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We interrupted our history of the world in order to give the reader a brief overview of Capitalism. Now that we have done that, let us return to where we left off, namely at the beginning of modern times. In England in the late 1700's, all production was done in little cottage industries, and each cottage industry was owned and operated by a family. Parents and children laboured long hours, using methods that had remained the same for centuries.
But new intellectual currents were sweeping the world. Francis Bacon taught that we must use experimental methods to find better ways of doing everything, and so improve human life on earth. His ideas must have filtered down to some of the little cottage industry owners, because some of them started to invent new and ingenious machines that made production faster and easier and more efficient.
This could have been a good thing for all humans. But instead, the Beast got hold of the new technology and ensured that it brought only misery and evil. In Capitalism, people do not cooperate for the common good. The inventor of a new machine did not share his discovery with the world. No, he kept it secret, hoping to gain a competitive advantage and get rich while driving his neighbours into bankruptcy.
But his neighbours soon realised that their trade was falling while his was booming. By spying, they learned of the new machine, and broke into his house and destroyed the machine that was ruining them. But some of the machine-smashers memorised its design, and when they went home, they secretly built their own machines. In this way, mechanisation spread, and the Industrial Revolution had begun.
Society changed not for the better, but for the worse. Those who were quickest to acquire the new technology set up big factories and attracted the whole trade, while thousands of little cottage industry operators, unable to compete, went bankrupt. Some of them found employment in the new factories, but there were always more people looking for work than there were positions available. Factory owners used this situation to drive wages down below starvation levels. Workers toiled for 15 hours a day for wages so low that, even when a whole family had work, including the youngest child, they still had to rely on charity to survive. There was such an oversupply of unemployed workers anxious for a job that factory owners did not need to keep their existing staff alive and healthy. Instead, the factories consumed human life just as heartlessly as they consumed other raw materials. A small minority of humans grew enormously wealthy out of the Industrial Revolution, while the great majority suffered extreme poverty. Byron wrote, "I have been in some of the most oppressed provinces of Turkey, but never under the most despotic of infidel Governments did I behold such squalid wretchedness as I've seen since my return to the very heart of a Christian country". Another writer described factory workers as "ugly, pallid, undersized, thin, bow-legged, often hobbling, nearly all flat-footed, spiritless, and dejected". And these were the people who were fortunate enough to have work. The factories they laboured in were called "dark Satanic mills". Poorly lit, dirty, and dangerous, they were often just old converted stables into which machines had been crammed with no thought for worker safety. Factory discipline was harsh. The machines worked at a relentless, inhuman pace, and workers had to keep up for hours without a break. Merely gazing out the window for a second or two was punished with fists, straps, and boots. Child slavery was widely practiced. Child wages were a mere fraction of adult wages. But this was still not cheap enough for the factory owners. Orphans were taken from the poor-houses and chained to the machines to stop them running away. Unsafe machines were very dangerous for sleepy, overworked, and often sick children. Injuries and deaths were frequent, and workers' compensation was unheard of. Anyone who was incapacitated by injury was unceremoniously sacked.
If the factories were bad, the coalmines were worse. Men, women, and children crawled half naked in icy water in narrow crevices where no daylight could penetrate, and where floods, cave-ins, poison gas, and explosions were a constant danger. A contemporary poet described the coalminer as a "poor living corpse" who "labours in the grave".
After a long day's work, labourers went home to living conditions that were no better. Dirty, cold, vermin-infested tenements had been hastily erected by factory owners and rented out at exorbitant rates. Luxuries like heating or furniture were out of the question. Workers slept on bare dirt. Epidemics were common, and life expectancy reached a new low. In Biblical times, people could reasonably expect to live until 70 or 80 years of age. But in the industrial towns of England, average life expectancy was a mere 30 or 40 years.
An inhuman society produces inhuman people. Drunkenness, violence, and immorality were widespread. Street quarrels were frequent, and gangs of hooligans roamed the streets, terrorising the citizens. Cockfighting and bearbaiting and other cruel sports were practiced everywhere. Crime was widespread, and punishments were extreme. Even small children were executed for minor offenses. Hanging day was always a popular entertainment that attracted huge crowds of eager spectators. The early industrial towns were bleak, dismal places with no open fields for sports or other activities, because factory owners felt that any enjoyment would only spoil the working masses.
The Industrial Revolution spread from Europe to the USA, and the same story of misery repeated itself there too. While the poor suffered terribly, rich people rolled up dollar bills and smoked them like cigarettes, saying to each other that the Industrial Revolution was a great thing indeed. The theory of Social Darwinism was very popular among factory owners, because it gave them license to be selfish and greedy without having to feel guilty about it. Naturally, the rich were in control of Government and could make any laws they wished. The laws of private property were held sacrosanct. But there were no minimum wage laws, nor any maximum hours of work. Age pensions, health and safety regulations, and minimum age for child labourers were also nonexistent. What was good for the rich, it was said, must also be good for the poor. The "invisible hand" of Satan was given complete control of economic forces, and Capitalism was worshipped like a religion. "The man who builds a factory builds a temple", said Calvin Coolidge, while Reverend Russell Cornwell considered wealth to be "holy".
Some poor people tried to fight against their Capitalist oppressors. There were machine-smashing riots, and there were attempts to form labour unions. The rich reacted to all this with swift brutality. While it was perfectly acceptable for rich people to form associations to promote their interests, the same privilege was denied to poor people. Any "combination of workers to raise wages" was made illegal, and violent clashes between trade unionists and state police flared up. Employers even hired thugs on a private basis to beat up and murder any workers who engaged in trade unionism.
Government reforms to help the poor were very slow in coming. Factory owners bitterly resisted every measure that threatened their profits. To be sure, the Government did improve public sanitation. But that was only because epidemics threatened rich people as well as poor people. Lord Shaftesbury managed to introduce laws to regulate child labour, but these laws were widely flouted by employers. There were a few factory owners who treated their workers with humanity and kindness. But the great majority continued to behave with total selfishness and callousness.
Machine smashing and trade unionism attack only the more visible symptoms of the evils of Capitalism. But a few educated intellectuals saw deeper and perceived the Beast behind those evils. The most well known of these intellectuals, of course, is Karl Marx. He devised the economic system we call Communism. In Communism, private property is abolished and everybody owns the farms and factories together, working side by side and sharing the produce fairly and equally. In this way, Karl Marx wanted to combine industrial production, which he saw as a good thing, with the ethics of primitive society.
