Category: capitalism

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THE BODY OF CHRIST AND INDIVIDUALISM

The doctrine of eternal damnation helped create the concept of the individual.  The overarching embrace of the Roman Catholic church held forth the promise to this now terrified individual the possibility of salvation within the body of an eternal collective, the Church.

But this same church held out also the threat of damnation, which threat itself alienated, fragmented the collective more deeply into numerous individuals.  In the midst of a tendency to threaten us with damnation and then wink and say slyly, “just be good, take communion, and don’t worry about it,” up rose Luther who took damnation very seriously, and Protestantism became the struggle of individuals not to be damned, but in the midst of this struggle individualized even further the organs of Christ’s body.  Increasingly, as the obsession with individual damnation became more intense and conscious, the body of Christ fragmented into Catholic and Protestant, and then into countless Protestant denominations.  Much of the conflict between the two churches was over this: how shall the individual be saved?  Just as the first step – one might argue – to the Nazi holocaust was the unquestioned assumption (in the 19th century, before there was even a Nazi party) that there was such a thing as a “Jewish Problem,” after which much ink would be spilled over what, specifically, the “problem” was and what to do about it, the Christian holocaust against the soul began with the assumption that there was a soteriological problem on the individual level.

Once this coup was achieved, it was simply a matter of time before any powerful or empowering vision of a Christian Collective was increasingly weakened, disempowered to the point where the church could become a mishmash of angry, frightened, depressed, or indifferent individuals who cannot stand up to the world, who see the Kingdom of God as none of their business, and see politics as being beneath the contempt of religiously minded people or merely an authoritarian meddling in the rights of those not in the same faith.  “Where is the body of Christ?” one might ask them, and if they answer what they truly think, it would be this: “elsewhere.”

Thus does our conception of the individual take root in the mysterious and thoughtless rejection of the doctrine of universal salvation, become exacerbated under Roman Catholicism with its avoidance of the issue, and made worse with Protestantism. 

Is it any wonder that Protestantism, if it played its role in the birth of capitalism as per Max Weber—and I believe it did—should thereby have given forth the launching pad for the next and most extreme and destructive stage of individualism: capitalism?

In the meantime, who was left to take up the mantel of the collective self since the church had cast it off?  Communism (in the broad and correct sense of that word, not the perverted “communism” of the Soviet Union) whose efforts were often heroic and, yes, loving, was left with this task.

But this collective body in communism was conceived not as the body of Christ, for the Christian churches had turned that conception into a corpse of itself to be venerated in a tomb far from empty, and which was by  no means allowed to be site of a rebirth on or kin to this Earth.  Truly, the Body of Christ was to be a neverlandish affair entirely, the business of God alone.  The churches carried away this body and deprived and secularized and thereby disabled the promising bloom of the collective subject known as communism.

Thus was the church deprived of its earthly reality and communism of the soul it might have had, the church becoming thereby a ghost, and communism a corpse.  What was to be the marriage of Heaven and Earth was abandoned.

The church and the communists were conceived then as natural enemies when they are by nature one and of the same collective.

But tragically, whenever communism failed, especially ethically, this failure was attributed to its atheism and to its belief in the collective.  The first of these criticisms has truth in it, but not in the way the critics think.  The second criticism is a lie.

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MONDAY’S ELECTION: GO LEFT, CANADA

Claims have been made lately that in the upcoming tussle between the Liberal Party and the Conservative Party in Canada, the NDP will do badly at the polls.

Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that this prediction is well founded.  That is, let us suppose for the sake of argument that the bourgeoisie are not blowing smoke up our asses to convince us, as they usually want to, that nothing even remotely leftist can possibly succeed.

What are we to make of this impending slaughter of this furthest left of our major parties, a party which, even at that, is scarcely Left and does not dare to be socialist?

Take a look at what has been happening in the U.S. for years.  In order to prevent Republican victories, progressives and leftists of various sorts have been saying that while the Democrats have their serious faults (proxy war and genocide spring to mind) the Republicans are worse.  This is the “lesser of two evils” argument .  I myself have been undecided sometimes about this line of thought.  I admit that had I been an American, I would have voted Democrat in the last election.  Was it not so paramount that the Republicans be defeated that even the execrable Democrat party was eminently preferable?  Is not the increasing madness since the inauguration an indication of just what a catastrophe it is that the Democrats did not win the Whitehouse?

