside trading and local subsidizing insures an economic value of scarcity. In June 2001 President G.W.B. began a trade squabble privatizing or promoting economic exclusivity to U.S. steel by passing “section 201” so he could restrict or ban imports or again support U.S. trade. This in turn prompts a similar action by European (E.U.) Steel interests. Anti-dumping laws are imposed so that profits are strictly regulated and not lower than competition in that it should not affect businesses with standard pricing. Claims against price dumping are greedily invoked in courts and even the World Bank agrees that it is an openly subvert process. Citing Freeman, of said clandestine “packaging of protectionism” which creates an economic “Cartel” in which laws to create trade freedoms actually complicate and unnecessarily restrict trade. The laws are just fixed that way in favor of the rich, demagogic corporate interests. It’s all in order to conceal the vast majority of global capital being controlled by Fortune’s Top 500. Of the 400 largest economies 51 are corporations and 49 are nation-states.⁵ Supposedly it’s the job of governments to control trade for the sake of ideas such as Democracy, Socialism, and Communism, the world trade language itself is not English, the world trade language is CAPITAL. The monopolies are growing stronger, and there are fewer and fewer of them controlling larger percentages of world trade. This means that smaller companies cannot compete in the “world-trade” market.

Examples of such capitalism make the black market often seem more viable, what isn’t being said is that corporate interests pirate entire global markets, indicting all trade to questionable legality. The profit margins grossly subsidized in the E.U. and U.S. further ensures global wage slavery and indebting world markets into indebted servitude. One example here being Andrew Shapiro of the Harvard Law School’s Center for Internet and Society arguing with Microsoft’s demagogue Bill Gates regarding private monopolies which limit technology and accessibility rather than open resource software which allows for universal empowerment.⁶ Given that we are talking about politician Andrew Shapiro, I found it difficult to believe that McNally really would think that Shapiro wasn’t only complaining that he didn’t have a controlling share in Microsoft himself for his own devious purposes.

NAFTA, the military industrial complex’s design to protect globalization and its private corporate interests, sponsored largely by post WW2 Federal Direct Investment (FDI) and McCarthist dogma, special investment and interest in Asia, Central and South America insure that exploitation is a multi-national global market. Meanwhile of our freedoms within trade currency markets are moving at least 3 trillion (USD) on a daily basis, outward FDI reached one trillion in 2000, foreign affiliates sales hit $11 trillion in 1998, compared to world exports that year which was $7 trillion, and internal cross-boarder transfers of goods and services comprise about half of all world trade, the largest 100 of which control 40% of all foreign assets (In excess of $2 trillion) surpassing that of wealthy nations.⁷ NAFTA’s chapter 11 does not hold corporations to international laws such as ecological standards or child labor; it only gives corporations the right to enforce them. Therefore the World Trade Organization (WTO) is “the rights of property over people,” and “globalizing poverty and inequality.” Globalization has decreased per capita income, increases infant and child mortality, declined life expectancy, 40% of the world lives on a buck or two a day (USD), major international agencies define 77% of the world as poor. Globalization increases world inequality, impoverishing the sub-Sahara of Africa, in so that their larger share of export exploits them into continually increasing poverty. In places like Africa disease is related to poverty, cholera, TB, AIDS/HIV, genocide and increased political and ecological instability.

In 1983 Ronald Reagan essentially bought South Korea with a Super 301 trade law, and still Korea imports more U.S. agriculture than anyone. GM buys out Daewoo, after the influx of revenue in Asian markets from U.S. profiteers destabilizes the market between 1990 and 2000; at that point layoffs reached 300,000 a month. The same “social genocide” occurs in Argentina in 2000, eliminating exportation income, and burying the country in debt and economic instability thanks to the IMF and the World Bank. NAFTA virtually enslaves Mexico, their minimum wage fell 40%, and Mexican auto workers earn ½ the amount that U.S. workers do. Price fixing kills U.S. agriculture competition, and there doesn’t seem to be statistics on the rise of black market trading, or its related drug economy. There has been no perpetuity of balance for the working class within NAFTA, no contracts, legal rights, or anything other than layoffs generally. A June 2000 worker uprising in Mexico against U.S. owned Duro factory of which employed police brutality, fired at least a hundred protesters, and the government refused to certify the worker’s union there.

