Wake up and stretch my legs
Take a deep breath of freedom
And smile at another beautiful day in America

16 hours since our last mass shooting

Coffee brewing, check the headlines
Shopkeeper acquitted
Of shooting a black kid in the back

That’s a nice light roast
Shade grown
Fair trade
Damn good coffee
Cat meme, nice.

Black kid guilty of first degree murder
Given 35 years
Seemed like self defense to me
But I wasn’t there
I didn’t see the video
I guess we gotta trust the system
Cat meme

There’s a fight and a concert
Pay-per-view
On the White House lawn
And a man faced no charges
For getting drunk
And shooting his daughter in the face
For insulting the President
It was an accident
He just meant to scare her
Cat meme

Beautiful day in America
Police shot at a family
In a car they thought
Had stolen diapers
And murdered a one year old boy.
America.

We just made a trillionaire
And a couple thousand millionaires
And all it cost was cancer research
And all your personal data
And 14 million starving children
Cat meme

It’s been zero hours since our last mass shooting

Another black man committed suicide
In the park
With a rope
On a tree.

What’s for supper?
Do I smell pizza?
America
Cat meme

Early on a crisp autumn morning
In a clean and well-starched uniform
He crosses a close cut lawn in the suburbs
And approaches the door

It’s not the first porch he stood on today
And it’s not gonna be the last
But he can power through till forgettin’ time
tonight at the hotel bar.

When they answer he says Ma’am I’m sorry
but they are never coming home
They died defending our freedom from a critical threat
In a way that made some people tons of cash

In appreciation for this service,
This sacred duty
This sacrifice,

Of all they ever had in life to give
And just a little bit more

Here’s a folded up flag
You can hang it on the wall
Next to their picture
By the door.

I’m sure you understand
It was a necessary sacrifice

you see
Freedom isn’t free

and we
pay in blood and iron

Decorate the landscape
with soldiers torn and dyin’
Strong bodies
ripped in half
With spray and pray precision
Pure potential shattered
With industrial ammunition

Without war we’ll let the commies win
you understand

On a chilly Friday in December
Quiet office, cup of coffee blowing steam
Cell phone shatters the silence
Her husband’s voice on the other end was rushed

Something’s happening, he said
baby please turn on the news
the school won’t answer
I don’t know what to do

Twenty minutes later on the TV
The man in the suit said the nightmare was done
A Twenty year old broken boy with a gun
wanted to go out with a high-scoring run

And she was just another
of Twenty grieving mothers
That lost a baby to pay the unfortunate cost
Of our worthy privilege

I’m sure you understand
It was a necessary sacrifice

You see
Freedom isn’t free and we
pay in blood and iron
Don’t count the cost in kids
We see torn and dyin’
Tiny bodies
ripped in half
With blind, corrupted vision
A generation shattered
With Wal-mart ammunition

Without our guns we’ll let the socialists win
you understand

On an overcast Saturday afternoon,
Something good stewing on the stove.
Feeling every bit yourself with a fresh outfit
Streaming some trashy reality show
When you hear twelve pops from where your grandson plays
The kind that drops you to your knees to pray
The sound of bullets taxes pay for
Ricochets against every apartment door
And you’re already dead when you don’t see the toy gun
You told the boy to leave behind

And the man in the crisp uniform says
We have to inform you
The young man

was waving that toy gun
Pointed it at someone
And I couldn’t take the chance it wasn’t real
I was completely afraid for my life
And I deserve to get home to my wife
So i put one bullet through his chest
For each year that he lived.

But don’t worry,
I’ll be fine with counseling
And back on the street in a week.

I’m sure you understand
It was a necessary sacrifice you see
Freedom isn’t free and we
pay in blood and iron
Who cares if one of them
Is bleedin’ and dyin’
Dark bodies ripped in half
With paperwork, on mission
A neighborhood shattered
with government ammunition

Without the cops the criminals win
You understand.

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We live within a global economic architecture so pervasive that we treat it as an immutable law of nature, akin to gravity or the orbiting of planets. Yet, while the structures of “capitalism” define the rhythm of our labor and the value of our time, the system’s origins remain obscured by a sanitized mythology of peaceful trade. To peer into the history of its “invention” is to survey a landscape littered with the debris of broken feudal contracts and state-sanctioned enclosure.

Capitalism was not a discovery made in a laboratory, nor was it the inevitable result of human bartering instincts. It was a specific historical accident—a fundamental reorganization of social life that emerged through centuries of upheaval. To understand where we are going, we must first recognize how this architecture was actually built.

1. The Word Was Originally a Weapon

Today, “capitalism” is often brandished as a badge of honor by its defenders or used as a neutral descriptor by economists. However, the term was forged in the mid-19th century as a linguistic weapon by its most fervent critics.