Communism, of course, was not new. Animals and primitive humans had practiced it for millions of years. Many civilised people had also dreamed of Communist ideals. Plato advocated a form of Communism in his book "The Republic". The Essenes, a Jewish religious sect, practiced Communism about 200 BC. So did the Christian monasteries of the Middle Ages. Sir Thomas More's book "Utopia" is a well known early text on theoretical Communism. Jean Jacques Rousseau advocated Communist ideals, and in 18th and 19th century USA, many religious groups experimented with it.
However, all these attempts to oust the institution of private property and return to primitive ethics failed, either due to quarreling between the members of the community, or due to pressure from the outside world who saw Communism as a threat.
Then Karl Marx published his Communist Manifesto, which marks the beginning of revolutionary, scientific Communism. Soon Communist revolutions were happening all over the world. Russia and China became the two largest Communist nations. And in Europe and the USA, worker discontent was reaching boiling point, especially as the Great Depression of the 1930's took hold. Poor people grumbled against their Capitalist oppressors and cast envious eyes towards Russia and China, where a prosperous Communist state was emerging, and in which it was rumoured that poverty and exploitation would be abolished forever. Capitalism was no longer seen as God's economic system. A 1934 poll of US Protestant ministers found that only 5% of them thought that Capitalism was "consistent with the ideals and methods of Jesus". There was a general feeling that Capitalism was doomed, and that Communism would soon take over the world.
However, in the end it was Capitalism that triumphed over Communism. This is partly because Capitalist nations have been engaging in an intense campaign of sabotage against the Communist nations. Also, the Communist regimes were plagued with numerous internal problems. Government was inefficient and corrupt, and workers found themselves trapped in a rigid and totalitarian system which became even more harsh and repressive than Capitalism had ever been. Suddenly, Capitalism with its democracy and free market began to appear the more attractive. Also, after the Great Depression was over, Capitalist nations began to introduce social reforms to help their poor. Unionism was permitted, and there were minimum wage laws and paid holidays. Basic education was extended to all citizens, and welfare was made available for the poor and sick and old and unemployed. Life for poor people in Capitalist nations became tolerable, even pleasant, and pro-Communist sentiments largely died out.
But Communism failed for other reasons too. The Communists had made the mistake of abolishing religion. Deceived by Satan, they thought that religion was nothing but a lie and an instrument of oppression. One US Communist publication, the Daily Worker, declared that "the church is a gigantic fraud, manned by the greatest collection of specialised hypocrites that ever lied themselves out of working for a living". A popular catch-cry was "Banish God from the sky and Capitalists from the earth!".
In short, Communism and religion, which preach similar ideals and which should have been friends, were set against each other as enemies. The virulent anti-religious tone of Communist propaganda offended ordinary people. Communism came to be seen as an invention of Satan, and Capitalism became once again God's economic system.
It was not from kindness, and only partially from fear of Communism, that Capitalist nations introduced reforms to help the poor. No, the rich had discovered that, by increasing the purchasing power of poor people, the economy could be made to move faster, so that the rich could get richer. Capitalism has one major drawback: it tends to produce more goods than can be sold. We said earlier that a factory worker cannot use his wages to buy back what he produced. A whole nation of workers cannot therefore buy back the produce of their nation either. As a result, shops become clogged up with goods that they cannot sell. Production grinds to a halt, workers are sacked, all economic activity ceases, and we have a recession. When no more wealth is being produced, the rich cannot get richer. Laissez-faire Capitalism, if left to itself, tends naturally to fall into recession and stay there forever unless stimulated by some outside force.
In the past, Capitalist nations survived because they were able to use other nations as "dumping grounds" for their excess produce. Major technological innovations, like the steam engine, or the automobile, or the computer, can also stimulate demand. But as long as workers are starved of capital, these measures have only a temporary effect. By driving down wages, Capitalists are really cutting their own throats.
During the Great Depression of the 1930s, it looked as if the whole Capitalist world had fallen into permanent recession. The invisible hand was not doing what it was supposed to do. So Governments decided to step in and get the economy moving. Expensive public works were undertaken, and money was spent on the armed forces. Also, the rich were taxed and the proceeds redistributed among the poor in the form of welfare.
The results seemed promising. As soon as the poor had some spending money, they started buying goods. Production started up, and the economy showed faint signs of life. However, it died again. The Government had not spent anywhere near enough. What the Government needed was an excuse to embark on some really extravagant spending.
And there is only one excuse that will do: war. No Government expenditure is more expensive or extravagant than war. And so, the Capitalist world embarked on World War II, the most expensive war in all human history. Almost overnight, unemployment dropped to zero. The economy boomed as it had never done before.
When World War II was over, the economic boom just kept going. Wages were kept high so that people had money to spend. The Cold War ensured that arms spending remained high as well. And a technological innovation of major economic importance had appeared on the scene, namely the private automobile. Everybody wanted to own a car, and the Government started spending huge amounts on roadbuilding so as to make car ownership easy and keep demand for cars high.
Today, lavish Government spending has become a necessity of life in the rich Capitalist nations. People who are ignorant of economic reality tend to complain that the Government is wasting money. But if Governments stopped spending, we would fall into another Great Depression. This is the last thing rich people want. And since rich people have the real political power, Government spending will continue. Of course, in elections, all the candidates say that they will curb Government waste. After all, they know what voters want to hear. But once in power, they will not actually do it, even though from time to time they make a public show of doing it.
During the 25 years following World War II, the rich Capitalist economies of Europe, America, Australia, and Japan, entered upon a period of unprecedented prosperity. A generation of humans grew up in an industrial affluence such as the world had never seen. Consumer goods were plentiful and cheap. "We live in an age of dreams come true", one writer exulted. "The problem of production has been solved at last". Nutrition, health, and life expectancy improved dramatically and even began to approach the perfect health that primitive people enjoyed. The rich welfare state was created, in which no human being ever needed to worry about where his next meal would come from. It was widely said that the Age of Scarcity was over at last, and the world had entered upon a new age of industrial abundance. The Technological Paradise promised by science would shortly be here and put an end to poverty. Soon we would have those dreamed-of automated robot factories that did all the work while humans, free from beastly slavery at last, could spend their days sitting in the shade of trees, composing symphonies or conversing with friends. And every person could order from the robot factories anything he wanted, be it a flying palace with discos and swimming pools and golf courses, or a luxury theme park with robot sex slaves and 3D cinemas and gourmet restaurants. Everybody would be super-rich, and theft and envy would be a thing of the past.