“And this, as the Zapatistas well know, gives us an important clue to one of the dirty secrets of the neo-liberal agenda: that it rests on repression and violence. Indeed, without the use of police and troops, the globalization agenda could scarcely get off the ground.”⁸

India’s economy has been increasing, although they are still a minority in the world market. Out sourcing hasn’t actually stabilized the economy very much, with 92% of Indians who work in the “unorganized sector” vendors, laborers, truck drivers, “where they lack job security, stable incomes or basic benefits.” The Wall Street Journal in 2004 indicates 20% poverty rate and chronic under employment. In rural India agriculture has become such an economical impossibility “that tens of thousands have committed suicide.” New York Times reporter Amy Waldman observes “that dead farmers are the canaries in the mines for India’s agricultural economy-indicators of dire straights.”⁹

With 14% of world trade output China’s distance between the rich and poor doubled from 1980 to 2000 awarding it the highest social inequality in the world, which the World Bank in 2003 cites as the defiler towards any claim China might have towards Socialism, in which half the population live in “absolute poverty,” less than one (USD) dollar a day. Not unlike elsewhere in the world 60% of healthcare in China is commercial based on personal revenue, not a socialist agenda. In China ¾ of rural and half of urban Chinese cannot afford healthcare.

According to data from the International Trade Confederation of China, “workers work 60-70 hour weeks, 2/3 have no medical insurance, more than 90% have no pensions, and they work in some of the worlds most hazardous and unhealthy environments.”¹⁰ Like elsewhere in the globalization model China’s economy is a typical example and in a 2005 Human Development report child mortality had worsened. With new billionaires in China protest and conflict between the rich and poor has increased, including labor strikes and strikes against police/paramilitary land seizure.

It would seem as time progresses and in the advent of post-industrial society especially police enforcement has turned the private sector into a militarized zone, with more supportive martial law legislation, paranoid anti-terrorist security measures, more prisons and jails, which actually destabilizes the economy and demoralizes the populace. McNally cites the rise in U.S. internal fascism in LAPD brutality reports, unfair incarceration of Native Americans in Canada, Ontario courts routinely incarcerate African Americans unfairly in due course, as well as using the war on drugs as a cause for brutality in Toronto and elsewhere as well as unbalanced brutality in Montreal which is supported by judicial prejudice.

The war on terror has lead Britain’s anti-immigrant laws (like elsewhere in the world) to become stricter, and incorporate inadequate legal council. Refugees like those in Britain’s Yarl’s Wards asylum prison treat their inmates like animals, subject to racist and dehumanizing treatment. The trend like that in Guantanamo is a global one. Mass suicides are common in such places. In Australia the asylum prison is surrounded by three rows of razor wire and inmates there are exposed to the harsh elements. When existence is so derelict on such massive scale capitalism should be held criminally suspect.

Neo-liberalism, free market economy these kinds of expressions are used to describe an anti-capitalist rage without actually using the word capitalism. Non-government organizations (NGOs) such as The Clinton Group and the like would replace “the free trade agenda with free trade politics.”¹¹ It would seem that the politics of capitalism might somehow replace actual capitalism, and perhaps no one would otherwise understand that there is any difference other than conceptually.

