This was an old writing of mine that I have decided to post since I am posting other articles in my ongoing "How to Combat Corporate Propaganda" series. I think this site is really starting to be a vehicle for citizens to showcase their analyses of corporatism and the culture the institutions of corporatism has fostered.
One of the most significant ways a group of citizens can deal with the issue of corporate accountability is to counter corporate propaganda. Part of this process is understanding corporate propaganda and the motivations behind it - the issues involved in the corporate mercantilist or capitalist system.
Wealth is a zero-sum game, whereby those who concentrate economic resources do so at the expense of others who have operated under the same economic system. To integrate others into our economic system through investor-friendly globalization means that they will become competitors to a finite collection of economic resources.
When corporate propagandists say that wealth creates money, they mean that investors, not workers create capital. This is demonstrably false.
Wealth is generated by the intersection of two entities. The first are natural resources, for example trees. The second is the human labor that is involved in accessing and processing those natural resources to allow the income-generating potential of the asset to be developed, for example turning trees into timber and at length furniture.
The human labor is the part of the production path that brings value to the asset. In fact, human labor is even considered a resource in itself. Remember though, that all work requires energy. The variable capital, or labor power, comes from the hours of rest that a worker gets or the caloric intake of the worker.
What this all means is, the energy that gives natural resources income-generating potential in a capitalist system is the life essence of the human workers. Thus, wealth is not generated from free-market exchange, this only enhances the value of an asset. In essence, a tree has no value in the commodity market because there is no market or demand for a given tree in some part of the world. However, there is a market or demand for furniture, so it can be reasonably asserted that the investor cannot create value from a tree, a laborer must so do.
Conventional capital or money is not, in itself, wealth. It is an agreed upon substitution of wealth, and there is only so much of it that can go around. It takes a process to develop and maintain this abstract system of speculative market wealth. Part of this process involves the use of state power.
Historically, the ruling domestic interests of various nations use the power of the state to maximize their power and wealth by using the military to secure assests and exploit them in other lands, in order to keep a privileged lifestyle for the wealthy elite in the state. This is because in order to capitalize on the market-value of a resource there must be a way to secure that resource.
Therefore, it is known and accepted that the power of the public state is used to aid the process of concentrating economic power and resources into the hands of private citizens. This arrangement is typically referred to erroneously as democracy or capitalism. It is neither.