Footnote: The Anatomy of Exploitation

Conceptually, a sovereign state is like a spherical shell. It includes a finite space (its own sovereign territory) and excludes an infinite space (the rest of the universe). Its purpose is to facilitate the subjugation and exploitation, by the elite minority, of the resources and inhabitants of both these spaces. The sovereign state thus com­prises the mechanisms necessary to formulate, expedite and enforce laws and poli­cies to specifically achieve the selfish ambitions of the elite minority.

Although, in principle, the objective is the same in both cases, the methodology for subjugating and exploiting what is inside and what is outside a sovereign state are necessarily a little different.

Internal Exploitation

The systemic model for subjugating and exploiting inhabitants and resources that lie inside the shell is that of a kingdom or republic.

Before a kingdom exists, each nuclear family of the people who live in a particular geographic region, such as Great Britain, is able freely to use a necessary and suf­ficient amount of land to turn its labour into its needs of life. Soon, however, in each locality, an exigent individual arises who subjugates those around him, event­ually dispossessing each family of its necessary and sufficient resources. He there­by makes all the land in the locality his personal possession.

Among such exigent individuals in the region as a whole, the stronger then preys upon the weaker until the landed estates stabilise in size, according to various geo­graphical and administrative constraints. The region thus gravitates towards a small number of landed estates, each headed by an exigent individual that we could, for the sake of argument, refer to as a baron. The most dominant baron is then either elected king by his peers or arbitrarily takes charge through superior charisma. He thus becomes king of the geographic region, which thereby becomes a kingdom or sovereign state.

With very little infighting or dissent, such a form of kingdom can remain stable for a long time. It may suffer tentative invasion by other kings, but generally the barons can live the wealthy life fuelled by the toil of their subjects, who must content them­selves with their misery.

Inevitably, industrialisation arrives. The agricultural processes of the landed estates become mechanised. Fewer human workers are required. The majority is displaced. Manufacturing now requires workers. Most are therefore forced to move to cities to power fabrication and distribution. For this purpose, industrial skills are needed. So people must be educated and trained. This precipitates the unwelcome collateral consequence that they learn to think. They now see and understand their wretched state, which, in turn, inspires them to seek control over their lives. They demand democracy.

The king is either sidelined as a mere symbolic head of state or the institution of the monarchy is abolished altogether. The barons become an industrial elite. But the people are still without the power afforded by the unencumbered possession and use of land and primary terrestrial resources. Common man is therefore un­equip­ped to be able to stand alone as a democratic representative. He does not have the means to compete in a political campaign to get himself known and trust­ed. Only members of the landed elite have the means and connections necessary to present themselves or their chosen marionettes to a large industrialised popula­tion for dem­ocratic election.

Consequently, the policies of the elite are power-sold to the gullible masses, who are purposefully deluded into thinking that what is best for the elite is also best for them. But nothing changes. Common man is still the bond-slave of the elite. He may be, theoretically, free to choose which individual master he serves, but he is still bonded to the industrial system as a whole. He must serve somebody to sur­vive. An obligation to seek and find work is imposed upon him, whether or not there be a master that has need of his labour. Common man thus lives in a state of un­ending exploitation. To protect itself against social insurrection, the elite provides a pittance to those unable to find work or are otherwise incapable of working.

But consequences are inevitable. Eventually, the young ones, born of the exploited many into inescapable disparity of wealth and opportunity, react to their situation. They go on the rampage: sometimes on a nationwide scale. They cause havoc and destruction. But the poshboy puppets of the exigent minority can never see the cause. They think the perpetrators are simply malcontents, who must be punished out of kindness by a firm hand. The exploited majority in a nation are held under the force of an impregnable system of enforcement, which they do not have the critical mass to break. They may cause significant disruption at times. But the status quo is always restored.

External Exploitation

The systemic model for subjugating and exploiting inhabitants and resources that lie outside the shell is either, on the one hand, that of a worldwide empire, or, on the other hand, that of the dominant economy within a neo-liberal global free market.

The empire finances and dispatches explorers and adventurers to the "four corn­ers" of the Earth to seek and survey useful economic resources such as gold, preci­ous stones, fruits and other commodities not available in, or natural to, the home­land. In their wake, the empire sends out trading expeditions as a means of buying the discovered commodities for the quintessential price of a banana.