Capitalism allows for free trade to exist with coffee beans, organics etc., but not steel, oil, or machinery. Non-fair trade items also seem to be the reason that modern wars are committed. McNally brings to our attention that although Adam Smith (1713-1790) had a similar barter system it was actually a realist conceptual economic model for his day. By todays anti-capitalist standards he would furthermore only be considered to be a capitalist as such for the belief that fair governance should strictly accompany capitalism. As capitalists are the real threat to free trade, Smith’s philosophy is obviously anarchist by today’s current standards in economy. Another way of looking at it would be that all of the bribes and anything or everything else that creates government corruption amount to a global capitalist totalitarianism. Global justice is regarded in the media [especially the Fox network,] as anti-capitalist. It is a very sickening irony that in the 234 years of this conceptual democratic American structure, or experiment, that Smith’s idea of fair-governance capitalism has never been recognized.

“…the conduct of the individual multinationals is simply a product of a broader global economic system.”¹²

Embedded in the language of so called liberal ideology is the concept that trade is the fair and righteous path and in capitalist dogmas the most persuasive propaganda supports this falsehood, [re: the Fox network.] Economic anthropologist and historian, Karl Polanyi in 1957 mistakenly links technological advancement as a relevant positive take on the evolution of capitalism rather than simply attributing it to class warfare. Here McNally states Polanyi, by clarifying that “market exchanges have been “accessories” to economic life,”¹³ yet the supposed checks and balances in this relationship become ultimately absorbed by localized sociological constructs within that of the economic. To restate Smith, those accessorial exchanges are thereby not within the strict confines of fair governance.

Worse, Polanyi’s ideas of reciprocity [capitalist obligations] and redistribution [communist seeming equalization of material, enough for everyone by all,] is best suited for today’s agricultural-localization movement. In other words to restate Smith yet again, in this case the agricultural subsidies and especially in California the politics of water zoning and usage is not operating within the political concept of fair governance. Economically speaking these examples of agricultural practices in government most exemplify my idea of a government corruption that amounts to a global capitalist totalitarianism. Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom, former Mayor of San Francisco gave Bill Maher a nod this week when Maher mentioned that California is 8^th in the world economy. What practices does our own government use to further demonize localization? Why should we tolerate political practices in California that when used in other countries create starvation? When will human beings realize that capitalism creates genocide? Why don’t ecological sanctions also weigh in as a similar regard? These questions come to mind in relation to McNally as I examine Soil Not Oil by Vandana Shiva.

“What is needed is a carbon tax on corporations-both for their production systems, no matter where their facilities are located, and for transport. The global economy is destroying local production and promoting long-distance supply for even the smallest items. Long-distance transport is subsidized, while local, low-carbon-emissions of long-distance transport have been totally excluded in the Kyoto Protocol. The WTO has spurred a huge increase in carbon dioxide emissions due to global transportation, and increase that is not even accounted for in emission reduction targets.”¹⁴

Reading from Shiva I am to find that carbon emissions are the least of our concerns on this planet as we live in a world that does not include fair governance and whose barter system amounts to unmitigated totalitarianism. Back to Polanyi however, his ideas of equal distribution are actually conceptual ideologies based on, (of all things foreign to capitalism in general,) that of sharing. I was struck by McNally’s use of Polanyi. My questions on the former page come from this, yet his clause of unilateral usage reminded me of that of Shiva. One question remained. Why doesn’t Polanyi tie the ecological with his argument? Judging from the amount of belated and defeated governing in the world as I have seen in McNally, Shiva, and others such as Mike Davis, the answer is obvious. Sadly there are simply too many examples of unregulated toxicity. I came to the realization that this is something that Polanyi must have known in the 1950s. Sharing. Obviously cultural anthro-econ should become regulated requirements for academic business and economic models of study, (the last time I checked something similar to that supposedly is anyway, in some academic circles only related statistics are used,) especially if we as a species should survive capitalism.

Global capital demeans that of localization, which seems to be systemic to cultural xenophobia when we look at the ongoing US sanctions against Cuba, Bolivia, and other US foreign economic policies like that in South Korea and Columbia. In my view I find that McNally goes on to equate examples of localized racial marginalization as another form of anti-synthesis regarding the support mechanisms which must be involved in economic localization. Greed, ignorance, and regional xenophobia are often the cause for genocide and ecological toxicity. As corporations rape the earth all people are meant to suffer. This also has been the trend historically within the climes of class warfare, and inequality in general.

