Very few economists will admit that their pseudo-science—what is generally referred to as political economy, that is, the structural dynamics of capitalism—is primarily based on large-scale plunder and rapine. Pirates and buccaneers were, by comparison, mere amateurs, seeking to emulate the practices employed by commercial and state powers. Probably with more generosity and less savagery. What they were criticized for was simply wanting to “work” independently, refusing to submit to these established powers. Those who did submit, moreover, went on to have successful careers within the system (see Michel Le Bris’s *D’or, de rêves et de sang* on these topics).
Capital, as it took shape, operated on an entirely different level, and nothing deterred it from its logic of exploitation: mass genocides in the Americas, the enslavement of survivors, and the importation of slaves torn from Africa when local populations ran out. All this in the name of the god Profit and, more often than not, with the blessing of various religions and bourgeois morality. The books of Eduardo Galeano, among others, are highly illustrative on these subjects (see, for example, *Open Veins of Latin America*). And the same was true almost everywhere—in Africa, in Asia, in all the territories brought under the control of capitalism from the 16th to the 19th century.
It is worth noting that official historical memory remains, for the most part, strangely lacking on these subjects, as the contemporary heirs of capitalism are not particularly keen to delve into its genealogy.
Especially since the myth of Capital’s naturalism, associated with a notion of progress, continues to dominate ideologically. The fact that the principles of Capitalism have consistently been imposed through coercion and violence unfortunately belies the naturalism of this Megamachine, which is blind to anything that does not serve its own growth.
However, and like any criminal organization, capitalism has always strived, at least in its vital centers, to limit the visibility of its overly negative aspects. Its main strategy to this end has therefore always been, as much as possible, to situate its countless misdeeds and their consequences—whether at the level of the biosphere or of populations—far away.
Colonialism—that wholesale subjugation of the territories in question (what was once referred to as the “Third World”)—having fallen out of fashion with the globalization of the system, the pressure exerted on this “far away” has taken on a new form with the establishment of a more subtle neo-colonialism. Relying on the collaboration of corrupt, nationalist-style authoritarian regimes, the plundering of resources and the exploitation of indigenous populations thus continue unabated. Added to this is the outsourcing of the most disastrous forms of pollution and the destruction of ever-larger territories.
It is also worth noting that this “far away,” this periphery of the capitalist world, due to the scale of the destruction suffered at every level, is only expanding—and thus drawing closer. This unbridled plundering of peripheral territories, with its growing share of ruthless, competitive clashes over the appropriation of resources, drives vast numbers of people onto the roads—deprived of their land and the means of their survival, and desperately forced to seek refuge elsewhere. Yet it is the very essence of contemporary capitalist technologies that relies on this dispossession and piracy. The consumer dependent on the Megamachine of capitalism rarely asks himself from which resources, under what conditions, and by whom the technologies that occupy his daily life—and which he views as conveniences—were produced.
In this respect, however, they are very close to the fetishism of those Melanesians who, at the beginning of the 20th century, developed the Cargo Cult. Seeing streams of goods from unimaginable origins arriving by sea and air—and intended exclusively for the colonizers, who produced nothing themselves—they perceived them as the effects of a special magic that they sought to imitate through rituals dedicated to that end.
The contemporary consumer, for his part, wants to believe that the technology offered to him for cash or on credit is merely the product of an inventiveness presented to him as progress. He is far off the mark, and by obscuring the real circumstances that enable the production of technological artifacts, he surrenders himself body and soul to the organizational system that is in the process of destroying our planet and the very future of humanity. In this respect, they are not very different from those Melanesians of a century ago who wanted to believe in magic and divine intervention to solve their problems, and who then saw their world collapse.