Nature Gave You Water, Capitalism Gave You Waters

I was in the waiting room as my car was being repaired recently and I heard a woman offer a young girl “a water”. That was perhaps not the first time I had heard the term, but it was the first time I realized how strange that would have sounded to a younger me, or my parents, or their parents, or anyone living in any past age. Only in this time and place can “a water” exist. I suppose it’s only a matter of time before I am asked if I would like “an air”. 

Water was a free-flowing liquid with no set boundaries before it entered the free market. Only capitalism is capable of taking something so far-ranging and nebulous as water and atomizing it. Because that’s what capitalism does. It takes what is ours and breaks it down into yours and mine. The next time you’re on an airplane, take a look down at the neighborhoods and see how all of nature has been broken down into individual lots. Primitive man couldn’t have understood this concept. They wouldn’t have been able to understand how one person might own water while another person is allowed to go without.

Capitalists will tell you that ownership is natural and that the government needs to keep its nose out of their right to ownership. But the truth is the government exists to enforce ownership rights. Nobody could own the water or the mineral rights of an area unless government granted such rights to a certain group of people. Without government you would have no private ownership of anything other than the most basic of possessions, the sort of things the working class might have ownership of: a modest house, furniture, tools, etc. It is government that grants private ownership of what we would otherwise consider common resources.

Capitalists are fond of telling you how bad it is that the government gets involved in business, but there would be nothing but the smallest of business interests if corporations did not create governments to justify their ownership. There would be no private beach, no shopping mall, no plot of farmland except that a government exists to decree it so. 

John Malone owns 2,200,000 acres of land. How did he come to own so much land? Did we the American people or the citizens of the planet decide to give it to him? No. “Ah,” you say, “he purchased it fair and square. It is his by right.” “Purchased it from who?” I would ask. “Why, from the rightful owner.” But who did he purchase it from? Surely another rightful owner, but let us work our way back to the beginning and ask how land originally came to belong to anybody. Who decided that someone owned what once was not owned by anybody but shared by everybody? Only the government has such authority. And what kind of government would bestow land that was shared into the hands of someone who wants the land all to himself? Only a government that was working for an elite few at the expense of the rest of us.

So the next time you hear some propagandist for the ultra-rich complaining that the government is meddling in the interests of private companies, remind yourself that more than likely they are meddling for the benefit of those private companies far more than they are against them. Whatever limits government places on the wealthiest of its citizens is done so only because the avarice of the wealthy elite has become so great that if some limits had not been placed the people would have risen up and gotten rid of them by now. Rest assured that it is mere window dressing. 

As water has been broken down into individual units, so too have human beings. In both cases it is not a natural condition but one that was carefully constructed. We are divided into two parties, but more than that we are divided from each other, have been taken out of our natural state of communal living and been set one against the other in a competitive model. This is not our inclination, but we are taught to follow the lead of the capitalists, in whom the communal aspect of their personalities is peculiarly lacking. It is true that in a healthy society we are to a degree both communal AND competitive, but the environment we inhabit now has become one of toxic competitiveness. Capitalists call it “freedom”. Keep in mind that to a capitalist the word freedom means the ability to accumulate as much wealth as possible and little else.

As our water and our citizenry are divided into individual units, so too are the nations of the world. As we view our fellow Americans as threats and competitors, so must we view other nations in the same light. With such a worldview, we will never know peace, cannot even lay a contextual framework for imagining peace. In the world as it now stands, each waning war corresponds with the build-up to the next one.

As the capitalist desires ownership of the land and resources here in the United States, so too is he covetous of the resources of other countries. As he seeks to profit from the labor of his fellow citizens, so does he wish to profit from the work of citizens of foreign lands. To this end he will once again employ the government he allegedly despises to threaten violence against other nations in order that his profits might increase greater still.

We see the wealth of the great capitalists and we mistake it for a sign of their great human qualities rather than their great human flaws. And in making that mistake, we allow ourselves to accept the mindset of the extreme capitalists as a good one, we see competition as preferable to cooperation. We see what divides us all rather than what it is we together share. Until we cannot even see water as a shared blessing but instead individual commodities to be purchased. And so we end up with our lakes and rivers as receptacles of our single use water bottles. We pollute our common resources with our selfish behavior, as we pollute our shared values with our inability to see what is in the best interest of all. The picture you see below is the result of thousands of selfish decisions and the unwillingness of each of us to work together for a common good.