Undoubtedly, Republican victory has not made anything better (even the promise of peace in Ukraine seems to fade with every passing announcement) and it has made many things a great deal worse.  But counter to the “lesser of two evils” argument, which has been made for many years, is the fact that following the “lesser of two evils” practice makes that lesser evil more and more evil, with every passing election.  Abandoning human principles on the basis that you are still better than your enemy seems to mean that while your enemy charges further and further through the gates of hell to embrace the devil, you, for all your intentions, end up chained to your enemy, and following at every step.  But perhaps, when you finally meet the Lord of Darkness, you will embrace him not quite as tightly as your enemies do?

One advantage Canada has is that we actually have a viable NDP.  And while it has never taken power in a federal government, it has sometimes had sufficient muscle to influence that government significantly, and has not infrequently won provincially.

But if we quash this party on April 28, though I reject any cowardly fatalism that would call this defeat permanent, we will be strengthening the Right in Canada—ironically, in our attempt to weaken it.

How shall we fight capitalism in its current Trumpist manifestation?  Why, smash the closest thing we have to a Left, of course, what could make more sense?

If the NDP is sidelined to insignificance, Canada will be left in a Yankee-like spiral of “the lesser of two evils.”  Our “democracy” will be democracy only for those who do not want to vote Left under any circumstances.  Our “democracy” will be, in effect, bourgeois democracy: a choice between two factions of increasingly destructive capitalism.

Thus do we allow capital to make the rules.  No wonder it keeps winning.

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A NOTE FROM MICHAEL LÖWY’S FIRE ALARM

I just finished reading Michael Löwy’s Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History,” but not without coming across, in the endnotes, this most interesting comment (p. 136, Verso 2016):

As Miguel Abensour rightly observes, it is not utopia that is generative of totalitarianism, but a society without utopianism that is in danger of becoming a totalitarian society, caught up, as it is, in the dangerous illusion of completion.  See M. Abensour, L’Utopie, de Thomas More à Walter Benjamin (Paris: Sens & Tonka, 2000), p. 19.  Abensour argues that the hatred of utopia is a ‘repetitive symptom which, from generation to generation, affects the defenders of the existing order, who are prey to the fear of otherness’.

This strikes me as entirely true.  I have often heard it stated (but don’t recall it ever being argued in any detail) that revolutions become violent because the revolutionaries degenerate into a rage when they cannot bring about a utopia, and begin instead to destroy as much as they can of what is.  Rather, I suspect it is far more often the case that reforms or revolutions become violent when they are steadfastly, even violently resisted in their most moderate and reasonable demands.

Do we not live in a violently anti-utopian age?  Has not capitalism discarded its professed idealism of liberty and prosperity for all to reveal what has been there all along for those paying attention: nihilism, cynicism, a truculent worship of power? 

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REALISTS AS LACKEYS

The “realists” claim they can see what the idealists can not, or which the latter even flee from seeing.  But curiously, it seems to be the idealists (who are, on the whole, the most likely to question capitalism’s supposed necessity or inevitability) who are most likely to ask why things are going so grimly: what is behind it all?  The “realists” scrupulously avoid asking about the causes of our current problems.  In that sense, they are not realistic at all: they do not look for the reality behind reality.  They do not want to get too close to ultimate causes, whatever they may be.

Primo Levi quotes a guard at Auschwitz as saying, “hier ist kein warum” (here there is no why).

It might also be said that behind the authoritative veil of the cynical-mystical “realist” and his deification of darkness and pain is the snivelling lackey: the first to screech that the emperor is very well clothed indeed.  So close your eyes, underlings, and continue your swaggering!  What else do you have to offer?

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C.S. LEWIS’S PHILOSOPHY OF HELL AND A NEW WORLD

C.S. Lewis never wrote about politics very much, but in the eighteenth letter of The Screwtape Letters he has his devil, Screwtape, say the following:

The whole philosophy of Hell rests on recognition of the axiom that one thing is not another thing, and, specially, that one self is not another self. My good is my good and your good is yours. What one gains another loses. Even an inanimate object is what it is by excluding all other objects from the space it occupies; if it expands, it does so by thrusting other objects aside or by absorbing them. A self does the same. With beasts the absorption takes the form of eating; for us, it means the sucking of will and freedom out of a weaker self into a stronger. ‘To be’ means ‘ to be in competition’.  