McNally cites anti-Native American policies regarding potlatch ceremonies in Canada that subsumed “communal and cooperative practices,”¹⁵ a kind of policy that happens in the USA and Australia also. The myth related to capitalism here being that starving wolves are the most ingenious competitors and that the survival of the fittest ideology makes for the most individualistic search for capital. Which is stupid and devolutionary because anyone can tell you that even wolves need packs to survive in the wild. In laymen’s terms, “I’m so sorry we are going to foreclose on your entire community so that we might mine for uranium and toxify this entire area for hundreds of miles beyond this specific location, and for hundreds of years theretofore also. Also we are un-amused that you do not support our currency and our economic system of indebtedness, so this foreclosure is thereby declared your own fault.”¹⁶

England from the 18^th century onward, (now like most neo-global corporate pirates, then related to classist property theft,) engineered internal labor markets to make a plunder of this sort all of the more socially viable to English faces. The American phrase, “no taxation without representation,” although now a meaningless cliché and part of the American propaganda machine, does still come to mind. A fixed labor market, the exactitude of a fixed economic classism is exactly what the rich want to enslave all others. Those that do not meet their stringent regard for genealogical purity are eliminated.¹⁷ The creation of market is in itself a visage in which to further impoverish and divide, the initial introduction of internal markets being in itself a formation and distinctive tactic of class warfare.

McNally uses Marx to remind us that labor power is in capitalism, seen as an object, an expendable, exploitable, malleable object. Marx called this alienated labor. Like in first year economics, or like the initial perception of monarchy, ancient or current, the only possible recognizable object in capitalism is free time and surplus value; everything else in capitalism is slavery. Using the British historical exploitation of the poor via the manipulation of commons laws, McNally uses this as a comparison to modern exploitation of a similar regard. Especially within globalized agricultural subsidized [Euro, USA and Canada in particular, at 360 billion a year in 2001,¹⁸] markets, there can be no competition, no one can defeat the school yard bullies here, hence there can be no free markets. I believe that at least symbolically agriculture, with its history of real estate theft and other hostile deprecations such as that of wage slavery, foreign or otherwise, is usually propagandized as a rustic or rural tradition as one of many outrageous gratuitously exploited ironies. McNally used Marx to explain a paradigm that exactly relates to my considerations on transnationalism as a function of globalized fascist capital.

In light of U.S. trade and subsidies feuding certain legal private sanctions in our government actually deflate economies in foreign markets in such a way that cannot be considered fair regulatory governing. Coffee, banana, sugar, and cotton production (especially demand,) in comparison to unsubsidized markets in Africa, Asia, South America, which is to say basically everywhere else . . . this is a locked or closed market. In the NFL this is known as “straight-arming.” In familiar legal terms it is known as fixing the market. Is it any wonder why Americans are still considered to be “The Great Satan” abroad? Why can’t we get Glenn Beck to report the news in Tripoli or Cairo? Why do we have to send CNN reporters? They already risk themselves. Maybe send out some more suitable bench sitters once in a while to balance the system.

So like in 18^th century Britain, land ownership becomes divided into fewer hands, with larger amounts of exploitable labor power earning much less than their fiefdom lords, the process is encouraged in the global South due to the fact that; “rich capitalist farmers [con-agra,] export a larger share of what they produce (since poor farmers directly consume or barter much of their produce) and generate more foreign currency.”¹⁹ Global fixed labor marketing is also responsible for global rampant ecological disaster. UN reports conclude that re-forestation is not likely, […the US for example will send money to Haiti, but won’t replant a fucking thing for anybody, although the US still wants to sell you its gasoline and machinery…this therefore would seem to be a classic cause to rage against the machine…especially difficult in California when the Terminator was in office…] and that the over-extension on soil diversity will eventually [by 2080] starve most of the world with industrial greenhouse pollution.