Sooner or later, however, the peoples of the exploited territories perceive that they are being short-changed. Disparity rises. Poverty sets in. Unrest ensues. The em­pire sends a naval fleet with an army plus civil administrators to impose order. They take over the territory by establishing and enforcing the empire's system of law. The exploited lands thus become subjects of the empire. The empire expands in this way until the sun never sets upon it. Eventually, under its own weight and cost of remote administration exacerbated by growing local unrest, the empire crumbles and its former subjects become independent states once again.

In today's world of superpowers with strongly contrasting political views, under the constant military threat of mutually assured destruction, overt empire building by overwhelming military force is no longer viable.

Notwithstanding, if such a superpower were ever to feel threatened by the world, whether that threat be real or imagined, it could be motivated to invade and subjugate weaker neighbours in order to provide a buffer for its own protection, while the rest of the world simply views it as an overt aggressor.

Military invasion is no longer acceptable to world public opinion. But killing people slowly through economically induced poverty and starvation is acceptable. This is because, within the superficial global public mind, the effect is sufficiently dissoci­ated from the cause not to raise indignation.

So in order to exploit the resources and inhabitants of the planet, a predator must employ a more sophisticated and clandestine methodology. For this it needs the help of leading-edge technology, both to seek out and survey the planet's desirable resources and to listen in on the thoughts of its prey.

Consequently, from the anonymity of space, the predator's satellites spy analytic­ally upon the bounteous surface of our planet. They probe between the clouds with their high-definition cameras, infra-red sensors and radars. They robotically map areas of land and sea where lie extractable minerals, oil and gas. And ensconced behind these satellites, cruel neo-liberal minds behold with envious eyes this patch­work of lucre, insouciant concerning the collateral destruction and poverty their ex­ploits will wreak upon these lands, seas and their inhabitants.

With cold calculation, they choose an area to exploit. They investigate the politics of the sovereign jurisdiction within which it lies. If it be an elitist regime wielding the strong hand of a despotic leader or warlord over its common people, they nego­tiate a trading agreement with its elite to relinquish the country's agricultural and geo­logical heritage to them for the price of a banana, lubricating the process with copi­ous back-handers to those in control. The common people lose their means of turning their labour into their needs of life. The rich grow ever richer. The poor grow ever poorer. Disparity forever rises. And so the wheel turns.

On the other hand, if the area lies within the jurisdiction of a left-leaning regime, whose leaders follow a moral obligation to care for their common people, the pro­cess is a little more complicated.

They must first sift through the political landscape of the country to find the inevi­table cauldron of rightist Randian hot-heads who care nothing for their kinsmen but only for maximising their own wealth and furthering their own interests. They then pour vast amounts of money into this fledgling group, furnishing it with all the ext­ernal expertise necessary for it to promote itself with sufficient force to precipitate a general election and democratically wrest power from the established socialist government or party. In less developed socialist countries, or if democracy does not work, they finance the arming of a local thug or warlord to enforce their wish to ex­ploit the country's resources.

They then induct their prey into their global free market. By deliberately making it cheaper to import various essential commodities like technology and medicine, they make their prey vitally dependent upon the external market. They also lock their victim into long-term contracts to use most of its productive land for export cash crops while importing essential foodstuffs. Thus it no longer has the home-based in­frastructure to provide all the needs of its population. It becomes vitally dependent on international trade.

Thereby, in the event of a leftist resurgence, these cruel neo-liberal minds simply apply trade sanctions to stop the inflow of vital commodities and orchestrate dis­rup­tions to infrastructure and services. This causes untold misery and hardship for the population. The vast majority thus becomes dissatisfied with the new incumb­ent Left, which inevitably results in popular insurrection against it and the re-estab­lishment of the Randian puppet.

Should the leftist regime somehow manage to contain and suppress the popular up­rising, these cruel neo-liberal minds may engage in state-aided skulduggery to ass­assinate an immovable leftist leader by modern traceless means. Failing this, they have the power to lobby the government of their powerful homeland to mount — or at least threaten to mount — a justifiable military invasion of the country to "save" its people from socialism and re-estab­lish their rightist puppet.

They then continue to subsidise the maintenance of the new rightist status quo, pres­suring the puppet government to agree to relinquish the country's socio-economic heritage for the price of a banana by giving copious back-handers to the local elite. They finally exhaust the resources of the country, leaving a rich minority with the majority sinking into ever-deeper poverty.

Though these cruel neo-liberal minds may themselves be intellectual psychopaths, thereby feeling no remorse concerning the devastating collateral effects of their en­deavours, they need to present a cogent moral justification to their homeland pop­ulations. This they do through the obviously flawed doctrine of Manifest Destiny, which asserts that they are a superior people chosen by an omnipotent being to rule over the rest of an inferior humanity.

