The useful part of living in the Inland Empire is you that are given a microcosm of what has happened to America these past 40 years. Neoliberalism has gutted industry and left us to the devices of domestic + multinational capital. Warehouses are everywhere, because that is what is left for the average worker in this age: packaging & delivering the goods which our consumer-driven service economy depends on. Amazon dominates our cities’ jobs; storage units line every inch of cities for the useless stuff which we Americans buy to assure we are not empty inside; recycling & junkyards for all the waste that is produced; all we do is consume because there is nothing left for us to produce.
We have been stripped of this vital aspect of what it means to be human: our ability to utilize our labor to create things in the world. And such things are evident within the landscapes of our homes.
From Perris to Moreno Valley there is graffiti upon concrete pillars and decaying walls. The arid mountains are lined with broken homes & ripped flags that seem ready to fall off the edges of feeble poles. Towards Riverside it is more the same, except we encounter some factories.
We sigh a sense of relief: “Oh yes, production! Perhaps we still do make things!”. But soon we are engulfed by more warehouses, with the occasional car dealership to make sure we don’t forget to buy more stuff.
But that is what the beautiful Inland Empire is: a delivery hub for Los Angeles, San Diego, and Las Vegas. It is why my own father works in the same industry as truck driver; it is why sister and cousin have work experience with warehouse packaging.
I say this all because the words “capitalism”, “neoliberalism”, “imperialism”, “neocolonialism”, are not simply these abstract concepts which we discuss: they are marked in the world around us. They are engraved in the pot-holed streets we walk and drive upon everyday, and the same generic plazas with gas stations & multinational corporate fast-food chains. They are socially reproduced among us through similar work experiences; they are found within our reflections of our darkest memories and most stressful moments of life.
My parents are grateful that their children are on track to enter the professional class (teaching, secretary management, & whatever i’m gonna do with my Stanford degree). That has been the goal these past 30 years for most working-class families: escaping the hopeless labor market which only provides jobs in the service & distribution sectors of our economy. That is why the 1990s-2010s were marked by this constant push to go to college for “a good job”.
We gladly accepted this, however, never questioned what had happened to the good jobs that did not require a college degree. Instead, we blindly accepted jingoist arguments of how “China is taking our jobs!”. However, it was not the China who had willfully taken these jobs, but rather, the choice of multinational corporations to look towards cheaper labor. We have been convinced that this topic is one of geopolitical tensions between nations and peoples, instead of an economic issue that has arisen because of how governments now unite with multinational corporations for the simple pursuit of profit. In other words, we have been convinced that this battle concerns Americans versus the Chinese, Mexican, African, and other peoples of the Global South. It provides an effective distraction for the real issue at hand & propels violence and division among working people across the world instead of uniting against the true culprit: multinational corporations emboldened by neoliberal capitalism.
The Inland Empire reminds me why I critique this all because it fills me with love. How could I not when I look outside and the landscape greets me with yellow trees, rolling hills, and curved creeks. There is beauty here which is not captured in the urban centers we have become delivery cogs for. It hosts us like blessed guests, curling its mountains around us to make us feel taken care of. We come face-to-face with the Earth and have no desire to plaster it with concrete and asphalt. The 91-Line on the Metrolink reveals this all, and yet, we blemish it with decaying infrastructure and abandoned buildings. We diminish the beauty of the valley with this lack of care towards ourselves and the world which dies simultaneously with us.
It rots as we rot; it fades as we become cynical; it aches as we ignore maintenance.
But I know the Inland Empire feels it all; we are agitated because we experience it everyday. It is why as I pass Yorba Linda, I pass a white gas tanker with yellow ochre graffiti that exclaims “FUCK THE BANKERS”: common mantra since 2008; don’t we remember?
But our critique must extend beyond simply the financiers, but who is soliciting finance-capital from them: multinational corporations. And it is not simply these multinational corporations, but the government which supports to protect them, the 2 political parties which dedicate their life to capital, the politicians who use their insider knowledge to profit, it is all of it. The American people must look inwards and realize that the decay which marks most of our lives is not some result of an external threat, but the result of our own society’s structure.
It is not enough to merely say “the rich are bad!” or “corporations suck!”, we must gain a full understanding of the world around us. That is to say, critique must not merely be extended to slogans, but through a meaningful political education campaign among the working people of America.
The deliberate dumbing-down of America has left us defenseless against the ideology of the ruling class who now presents our current way of life as the only way to live. And academics would rather discuss oppression in abstract terms. I refuse to entertain both! The education does not merely extend to reading books & pamphlets, but finally looking at the world around us. We walk through life without any second to think, what is going on? Why is this happening? How and why is this like this? Instead, we abstract it all and naturalize it as how things just are. But this social world we live in exists because of us and the relations we establish & uphold everyday. At any moment, it is able to break down if we are to pull back.
