One of the problems with capitalism I struggle with the most is how psychologically damaging it is to perform exploitative actions. To me, the explanation of "material conditions" seems like a post-facto justification of an act, and doesn't fully capture the real violence and lack of regard for other life that is necessary to do it.

I've been reading Columbus and Other Cannibals by Jack Forbes ( as well as some essays by Ian Wright about capital as a God ), and he talks about a concept called wetiko. Wetiko was the name of a spiritual illness that some Native Americans thought Europeans had that caused them to destroy, steal, and extract from the world instead of living as good citizens within it.

Wetiko is spread by an already-infected person interacting with a non-infected person, an easy example being how working in a capitalist economy encourages you to put your own well-being ahead of other people's well-being. In this case, your boss (who has wetiko by definition of being a boss and exploiting you) is literally infecting you with wetiko. And by working and living in a capitalist system, you are infecting the people around you with wetiko.

Whether wetiko actually exists as a real phenomenon is beside the point; the effects that it has are real enough, and I think framing profit-seeking as a symptom of a disease instead of a purely economic force adds explanatory and emotional power to a capitalist critique instead of obscuring it. Consider these three situations, with decreasing degrees of alienation:

    1. A billing office director at a hospital is trying to increase payment collections from 50% to 60%. They brainstorm ideas, and eventually decide that paying a collections agency will help accomplish that. So they hire one.
    1. Then, a debt collector goes to a debtor's house, and tells them that they they will be taking their home as collateral unless they pay off the debt.
    1. One month later, the debtor fails to pay, and a police officer physically removes them from their home.

These three situations are all examples of wetiko behavior, but the 3rd one is much more psychologically violent than the 1st one because it involves the real, physical harm of another human as opposed to looking at numbers on a screen. Without the idea of wetiko, we can explain the 3rd situation as "the officer's material conditions were such that they were willing to physically harm another human". However, that fails to capture the real cruelty inherent in that act. And that's where wetiko's explanatory power can come in. Knowing of wetiko, you can say "the officer was willing to do it because they were infected with wetiko, which is a spiritual disease that causes people to view the world around them as exploitable", and we don't need to assume the officer's material circumstances. And we know that the police officer has wetiko because they are living and working in a society of wetiko-infected people as evidenced by the society's actions of exploitation and destruction. TO BE CLEAR: THIS DOES NOT EXCUSE SOMEONE OF THEIR WETIKO BEHAVIOR. YOU ALWAYS HAVE A CHOICE TO NOT HARM SOMEONE. RATHER, IT EXPLAINS WHY THEY HAVE THE ABILITY TO BEHAVE THAT WAY IN THE FIRST PLACE.

The wetiko disease also explains much better the culture of cruelty and destruction that exists in capitalist countries, the "death cult", the mistreatment of animals and land, the bigotry, and the perception of poor people as sub-human. It's intersectional, and is the umbrella over it all.

To get rid of wetiko:

  • If it's in yourself, you must recognize that it exists and stop engaging in destructive behavior
  • If it's in another person, you can try to get them to realize that they have wetiko
  • If it's the Native Americans defending against European colonizers, they can perform wetiko actions to do it (ie kill them) but they should acknowledge afterwards that what they did was wetiko and that they won't continue to do wetiko behavior

Do you think wetiko is a useful concept? Or is it straying a bit too far from materialism? Personally, it's helped me recently to view capitalism as more of a disease than just in purely economic terms.

          • carbohydra [des/pair]
            ·
            3 years ago

            try to remember that "work" is not the same as "extraction of surplus value"

                  • carbohydra [des/pair]
                    ·
                    3 years ago

                    sure, students aren't exactly exploited in the strict surplus value sense, but college in modern capitalism is an incredibly alienating institution in its own right.

                    before i started studying i would read theory on my own initiative and even enjoy it. it was my time and my initiative.

                    now add a professor backed by a daunting bureaucracy that says to read this or that text in a set amount of time and answer these questions while confined to these ideological limits at the seminar. suddenly it is a completely different kind of activity, one that i also found awful.

                    even in the rare case that they assigned some coursework including stuff i had enjoyed reading before college, the new context turned it into absolute drudgery.

                    and why was i doing this? to get a degree that would mysteriously help in the labor market, even in unrelated fields? it's truly absurd.

                    and if i had any free time, the gnawing sense that i could be studying at any moment had me give up on my hobbies as well. oh and you're supposed to make friends too because after you're done here and enter the labor market there will be close to zero time or opportunity for that.

                    your brain is not broken, it's having a proper reaction to a horrifying unnatural system.

                    have you read Capitalist Realism? it's fairly short and pretty digestible for a academicy book. it really loosened some mental knots for me about suff like this.

                      • carbohydra [des/pair]
                        ·
                        3 years ago

                        oh definitely, but it always ended up with me neither studying, nor doing hobbies, nor socializing, just paralyzed, and then panic studying at the last minute. balancing those priorities is taxing even for privileged and lucky people.

                        the book is indeed a bit doomer, but at least more in a "society is stuck" way than a "i, individually, am irreparably broken at a spiritual level" way

                      • ComradeBongwater [he/him]
                        ·
                        3 years ago

                        I thought this was sort of just unique to my brain, for some reason.

                        As someone with ADHD and anxiety, this quite accurately describes my experience within academia. A constant feeling of dread or shame, especially when partaking in hobbies, for not working on assignments or studying, but the lack of knowing where or how to begin preventing you from doing so.