This, people thought, was how Capitalism, that wonderful saviour of the world, was going to create Paradise on earth.
Alas, the reality turned out vastly different. Dazzled by visions of unlimited wealth, humans followed the Beast into new, terrible evils that no one had foreseen. Capitalism is not concerned with human welfare, but with profit. To keep the profits rolling in, Capitalism must keep the cycle of production and consumption going round ever faster and faster. To start with, people enjoyed the plentiful goods that Capitalism gave them. But just as happened in the Neolithic Revolution, the new lifestyle turned into a trap. People found themselves trapped on a treadmill that spins faster and faster and refuses to stop. We are helpless in the grip of an industrial lifestyle that is rapidly going out of control and carrying us towards destruction.
In the rich countries today, the average individual consumes on a Pharaonic scale. We use energy equivalent to hundreds of hardworking slaves, a luxury that only kings and nobles could afford in earlier times. We are creating a world of push-button convenience where every whim is instantly gratified. Our homes are full of gadgets, such as refrigerators, televisions, videos, stereos, plus an endless range of kitchen appliances that mix, grate, chop, simmer, peel, pulp, boil, and percolate our food. We can watch a great movie in the comfort of our homes while sipping wine from the other side of the globe, or we can jump in our car, also equipped with stereos and air conditioning and so on, and drive along smooth and fast roads to a supermarket, stocked like a veritable Aladdin's cave with every imaginable goods. Hunger is something we have never experienced. If we get sick, we can visit a doctor who has all the latest medicines and surgical procedures to cure us. And if we get unhappy, we can see a psychologist who will help us find the root cause of our problem.
Such, on the surface at least, is the life we live in the rich countries today. But underneath the superficial glitter there is a yawning spiritual emptiness. Cut off from God and Salvation, we try to find meaning and happiness in the pursuit of money and in the enjoyment of earthly pleasures. But money, the false god of Capitalism, can never be an adequate substitute for the real God. Nor can temporary pleasures in the Technological Paradise satisfy our hunger for Salvation.
Nor has Capitalism solved the problem of de-socialisation either. On the contrary, it has exacerbated it. Modern cities are crammed with tens of millions of people, yet the loneliness of modern city life is like nothing the world has seen before. Neighbours hide inside their homes and barely know each other by sight. And even when they go out, they still hide within their private cars. At rush hour, a thousand people may pass us by, and we do not see a single human face, only blank windscreens. Lewis Herbert wrote(24) that "the city man in a modern metropolis has reached a degree of anonymity, social atomisation and spiritual isolation that is virtually unprecedented in human history". Increased mobility means that people move house and change jobs so often that deep relationships have little chance to grow. In the great mega-machine of modern society, human relations become superficial, formal, and coerced, as people are reduced to interchangeable economic parts. Even within the family, people are increasingly separate from each other. The average father, according to research, talks to his wife for five minutes a day, and to his teenage son for 10 seconds a day. One sociologist, William Wolf, said that "the family is dead, except for the first year or two of child-raising". Cut loose from human love, we drift in a nameless concrete jungle of fear and insecurity in which our survival depends on an increasingly complex and chaotic system which we can neither trust, control, or understand.
All animals have inbuilt systems for coping with danger. When faced with evils that threaten our survival, adrenalin is secreted into our bloodstream, increasing the supply of oxygen to the large muscles and making us ready for energetic action. In nature, these systems for coping with danger were not overtaxed. But as soon as civilisation began, humans were forced to evolve resistance to chronic stress. Human beings today can survive in stressful situations that would kill any other animal. Yet even so, the stress of modern city life leaves us exhausted and emotionally drained. We hardly have the energy to react emotionally to our surroundings any more. We become callous and unfeeling towards our fellow humans. Thus, in 1964, a woman named Kitty Genovese was brutally murdered in plain view of no less than 38 onlookers. For half an hour these people watched while she struggled with her attacker and called for help. But not one helped, or even bothered to call the police. A lone hoodlum can often singlehandedly terrorise an entire neighbourhood full of people, robbing and killing and raping for years, because his victims are incapable of even the most basic cooperation. Each one acts as if he was the only human in the world. Never before have humans been so literally and completely reduced to the dreaded "all against all" state.
We already mentioned the cycle of production and consumption that must spin ever faster and faster. Our lives are increasingly dominated by those two things: production and consumption. We have less and less time to do anything else except to produce or consume. During work hours, we are pressured to become more productive and efficient, and after work, advertising and peer pressure lures us into ever more lavish consumption. In the early stages of industrialism, this was a welcome relief after centuries of poverty. But things have now reached a point where increased production and consumption no longer means an increase in human happiness. Rather, the reverse is true. Modern mass production methods were designed for economic efficiency, not for human happiness. Adam Smith wrote about a pin factory in which the process of production was divided up into a great number of very simple gestures. Each worker is assigned one gesture, which he can learn in a matter of seconds, and then he is told to repeat that gesture over and over. Production is enormously speeded up by this arrangement. But what happens to human happiness? Professor Stephen Boyden listed certain human needs which were satisfied in primitive communities, but which are not satisfied in modern industrial production. These include the need to be creative and emotionally involved, to have a sense of purpose, and to be aware of how we fit into society. Needless to say, most office and factory jobs do not satisfy these needs. And workers react by becoming apathetic. They are resigned to the necessity of work, but they do not enjoy it. One poll asked people why they kept working, and the most common answer was the "work ethic" -- it is morally right to work. Other answers included "to avoid loneliness", or "I wouldn't know what to do with myself" or "to stay out of trouble". The least common answer was "I work because I enjoy it". Traditional industrial psychology assumes that people dislike work, that they have no ambition, and that they do not want to make decisions. However, they do want economic security. The task of industry, therefore, is to play on people's need for security to force them work, and at the same time provide detailed instructions so that workers are spared from the necessity to think. Obviously, when humans are treated thus, they become something less than human. They are reduced to "a mere appendage of flesh on a machine of iron". As Pope Pius XI put it, "from the factory dead matter goes out improved, whereas men there are corrupted and degraded".