But ruthless exploitation in the external world also has consequences. Against en­forced dispossession, disparity and poverty, people eventually have no choice but to react. It is a matter of survival. And such reaction can spark off in different and dis­connected parts of the globe within radically different cultures. But not one has the resources to mount war against a neo-liberal superpower in order to prevent its nation being bled dry of its natural resources. So there is only one way they are able to react. And that is by a sustained and relentless campaign of arbitrary and sporadic hits upon the society that exploits them.

On the one side is vastly superior military technology with ostensibly robotic means to do the dirty work while their human operators are safely esconced thousands of miles away. On the other side is economic desperation driving a quest for liberation from exploitation fuelled by a kamikaze religious fanaticism in people who have been left with nothing to lose. And the exploited peoples of the world are now way beyond critical mass. They cannot be contained. So the eternal war will continue and grow in super-regenerative escallation until both sides are broken. That is the inevitable future unless or until the cause is removed by the cessation of ruthless economic exploitation of the peoples of this planet.

The Charitable Solution

The result of people being expelled from their lands by cash-crop war lords aided and abetted by first-world powers is the extreme deprivation, misery, disease and starvation we see in the world today. So what is the Western Elite's solution to this crisis of their creation? Charity. But not by them. They encourage the formation of vast corporate charities who use all the psychology-driven techniques of corporate mass marketing to play on the minds of ordinary — including very vulnerable — people to contribute their all to save the poor and starving of the world. All while the psychopathic elite themselves bask in their obscene wealth.

These corporate charities bombard survival-wage people with avalanches of mail with pathetic conscience-pricking pictures of starving diseased children. They bom­bard them also with endless telephone calls, for which any other perpetrator would be arrested for telephonic harassment. And if you give to one, your name is pas­sed to hundreds of others who then pester you to death forever more. I know per­sonally of two separate cases in which old ladies — both with Alzheimer's — were relent­lessly targeted by such charities until one of them literally had absolutely no money on which to sustain her life. The only solution was for her family to make absolutely sure she never had any money and to furnish all her needs in kind.

Conclusion

The disgraceful vicious cycle whereby the corporate elite and their investors ruth­lessly exploit the peoples and resources of this planet is shown on the right. Occi­dental corporations finance ruthless Third World military dictators to buy advanced military hardware with which to subjugate their people and remove them from their land. The people can therefore no longer grow their needs of life and are consequ­ently thrust into a state of poverty and starvation. The military dictators then let Corporate Agribusiness use the land thus vacated to grow cheap cash crops and extract minerals which they take to the West and sell to Western populations at Western prices, thus gaining a high profit for their investors.

The political grease that enables the wheels of this rancid machine to turn is suppl­ied through the diplomatic channels of occidental governments.

The news media make the people of the West aware of the poverty and squalor in which the Third World people are living. In response, corporate charities mount ap­peals in which they apply all the psychological techniques of commercial marketing to emotionally blackmail the common low-to-middle income people of the West to dig deeply in their little pockets to help these poor people. But these Third Worlders have been thrust into this situation by their ruthless military dictators, who some­how seem to have acquired all the advanced Western weaponry they need to main­tain their state of oppression.

Excellent for the corporate shareholders of the West. Good for the ruthless military dictators of the Third World. Painful for the conscience-ridden people of the West. Absolute Hell for the unfortunate inhabitants of the Third World. So off to church go the corporate investors to thank the Lord for his bounteous kindness.

I think it is the corporate investor who should pay to rectify the humanitarian crisis that he has created. It would take only a small part of the obscenely high profit that he has so maliciously acquired.

It is forever a source of amazement to me that this notion never seems to cross the mind of the ordinary Westerner. Perhaps he just passively swallows the Thatcherite doctrine that the corporate investor has acquired his obscene profit by "merit" and therefore deserves to keep it, rightly leaving the meritless hordes [i.e. those of low income] to pick up the tab. It is only through this doctrine of externalisation that corporations can systemically survive. Without it they would rapidly disintegrate.

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This essay has described the abstract principles of exploitation. It must be obvious to any mind, capable of independent thought, where, over the decades of living memory, this principle has been applied. And, in view of such events, it must be incumbent upon the reader to decide, in clear conscience, whether or not such be­haviour be acceptable.

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Parent Document | © April 2019 Robert John Morton