Nothing is Too Unworthy of Being Mined

But again, these little manipulations fly under the radar if you’re not on the lookout for them. Such is the brilliance of the US empire’s invisible propaganda machine. That’s why it’s very difficult to win a propaganda war against the United States, that’s why westerners have been so successfully manipulated into accepting a status quo of endless war, ecocide, injustice and exploitation, and that’s why the world looks the way it looks right now.

[Source: "In The War Of Propaganda, It Is Very Difficult To Defeat The United States" by Caitlin Johnstone]

Colonialism and capitalism render every living being into their service — humans and the natural world — as well as every possible resource. There is nothing that is too unworthy of being mined.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage-labourers.

[Source: The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels]

If you go back and read Karl Marx's book, Capital, particularly the chapter on the working day, it's very instructive. What Marx argues is that capital ordinarily would like to hire the worker for a 24 hour period. There is no limit as far as capital is concerned to how they want to hire people. After all, it was under the rule of capital that they did do that. They hired people and enslaved them and made them work unbelievably long hours.

Well, the problem is, if you hire somebody and make them work for 24 hours, they'll die in two days or three days. They won't survive. So there's a human limit to how many hours you can work. But still capital fights with us to basically take as much labor as possible […].

[Source: Vijay Prashad on the Green Dreamer]

Capitalism, on the other hand, involved constant reinvestment, turning one’s wealth into an engine for creating ever more wealth, increasing production, expanding operations, and so forth. But imagine, Weber suggested, being the very first person in one’s community to act this way. To do so would have meant defying all social expectations, to be utterly despised by almost all your neighbours – who would, increasingly, also become your employees. Anyone capable of acting in such a defiantly single-minded manner, Weber observed, would ‘have to be some sort of hero’. This, he said, is the reason why it took a Puritanical strain of Christianity, like Calvinism, to make capitalism possible. Puritans not only believed almost anything they could spend their profits on was sinful; but also, joining a Puritan congregation meant one had a moral community whose support would allow one to endure the hostility of one’s hell-bound neighbours.

[Source: The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow]

Colonialism is the highest form of capitalism.

[Quoted to me from a Marxist acquaintance]

The colonial mode of production, as Chairman Omali Yeshitela of the African People's Socialist Party puts it, is what took Africans and other people at gunpoint to be slaves for the colonial powers, and commits genocides of indigenous peoples to claim land and resources for the colonial powers. Lives and land, nothing is unworthy.