Machines have speeded up production enormously. But where are the reduced work hours and the increased leisure that workers thought they would get as a result? Basically, it has been appropriated by the rich. Workers continue to work long hours, and the extra production goes not into reduced work hours, but into the pockets of business people. Indeed, a whole host of new industries have appeared to fight over that extra wealth. These industries produce nothing useful or necessary, or even particularly desirable, and in a rationally planned economy they would not exist at all. Karl Marx spoke of "a new variety of parasites in the shape of promoters, speculators, and merely nominal directors: a whole system of swindling and cheating by means of corporate promotion, stock insurance and stock speculation". Advertising, sales, real estate and finance are examples of industries which, in the words of Eli Zaretsky, "have the purpose of perpetuating capitalist relations of production, rather than producing necessary goods"(25).
Because humans are not naturally fitted for industrial work, they have to be trained from early childhood. Many studies have found that working class families tend to be authoritarian. That is, children are denied the right to think or make decisions for themselves, and instead they are trained in unquestioning obedience. Modern schools are also designed to turn humans into mindless, obedient factory workers. Originally, schools were intended to liberate humans from ignorance and slavery by giving them the knowledge and the ability to think they needed to function as truly autonomous human beings. But instead, schools have become a training ground for industrial discipline. This is accomplished not so much by the subjects taught, but rather, by the way they are taught. The children are under the supervision of a teacher, or "foreman" whose orders must be obeyed. There are time schedules, bells, production quotas, and deadlines to adhere to. And at the end, all work is quality inspected, that is, marked by the teacher. Each student is given his wages in the form of a grade. Fixed and predetermined curricula tend to discourage individual creativity. The subjects to be studied are not determined by the intellectual curiosity of the students, but by a time table or "production schedule".
By the time the average school student is ready to go out and get a job, he typically has little knowledge, imagination, or initiative, and he regards learning as a dull chore to be avoided wherever possible. However, he has been thoroughly conditioned to the discipline of the factory clock, which is the main thing that employers want. Factories need compliant, mindless automatons who are resigned to life as a mere cog in a great machine. Ivan Illich considers this kind of schooling to be equivalent to assaulting children. He wrote(26) that "All effective preparation of children for an inhuman socio-economic system constitutes systematic aggression against their persons".
Once a person leaves school and becomes a worker, education largely ceases, except for what Aldous Huxley termed that "silly and pernicious adult education provided by advertising". That brings us to the other major facet of modern life, namely consumption, which is what we do when we are not working. Do workers, tired after a long day at work, go home and find meaning and happiness in life through consumption? Or has consumption become merely a continuation of the meaningless merry-go-round, a chasing after an elusive promise of happiness that forever escapes us and leaves us more empty than before?
The latter is probably closer to the truth. People consume in the same uncreative way in which they produce. Prior to industrial society, most people had the skill to play a musical instrument, to sing songs, to draw or paint pictures and tell stories, to converse, to play sports and games, and to create things with their hands. But modern industry does not want people to pass their time in such creative activities. No, Capitalism needs people who find their happiness in voracious consumption of factory-produced goods. Consequently, people have been reduced to impotence. They no longer live, they consume. "An addiction to paralysing affluence", says Ivan Illich(27), "...generates modernised poverty". Uncreative and without imagination, we are increasingly dependent on mass-produced and pre-packaged entertainments of a totally passive kind. Erich Fromm spoke(28) of "the spirit of contemporary society. Man", he says, "has transformed himself into a homo consumens. He is voracious, passive, and tries to compensate for his inner emptiness by continuous and ever-increasing consumption...He appears to be active...yet deep down he is anxious, lonely, depressed, and bored...Twentieth-century industrialism has created...homo consumens primarily for economic reasons, i.e. the need for mass consumption".
And how has industrialism created "homo consumens"? With advertising. When industrial production first got under way, it was found that people were not really interested in spending money on goods they did not need. And traditional advertising, whose purpose was to inform, or to persuade by logical argument, could not overcome people's unwillingness to buy things that they were accustomed to doing without.
So a new kind of advertising was born, one which sells not products, but dreams. Advertisers learned how to tap into people's secret ambitions and unfulfilled desires. By subtle suggestion, they create a belief that the product being advertised is the fulfillment of those dreams. For example, if tobacco advertising is aimed at men, the suggestion is made that smoking will transform us into ruggedly handsome heroes. For women, smoking is the key to equal rights and independence. And for teenagers, the suggestion is that puffing on a cigarette will make us popular.
And the new psychological advertising worked. People were quickly persuaded to buy whatever new goods industry wanted them to buy. Soon they were hopelessly addicted to wasteful consumption and passive entertainment, and they lost their creativity and ability to entertain themselves. By advertising, industry manages to insert some commercial product into every facet of our lives. Advertising, said Winston Churchill, "nourishes the consuming power of man". It creates cravings where none existed before, and intensifies already existing cravings. Advertising has been defined as the art of persuading people that they have waited all their lives for some product they never heard of.
Traditional wisdom teaches that "true wealth is to have simple needs". But modern advertising goes in the opposite direction. It is designed to make people feel that no matter how much they have, it is never enough. The relentless push towards increased consumption corrupts everything. Human love is not spared. Advertising teaches us that we do not really love our wife or children unless we buy them expensive gifts. The depth of our love is measured by the price tag, and the truest love goes into debt. Love as it come out of the human heart is considered cheap and tawdry unless it is accompanied by a commercially produced gift. Nothing is sacred for modern advertising, not even religion. Christmas and Easter used to be sacred festivals, dedicated to God. But Capitalism turned them into orgies of materialistic greed. Each Christmas, many people are still paying back loans they took out to finance the previous Christmas.
