Reflections on Slavery, Culture, and American Exceptionalism

The following is an excerpt from Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (2004) by John Perkins. I typed this out verbatim from Pages 212 and 213 and it is not my own work.

"Today, we still have slave traders. They no longer find it necessary to march into the forests of Africa looking for prime specimens who will bring top dollar on the auction blocks in Charleston, Cartagena, and Havana. They simply recruit desperate people and build a factory to produce the jackets, blue jeans, tennis shoes, automobile parts, computer components, and thousands of other items they can sell in the markets of their choosing. Or they may elect not even to own the factory themselves; instead, they hire a local businessman to do all their dirty work for them.

These men and women think of themselves as upright. They return to their homes with photographs of quaint sites and ancient ruins, to show to their children. They attend seminars where they pat each other on the back and exchange tidbits of advice about dealing with the eccentricites of customs in far-off lands. Their bosses hire lawyers who assure them that what they are doing is perfectly legal. They have a cadre of psychotherapists and other human resource experts at their disposal to convince them that they are helping those desperate people.

The old-fashioned slave trader told himself that he was dealing with a species that was not entirely human, and that he was offering them the opportunity to become Christianized. He also understood that slaves were fundamental to the survival of his own society, that they were the foundation of his economy. The modern slave trader assures herself (or himself) that the desperate people are better off earning one dollar a day than no dollars at all, and that they are receiving the opportunity to become integrated into the larger world community. She also understands that these desperate people are fundamental to the survival of her company, that they are the foundation for her own lifestyle. She never stops to think about the larger implications of what she, her lifestyle, and the economic system behind them are doing to the world - or of how they may ultimately impact her children's future."

Very little of this has changed, and if anything, it's only gotten worse. There are more slaves in the world today than ever before in human history. The entire economic system was designed to benefit rentiers. It's a rentier system created by rentiers. If you're not collecting rent, you're paying it. Modern liberalism, neoliberalism, suggests that you escape slavery by becoming the slave master.

In 2008, Mark Fisher published Capitalist Realism. One of the book's chapters was aptly titled "It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism."

Television shows critique capitalism (e.g. Mr. Robot, Severance) on the highest rated capitalist television channels and streaming services. The end result is more insidious. Roiling, volatile energy - the kind needed for any revolution, from unionising a small group of coworkers to overthrowing an authoritarian government via populist democracy - is mollified and assuaged by a steady trickle of dopamine through fictional successes and resolutions. When you close your laptop or turn off the TV screen, you may feel a bit better, but nothing material has changed.

And this is my biggest critique of the book. (Spoiler warning!) Confessions is the story of some guy who had a privileged upbringing and got even richer by convincing countries to enter into an imperialistic relationship with the United States. He tried to back out, was tempted to stay with even more money, tried to back out again, only to end up finally retiring on it all with a book.

The worst part is what I thought to be a baffling tautology made at one point in the book: American imperialism was once actually good and noble... because it was noble and good, and therefore America (and/or imperialism) was noble and good.

In Perkins' defence, he somewhat humbles himself in the epilogue by reminding the reader that the point of the book was not a prescription, and I think the book is not simply platitudes. Perkins deserves plenty of credit for exposing the cracks in modern American imperialism and the lengths the nation-state goes to achieve its goals (especially the attack on Panama, numerous CIA assassinations, and US complicity in many "free" regimes around the world). But this does not excuse the American exceptionalism, and worse, individualistic bootstrapping, in which individual consumer choices and evangelizing international affairs will somehow bring down economies of a much larger scale than wherever "boycott [product]" is happening or some trending hashtag is trending.

Critiquing the Critique

There's a frequent argument from the non-Left that goes something like "you critique capitalism, yet you participate in it." If you're reading this, you probably live within some form of capitalist economy. It's basically participate or starve. If you live in a third world country, you can skip starvation and simply die - assassinated by an American-paid jackal, as Perkins described. We have to work for money (created by the state as a form of debt to us for our work), consume goods with this money (likely produced through exploitation and unfair market transactions), and otherwise accept some form or variation of this work-consume cycle to continue living. This is precisely why the goal of Left politics should be to change the system, not simply improve it to, for example, crush less orphans.

Another fault of my own is that I call Perkins out for his suggestion to make better consumer choices. Some on the Left have a tendency to shy away from attributing any blame on the individual for their shortcomings. This has given rise to a fixation on all sorts of victimhood and therapy-speak, in which it's not only easier, but encouraged to revel in one's oppression. One of my favourite writers, Catherine Liu, has written plenty about trauma. You can find one of such articles linked on my reading page. The problem of victimhood is that conservative influencers take advantage of a lack of self-discipline, which is the crux of "manosphere" personas such as Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate. The best of their pabulum distills into prosaic advice on extremely basic life skills or "being a man is not a bad thing", respectively, which seem somewhat alien to some on the Left. Personal responsibility should not be co-opted as some right-wing ideology - it's just a part of growing up and holding yourself accountable for your own actions. Of course life would gradually improve if enough people in power made better choices. They would simply relinquish that power to the masses and work in the interest of the public, not shareholders or autocrats.

And even this is not some sacrosanct position. Mark Fisher wrote a later piece, about the Vampires' Castle, in which one fears being ostracized and is therefore trapped in a discourse where nothing is ever challenged and there are no debates. This plays out, for example, in some environmental activist circles, where criticizing someone for driving a car to get to work in the city from a rural area is encouraged, even though said person lives in a former mining town and therefore must commute to find work. This is not going to suddenly bring about public transit in the form of a subway system running on renewable energy, which is what ought to be the discourse, only that this may very well be silenced by cries of "traitor!" or "that's selfish!"

As I've stated many times before on this website, solving the problem of imperialism, and the economic system requiring it, requires change at a structural level. The hardest part is imagining a future in which people have real freedom to choose what they want to do with their lives. Our needs should be secured as a right and not only limited to the rich.

Lastly, my critique of individualistic solutions and their impact could be construed as a form of reverse virtual signalling. I concede that I don't have a large enough following, let alone readership, to really justify the content or length of this text. Knowing that these words will have limited reach and therefore impact, this piece is akin to adding the country-flag-de-jour or slacktivist hashtag to one's X/Twitter profile. My point was to make a genuine critique of the book and its implications, not simply critique for criticism's sake, though I will leave it to the reader to decide which one it ended up being.

Addendum

I didn't really know where to put this in the previous text, but here goes. I'm a pretty slow reader and I often abandon books because I forgot I started reading them (please laugh). I don't think I ever enjoyed reading to call it a hobby, but I do a lot of it nowadays, even if I'm still slow at it. Of the few books I've gone through in recent years, Catherine Liu, Barbara Ehrenreich, and David Graeber rank among my favourite contemporary writers. (Unfortunately the latter two died within the past decade.) I also have to admit that the only reason I had Confessions in the first place was because it was a required textbook for a sociology course during my undergrad. It might surprise you, but I dropped out of this course and eventually changed majors. (And I regret it, even though it was the better choice career-wise. Sociology will always be my first love.) Being a young 20-something at the time, I didn't understand enough about the world to understand broad critiques of it, nor did I have the patience to understand it. Now that I've actually read the damn thing, I can't help but recommend it because of how approachable and practical it is, even if the author's former proto-Influencer jetsetting is undoubtedly gaudy. If you're interested in this book, check your local library first. I was surprised to find it in the catalog there. If you're elsewhere, send me a message (Bandcamp or email) and I'll see how I can send you my copy!