In famous examples Brazil and Columbia has paid off its IMF loans by devastating it’s ecology with non-organic and otherwise un-environmentally sound practices. Toxic waste dumping is thereby systemic to IMF and World Bank domination in that wasted lands become toxic waste dumps. We know this to be true because it happens in Northern America constantly.

“The US nuclear test program has been under almost constant siege since the Las Vegas-based American Peace Test … first encamped outside the NTS’s* Mercury gate in 1987. Since then more than ten thousand people have been arrested at APT mass demonstrations or in smaller actions ranging from Quaker prayer vigils to Greenpeace commando raids on ground zero itself. (In Violent Legacies [Robert] Misrach includes a wonderful photograph of the “Princesses Against Plutonium,” attired in radiation suits and death masks, illegally camped inside the NTS* perimeter.)”²⁰ [*Nevada Test Site.]

Davis’s account in Dead Cities, also cites similar activity in the USSR, (the Urals and Central Asia,) and South East Los Angeles regarding industrial toxicity. His point is the horror and fascination regarding how arid climate zones, which actually have ecosystems and are not exactly natural wastelands, become industrial wastelands, he also cites the subsidies circuit as part of a malicious political agenda in places like Nevada and South East Los Angeles that promote toxic waste handling in populated areas. Similarly in Shiva’s Soil Not Oil, there is described the disgusting politics of subsidized nuclear energy, it’s ecologically disastrous waste, and it’s ruining inefficient economic considerations [this nuclear debacle is part of US, Indian foreign relations,] as her sister turned her from being a physicist to a most outspoken activist and author. I only hope that the Shiva family may live long and prosper.

In India the “Green Revolution” of the 1960s intensified land use including pesticide spending which ultimately contributed to India’s rampant poverty, malnutrition and also ecological devastation – large dams and other industrial projects also contribute to this history of real estate theft and land management issues regarding classism and other IMF related maniacal capitalist schemes. This trend extends to the Philippines [the global holocaust of agricultural price fixing,] Indonesia [massive displacement,] Colombia [rampant anti-drug militarism, which in this country has led to incarceration on a previously unknown scale with the privatization of the jails and prisons, which is still based on local taxes,] Mexico’s diminishing landscape, Papua New Guinea’s shift from communal land share to private land ownership [a history previously examined in this essay.] The Honduras 1998 repeal of indigenous land sale prohibition after Hurricane Mitch displacing 150,000 Garifunas, who are African slaves that had lived on the Atlantic coast for 200 years.

“The heart of this process is the commodification of human labor power.”²¹

McNally refers to this process specifically as capitalism and points out that increasing primitive accumulation is a significant feature of neo-liberalism. Seizure, privatization, and commodification plays out in a capitalist economy and “charging a fee for what was once free.” McNally once again sites Polanyi.

Problematically it all seems to be a direct and intentional trait of capitalism. Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine: The Rise Of Disaster Capitalism²² indicates if nothing else that this is all intentional, and that behind the evils of capitalism, there are evil corporate leaders with unscrupulous intentions.

