Thread for the Analysis of Henry David Thoreau's Writings

[vulcanlogician]

As I've argued before, Thoreau hated capitalism, but even if you LOVE capitalism, you have to admit, nature makes capitalism and free enterprise possible. Try opening a Wal-Mart in the sewer. I bet business there will suck. That's a good argument (capitalist or Marxist) for not turning the world into a sewer.

Here I think we have to differentiate between 20th century capitalism and the newer kind. For the most part, the way it works now the billionaires don't have to worry about any nature but their own estates. 

In the olden days, Henry Ford had to pay his workers enough so that they could buy a car. He had a stake in consumers living fairly decent lives. As long as you make money from selling manufactured goods to consumers, this is generally true.

But the economy has been "financialized." Billionaires now make their money by buying and selling stocks and bonds and futures and exotic financial instruments. They don't have to make anything or provide anything for regular people. I suspect that even the Walton family (who owns Walmart) currently get richer due to finance. 

In Rogue Economics by Loretta Napoleoni, she distinguishes between "stationary bandits" and "roving bandits." Stationary bandits can't bleed their victims totally dry, because they have to come back and rob them again later. This was the old way. Now that everything is globalized and financialized, roving bandits can destroy a region completely, to the point it will never recover, and move on. Chris Hedges' books about "sacrifice zones" in the US describe such places. 

So a sense of place, something Thoreau valued, is also a victim of capitalism.

Even Marx saw it this way: 

We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the right of personally
acquiring property as the fruit of a man’s own labour, which property is alleged to be the
groundwork of all personal freedom, activity and independence.
Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the property of petty artisan and of
the small peasant, a form of property that preceded the bourgeois form? There is no need to
abolish that; the development of industry has to a great extent already destroyed it, and is still
destroying it daily.
Or do you mean the modern bourgeois private property?
But does wage-labour create any property for the labourer? Not a bit. It creates capital, i.e., that
kind of property which exploits wage-labour, and which cannot increase except upon condition of
begetting a new supply of wage-labour for fresh exploitation. 

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/wo...ifesto.pdf

See the bolded potion of Marx's quote. The family farm is dying because of agra-business. The conservative base is frightened that they may lose property rights over their farms because of State interference, but capitalism has already abolished the right of the petty farmer holder to own land. Anybody who has their hand on the pulse of the Appalachian farmer knows that, while he guards his wallet against the federal government, his wallet has already been picked dry and pronounced a permanent desert by the corporate exploiters.

As Thoreau put it:

Men think that it is essential that the Nation have
commerce, and export ice, and talk through a telegraph, and ride
thirty miles an hour, without a doubt, whether they do or not; but
whether we should live like baboons or like men, is a little
uncertain. If we do not get out sleepers, and forge rails, and
devote days and nights to the work, but go to tinkering upon our
lives to improve them, who will build railroads? And if railroads
are not built, how shall we get to heaven in season? But if we stay
at home and mind our business, who will want railroads? We do not
ride on the railroad; it rides upon us. Did you ever think what
those sleepers are that underlie the railroad? Each one is a man,
an Irishman, or a Yankee man. The rails are laid on them, and they
are covered with sand, and the cars run smoothly over them. They
are sound sleepers, I assure you. And every few years a new lot is
laid down and run over; so that, if some have the pleasure of riding
on a rail, others have the misfortune to be ridden upon. And when
they run over a man that is walking in his sleep, a supernumerary
sleeper in the wrong position, and wake him up, they suddenly stop
the cars, and make a hue and cry about it, as if this were an
exception. I am glad to know that it takes a gang of men for every
five miles to keep the sleepers down and level in their beds as it
is, for this is a sign that they may sometime get up again.

 
https://www.fulltextarchive.com/page/Wal...-Thoreau2/