We have seen what life is like for the rich one-fifth of the human race. What about the remaining four fifths? On our TV screens, we regularly see pictures of starving children with enormous swollen stomachs, or we are shown huge crowds of dispossessed widows and orphans hurrying on bare feet along a road, fleeing the onslaught of some marauding army. We get so used to these images that we hardly notice them anymore. Or else we do not understand what they mean. "It's their own fault if they starve", we say. "They should not have so many children". We also believe that we in the rich countries are rich because we are hardworking and clever, while the poor are poor because they are lazy and stupid. Anyway, we are told, the rich nations give lots of aid to poor nations to relieve the worst suffering. Also, it is only a matter of time before industrialism will save the whole human race and end all poverty forever. Already, many big corporations are building factories in poor countries and creating jobs for the local people there. Soon the poor four fifths of the human race will enjoy the same industrial plenty that we do.
At least, such is the popular belief. But the reality is far different. Industrial plenty will never reach the poor. On the contrary, our industrial plenty is the very cause of their poverty. We are rich precisely because they are poor. Contrary to popular belief, the poor countries are net exporters of wealth, while rich countries are net importers. The international scene is not governed by law and order, but by a "free-for-all" in which the strong prey upon the weak. Rich countries have the economic power to dictate terms of trade, and the result is terms that heavily favour the rich. There is a net flow of wealth from poor nations to rich nations. Then the rich give a small portion back as aid, and boast widely about their generosity.
Several hundred years ago, as modern Capitalism was just beginning, Europe had grown into a monster that was about to devour the world. Due to almost constant war between the various European nations, the Europeans had grown very skilled in warfare. They also had the most advanced technology in the world, and due to Capitalism, they were hungry for new resources to exploit.
And so, journeys of exploration were undertaken by the various European powers. One by one, all the other continents of the world were discovered. In Australia and North America, the explorers found primitive humans who, to a large extent, still lived in the same innocent bliss that God had originally intended. Here the Europeans had a unique chance to learn about the Paradise they had lost. But far from being willing to be instructed by the primitives, the Europeans hardly recognised them as human at all. The newly discovered theory of evolution had convinced the Europeans that they were superior in every way to the natives, who were regarded at best as pre-human animals. Australia and North America were treated simply as vacant land, inhabited only by wild beasts, and the Europeans felt free to move in and set up their industrial lifestyle. The natives were pushed aside, ignored, exploited, or even deliberately exterminated. Today, North America and Australia have become part of the rich world, populated mainly by people of European descent, with the original inhabitants forming a despised and underprivileged minority on the fringes of European culture.
In Asia and Africa, meanwhile, the European explorers found densely populated societies in various stages of civilisation. Here, the Europeans could not simply move in and push the locals aside. No, they had to trade with the natives, or make war on them. And they did both with spectacular success. Everywhere, peaceful and prosperous civilisations were swiftly reduced to chaos. Plundering, massacres, enslavement, deceit and genocide followed wherever the invaders went. All the world's civilisations were turned into to mere instruments of European Capitalism, supplying Europe with cheap raw materials and labour and serving as dumping grounds for excess produce. To this day, Asia and Africa are populated by a majority of poor natives, with a minority of wealthy, privileged Europeans.
For 400 years, the Colonial powers of Europe dominated the world, and wealth poured in great rivers into Europe from all over the world. This gave Europe the capital needed to start the Industrial Revolution.
When the Colonial era ended and the European powers withdrew, they left behind a world in ruins. Agricultural land that used to be owned in common by a village was now in the hands of a few wealthy landowners, and everyone else were dispossessed and without a livelihood. Also, during Colonial rule, the Europeans had moved entire populations about and redefined national boundaries without regard for anything but their own economic or military considerations. Today, people in the poor nations are still trying to recover lost territory, or get back to their original homelands, or gain acceptance in the new places where the Europeans had put them. The resulting wars and conflicts drain poor Governments of precious wealth and take enormous toll on ordinary people. The poor are massacred and crippled and turned into refugees by the millions. Since the end of World War II, the world has not been at peace a single day. On the average, 12 wars are raging at any one time, and nearly all of them involve poor nations fighting against each other.
The Europeans also left their former colonies in the hands of local ruling elites that had been thoroughly indoctrinated in European ideals. These ruling elites had learned only contempt for their own original culture. Instead of caring for their poor, these elites were more intent on creating a European lifestyle for themselves. They also wanted to impress the rich nations with an appearance of affluence. Gleaming skyscrapers rose up in the midst of desert landscapes, six-lane superhighways began and ended nowhere, and ultra-modern airports were constructed in nations where most people still traveled barefoot or rode on donkeys.
Governments in poor countries are also notoriously corrupt. Heads of state steal millions from their national treasuries. Government officials are not merely open to bribes in return for special favours. No, they demand bribes merely to do the job the Government already pays them to do. Ordinary citizens who refuse to pay bribes have a hard time getting any kind of service from the Government at all. A person who gets a Government job does not consider that he has any responsibility to society. No, he sees his job as an opportunity to enrich himself by taking bribes and exploiting the population. Such Governments have been called "kleptocracies". They have also been referred to as "mining operations" -- the population is "mined" for wealth. Often the worst corruption is found in the police force. Police officers appointed to investigate bribery allegations will happily accept bribes from those they are supposed to investigate. One Indian judge said that the police in India was "the largest organised gang of lawless elements in the country".
Naturally, poor people who cannot afford to pay bribes are at a great disadvantage. Rich people, by appropriate bribing, can literally get away with all kinds of terrible crimes, including murder. Suppose that a rich landowner has decided that he wants ownership of a poor neighbour's little plot of land. He hires dodgy lawyers to falsify documents, and the poor person is suddenly told by the police that he is a trespasser and must get off his own land. Without money and often unable to read, the poor person is helpless. If he refuses to leave his land peacefully, the rich neighbour can hire thugs to beat him and his family up, or even murder them. The police, once they get the bribes they eagerly expect, will merely pretend to investigate the murder while in reality not doing anything at all. Poor people sometimes get tired of complaining to police officers who merely listen politely and do nothing, and they try to take matters into their own hands and repay violence for violence. But then the police immediately clamps down hard. Because the poor cannot pay bribes, they are bullied and illtreated and robbed of what little property they have, and there is nothing they can do about it.