WTO TRIPS (Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights) gives the WTO carte blanche over all patents inventions and discoveries. This is so they can fee for usage universally with impunity which complicates treatments such as that used by HIV-AIDS victims. “Twenty percent of the human genome is privately owned.”²³ A US based biotech company owns hepatitis C and another owns the gene for diabetes. I wonder if these are not factually constructed viruses and if we aren’t suffering from a classist capitalist structured genocide. The myriad company holds exclusivity for gene research indicating susceptibility to breast cancer. I wonder if the myriad company isn’t responsible for an anti-feminist, sexist agenda of genocide. Unable to meet Myriad’s fees hospitals no longer use the diagnosis test. Of 36 million people with AIDS 26 million of them are in sub-Saharan Africa in 2000.²⁴ The fight against AIDS/HIV clone or hybrid medication prevents treatment in places like Brazil, Thailand, and has faced fines by the WTO for illegal drugs, where as in Kenya for example, AIDS drugs from Pfizer are unaffordable to most Kenyans. Plant life, seeds, indigenous knowledge in India, wild soybeans (Monsanto,) and seeds are genetically altered to not reproduce so as to drive up farmer costs and inhibit us on a massive scale. The WTO, The World Bank, and Monsanto are pushing for corporations to privatize water. To strive for the sake of commodities, is to produce alienation as they separate us from prurience in the human condition, which in turn creates a kind of human zombification. In short capitalism cannibalizes human beings as part of a plan of genocide to keep the rich wealthy.

The four essential aspects of alienated labor:

1. The worker is alienated from the product of her labor.
2. The worker is estranged from the process as it is controlled by managers.
3. Alienated from fellow workers since there is no sharing, only competition.
4. Repeatable physical motion, “scientific management,” due to Taylorism.²⁵

United Sheep

“follow the sheep
as the wolf drives the sheep to slaughter
stand with the wolf
as the sheep eat each other
crumbling at the roots
fearing of the wolf
love your fellow sheep
as you march straight in to death
follow the sheep to unity.”²⁶

Capitalism teaches us that neo-liberal transnationalists have two goals; enlistment by way of media propaganda and commodity production, and the devaluation of labor. McNally refers to property-less laborers as proletarians which increased in number from 1.9 billion in 1980 (seemed like a lot at the time) to nearly 3 billion by 1995. By driving 3^rd world peasants off their land, big business made a new slave labor force for themselves.

“Alongside these developments went the neoliberal offensive against the wages, job security, and union rights of workers around the world.”²⁷

In the 1980s Ronald Reagan destroyed the US Air Traffic Control Union and Margaret Thatcher destroyed her miner’s union. In the US 25% of labor was unionized in 1980 to less than half that in the middle 1990s. Latin America has seen the most brutality due to the IMF and of course NAFTA also. Neglected or annihilated contracts in 1996 rose to 30% in Chile, 36% in Argentina, 39% in Columbia, and 41% in Peru.²⁸

McNally indicates statistics based on the percentage of workers incomes which go to national income. While in western countries this has risen, in Latin America this has fallen and is in direct proportion to the devaluation of minimum wage, the number of people in poverty, and the rise of the favela or ghettos in Latin America also. Proportionally also is the ratio of the gratuitously wealthy. The statistics are staggering [McNally pages 128-129,] the message however is clear, eat the rich! Using a cross ratio reference of the top and bottom 20% of the world’s income (3:1 in 1820 to 74:1 in 1997.)

“Rather than lifting “countless millions out of poverty” and making “the world a safer, richer, better place,” as its defenders claim, globalization has done precisely the opposite.²⁹ The world today suffers under the greatest global inequalities it has ever known – and the neoliberal agenda will only continue to exacerbate them. In doing so, globalization intensified the historical legacy of colonialism, racism and imperialism that has marked capitalism since its birth.”³⁰

Cecil Rhodes is notorious for annexing South Africa for the British Empire. Genocide, scalping and gold fever spell out the initial misfortune of manifest destiny. McNally reminds us vividly of De Las Casas, and I believe his point is simply that the mechanisms that drive capitalism have long held in place, and one simple result of it here is that 98% of all indigenous Americans are no longer with us. McNally uses a quote from David Brion Davis to refer to the differences in slavery between North and South America.