Before it was a system, “capitalism” was a pejorative. Early socialist thinkers like Louis Blanc and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon used the word to diagnose a specific social malady: the concentration of the means of production in the hands of a few, to the exclusion of the many.

“Capitalisme [is] the appropriation of capital by some to the exclusion of others.” — Louis Blanc, 1850

While William Makepeace Thackeray introduced the word to the English-speaking world in his 1854 novel The Newcomes, he used it merely to describe the personal “condition of having capital”—a state of individual wealth. It was the systemic, socialist critique that gave the word its teeth. To those early observers, capitalism was not a synonym for “commerce”; it was a regime of exclusion where the ownership of the world was severed from the people who worked it.

2. Capitalism is Not “Just Markets”—It’s a Compulsory Social Relation

The most persistent myth of our age is that capitalism is simply the act of buying and selling. In reality, markets and trade have existed for millennia—from the merchant networks of the Medici to the bazaars of the Silk Road. What makes capitalism unique is not the presence of a market, but the fact that the market became a master.

In the feudal era, exploitation was a matter of extra-economic coercion: a lord used legal status, customary hierarchy, and the threat of physical force to extract surplus from peasants who still had direct access to their own land and food. Capitalism replaced the whip with the “silent compulsion” of economic necessity. This transition created a “dual sense of freedom” for the modern worker:

1. Freedom from feudal bonds: The worker is no longer legally tied to a lord or a plot of land.

2. Freedom from the means of survival: The worker is “freed” from any tools, land, or resources of their own.

By being separated from the means of subsistence, the individual is forced into market dependence. Survival itself is now contingent on selling one’s labor-power for a wage. This specific social relation—private ownership versus a dispossessed workforce—is the actual engine of the system, making the market an unavoidable master rather than a mere place of exchange.

3. The Bloody “Midwife” of Primitive Accumulation

Capitalism did not emerge through the gradual, peaceful accumulation of savings by industrious individuals. It required what Marx called “primitive accumulation”—the violent process of divorcing producers from their means of production to create the “startup capital” and the displaced workforce necessary for industrialization.

The historical record reveals three primary drivers of this transition:

• The Enclosure Movement: In England, common lands that had supported the peasantry for centuries were forcibly fenced off and privatized. This “enclosure” turned self-sufficient producers into a landless proletariat, leaving them with no choice but to migrate to burgeoning cities to seek wages.

• Colonial Plunder: The seizure of gold, silver, and resources from the Americas provided a massive injection of liquidity into European banks, financing the birth of the factory system.

• The Transatlantic Slave Trade: The unpaid labor of millions produced the cheap raw materials—cotton, sugar, and tobacco—that fueled the growth of the global market.

As the history of economic thought suggests, if capital comes into the world, it does so “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”

4. Mercantilism Was the Parent, Not the Peer

We often confuse mercantilism with capitalism, but they operated on fundamentally different logics. Mercantilism was the era of the state-chartered monopoly, where monarchs managed trade as a tool of national power. It was a bridge—a “parent” system that used state violence to clear the path for the private industrial system to follow.

While mercantilism focused on the state’s treasury, it created the very infrastructure—the banks, the naval routes, and the concentrated wealth—that allowed private capital to eventually dismantle the state’s monopolies and take the lead.

5. The Great Debate: An Accident of Property Relations

Was capitalism inevitable? Historians have long wrestled with this through the Dobb-Sweezy-Brenner debate. While Maurice Dobb focused on internal class struggles within feudalism and Paul Sweezy pointed to the “external shock” of expanding trade, it was Robert Brenner who offered the most piercing insight.

Brenner argued that capitalism was not triggered by “more trade,” but by a specific reorganization of agrarian property relations in the English countryside. When landlords and tenants were stripped of their ability to survive through customary rights, they became entirely dependent on the market. This forced a new behavior: the compulsion to innovate, compete, and increase productivity just to keep the land.

This suggests that capitalism was a historical “accident”—a unique set of circumstances that could have gone differently. It was the moment survival became tied to market competition that the “starting gun” of the modern world was fired.

Conclusion: Beyond the End of History

Understanding the history of capitalism reveals that it is a system made by human hands through specific historical processes—not an eternal law of nature. It was forged in the decline of feudalism, the violence of enclosures, and the strategic maneuvering of mercantilist states.

If the structures we live under today were built through centuries of social and political struggle rather than emerging from a natural state of grace, it raises a final, provocative question. If capitalism was “made” at a specific historical moment, it is inherently subject to the same laws of change as the feudal and mercantilist systems that preceded it. If it had a beginning, and was shaped by specific historical choices, what might the next transformation of our economic world look like?

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