In these lawless conditions, the only defense that poor people have is to produce many children. He who has the biggest army of sons and grandsons to fight for him will have the advantage in any neighbourhood dispute. A large family also means economic security in old age. In poor countries, old age pensions are usually nonexistent, and many children is the only way a person can ensure that he will be looked after when he is too old and frail to look after himself. This is how the population explosion in the poor nations is caused. Every person produces as many children as he can in order to gain an advantage. But the overall result is that everyone is worse off. People in rich countries criticise the poor for having more children than they can feed. But rich people behave in the same way. Each of us wants a private car so we can get to work faster, but the result is traffic jams that make everybody late. We know we should use public transport, but we all wait for others to do that while we ourselves want to continue using our car.
Rich nations, when they see the sufferings of poor people in poor nations, have often felt a sense of moral guilt. They feel that, being rich, they ought to give some of their wealth to the poor. As a consequence, once the Colonial era was over, the rich Governments and the big corporations began discussions on the best way to help the poor. But the Beast of Capitalism insinuated himself into these discussions, and somehow the moral love that started the whole process was lost. It ensued that the rich were not actually going to give wealth to the poor. No, that would only spoil the poor and make them lazy and dependent. Instead, the rich nations would sell the poor countries useful things like machinery and technical knowhow, so that the poor countries could make themselves into rich countries. Plans were drawn up for huge hydroelectric dams to supply the poor nations with the electricity they would shortly need when they industrialised themselves. In this way, the rich could help the poor and at the same time help themselves to a nice profit.
But the poor Governments did not have the money to pay for the machines and hydroelectric dams and other things. So the rich countries offered to lend it to them -- against interest, of course. The poor countries were assured that when they got rich, they would easily be able to pay off their loans. But just to make sure, the rich attached stringent conditions. Poor Governments had to lower wages and cut out "unnecessary" expenditure like health and welfare and education, so that more money would be available to pay the loans back.
The ordinary poor people in the poor countries, of course, had no idea about the "help" that their Governments had arranged for them. But they soon saw the first signs of that "help". Soldiers with guns and bayonets came and forced them off their land in order to make room for the new hydroelectric dams and industrial farms and other projects. The homes of poor families were unceremoniously bulldozed, and their crops were destroyed to encourage them to leave. Compensation was either token or nonexistent.
Other poor families were evicted from their land in more subtle ways. They were persuaded to go into debt to buy a tractor and some chemical pesticides and fertilisers. The interest rates were often usurious. Once in debt, they could no longer use their land to grow food for themselves. No, they had to grow crops for sale, so they could pay their loans. But their small farming operations could not compete with the big industrial farms owned by rich people. And so, the poor farmers went bankrupt and were forced to leave their land.
Dispossessed and with no chance of making a living in the country, millions of poor people drifted into the big cities. But there were no opportunities for them there either. They ended up living in crowded slums where life was far worse than it had b before the rich decided to "help" them.
Meanwhile, what happened to the hydroelectric dams? The big demand for energy that had been expected failed to materialise, and the dams turned into expensive, under-utilised monsters. They became environmental disasters as well. The most infamous example is perhaps the Aswan Dam. The river Nile used to deposit rich, fertile silt all over the farms of Egypt every year when it flooded. Now all that silt is trapped behind the dam, and Egypt must buy expensive fertilisers to make up for what nature once provided for free. The dam is also a breeding ground for diseases. Many villages now have a 100% infection rate of the tropical disease schistosomiasis.
When the rich Governments and corporations saw that the "help" they had given the poor nations did not work, what did they do? They did their best to reassure everyone that it was natural to expect some initial dislocation, but that in the long term, the "invisible hand", which had been so benevolent to the rich, would do the same for the poor as well. But industrialisation will never save the poor from their misery. During the Colonial era, wealth poured into Europe from all over the world, and this wealth enabled the Europeans to get their Industrial Revolution going. But the poor countries today have no rivers of wealth flowing into them. On the contrary, as we said, they are net exporters of wealth. Burdened with unfair trading terms and huge interest payments on loans, they have no chance of accumulating the capital necessary to industrialise themselves. Whatever wealth they do manage to scrape together is immediately taken by the rich. In Colonial times, the rich openly exploited the poor. Today the exploitation still goes on, except that now it is disguised as "help". The rich say that they are "developing" the poor countries. But as always, they are concerned only with their own profit. Agricultural land in the poor countries ought to be used to grow food for the local poor. Instead, it is used for luxury crops like coffee and tobacco which are exported to the rich countries. Big landowners in the poor countries find this trade more profitable than feeding the local poor. And if crops are not directly exported to the rich countries, they are fed to cattle which is sold to the rich countries for meat. Peru's anchovette catch would more than satisfy the protein shortage in all of South America. But instead it is exported to rich countries where it is fed to livestock or sold as pet food. Quite often, a poor country experiences famine when its food production is actually booming. The local poor starve while rich local landowners send shiploads of food to the rich countries.
In an effort to make some quick cash, many poor countries are now cutting down their irreplaceable rainforests and selling the timber to the rich countries. Environmental concerns are ignored, as are the primitive tribes that have lived in those forests for hundreds of thousands of years. The rainforests are clearfelled, leaving nothing but bare plains. Then big cattle ranch operators move in, producing hamburger meat for export to rich countries. But after a year or two, the soil is exhausted, and the ranchers move on, leaving nothing but useless desert behind. And so it goes on. The rich nations may pretend that they are "helping" the poor, but in reality they are like vacuum cleaners, sucking up wealth wherever it can be found, and leaving nothing behind. Ever since the first European explorers gave the natives glass beads in exchange for gold and land and slaves, the poor nations have been subject to ruthless, inhuman exploitation. The rich use every means at their disposal. Big corporations and rich Governments cooperate to keep the world unjust, and to this end they employ embargoes, subversive use of intelligence agencies, repression including torture, counter-insurgency operations, and even full-scale military intervention(29). While in the poor countries a child starves to death every second, rich nations destroy huge amounts of food in order to create artificial shortages and force food prices up. If food production in the poor countries goes up, on the other hand, the rich use their market power to force prices down, so that the poor get no benefit from their increased production. The poor end up working twice as hard for the same return, while the rich reap the benefit.
The injustice of the world can be clearly seen when we consider how unevenly the world's wealth is shared out. In 1989, the richest person in the world had 15 billion dollars, while in that same year, a million children starved to death for want of a few cents' worth of food. Of the nearly 6 billion people alive today, 20% consume 80% of the world's wealth and own 80% of all property, leaving 80% of the world's population with only 20% to survive on. Women constitute two-thirds of the world's poor, and they do two thirds of all the world's work, but get 10% of its income and own a mere 1% of its property.