When we speak of capitalism, it is all true that it is an economic system that relies on capital [the means to produce] to be held with the hands of a few [protected by private property rights]. And from this, a relation arises between the capitalist & the laborer.
But it is also found when you go to the grocery store; how you never encounter those who own the chain, but are met with a person behind the register. How you know nothing about this person except that they are here to perform the action of checking you out. They are an alien to you, and this allows you to view them in terms that make it easy to not question anything about the reality of what’s going. They are not another human who has their own life, but another component to how the grocery store operates. This is seen across all types of jobs: we lose ourselves and become integrated into a larger system or process. This is largely what has happened to people who have more become involved in the service and distribution sectors of the economy.
The traditional goal of capitalism was always surrounding production: factories, agriculture, and natural resource extraction; the central premise being to create more money, from money [investing in something to make it more valuable, and then selling it to make a profit].
Because the capitalist owns capital [like the factory building, the farm/land, and mining area], they are able to employ many people to do the work for them. But since they own the equipment that is being used to produce things, we are led to believe that the capitalist owns all that is produced in a workplace. You see here how the capitalist steals the value that the workers added to the product which the capitalist sells, despite the fact it was the workers who assembled the product in the factory, or harvested the vegetables, or mined the iron ore; he gives a wage for their work under the value of what they actually produced, reaping the profits from what is sold.
However, things have changed tremendously as you can tell by a look around us. Most factories have shut down along with agriculture & natural resource extraction becoming highly mechanized. The remaining jobs are found within the service and distribution sectors which are found everywhere in the Inland Empire as I explained earlier.
But this is no accident: it is a result of many historical processes these last 200 years. Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, began this historical process. With regard to imperialism, we see how capital has dominated the national/domestic market so much, that it must spread outside the borders of the nation for the sake of profit. This is where the important concept of “monopoly capital” comes from, as the only way it can get to this point is when the domestic market [within the USA] has been divided among monopolies/oligopolies. Imperialism therefore looks for new ways to accrue profit & capital in other countries, traditionally through war & conquest.
You see how agricultural and natural resource production in countries outside of the USA thus now serve the interest of not serving the people of that country, but to provide cheap input production costs for imperialist corporations across the world. That is the ultimate goal of capital: to subjugate everything to ensure it is cheap to produce the things it wants to sell.
But we do not see [most] countries being occupied anymore. The next step in the historical process was Neocolonialism: the last stage of imperialism. It engages in same goal of the imperialist pursuit of accruing profit OUTSIDE of the home country, but now through domestic forces doing the dirty work. This allows foreign powers to wield similar influence over the politics & economy of former colonized nations, as the rich of poor countries collaborate with the rich of richer countries. Coups, election fraud, and assassinations define critical components for how foreign powers now intervene, as opposed to traditional war. Imperialist ambitions, therefore, should not be conflated with simply “war”, but rather, for the pursuit of monopoly-capital’s goals.
And this explains how the West/Global North is so wealthy: it was able to accrue wealth from these imperialist & neocolonial relations with other countries because it allowed for corporations to have higher margins of profit, all the while depriving the development of the countries it had dominated. The difference between capitalism & colonialism is noted here, as a consequence of capitalism is the development of productive forces within a nation [I refer to infrastructure, factories, ports, railways, so on]. Through colonialism however, take Africa for example, the productive forces were not developed given American & European industry did not competition, but did want cheap inputs for production (natural resources, mining, crops, etc).
There was some pushback against this after World War II, which saw many revolutionary/decolonial movements arise to fight against these relations. Nevertheless, the current world we live in was born in the ashes of their defeat with the rise neoliberalism: the political & economic philosophy that arose in the 1970s that believes that the free market should reign, social services are better privatized/cut, and many things should be deregulated for the market to determine outcomes & distribution. The strongest point of how this relates to other definitions above is the “free-flow of capital”, where trade becomes borderless for the sake of the free market. Free-trade deals (like NAFTA, for example) allow for for economic-trade zones to be set up, allowing capital to impact all nations involved without the need for a country to intervene. The corporations involved within this free trade now call the shots on how the economy works, and therefore, how/why the state functions.
Throughout the late 1970s-1980s we saw debt crises plague Latin America, Africa, and Asia enable the IMF & World Bank to restructure these economies away from being geared towards the people and for the interests of capital; social programs were cut and free trades were signed to enable foreign capital to flood domestic markets and disrupt local producers. Moreover, the collapse of the communist bloc by the 1990s created a situation where there was no opposition to the interests of capital, and allowed it to run wild. The rise of information technology, automation, and the internet would coincide with this collapse of the communist bloc in the 1990s, transforming the global economy and particularly, production processes. The rise of post-industrial economy in the US & Western Europe had begun to take shape.
Production was no longer where one could make the most money, but rather, financial speculation on the market. This is an essential component of neoliberalism: the rise of financialization as the primary means to get rich. The surge of venture capital investment during the 1990s into the tech industry had captured the American imagination. People were getting rich left and right off the stock market as things became increasingly deregulated for the sake of neoliberal economic policy. And with multinational corporations now able to settle down outside the USA, the productive sphere of the economy found in manufacturing had soon disappeared. Money was no longer found in owning a factory or parcel of land, but in investing.