This philosophy could be seen as what has always been the dominant politics of the world—or the sin of pride in its structural or corporate manifestation—whether the rulers were soldiers, priests, hereditary aristocrats, or business people.  Capitalism, with its “war of all against all,” its social Darwinism, is the locus of the Devil’s philosophy in the current age.

Many Christians simply accept Churchill’s dictum that history is “just one damned thing after another.”  Whatever he meant by that, they see it as an essentially meaningless and contemptible series of events and eagerly await the Christ to come back and wipe it all out, taking us to heaven.  They are disappointed in life, and want it to be punished.  And for what they imagine to be their admirable otherworldliness, they think they shall be rewarded with a new world that has no connection to and very little similarity to this one.

What is a resurrection?  It is a rebirth, a new person, but a person not entirely discontinuous with the old person.  It is the old person who has died but is transfigured and reborn.  Otherwise, there is no resurrection, but simply the death of one person followed by his or her replacement by another who is entirely someone else.

Thus it is, I believe, with the new Earth that is destined to be born.

The Christian’s approach to history should not be that of an unloving parent troubled by a chronically and seriously sick child, hopefully counting the days down to when that child shall die and the parent be presented with a healthy replacement.  The parent wants the child to be saved, not replaced, and this is what we should want for the world—not just for the individuals within it. 

Much of Christian eschatology, unfortunately, is simply a disguised desire for genocide, geocide, even.

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ON MERIT AND CAPITAL

We are often told to beware those who seek the easy way.  But I would add, beware those who accept only the hard way, for they have chosen to make the accumulation of merit the focus, even the whole point, of their lives.  Merit thrives on difficulty—indeed, cannot be produced without it.

And what is merit?  Let us not confuse it with virtue.  Virtue, or perhaps virtues in the plural, might be described as the powers to do or be good.  Analogously, a person might go for a walk to sustain or improve her powers of locomotion.  Of course, going for a walk can be, should be, of itself a good thing.  So, her walk has two purposes then.  But what if she views her walk as meritorious as well?  Merit comes in when she expects something from some unspecified or transcendent source for this action, as opposed to simply improved health or the pleasure of a Summer’s day.  She might not even expect to get this something.  She may be satisfied with, even prefer, that she simply deserve it.  A debt is owed her, and that debt takes no particular form, but is in fact pure debt.

Of course, if she is religious, she will likely be thinking of receiving God’s commendation.  But it is not necessary for her to be at all religious in order to have, even if not consciously, an almost religious devotion to her own merit.  Lacanian psychology, for example, speaks of the “Big Other,” an entity in the psyche for whom one is in effect performing, whom one wishes to impress.  This entity could be God, a parent, a historical figure, an influential person from one’s life, etc.

In critiquing merit, I do not intend to disparage the general idea of an exchange in favor of some more altruistic or unselfish motive for doing everything.  That is not the issue here.  What is at stake is this quasi-mystical bartering as the center of life: that is to say, a frame of mind which says I have the power of doing good, and will choose to exercise it to gain this ghostly merit: in other words, to put the beyond into my debt.

For merit is nothing of itself (again, it is not to be confused with virtue, or with good character, for example) but is rather, a kind of promissory note.

And in this sense, merit is much like money—is perhaps its foundation or prototype, or progenitor.  They have similar tendencies, especially when we look at money in capitalism.  Merit might be described as value in the spiritual realm, without being spirit, just as capital is value in the material realm without being material.

For in capitalism, one increases one’s capital for this reason: to invest and in turn increase one’s capital further, and to no known limit.  Capital, which can be used rationally to purchase use values, is used to increase itself, and to that end in itself, rather than to the purchase of more use values.  Use values are subordinated to exchange values in the most idiotic and indeed nihilistic philosophy humanity may yet have devised.

Likewise, with merit.  Those who seek merit do not desire to trade it for something else they supposedly really want.  They want the merit itself.

The pursuit of merit, which may actually be, or at least bear a strong connection to the sin of pride, is the spiritual foundation of the very material practice of capitalism.  (Why is pride a sin?  Perhaps because it seeks to put God in one’s debt, and therefor completely misunderstands the nature of God and humanity.)  Many generations before Adam Smith or his contemporaries, religious people of various sorts were pursuing merit.  The wiser amongst them would be alert to this tendency in themselves, this wandering from the path of virtue, in effect, and adjust themselves accordingly as far as possible.