And the gap between rich and poor is widening. Humanitarian disasters get worse and worse. Famines now happen on a continental scale. Terms like "megadeath" and "megacorpse" were invented by the nuclear weapons industry to measure the power of nuclear bombs. Now these terms are used to describe famines and other disasters instead. Capitalism ensures that food goes not where the need is greatest, but where profits are highest. The poor need food desperately, but they have no money to pay for it, and so they get none. Rich people tickle their overfed palates with expensive delicacies while the poor cannot get enough food to maintain basic life. Rich people spend more money curing the ill effects of their own overeating than what is spent to provide emergency food for the starving. Few people in the rich countries have any idea of what real hunger means. We say we are hungry, but a person with fat reserves in his body is not hungry in the strict sense of the word. He merely has an appetite. Real hunger begins only when the body has used up its fat reserves and starts to consume muscle tissue. Pain and hallucinations are experienced, and the sufferer cannot think of anything else except food. When the muscles are gone, the body starts consuming the vital organs, and death is not far away. Rich, overweight people who complain that they are "starving" or "absolutely famished" because they have not yet had their dinner do not know what they are saying. Neither do rich people know what they are saying when they complain of being poor. What they should really say is that they cannot afford the lifestyle they would like. This is "relative poverty" -- we are poor relative to those who are richer than us. Only absolute poverty is real poverty. It is when we cannot afford to maintain basic life and health. Relative poverty merely causes envy. Absolute poverty kills. Rich people often pretend to be poor in order to attract sympathy and avoid moral condemnation. Having stolen the world's wealth, they add insult to injury by also stealing the sympathy which should rightly belong to the poor.
Over a billion people in the poor countries are dying a slow, lingering death by starvation. Having never in their life had enough to eat, their body size is small, and they lack strength for hard work. Rich, wellfed people have been known to condemn these starving humans for being lazy. But this is totally unfair. A manual worker needs about 3,000 calories of food per day to enable him to work hard. If he must subsist on 2,500 calories per day, his production drops by half. This is true of all humans all over the world. During World War II, the Germans found that if coal miners got 3,000 calories per day instead of 2,800, production increased markedly. In the poor countries, many labourers are forced to survive not on 2,800 calories per day, or even 2,500, but a mere 1,800. A person on such a meagre diet is listless and unproductive and needs frequent rest, not from laziness, but as a survival necessity. These people are slowly but surely starving to death. There are no humans in the world surviving on less than 1,800 calories per day, because they are already dead. 1,800 calories per day is the limit. People on that borderline are caught in a downward spiral of poverty. Low productivity means a low income, which means more starvation and still lower productivity, and so on. The starving person is incapable of breaking out of the cycle of poverty by his own efforts. Indeed, many have lost the battle before they were even born. The mother's body is starving already, and the child is born weak, undernourished, listless, and mentally and physically impaired.
Rich people sometimes think that there is not enough food in the world for everyone, and that some humans must be sacrificed so that the rest can survive. But this is far from the case. If the world's wealth was fairly shared out, everybody would have more than enough to live a healthy life. The problem is not one of insufficient supplies, but of maldistribution. Not that the means of fair distribution are lacking. Private industry has managed to ensure that cigarettes and soft drinks are available in even the poorest villages across the world. There are enough ships and planes to transport a mountain of food across the globe in a matter of hours. Indeed, many of these ships and planes are already being used to transfer food from poor countries to rich countries. Clearly, the cause of poverty is simply that the rich do not want to share with the poor.
Yes, but do not the rich countries give aid to poor ones? Maybe so, and yet the amount is utterly inadequate. We said that the rich 20% consume 80% of the world's resources. How much should the rich give to the poor to achieve perfect equality?
To work that out, let us say that we have five people, and these people have five apples to share out. Justice demands that each person gets one apple. If one person takes four apples and leaves one apple for the other four people, then we get the situation that currently exists, where 20% of humans consume 80% of the world's wealth. To achieve perfect justice, the person with four apples must give three of his apples away. That way, everybody will have one apple each.
Now, three apples out of four is 75%. This means that the rich countries of the world should give 75% of all their wealth to the poor countries to achieve perfect equality. 75% may sound a lot, and yet, the rich can afford it without any danger of starvation. We already said that there is more than enough food in the world to feed everyone. Indeed, with less unnecessary wealth, the rich would eat a healthier diet and get more exercise. In wartime, rich Governments find again and again that with food rationing, the health of the population actually improves. Giving away 75% of their wealth will therefore benefit the rich as well as the poor.
Needless to say, however, no rich country ever gives 75% of its wealth in aid to poor countries. The most generous aid donors, namely Norway, Denmark, and Sweden, donate about 1% of their GNP. Nigeria, a poor country, gave 0.28% in 1976. This is more than the two richest countries in the world, namely the USA and Japan, who in that same year managed only a meagre 0.22% and 0.21%, respectively.
Clearly, these amounts are far from the 75% the rich should be giving. But even these tiny amounts are in danger. A 1977 poll in Britain found that two thirds of the population felt that Britain was too poor to give any aid at all. Aid agencies report what they call "donor fatigue" -- people think they give enough, and when it has no visible effect, they think that giving any aid at all is useless.
The fact that 40,000 innocent children starve to death every day in poor countries is an enormous humanitarian disaster that should cause the rest of the world to put everything else on hold and spare no expense to get some food to those poor children. But far from sparing no expense, few people bother to do anything about it at all. It is not that we are ignorant of the facts. Every day we see the pictures on our TV screens. It is rather than Capitalism dulls our moral judgment. We persist in the false belief that Capitalism will soon save the poor from their misery, and we think that if we give $2 out of a $30,000 a year income, we have given more than our share. Meanwhile, we spend thousands each year on cars and holidays and videos and other luxuries for ourselves. Each time we do this, we commit a moral crime against humanity. But no one convicts us. The victims are unable to protest or bring us to justice, and our immediate neighbours who could accuse us refrain from doing so because they themselves are guilty of the same crime.