The rise of investment and the financial takeover of the American economy saw the increasing prices for college & housing, as these sectors of society had been the first places where investors could get an immediate pay-off, as the demand for both were essential & increasing within our post-industrial economy. However, this process would soon result in the decimation of American economic conditions, as the financial sector increasingly contributed to American GDP growth compared to the productive sector. Wages had begun to stagnate while costs of living increased. People soon needed to take enormous amounts of debt through credit cards and mortgages to maintain the ideal American life style, further expanding the importance of the financial industry in our economy and society. This would of course set the stage for the devastating dot-com bubble of the early 2000s and 2008 Great Recession, which are both direct by-products of the developments I had just described.
The dot-com bubble was more so a market correction of reckless speculation by investors in the tech industry; many start-ups had soon collapsed, allowing for the survivors (Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc) to consolidate power and soon become the unrivaled monopolies we know today. However, lessons were not learned, and this reckless speculation was soon extended to the housing market.
Predatory sub-prime mortgages soon flooded the market while credit card debt mounted across many American families. The financialization of the American economy was soon to meet its natural conclusion, as many people began defaulting on their debts which translated to the collapse of the financial system in the USA, and then across the world. The decay which I had described earlier arises from this all.
So what is left for the American people after this? Good paying jobs now all require a college degree, but the financialization of the economy had made it extremely expensive to acquire one; and when a degree is acquired, it is hard to find a job anyways; and when a job is found, it is hard to find affordable housing where such jobs are located. And those who do not have a college degree are then subjected to dehumanizing work within the service and distribution sectors of our economy. This is coupled with an immense attack upon union/labor rights and inadequate healthcare for most workers.
This is all witnessed at the final destination from the Metrolink: downtown LA. My friend Andy and I were walking around towards Japantown and needed to cross the LA and federal courthouses in downtown. However, there was immense pain everywhere. Surrounding these institutions of justice were gross displays of injustice that have been inflicted upon major segments of the American population. The streets were lined with tents and homeless encampments just a few feet away from these courthouses. And from afar, you can see multinational corporate skyscrapers hover over this all. Wells Fargo, City National Bank, US Bank, Aecom, and Deloitter comfortably afar, but still present.
It is almost as if God had painted an allegory for what has happened to our nation: a complete loss of sovereignty to finance-capital. Our laws are at its whims, and our justice is determined by what is best for these corporations. They hover us because they are who are in control, with the LAPD headquarters only a few blocks away. This is what reality has become: the relinquishment of our power to corporations, the destruction of social services to leave us destitute, and the immense funds provided for social control to mediate the issues which arise in such horrible states of living.
Witness how all of this exists as historically connected. From capitalism arising within Europe and North America to develop productive economies, to Imperialism and monopolies dominating these economies and encouraging the governments to look toward dominating other countries for cheap resources and labor, to Neocolonialism and rich countries choosing to collaborate with the rich of poor countries to still gain access to these cheap resources and labor while the rich of poor countries now get a slice of the profits, to Neoliberalism finalizing the corporate takeover the world, and the rise of financialization to provide new means for profit that production could no longer effectively provide in post-industrial economies like the USA.
We must understand what we observe around us did not just arise naturally, but rooted through a particular history that has transformed the economy and society in the way it is currently set up. We are reminded that these terms are not abstractions, but have left marks on the world around us. They are directed contributed to our material reality and now shape how we navigate life; but they also provide us the realization that it means our society is subject to change, and can change on our terms.
We must look at our history and reflect on how we move forward; not through screaming about “the elites”, but by actually understanding how capital structures our social relations and economy. Through this, we understand that the two dominant reasons why the US has decayed is due to its lack of productive capacities [no manufacturing] & the dominance of financial speculation. The ability to produce (utilizing human labor to create something new) is an essential part of what it means to be alive. And yet, we have destroyed all abilities to pursue this; instead, we offer dehumanizing jobs in fast food chains & Amazon distribution centers that overwork & underpay their laborers; we revere men & women who do nothing but gamble and speculate upon fictitious capital that provides nothing for the country. However, the revitalization of American production must not rely upon the necessity to return to an era.
America does not need to return to the 1920s (where it relies on cheap input costs by dominating foreign countries); on the contrary, the American working class must unite with the working classes of the world who have been decimated by US Imperialism to take it down; for, US Imperialism is the ideology of the ruling class which has led us to this exact situation. There must be a commitment for labor to defeat capital, as the domination of capital has created these exact conditions we all complain about.
Fascist mantras & populist platitudes cannot deliver what Marxist analysis can. Only through a greater understanding of how the world around us has arisen can it can be effectively changed for the better. This is the science of revolution!
Caracol Future 