But just as merit is a ghostly thing, a promissory note that can never keep its promise, so is capital.  Pride and capital know no natural bounds, and thus, as we see in environmental destruction, for example, destroy nature itself.

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DAVID GRAEBER AND CAPITALIST HOPELESSNESS

Coming close to the end of David Graeber’s marvellous Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011) I encountered the following:

How did we get here?  My own suspicion is that we are looking at the final effects of the militarization of American capitalism itself.  In fact, it could well be said that the last thirty years have seen the construction of a vast bureaucratic apparatus for the creation and maintenance of hopelessness, a giant machine designed, first and foremost, to destroy any sense of possible alternative futures.  At its root is a veritable obsession on the part of the rulers of the world—in response to the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s—with ensuring that social movements cannot be seen to grow, flourish, or propose alternatives; that those who challenge existing power arrangements can never, under any circumstances, be perceived to win.  To do so requires creating a vast apparatus of armies, prisons, police, various forms of private security firms and military intelligence apparatus, and propaganda engines of every conceivable variety, most of which do not attack alternatives directly so much as create a pervasive climate of fear, jingoistic conformity, and simple despair that renders any thought of changing the world seem an idle fantasy.  Maintaining this apparatus seems even more important to exponents of the “free market,” even than maintaining any sort of viable market economy.  How else can one explain what happened in the former Soviet Union?  One would ordinarily have imagined that the end of the Cold War would have led to the dismantling of the army and the KGB and the rebuilding of the factories, but in fact what happened was precisely the other way around.  This is just an extreme example of what has been happening everywhere.  Economically, the apparatus is just a drag on the system; all those guns, surveillance cameras, and propaganda engines are extraordinarily expensive and don’t really produce anything, and no doubt it’s yet another element dragging the entire capitalist system down—along with producing the illusion of an endless capitalist future that laid the groundwork for the endless bubbles to begin with.  Finance capital became the buying and selling of chunks of that future, and economic freedom, for most of us, was reduced to the right to buy a small piece of one’s own permanent subordination.

In other words, there seems to have been a profound contradiction between the political imperative of establishing capitalism as the only possible way to manage anything, and capitalism’s own unacknowledged need to limit its future horizons, lest speculation, predictably, go haywire.  Once it did, and the whole machine imploded, [Graeber seems to be referring to the 2008 financial meltdown here] we were left in the strange situation of not being able to even imagine any other way that things might be arranged.  About the only thing we can imagine is catastrophe.

But what has brought this situation about?  Let me assert that in the West at least, the two great systems of hope, as we may call them, have been Christianity and socialism—perhaps most specifically, Marxism.  Socialism has been betrayed by many of its so-called friends and alleged proponents in the form of party dictatorships, while being ruthlessly stamped out in hearts, minds, and the world by its enemy, capital.  Christianity has been co-opted by worldly power largely into two camps:  an ostensibly apolitical religion concerned solely with private faith and individual salvation on the one hand, and on the other hand a grotesque corruption of the Word of God into an aggressively and absurdly pro-capitalist, even fascist direction.  This perverse politics is not even a parody of Christianity, but an outright contradiction.  American Christian fundamentalism is as much a contradiction of Christianity as the Soviet Union was of Socialism (see Noam Chomsky, “The Soviet Union Versus Socialism”).

We are accustomed to looking at politics in terms of “Right” and “Left.”  This is useful.  (Of course, these useful labels are also routinely abused out of dishonesty or ignorance, as when the corporate media and those who use it as their only source of information refer to Democrats or liberals as “the Left”—cavalierly waiving socialism, communism, anarchism and anyone who actually is a leftist out of existence, or perhaps pretending that Hilary Clinton’s views are but a hairsbreadth to the right of Karl Marx’s).  However, we might also look at politics in terms of hope versus despair.

For it is only the Left, whether secular or religious, that has offered us any hope.  The Right is another matter.  Whereas the Left says that we can change things fundamentally, and for the better, such hopes tend to bring sneers of contempt to the faces of the Right, which proudly invokes “realism,” or perhaps “human nature,” or “the will of God” as in Luther’s conviction that the Almighty had given power and authority to the princes and so on.  On a theological level, the religious wing of the Left sees God as working not only in some otherworldly heaven, but has plans for this world, that may well include upheaval and revolution, but do not include writing the world off.