The United Nations has drawn up a Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which says in brief that all humans are free and equal and have the right to life, liberty, security, justice, good health, and a decent standard of living. Needless to say, all these right are breached every day. Of course, every nation says that it agrees with this Declaration. But rich nations are very slow and reluctant to put their signatures to it and make it legally binding on themselves. Instead, they take refuge in a variety of excuses. Rich people fear the Declaration of Human Rights because they know they stand condemned by it. If they could, they would like to destroy it altogether. Meanwhile, they hypocritically pretend to agree so as not to be condemned as immoral. This is none other than Satan who is afraid of the light of day and who prefers darkness for his evil deeds.
Of all evil kinds of human interaction, war must surely be the worst. Primitive people knew almost no wars. Of course, it happened sometimes that tribes quarreled with each other, and occasionally people were injured and even killed. But this was rare. For the most part, primitive people lived in peace and harmony with their neighbours.
According to the economic interpretation of history, all war is rooted in competition for wealth. In other words, war began as soon as private property was invented. We spoke earlier of a war of private property, which began as soon as the first person drew up private property lines and dared others to step over it. This war of private property has raged continually ever since the beginning of civilisation. Normally, people fight civilly. That is, they fight the war of private property in the market place according to the established rules of trade, or in the courts according to the laws of contract. But when greed and envy becomes too intense, people forget to be civil, and resort to guns and bombs and poison gas. The war of private property spills over into real war, as humans try to take back what they believe the other side has stolen from them.
Of course, no nation ever admits that they go to war because they are greedy for wealth. They pretend that they are fighting over high moral principles. But as Plato observed more than 2,000 years ago, "all wars are undertaken for the acquisition of wealth". No nation spends billions of dollars and thousands of lives merely to prove a moral point. Probably no war has ever been fought without the victor standing to profit greatly from the spoils of war.
The earliest wars were probably fought by angry mobs armed with clubs and spears, hacking away at each other. But soon war developed into a science, with generals who devised clever strategies to destroy the enemy with scientific efficiency. Catapults, crossbows, and fortifications appeared, and soldiers were trained in the art of killing people.
But nothing compares to modern warfare. We now have nuclear bombs and other weapons so terrifying that all sensible humans regret that those weapons were ever invented at all. Recruitment techniques have also improved. In Mediaeval times, a young man could escape the draft simply by running faster than the recruiting sergeant. But the modern population census leaves no escape for able-bodied young men. The quality of soldiers has also improved. Once, warmakers had to make do with underfed, doltish, unwilling peasants who did not take well to military discipline. Today, soldiers are tall and strong and perfectly disciplined.
As a result of these factors, it is no wonder that World War II is the most destructive war ever fought by human beings. 17 million combatants and 25 million civilians died in that war. And the cost of staging World War II, $1.5 million million, far exceeds the total cost of all previous wars put together. Governments that in peacetime are thrifty and careful with money become incredibly wasteful in wartime. For good purposes like health and education, every dollar is carefully counted. But when evil and destruction is the aim, billions are spent without a moment's thought. Before World War II, Western Europe was the richest and most powerful continent on earth. After World War II, Western Europe was in ruins and drained of wealth, and the USA and Japan were able to overtake it.
Following the horrors of World War II, many people thought that humanity had learned its lesson at last and would live in peace from now on. However, wars have continued unabated. Since the end of World War II, 25 million humans have died in war. And when people are not fighting a war, they are at home building weapons. Arms research is today the main use of science. More and more fiendish ways of killing people are forever being devised. It is believed that both the USA and the USSR have tried to insert genes for cobra venom into influenza viruses. But the nuclear bomb probably remains the most frightful of all weapons. When the bomb was first used in war, namely to destroy the city of Hiroshima in Japan, many of the scientists who had helped design it voiced their protests, but in vain. The atomic bomb produced a kind of destruction no one had ever seen before. At the spot where the bomb fell -- a few metres from a hospital -- all structures were instantly vapourised, and rocks were melted. 4 kilometres away, wood was charred, while windows were blown out as far as 200 kilometres away. All over the city, people thought that their own suburb had taken a direct hit. Survivors say that the whole sky was alight, as if covered with a continuous "sheet of sun". Two thirds of the city was leveled to the ground, and on walls still standing could be seen permanently etched shadows of things and even people. 80,000 humans died instantly, while survivors suffered injuries that doctors had never seen before. Today we call it radiation poisoning. A person might appear perfectly well, yet suddenly he would get a fever and start vomiting, or old wounds that seemed completely healed would suddenly open and start bleeding again.
About a trillion dollars per year is spent by Governments on weapons. Arsenals are now so huge that it no longer makes sense to ask which country is strongest. What is the point of saying that a nation that can destroy the world 200 times over is stronger than one that can only destroy it 100 times over? If these two nations went to war, there would be no winners left alive to celebrate the victory.
Weapons systems have grown enormously complex. Satellites in space keep watch over the whole surface of the planet and know instantly if a missile is fired anywhere. Supercomputers then calculate the payload, trajectory, target, and probable damage. The computers also make recommendations as to what response humans should make. Humans then have a few short minutes to decide what to do. Given such a short time, it is likely that the humans will simply do what the computers suggest. In other words, the technology for destroying the world is out of human hands and under the control of computers. These computers have a very difficult job to do. For example, they must distinguish real missiles, of unknown characteristics, from decoys, also of unknown characteristics. Should the computers make a mistake, and there is nuclear war, there is no time to correct the mistake. The world simply goes up in smoke in a matter of minutes.
If this sounds frightful, what is even worse is that, instead of dismantling the whole infernal apparatus, Governments are spending billions trying to make it even more complex and unwieldy.
What would happen if there was a global nuclear war? Foolish optimists have been known to think that such a war would be good because all evil humans would be wiped out, and the good ones could start a new and better world. However, a more realistic prognosis would be that, if anyone is left alive at all, they will have to face a severely polluted world where survival is extremely difficult. People would suffer from terrible diseases and genetic mutations. Scientists speak of a "nuclear winter". Clouds of smoke and dust would hang in the air for several years, blocking out the sun and shrouding the earth in permanent darkness. The planet would become freezing cold. Most life would die out, and agriculture would be almost impossible. The human race would almost certainly enter a Dark Age of barbarism and ignorance.
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