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 opoprtunity 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. I refuse to abide. Hustle culture is not the answer.
I recommend this book to those interested in seeing the trajectory this American man took, from privileged upbringing to seeing the corrupt system that made his life possible. However, I think there are some points worth critiquing. There is an irony behind the book. The more you pay attention to status quo critiques in contemporary media (film, TV, news), the more you'll see that it's nothing new (it's literally been around since the 1800s at least and you could argue most of the Abrahamic religions also had something to say about this). Is status quo critique more "profitable" because it's relevant to today's consumers, or is it relevant because it's profitable? Perhaps both, but we should know better than to think that any business has goals beyond profit. Once every source of revenue has been sucked dry, the beast has nothing left to consume but itself. The moment an anti-capitalist slogan goes on a t-shirt is the moment when counter-culture becomes culture, much like what happened to rock and hip-hop in music, or maybe even the more banal "Tax the Rich" dress a certain American politician wore to a gathering of wealthy people. Is our system cyclical? An ouroboros?
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. In the same way, (spoiler alert for Confessions) Perkins' entire backstory is that he got extremely rich from convincing countries to enter an imperialistic relationship with the United States, tried to back out, was tempted to stay with money, then tried to back out again, only to end up capitalizing on it all with a book (apparently a bestseller!). Worst is his baffling tautology that American imperialism was once actually good and noble... because it 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. Perkins also 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 make a significant difference.
Of course, the solution is not isolationism and autarky, which only begets nationalism and fascism. Even without the United States, getting countries to agree on something unanimously is borderline impossible. Wealthier nations have already started to detach themselves from parasitic postcolonial/imperialist trade relationships (i.e. anything with the Global West) and embrace transactional ones in their place (e.g. China). Is this the solution? I think it's a bit too pollyannish, and this goes back to what Perkins described above regarding slavery. The system has not changed. It is only under a new facade.
I want to point out the weaknesses of my own critiques. I think it's necessary to keep my previous writing as is, rather than simply editing out these weaknesses, in order to provide an example of political contradiction and how to reconcile this. (Any further edits I make will be to clarify rather than correct.) This particular point is mostly an introspection that critiques my own criticism of Perkins profiting from his self-flagellation. There's a frequent argument from the non-Left of "you critique capitalism, yet you participate in it." Yes, we all live under capitalism. It's 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, consume goods with this money (likely produced through exploitation and unfair market transactions), and otherwise accept some form of capitalism to continue living. I don't personally condone capitalistic behaviour and I find rent-seeking (via shareholding or landlording) as especially heinous and morally repugnant. However, that doesn't change the issue, which is that it is the entire system which is broken and needs to be fixed, rather than particular elements.
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 trauma, in which there is an incentive to identify and revel in being a victim, and personal responsibility, an age-old philosophy in which anything in life are attributed to individual agency (in a presumably free system). 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 latter is the crux of Jordan Peterson's persona in the so called "manosphere", which ultimately amounts to prosaic advice on extremely basic life skills that are for some reason are now considered right-wing ideas, and perhaps even more disappointingly, not taught to students in schools. But maybe this is better saved for another discussion. If enough people, especially those in power, made better choices, it is inevitable that they would simply relinquish their power to the masses and work in the interest of the public, not shareholders or autocrats. Life would gradually improve. But this doesn't happen because the incentives in the world we live in filter out those who would be willing to eat into their own profits to pay their workers more or serve the public, rather than themselves or their shareholders.
Recall Mark Fisher's concept of the Vampires' Castle. Criticizing someone for driving a car to get to work in the city from a rural area because they live in a former mining town and cannot find work in said town is not going to suddenly bring about public transit in the form of a subway system running on renewable energy. A wealthy writer, like Perkins, is not necessarily a grifter for writing a book with radical-adjacent ideas in order to ostensibly earn money (that's the purpose most books end up fulfilling, even if unintended). This is not to suddenly excuse all individual behaviour as inexorable. For crying out loud, if you're overweight, eat less Meat, especially. How's that for a segue? We are sold all of these fad diets, yet the one common factor between all of them is a caloric deficit. Every diet basically amounts to "eat less". But even dieting is not sacrosanct, because it is only one part of an imbricate economy. A cursory look at socioeconomic statistics and obesity will reveal that it is, after all, a class problem. The capitalist and professional-managerial classes in wealthy nations are less obese than the working class of the same country. The inverse is true for poorer nations: the rich tend to be fatter than the poor. In richer countries, people have moved beyond food. Money buys you time. In poorer countries, food is still insecure and thus obesity is symbol of excess. But I digress. In a local supermarket, one only needs to look at all the foods that are vegetarian, vegan-friendly, low calorie, and so on. Food is a commodity that must primarily be sold for profit, entertainment, or even pacification, rather than to nourish. Many foods are made to be as addictive as possible so people keep eating it, or more importantly, buying it. And business is booming. At some point, the diet argument becomes just another capitalist sleight of hand. Perhaps the lesson in all this is to first recognise that ghouls are propagandizing delusional body toxicity (e.g. obesity being euphemized as body positivity), rather than the people being harmed by it. Lke many arguments from the right, these things obscure food insecurity, food deserts, a lack of food education in school (or food entirely, via school meals), and so on. First we fix the capitalist system, then we fix food. (I'm pretty sure Leonard Cohen just rolled over in his grave.)
Again, to solve this requires change at a structural level, which perhaps would give people real freedom to choose what they want to do with their lives, including what and how much food they eat, because their needs (and effectively their wellbeing) are secured as a right and not only limited to the rich. Yes, some people have genuine eating disorders, just like others are more disposed toward drugs, alcohol, and so on, but a stronger social welfare system, stronger unions, and public accountability over business would limit the impact and prevalence of obesity, addictions, and a slew of social problems that western society has largely failed miserably in addressing.
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 fated to be the effectual equivalent of adding the country-flag-de-jour or slacktivist hashtag to one's Twitter profile - performative and vain. I should probably also admit that my form of critique is not new. While the applications and examples I described are unique to modern times, this was also ultimately the basis of Critical Theory, a la Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. This has its own weaknesses, namely the ronseal, "wysiwyg" (does exactly what it says on the label) notion that it sometimes amounts to critique for critique's sake.
I didn't really know where to put this in my original writing, but here we go anyway. 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 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 studies. It might surprise you, but I dropped out of this course and eventually the sociology program entirely. (And yes, I do regret it. Sociology was my first love.) Being a young 20-something at the time, I didn't understand enough about the world to appreciate the nuances, let alone the point of the book, 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 can seem a bit gaudy). If you're interested in this book and live in my city, send me a message (Bandcamp or email) and I'll lend you my copy!
Written sometime around January 2023. Last modified 18 July 2023