You don’t have to look too hard to see our societies disintegrating. You can judge for yourself whether yours is included in “ours”, I suppose. There’s America, having something like a soft civil war, between the age-old hatreds of the world’s largest former slave state, and the meagre, threadbare forces of decency. There’s Britain, torn apart into Brexiters, who never met a fact they accepted, and Remainers, baffled by how you fight fools. I could go on. China, Brazil, Turkey, India…it’s a long, dismal list.

Our societies are disintegrating, falling apart, coming undone. Some might say they’re melting like snow — I’d say they’re tearing themselves apart in psychotic, suicidal delusions which say self-destruction is nobility and freedom.

The question, then, is why. Why are our societies disintegrating? You’ll hear endless pundits hold forth on the fact that they are — but almost no one asks the question why. Let me answer that question — backwards.

What’s the point of a society? Have you ever wondered? I think the point of a society is very simple, hidden in plain sight. The point of a society is to nourish people, to protect them, to tend to them, to nurture them. And when a society fails at those basic tasks — then a society has no point whatsoever. And society without a point left will be a thing that falls apart.

Now. Let me go a little deeper. The point of a society, in the distant past, might have been to keep people imprisoned in artificial borders. Lines decided by barons and dukes, who came to own vast tracts of land, having done violence in the kings’ name, and therefore came to be called — ironically — “noble.”

Society in this age — the feudal age — was something much more like a contest for ownership not just of land, but of what it came with. Crucially, serfs and peasants. The way that a noble stayed noble — and ascended through the ranks — was to tax serfs and peasants, buy more troops and armies, fight another battle for the king, win it, and hope to be granted some share of what he’d conquered. It was a simple enough arrangement — the only twist was that it was masked in romantic, heroic myths of chivalry, which just meant that this knight didn’t do violence to you today, if you were anyone vulnerable.

Nevertheless, the point of society was very simple: to keep the caste arrangement iron-clad. To keep everyone in their places. Peasants stayed exploited, “nobles” stayed predatory, and kings and emperors ruled over them all. For most of humanity, the feudal age was one where the idea of society was something very much like an eternal prison.

Of course, our modern societies aren’t so much like that. Or are they? Along came the age of democracy. Or at least the pretense of it. We say simplistically that “people won the right to govern themselves”, but that isn’t really what happened. Some people did — men, white men, landed white men, etcetera. The right to vote took centuries to reach women, minorities, the poor and so on. Nevertheless, the age of democracy brought with it a genuine transformation: a kind of self-governance began to rule, where once peasants answered to nobles and kings.

Now think about today. There’s the average middle class American. What does society do for him? The answer, sadly, is: not very much. On the one hand, he has meagre, threadbare rights and privileges. He can send his kid to a tattered public school, and use a decrepit public transport system.

But what about the rest of the social contract? Well, to even do that much, he must accept dying in debt. That is what the average American’s situation now is — dying in debt, which means effectively owning, saving, or earning nothing, in real terms, over a lifetime.

Therefore, America’s social contract does less than nothing for the average American. It’s a bad joke to speak of the land of the free. The truth is that the average American is something very much like a peasant or serf of history. He lives and dies in perpetual “debt”, which he can’t escape. For the feudal peasant, that debt was denominated in gold or silver, and owed to the lord, and was the price of the land. For the American, that debt is denominated in a “credit score”, and owed to capital, and is the price of living at all.

Let me make that crystal clear, because I want you to understand it in the hardest terms. When the average person is dying in systemic, chronic debt, a social contract is the precise equivalent of serfdom or peasantry. Such a person can’t be said to be free in any real way. Their only real objective their whole life long is to clear the debt. But because the debt is systemic — like the feudal peasant’s — it can never really be cleared. The peasant owed, every season, just for harvesting — and the American owes, every season, because he will always earn less than he is charged. That is the true price of capitalism.

The true price of capitalism, in other words, is a kind of servitude, a neo serfdom, which is all too plain to see in the grim collapse of the American Dream. When people die in perpetual debt, of course they will turn to drugs to numb the pain, guns to give catharsis to the rage, superstition and extremist religion to dull the despair. Modern American life — and all it’s bizarre, gruesome ills — can be explained in precise, exacting detail when you understand that American are now effectively a nation of neo-serfs.

Now, that’s not to say that they live lives of absolute poverty. Sure they don’t. Unlike Bangladeshis, for instance, they’re not living ten to a room, in abject and dire circumstances. But they are not really free, either. And the “kind” of poverty — relative or absolute — often glosses over the central point. The experience of poverty is poverty. Nobody in their right mind would object to the simple truth that modern American life a thing of rage, despair, hopelessness, and numbness. Skyrocketing suicide and depression rates attest to that. Poverty is poverty — at least when it comes to the experience of deprivation, powerlessness, a perpetual, unwinnable struggle for subsistence.