On the specifically religious plane, Left and Right are literally worlds apart.  The religious Left takes seriously the Biblical claim that “God so loved the world…” but the religious Right can’t wait to see him turn it into a fire pit.  Paradoxically, while the Right is therefor very otherworldly (in a most unhealthy sense) it preaches what is in fact a worldly gospel that absolutely loses sight of the poor and oppressed, handing over power and authority to the rich: the very people scripture most often castigates. 

Despair is a choice, and it is political.

For what “liberals,” the “woke” or “politically correct,” for all their faults–real, imagined or exaggerated–have in common is a belief that we can and therefor should improve things in major ways, that merely tinkering with the status quo is not enough.  The endless tirades since the late 80s or early 90s about “PC” and how everyone, apparently, is held in holy terror of its hysterical dictates mask what is in fact a deeper fear: that we can and therefor must change the world.

Hope can be frightening.

What really pains the Right is the possibility that that liberal/leftist realm is actually pointing out our real responsibilities, and our real powers, if we but use them.  And this call to action, if correct, alleviates us all from our excuses to do nothing.

That is the real terror: responsibility.

But in fact, the problem runs deeper, and is more interesting than that.  A politics of mere responsibility, though it would be an immense improvement over the slash and burn mentality of capital, has the same weakness as religion does when it loses its heart and degenerates into phariseeism.  “Thou shalt not,” in the long run, or “thou shalt” does not have the staying power in public or personal life that is needed for real change.  A genuine sense of ethical responsibility easily degenerates into a prim and censorious temperament, and lacks the power needed to overcome the darker elements of individuals or systems.

And what the Left and Right have often had in common is this phariseeism.

What is the answer?  Perhaps I should leave that discussion for a later post.

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ON “REALISM”

In the prologue to The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism became the Religion of Modernity, Eugene McCarraher says,

Words such as “paradise” or “love” or “communion” are certainly absent from our political vernacular, exluded on account of their “utopian” connotations or their lack of steely-eyed “realism.”  Although this is a book about the past, I have always kept before me its larger contemporary religious, philosophical, and political implications.  The book should make these clear enough; I will only say here that one of my broader intentions is to challenge the canons of “realism,” especially as defined in the “science” of economics.  As the master science of desire in advanced capitalist nations, economics and its acolytes define the parameters of our moral and political imaginations, patrolling the boundaries of possibility and censoring any more generous conception of human affairs.

“Realism” is a deeply ideological word, and in a very negative sense.  “Realism,” in other words, says more and other than what it pretends to say.

“Realism” pretends that it refers simply to “that which simply is, or that which is possible.”  But we all know, given the countless times we have heard the word used and in its usual contexts, that what is or what is possible as designated by “realism” always has to do with what we wish were not real, that which thwarts our desires, or that which simply can’t live up to them.

“Realism” is invariably linked to some reality (present or possible) that cannot be what we wish of it.  “Realism” has to do with telling us we cannot get what we want, and that we may as well accept this fact.

What are we saying if we tell someone to “be realistic”?  We are almost certainly not telling him or her to see that the situation is or will become much better than he or she imagines.  Almost certainly we are trying to say that things are worse than this person has imagined, or will be worse than our addressee hopes.

So what am I saying?  Simply this: that “realism” is a subtle, powerful, and very commonly used ideological battleaxe deployed not only to diminish hope in a given context—indeed, in the name of honesty, one might well be justified in doing this sometimes—but to assault hope in principle.  The sinister and dishonest ideology of “realism” is that it equates reality with thwarted needs or desires; it subtly curses the positive, the good things in life, with the label of unreality: if something is good, even if it is undeniably extant (and “realism” is always very reluctant to see the good, literally blinds itself in its presence) that good is somehow not real.

In effect, we have what might be described as a kind of dystopic Platonism.  Only the negative, the regrettable, is entirely real in this rhetoric.

And what could be more useful to a society that wants to destroy hope at every turn?  What could be more useful to a society that wants millionaires and billionaires to be in charge and desires that no one will ever question this self-evidently absurd and unjust situation?

