Capitalism and War
The Industrial Revolution marks a major turning point in history; almost every aspect of daily life was influenced in some way. In particular, average income and population began to exhibit unprecedented sustained growth. Some economists say that the major impact of the Industrial Revolution was that the standard of living for the general population began to increase consistently for the first time in history, although others have said that it did not begin to meaningfully improve until the late 19th and 20th centuries. from Wikipedia.
Capitalism was around long before the Industrial Revolution. In capitalism money must be used to acquire the means of survival and all else beyond survival. To get money one must have a job, an inheritance, winnings, or some method of getting it. Most work. Now! You know how that goes. No money… no food.. no nothing. So, jobs were necessary. While the industrial revolution began to provide jobs in a vastly unsettled world, as in the 1800s, by means of growth, the available growth soon hit its limits. The Americas were mostly settled by the 1900s and soon enough the rest of the world was under contract, so to speak.
Problems began to develop for the system that requires you to get money to live. The Industrial Revolution began to replace workers with machines and at the same time to increase production. There were more goods made cheaper, but fewer and fewer jobs. The only help was more invention. Think of the computer and cellular telephone of modern times and the jobs we would not have without them. The same was true in the recent past. What could be done? How were the business going to sell their products when there were not enough jobs to supply the funds to buy them?
Can you guess the answer? Surely you know of the great wars of the world in the 1900s. How about all the little wars? What about the great depression? Can you see a pattern?
I wish I had the time to do a real book on the relationship between capitalism and war. The Industrial Revolution made it possible to have more products with less effort. In other words, it created abundance. Abundance is bad for capitalism. So is communism.
Put it all together if you can. You will see obvious facts that have been well hidden. Let me say this, capitalism is rotten to the core. We live in a time when we could all live beyond dreams of avarice with plenty of time off of work to enjoy it were it not for the concerted efforts of the controlling capitalists to prevent it.
The wars, the depressions, the factional strife, the political strife, the struggle to survive and much more are all part of the effort to nurture and maintain a social and economic structure that favors the few while denigrating the rest and at the expense of those denigrated. The insanity of it is beyond the conventional comprehension of a regular American. The atrocity is equally unintelligible to most. We can’t believe that crimes so heinous and demonic can really happen even when it goes on all around us. Just consider the number of young females that disappear each year never to be found. It is but a little thing compared to the rest. The insanity is killing the earth and all that lives upon it. How is that for a crime of horror?
If you can just stop long enough to consider that the human race is a family, you can see the solution. We can live as a family does. I do not mean “communism.” That word has been perverted. It was turned into a dirty word by the capitalists. In its real meaning it simply means sharing the work and the harvest, more or less. Let me coin a new word or two; cooperativism and collaborativism. Notice there is no way to derive from those words the letters needed to spell government.
How can you think you live in a free country that has a “government?” The very meaning of the word negates the possibility of freedom. Governments tend toward totalitarianism. That was said by the people who established the government that has become a monster that feeds on death, destruction, and people. They tried to limit government, but knew that freedom would have to be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots. Govern thy self! Leave me alone. I don’t need a government to prevent me from doing bad things. Do you? I don’t need laws. Do you? You want the laws to prevent others from doing wrong. How has that worked out for you so far? It’s all a bunch of crap!
We were and are spoon fed the crap from birth. Our parents did it to us without even knowing what they did. Some did it more than others, but socialization is just a feeding of crap to the kids. Mostly, though, the schools and the society at large did it to us. Most people cannot support a fraction of the things they believe. They don’t know “why” they like or dislike this or that. They just do it. We end up with people feeding a monster and protecting it like a bunch of zombies who don’t know they are zombies nor why they are chasing the non-zombies. It sounds funny, but it is not funny. It is horrible.
It wasn’t long ago that black people were slaves that could be hung for looking at a white woman, native americans were being exterminated, witches were being burned alive, and more and worse were the events of the day. It does not seem so strange to me that we have the world we have today or the end of it we will have tomorrow if we don’t snap out of it.