RD (@[email protected])

Attached: 1 image Capital is served by various institutions (property rights and legal codes, corporations, the system of wage labor, law enforcement, military, other religions, education systems, media, white supremacy, colonialism, imperialism, etc), by the billionaires and oligarchs who are its priests and the rulers and politicians who are their henchmen. As Albert Einstein wrote in Monthly Review, May 1949: "...private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights." As a result we have unwittingly internalized Capital's demands, to our great detriment. Capital's narrative is deeply embedded into every aspect of our lives. Note how this quote from the speech "The Three Evils of Society" by Martin Luther King Jr. assumes the Protestant work ethic is a good thing and not itself part of the implanted narrative that serves Capital. Instead of calling it out, MLK tried to distance it from capitalism. So while the second sentence of this quote is very true, the first sentence is an example of the deep conditioning of the narrative of capitalism and its precursors: "We have deluded ourselves into believing the myth that capitalism grew and prospered out of the Protestant ethic of hard work and sacrifice. The fact is that capitalism was built on the exploitation and suffering of black slaves and continues to thrive on the exploitation of the poor, both black and white, both here and abroad." Even "Democratic Socialist" Bernie Sanders sadly equates dignity and security with wage slavery: "This is the United States. We are the richest country on the planet. One job should be enough to live with security and dignity." David Graeber, from “Debt: The First 5,000 Years”: "For me, this is exactly what's so pernicious about the morality of debt: the way that financial imperatives constantly try to reduce us all, despite ourselves, to the equivalent of pillagers, eyeing the world simply for what can be turned into money - and then tell us that it's only those who are willing to see the world as pillagers who deserve access to the resources required to pursue anything in life other than money. It introduces moral perversions on almost every level. ("Cancel all student loan debt? But that would be unfair to all those people who struggled for years to pay back their student loans!" Let me assure the reader that, as someone who struggled for years to pay back his student loans and finally did so, this argument makes about as much sense as saying it would be "unfair" to a mugging victim not to mug their neighbors too.) "The argument might perhaps make sense if one agreed with the underlying assumption - that work is by definition virtuous, since the ultimate measure of humanity's success as a species is its ability to increase the overall global output of goods and services by at least 5 percent per year. The problem is that it is becoming increasingly obvious that if we continue along these lines much longer, we're likely to destroy everything." As @HeavenlyPossum has commented: "capitalism depends on ignorance of history for its ideological survival". It is the intent of this project to do what we can to remove some of this ignorance, to share the debunking of some of the lies we've been told; to encourage *unlearning the lesson* that has been forced upon us. 28/30