Reparative JusticePart 6 of 11 · What capitalism does
Land, law and protest
Colonisers made land private and wrote the laws we live by. Those laws still protect their wealth.
Land
One of the most important material legacies of enslavement and colonialism is the introduction of private land rights on a global scale (systemic mass enclosure).
- Capitalism commoditises land to be bought and sold by the richest people on earth to maximise profit
- Capitalism enables land and property to be hoarded and exploited by a very small amount of people at the expense of the majority of the world’s population.
- Once land is bought, it creates an unbreakable chain where the majority of the world’s population are forced onto poverty waged labour on plantations, in factories, shops and offices in order to live.
- Land is a finite resource and always subject to inflation under capitalism – not every single person in the world can own the same amount of land as financial institutions built on colonial empires, billionaires and monarchies.
- The largest land owners in the world are financial institutions who have virtually a limitless supply of wealth from which to purchase more land
- Inequality is predetermined to grow wider each second land remains privatised.
Land must be held under community, custodial ownership to handover to future generations in a better condition than we inherited it and cannot be bought and sold to the highest bidder.
Our world is already bountiful and rich, where everyone person is able to a live in home and benefit from the feeling of security if it were not for the legacies of enslavement and colonialism - capitalism and private property on a globalised scale embedded within it.
Revolutionary Reparations aims to break this most fundamental of chains around our necks and our predisposition to subjugation and inequality by dismantling capitalism, undemocratic power and the laws made by imperialists that keep it in place.
The law
The legal systems we all live by were determined by colonisers and imperialists, mostly in the last 300 years.
- Political systems are not truly democratic because the policies and choices are limited and confined to the interest of capitalism and therefore make no material difference to the economic model or our suffering.
- The enslavement of Afrikan people and claiming of lands occupied by indigenous people in the Americas and Asia has for centuries became lawful through imperial violence, not democratic choice, paving the way for mass lawful abduction, rape and genocide.
- Today, nearly all new laws, cultures, education and criminalisation systems are designed to firmly keep capitalism in place – the nation state, private property, prisons, patents and profits have come to be normalised in a just 300 years despite humans being here for 300,000.
- If human existence on earth was to be defined as 1 hour, capitalism has been with us for just 3.6 seconds.
Today’s laws are based on racist and patriarchal laws written by colonialists who with violence, legalised slavery and colonialism and globalised capitalism. They continue to legalise our oppression, exploitation and subjugation in many ways.
Today’s laws are predominately written to maintain exploitation under capitalism such as military funding and imperial expansion, private property and its policing and protection, maximisation of wealth and profits and vast inequalities, corporate impunity and deregulation and in some countries, a welfare system that barely allows for human and social reproduction.
Only a singular, aligned, global grassroots movement is able to peacefully pierce imperialist and militarist law making and courts to enable the legislating of anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist laws.
Wealth can never be levelled-up or made equal under capitalism, which means neither can power. When power is held by a minority, there can never be true democracy. Our government structures today are designed with this is mind. Only the dismantling of capitalism deliver democracy and the change to live in a world with reparative justice, peace, equality and sustainability.
Protest and propaganda
Right wing propaganda protects capitalism by shutting down rational, logical and empathic thinking that would improve the conditions of society and our planet. Those with meaningful agendas for social change have been targeted, trolled, and made into the enemy of the state by right wing propaganda before they become mass movements.
Capitalists and imperialists do not respond to data and statistics about climate change, poverty and inequality – their interest is in profit before people. The right to protest for new ways of organising the economy is being taken away by capitalists, making authoritarianism a global problem.
Revolutionary Reparations is strategic and non-violent way to mobilise mass movements into making radical and revolutionary change to get justice and build an oppression free world, where the poor make the law, not the rich.