“There is little doubt that slavery in Latin America, compared with that in North America, was less subject to the pressures of competitive capitalism.³¹ Anglo-American slavery, in short, was what Marx described as capitalist slavery, a system based on the use of slave labour to produce commodities for world markets. As a result, it exhibited unique forms of control and discipline of enslaved labour that struck observers as especially harsh.”³²

By the late 1700s there were 2 ½ million African slaves in North America, relieving the Irish and Indigenous there. McNally explains how the Irish were viewed by the British in the late 1800s. One hundred years had eased no burdens. Irish Catholics lost out land in Ireland by Protestant British. Catholics could not vote, join parliament, etc., apartheid had a previous example. Virginia manslaughter laws in 1723 did not apply to Irish, which as McNally points out crossed into laws anti-christianic laws from 1366 which granted Irish equal rights as British. To reiterate, racism and inequality are key to a capitalist structure, these problematic issues are extremely systemic.

“Slavery in the Caribbean has been too narrowly identified with the Negro. A racial twist has thereby been given to what is basically an economic phenomenon. Slavery was not born of racism; racism was born of slavery. Unfree labor in the New World was brown, white, black and yellow; Catholic, Protestant and pagan.”³³

“I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption, it is the other way, against the holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. All power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or certainty of corruption by full authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.”³⁴

Today we might even charge that capitalism is a criminal activity due to its biases against humanity. Hundreds of thousands of white slaves in America were the basis of Negro slavery. The only problem that slavers of North America had of consequence to their operations was that should Indigenous and Negro slaves survive disease and escape labor that they should settle in territories not quite yet controlled. British male elite Irish enslave their own people, yet the indigenous could not be stratified in this manner, as they had no consideration for inequality. War in the Americas was common.

In Virginia from March 22, 1622 the Powhatan Confederacy ends Indigenous enslavement and promotes Anglo bondage labor. In South Carolina the “Yamassee War,” (1715-17,) almost destroys the colony and eventually ends in genocide to the indigenous. From 1607 to 1682 ninety-thousand Europeans in Virginia, and Maryland, and in 1672 the Royal African Company controlled the slave trade. Bacon’s 1676 Rebellion fords the chromatic platitude of fifteen thousand, two thousand of which were African American, which at least scared the shit out of colonialist structure. Escaped slaves (Maroons) “headed to the hills,) and conducted colonial warfare. From 1730 to 1831 six significant slave rebellions were conducted, the last of which had two thousand participants. The solution became the West Indies enslaving themselves, whereas in British colonial North America Europeans were a majority. Mixed-race (anti-miscegenation,) laws seemed to cool rebellion. Equality in the new world was illegal.

“Freedom was increasingly identified with race, not class. And a new mental universe – the ideology of modern racism – was constructed as an inherent part of this process.”³⁵

NcNally continues, with the historic construction of race, the relationship of race to empire, the global misogynistic treatment of women in the sex industry and sweat shops, migrant labor, and he goes on to relate anti-capitalism to newer struggles such as that against McCarthism, events in Chiapas, Bolivia, Venezuela, and relates Socialism, and “communalism” as relevant tools against Capitalism.

Capitalism is a monster hell bent on destroying the world. When I was a kid in the 1970s up until somewhat recently, there was a mural at a recycling center in Berkeley. It showed a large mechanical dragon flying in space biting into the earth. The Earth was about the size of a child’s plastic inflatable beach ball, and the mechanical dragon was as big as a horse. [A mule maybe.] The tail of the mechanical dragon was being slowly changed into sizable pieces and brought to the Berkeley recycling center by volunteers. I think of that process when I think of McNally’s Ten Guiding Principles for Anti-Capitalism.

