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Capitalism is Smartphones and Eugenics

12 0
24.01.2025

Image by Nick Fancher.

We’ve entered the era of smartphones and eugenics. “They’re eating cats, they’re eating dogs,” Trump had exclaimed frantically, echoing words that could’ve been uttered by a Klansman in the early 1920s, but now that very same level of toxicity having been beamed into households all across the world for whoever has the stomach to bear it.[1] So many now have access to learning about events on the ground from almost anywhere, where we can communicate, send money to, and spread the word of various political events due to the devices in peoples’ pockets, and yet, none of that alters the fact that entire family trees have been erased in places like Palestine. No amount of streaming with emojis can negate the brutality of Israel’s siege, a high-tech form of genocidal intent and killing, with drones swarming the skies, but a genocide nonetheless.[2]

R. Palme Dutt, a Marxist theoretician of the interwar period in Europe, noted similar dynamics in his own era, the clashing of so-called technological progress with civilizational decay and impending horror. At the time, the productive capacities of Europe had expanded tremendously in a rather short period of time. Major manufacturing and industrialization had finally led to a capacity across most Western societies, including the U.S., to resolve issues of hunger and starvation. However, countries chose to get rid of their “surplus” food, burning it, dumping some of it into the nearest ocean.

“The burning of millions of bags of coffee or tons of grain, in the midst of mass starvation and poverty, have horrified the world,” he stated at the time, while the global economy had still been reeling from years of a financial reckoning.[3] In parts of the colonized world, European policymakers would intentionally funnel basic food commodities, like rice and grain, to maintain high levels of prices for such products, in the process leading to mass starvation in places like Bengal. Prior to European colonization, famines were a rare phenomenon. Even in feudal times, local authorities, however authoritarian and demeaning, had kept aside piles of grain to satiate the masses in times of hardship, to avoid unrest. But that had all changed the moment the British ships arrived, followed by the French and the Americans, all of whom were dedicated to squeezing profit out of every inch of land and person, from the trader to the peasant.[4]

Treating food as a commodity rather than meeting human needs remains a routine feature of our global system. It was only a month or so into the pandemic when farmers across the U.S. were compelled to destroy acres of “excess” food. “In scenes reminiscent of the Great Depression, dairy farmers dumped lakes of fresh cow’s milk (3.7m gallons a day in early April, now about 1.5 million per day), hog and chicken farmers aborted piglets and euthanized hens by the thousands, and crop growers plowed acres of vegetables into the ground as the nation’s brittle and anarchic food supply chain began to snap and crumble.”[5]

In 2008, Japan, one of America’s closest allies, had plans to “dump” excess rice in parts of Asia to alleviate food insecurity. The U.S. was against this, the number one reason being that........

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