The Fetishes of Empire
I do not hold fast to the notion that the capitalists’ so-called “profit motive” is to blame for our social ills today.
I believe that the profit motive is the most prevalent deathly rationalization of many of our social ills, yes, but I don’t believe that the rationalization of a toxic pattern of behavior fully explains the toxic pattern of behavior. The rationalization only ever indexes the pleasure that the toxic pattern of behavior yields.
Those who focus exclusively on the (ir)rationality of the profit motive are falling for a clever ruse. Uncover the ruse and one discovers social forms and practices of enculturation that privilege men who take pleasure in denigrating and dispossessing others, especially othered women and, writ large, (Mother) Nature as an othered woman by analogy.
All endeavors to do away with imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy by analyzing the profit motive are a lost cause. There is no countering imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy without countering the social forms and practices of enculturation that enable men to derive pleasure from exercising the power to denigrate and dispossess.
Too few recognize and fewer are brave enough to teach others that the maintenance and advancement of imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy has always been about toxic masculine pleasure seeking. Many cruel happenings since the years 1444 and 1492 only make sense if one attends to the fetishistic pleasures that they satisfied and the fetishists that they implicate: the capitalist, the white supremacist, and the slave master.
The exemplary capitalist is a patriarch whose socially constructed “endowments” enable them to exploit women threatened with poverty. They either use their endowments for their own direct pleasure, or take indirect pleasure lording them over others, brandishing their stockpiles of wealth like an oversized phallus.
The exemplary white supremacist is a patriarch whose socially constructed “endowments” enable them to exploit women threatened by projects of racial and cultural extermination, by genocide and ethnocide. They either use their endowments for their own direct pleasure, or take indirect pleasure lording them over others, brandishing their means of mass slaughter and cultural erasure like an oversized phallus.
The exemplary slave master is a patriarch whose socially constructed “endowments” enable them to exploit women in bondage and captivity. They either use their endowments for their own direct pleasure, or take indirect pleasure lording them over others, brandishing their retinues of docile bodies like an oversized phallus.
Wherever an imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchal regime has prevailed, the profit motive has served to rationalize the pleasurable fetishistic ends noted above, it has never been an end in itself. Ay, the iconography of every such regime has always functioned like an oversized dick pic.
To properly grasp the deeply interlocked horrors of white-supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy, we must call out the fact that, at bottom, those who call themselves “white men” and those who serve white men as proxies and redeemers get off on the reproduction of Black women in bondage as captives for their direct pleasure, and the reproduction of Black men in bondage as captives for their indirect pleasure. Extracting labor from Black bodies only ever served to rationalize the reproduction of captives to please white men: cheap labor is the byproduct of racialized slavery and apartheid, not the primary product.
Racialized slave labor was never the cheapest to obtain and maintain, nor the easiest to find and keep, nor the most efficient form of labor. Rather to the contrary, racialized slave labor was always a perversely expensive and pleasurable luxury. In other words, the pleasure to be found in racialized slavery was not in the productive use of Black bodies but in the pleasurable wasting of Black bodies. Laborers who can read, write, think for themselves, and take initiative are far more productive and profitable than workers who must be constrained and surveilled at all times to ensure that they do not read, write, think for themselves, nor take initiative.
The most outrageous lie that we are taught in school is that the enslavement of Africans by Christian Europeans was a practical solution to a real labor shortage problem. The labor shortage problem was not real and, even if it were real, enslaving Africans was not a practical solution. In actuality, Christian Europeans envied the ostentatious luxury of the Islamic kingdoms that they warred with, including their retinues of slaves, and they sought to both emulate and outdo their Islamic rivals by accumulating similar such luxuries. Of course, slaves were put to work and made to produce useful and profitable goods and services, but such “practical uses” of slaves were byproducts of the impractical luxury of being able to command others to do one’s bidding and to destroy their bodies, minds, and spirits in the process.