1. Opposition to gender, sexual and racial oppression as well as economic exploitation.
2. Radical democracy and popular power.
3. Opposition to imperialism and war, support of self-determination for oppressed peoples.
4. Communal ownership of social-economic resources.
5. Production for need based on worker’ control and democratic social coordination.
6. Social ecology.
7. Internationalism.
8. A culture of freedom.
9. Constructive involvement in all genuine struggles against oppression.
10. Self-emancipation and democratic mass movements.³⁶

McNally closes by describing the methodologies of global political transformation, which includes direct action, mass mobilization, and participatory democracy. David McNally knows every way to comprehend capitalism. If we ever wish to check the pulse of the capitalist monstrosity, one way would be to examine historical data regarding the Gross Domestic Product. The World Bank, The World Trade Organization, The International Monetary Foundation, Imposed Monopoly Privileges or Government Originated Legally Enforced Monopolies, The North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement, Federal Direct Investment, and so on contribute to an entire scientific approach of engineering enslavement. Every person, state, and country does what it can to move beyond these organizations and in many cases this forms piracy or revolution. Often the most powerful pirates are these very same economic organizations in question. Neo-liberalism, NGOs, and mostly big businesses such as the oil industry and automobile manufacturers help to contribute to wage slavery and ecological devastation. This often has led to war and genocide.

1 McNally pages 27-28.

2 McNally page 31.

3 His claims are from Restructuring And Resistance: Canadian Public Policy In An Age Of Global Capitalism, 2000 p. 266, Halifax Fernwood Publishiing.

4 Copyleft And The Theory Of Property, Eurozine 2010, Mikhail Xifaras, Page four. Even though Xifaras is discussing copywrite and I suppose copywrong laws, rights, and privileges, it is interesting to know just how far people within “the system” are willing to go to protect their vestiges of avarice. Whether or not we are studying the IMF or the IMP, the similarities are at least clear here, if not shockingly obvious. Also in “Death Culture” we find obviously frightening nightmarish abbreviations, such as GOLEM, or the TROLL deep sea oil rigs in the Norwegian North Sea. At least sometimes we can identify evil for what it is.

5 McNally cites the I.P.S., 2000.

6 McNally page 37. He is actually citing Naomi Klein’s No Logo: Taking Aim At The Brand Bullies 2000 p. 164.

7 McNally page 40.

8 McNally page 64.

9 McNally page 65.

10 McNally page 67.

11 McNally page 84.

12 No Logo: Taking Aim At The Brand Bullies, Naomi Klein, p. 421, Toronto, Vintage Canada, 2000.

13 McNally page 87.

14 Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice In An Age Of Climate Crisis, Vandana Shiva, South End Press, 2008.

15 McNally page 88.

16 My choice of wording here is perhaps vaguely reminiscent of something that I’ve heard or read from Naomi Klein regarding a similarity in subject matter, and I believe I may be inadvertently paraphrasing. Starting from the bottom paragraph on the previous page beginning with “The myth…”

17 Here I feel I am quoting or paraphrasing Polanyi. That and previous sentence.

18 Citation; McNally.

19 McNally page 99.

20 Dead Cities And Other Tales, page 47, Mike Davis, The New Press, New York, 2002.

21 McNally Page 107.

22 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shock_Doctrine.

23 McNally Page 109.

24 McNally Page 110.

25 McNally cites from A Guide To Office Clerical Time Standards, and the Wendy’s food chain as models of efficiency.

26 Neurosis, song United Sheep, from their Pain of Mind Album, Alchemy, 1987, Alternative Tentacles, 1990, 1994, Neurot, 2000.

27 McNally page 126.

28 Citation McNally page 127.

29 McNally cites someone here, I have missing pages. It sounds quite a bit like Reaganomic or Thatcherist propaganda, “Albeit Mach Frei,” or perhaps it is Orwellian, “Freedom is slavery.” Page 131.

30 McNally page 131.

31 Patterns Of Slavery In The Americas, David Brion Davis, New York, Oxford University Press, 1968, page 203.

32 McNally page 145.

33 Capitalism And Slavery, Eric Williams, London: Andre Deutch, 1964, page 7.

34 Essays on Freedom and Power, Dalberg-Acton, (1887,) John Emerich Edward, Boston, Beacon Press, 1949, page 364. [From Wikipedia; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dalberg-Acton,_1st_Baron_Acton.]

35 McNally, page 155.

36 McNally, page 351.