Now. What do you expect people who lives lives of neo serfdom to do about all that? Well, in the feudal age — there wasn’t much they could do about it. Try to revolt against the lord — and you’re asking for trouble. His sheriffs will probably descend on your little hamlet, burn your huts, and rape your wives, and maybe kill a few of your children. So society really was a prison in the feudal age. Violence of an extreme kind kept it that way.

We aren’t in such a position today. If we want out — no sheriffs are going to burning down our homes. We can merely abandon society right back — just the way it abandoned us. How do we do that? Well, we — some large enough number of us, at any rate — choose to vote for Farages and Trumps and McConnells. For Brexit Parties and GOPs. Enough of us say: “to hell with this idea of a society, anyways! Society’s never done anything for me! Burn it all down!”

The sad fact is that this sentiment is both perfectly rational, and perfectly understandable. If the only point of society is to make you a neo-serf — not to nourish or nurture you, not to improve your life in any real way, but to keep you in something like the precise equivalent of a caste system where you’re on the bottom, or at least near it — then of course, given the choice, you will choose to abandon that society, too. You will tear up that social contract.

Maybe, along the way, the bellowing demagogue will blame all your problems on imaginary monsters — refugees, immigrants, gays, Mexicans, Muslims, Europeans. Maybe you’re even foolish enough to believe it — because you’ve been living in despair and hopelessness for so long, you’ll cling to any kind of delusion of hope and power. But those are secondary and tertiary order effects. The first thing that you will do if society has abandoned you is that you will abandon society right back.

Now let’s come full circle.

The true price of capitalism is serfdom. You don’t have to look any further than America to see it. It’s the world most capitalist society, ever — by a very long way. And it’s also the one where people have plunged into a kind of neo-peasantry. Not metaphorically, not figuratively, not for poetic effect. Literally. The average American dies in debt, just like the peasant or serf of yore. Often, that debt is then carried over to the America’s family, too — just the like the peasant or serf of yore. There is very little structural difference between the feudal peasant, and the American neo-serf.

And yet there is a very big difference in social outcomes. The difference is that the American neo-serf has a degree of power the feudal peasant never did. He can’t really choose to reform society, to make a working social contract — but he can rip up the one that put him in servitude. He can say: “there’s no point to this society. Let’s tear it all down.” He can revolt against capitalism making a serf out of him, in other words.

And yet the revolution he can choose isn’t really one. So far, he has only been able to choose regress — not progress. Instead of capitalism, he can choose atavistic systems, like tribalism, fascism, and apartheid — in which there is less equality and freedom for all, but at least he is on top. That is all that has been on offer: the left has offered more broken neoliberalism for generations now, while the right has offered something between fascism, theocracy, and apartheid. Naturally, the American Neo-serf has chosen apartheid and fascism over serfdom. Better to be a master than a servant.

You can see this same calculus at work in nation after nation. The Brexiters’ logic is just the same. So is the logic of the Hindu supremacist in India, the ethnic supremacist in China. Better to be a master than a slave — especially in an political economy which has only offered you a kind of neo-serfdom, a bitter, pointless, futile, American-style struggle for existence, so far. Everywhere people are abandoning society, just as it has abandoned them, and taking refuge in the idea of the tribe, the fascii, the “bundle of sticks”, the bloodline, the sainted and true people. But this kind of nationalism and fascism has a price — a society no longer exists, as a democratic, civilized thing.

The true price of capitalism is serfdom. Social contracts which fail to nourish, nurture, or elevate people — but instead imprison them in caste systems of prole and capitalist, of ultra rich and poor, of nobody and somebody. People who are made neo-serfs give up on their societies and take refuge in the strongman and the tribe. Our societies are failing because they failed to take care of us, and they failed to take care of us because capitalism told them that everyone preying on everyone else was the only right and just way to have a society. In that contradiction, things imploded.

Finally, though, at last, there is the glimmer of a better way. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie, for all their shortcomings, offer something like a truer revolution. Will Americans be smart enough, at last, to choose it — instead of abandoning society, as they’ve done for decades now? Because the lesson that American collapse has to teach the world — one of them, at least — is that the vicious cycle of abandoning the society which abandoned you right back only leads to the bottom of the abyss, like any abusive relationship of vengeance and self-destruction.

We must learn to take care of one another, my friends. When we do, perhaps it can be said that we have taken a step forward, beyond the master and the servant, at last.

Umair

November 2019