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CELEBRITIES AND ARISTOCRATS

Perhaps in some ways celebrities are what has replaced aristocrats in a largely republican world (in the non-American sense of the word “republican”).  But celebrity is more cleverly dishonest than is aristocracy.  Aristocrats claim superiority as a function of birth.  This claim is now easy to see through.  But celebrities claim superiority as a function of earned worthiness.  What confounds the rejection of the power of celebrity is that from time to time, unlike in aristocracy, a given celebrity may well have earned some measure of his or her exalted regard.  Aristocrats, conversely, are always aristocrats only because of birth, no matter how worthy some amongst them may be.  Aristocracy can be rejected as nonsense across the board, for no aristocrat is superior by right of birth.  The needed annihilation of celebrity as such is handicapped by the occasional truth of this or that celebrity’s perceived earned superiority.

One can therefor reject aristocracy untainted by one’s own personal envy, self-loathing, or other dubious motive.  To reject celebrity in the same sweeping manner is much more difficult if one is wary of one’s motivations.

This is all the more tragic since the motivations of a given individual hostile to the idea of celebrity as such are not relevant to the overall need to annihilate the deceit and injustice of celebrity.  But we doubt ourselves and hesitate.  And for some, becoming a celebrity may be a genuine (if unlikely to be fulfilled) hope.  The same is not true of aristocracy since it is decided at birth whether one will ever be a member.

What I have said here about celebrity is also similar with regard to plutocracy under capitalism.

Could this be the secret of Donald Trump’s power? the persistence of his fan base and the incredible leniency shown him despite whatever he does?  There are many business people who are not celebrities.  There are many celebrities who are not business people or even particularly rich.  But Trump is a businessman, and a celebrity.  Nobody in the culture is more thoroughly both than he, and nobody more thoroughly combines the most odious capacities of both: the imperious sense of entitlement, of being the special case that the worst celebrities display; the parasitical nature of capitalists at their worst, who produce nothing of value and are instead vampires of money.

The combination of capitalist and celebrity makes for the most dangerous sort of spiritual vampire.

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THE POLITICS OF CHAPTERS BOOKSTORE

I was in a Chapters bookstore not long ago and noticed a problem: no, I am not talking about the fact that what used to be a bookstore with a large number of gift items has now turned into a gift store with a large number of books.

I am talking about an interesting section of books called “Culture and community.”  This was divided into four parts with the following labels: “Black Voices,” “Gender,” “LGBTQ+,” and “Indigenous.”

It is this sort of thing that makes conservatives bleat that liberals run everything.  But this is like complaining women run the world because there is a preponderance of females leading the feminist movement.

No, the real problem is there is no section on class.  And this, briefly, is the problem with much progressive politics.

The supposed liberal hegemony that conservatives complain about is nothing which in fact threatens them very much.  What is truly thrust into the shadows, as if there is a quiet understanding amongst all good people that the neocons are right in saying Marx and everything connected to him is both outdated and hopelessly wrong, is a class-based understanding of our current situations.

I would not simplify history in the manner of a vulgar Marxism and reduce it to a mere playing out of property relations.  But whereas there is little or no inherent power accruing to race, gender, sex, or sexual orientation, there is power inherent in the control or ownership of the means of production.  In other words, such power as men have had over women, for example, has been based not so much on some inherent power in being a male, as that men have managed to have more property rights than women in many times and places.

It would be a mistake to get into a competition between a class-based analysis and these other types of analysis.  In struggling with each other, advocates of all kinds for oppressed and marginalized people would only weaken each other and strengthen the oppressors.  So my point is not to decrease the attention paid to current ways of understanding injustice.  Rather, I would attach an understanding of class to these issues.

For is not class power central, perhaps even essential, in the oppression of various groups?  Consider some of the following observations.

A key factor in the oppression of women, historically, has been in making it difficult or impossible for them to own property.  Materially, they have been dependent on fathers and husbands.  In societies where they can get the same jobs as men, they often get less pay.  In other words, control of the means of production is restricted in their case.

Indigenous people in North America were opened to oppression largely by losing their land: that is, their means of production.  In the late 19th century the buffalo of Western Canada were opened up to massive over hunting by white people, causing literal starvation amongst the indigenous people of that region.

A common incentive for sexual and gender nonconformists of all types to stay in the closet is fear of job loss or harassment on the job.  Yet again, a threat to one’s means of production (keep in mind that employees do not own the means of production to begin with) is a key factor in maintaining injustice.

African people not only lost control of their means of production when removed from their land and forcibly exiled: they could not own property in North America and became literally the means of production for others in becoming slaves.