It's not a conspiracy, it's capitalism

We can't make sense of the present without knowledge of the past

In 2021, I was producing Radio Free Sarawak, the only independent radio news show in Malaysia. The program is a guerrilla news station, made in tandem with indigenous journalists who used pseudonyms to protect their identities as they cover the illegal extraction of Sarawak’s resources and the displacement of indigenous communities. This was where I cut my teeth learning how to be a climate corruption journalist.

One ongoing story in 2021 was, of course, COVID-19. At the time of the roll out of the vaccines, our team got wind that the Penan people, the last nomadic indigenous tribe on the island, were refusing to get the vaccines. We managed to organise an interview with one of their leaders who explained that decades of institutional abuse by the Malaysian state had created a well-placed mistrust of any government mandates. He said that the Penan would retreat into the forest to protect themselves and if after six months there had been no reports of dangerous side effects, they would come out and accept them. Their decision was not based in a mistrust of science, he explained, but government.

This was around the time that anti-vaxx rhetoric was picking up around the Western world. I had disparaged this rhetoric as moronic, but hearing the opinion of the Penan leader made me realise that there might be something more to it. That people’s intuition may be correctly telling them that something is not right with the modern world, but had jumped to the wrong conclusion. Rather than correctly point to our overarching systems of exploitation as the problem, they had pointed the finger at scientific expertise, conflating the two.

In the years since, I’ve had lots of conversations with people who espouse conspiracy theories, from vaccines cause autism to climate change is a hoax. And every single time I have realised that their analysis is driven by a prescient intuition coupled with a distinct lack of knowledge about the history and function of capitalism. Identifying capitalism could reveal the source of their discomfort and mistrust, but its very omnipresence renders it invisible to those who do not know that the requisite conditions for capitalism to function are consistently manufactured. This is where conspiracies are born, in a world in which people have lived experience of abuse and exploitation but no language to make sense of it. Rather than grasp that the world is functioning exactly as capitalism demands, they instead hold onto the belief that this exploitation is exceptional. This creates the hope that all it would take to stop this exploitation is exposing it, at which point the world would be liberated from the evil machinations of a select group of people.

If only it were that easy. The problem of exploitation is not exceptional, it is functional. Yet, conspiracists are already further to grasping that than those who think nothing of the state of the world. The Right has understood this, feeding them with invisible culprits, from immigrants to scientists, to stop them from reaching the right conclusion. Finding a way to cut through, then, and validate the intuition whilst exposing these theories’ incompatibility with capitalism is critical. Doing exactly that is often the best way to approach these conversations.

Conspiracy: Vaccines Cause Autism
Truth: Capitalism Needs Labour

The anti-vaxx rhetoric likely comes from a mistrust in both state intervention and for-profit pharmaceutical industries. The target, however, becomes science itself. Given none of us at school learn about the rigour of scientific research and scientific consensus, people often cannot discern that one quack’s opinion does not equate to the collective expertise of thousands of scientific papers. This is not a good rebuttal, though, because people are already primed to mistrust institutional expertise. An excellent approach is asking what benefit there would be for a capitalist economy to undermine the productivity of its labour force. Capitalism needs bodies. States and their private-public partnerships need more and more bodies to secure more and more growth. Deliberately targeting toddlers with a condition that may leave them unable to work is antithetical to capitalist logic. Governments everywhere are cutting back on the welfare state and care economy. Any body that cannot work is inhumanely perceived as a drain on the state’s resources. Simply, it doesn’t make sense.

An excellent olive branch is comparing this conspiracy theory with the reality that, certainly in the Western world, exponentially more people are being medicated every year against anxiety and depression. Rather than transform the conditions which trigger depression and anxiety in its subjects, the state is happy to give the pharmaceutical industry an opportunity to make profit from our collective dis-ease, whilst ensuring people can continue to be productive in an exploitative system.

Conspiracy: Climate change is a hoax
Truth: Capitalism needs extraction

The Right has whipped up a hatred of expertise, cleverly manipulating people’s feeling that our traditional institutions of governance do not exist to secure human well-being. The primary function of these institutions has always been to secure the resources and labour power necessary to expedite first primitive accumulation, and now capital accumulation. Making expertise the scapegoat of this intuition has been a phenomenal fait accompli. One way to cut through is explaining that, primarily, the scientific community are authorities of knowledge, not authorities of power. Their research into the devastating impacts of human extraction on Earth’s systems threatens the continuity of capitalism. It would be far more likely that scientists be pressured into publishing research refuting climate change in order to protect capital accumulation. None of our powerful institutions have anything to gain from highlighting the causal effect between the source of their power and the dangerous degradation of the planet. Scientists have nothing to gain from exposing it. Their research is an existential threat to the status quo.

The real conspiracy was the collective efforts of the fossil fuel industry to bury the data on the accumulating greenhouse gases in the planet’s atmosphere, exponentially increased with the burning of fossil fuels. Big Oil have known about this problem for over half a century. As exposed by journalist Amy Westervelt and academic Naomi Oreskes, these actors conspired to keep the public in the dark in order to keep making billions from polluting our skies.

Conspiracy: “They” want one world government
Truth: Capitalism decrees the world’s organisation

There are variations to the “one world government”, from the anti-semitic claim that the world is run by Jews to the assertion that the elite belong to the illuminati, a shadowy group that control our lives. That theory held more weight just five years ago, but Trump’s iron fist is breaking up political globalisation, forcing states and allies to consider isolationist policies. That said, capitalism’s reach extends all across the globe, homogenising our relationships, exploiting our bodies, and destroying our cultural and biological diversity, driving species extinct in the name of profit. This economic system dominates and defines all our lives, and the lives of our kinfolk. It is the primary lens through which states and industries make decisions. We don’t need one world government to be subjected to an inescapable violence. We’re already living it.

Also, that shadowy group that controls our lives? It’s not the illuminati, it’s the lobbying industry, funded by capitalists and extractive industries, dictating policies which reduce our freedoms, destroy our environments, and erode our communities. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s the active decisions being taken every day to create the conditions for even more capital accumulation.

Conspiracy: We’re being injected with micro trackers
Truth: Capitalism keeps tabs on its labour source

It’s notable that in a civilisation built upon non-consensual extraction, there is a virulent fear among conspiracists of being penetrated and inseminated with either maladies or technologies without their consent. Given most of us don’t leave the house without our phones, devices which track our locations and listen to our conversations, this theory seems particularly far-fetched: Why bother spending billions developing nano technology when most of us are sharing our locations with tens if not hundreds of apps already?

Nonetheless, people’s suspicion that their political overseers want to know where they are, who they are, and what they’re doing is correct. States have been tracking their populations for thousands of years in order to keep tabs on who owes money to the state. The Persian Empire tracked its enormous population spanning three continents in order to exact taxes and organise its military. The Romans kept written records of males fit for military services. In the 11th century, William the Conqueror’s “Doomesday Book” was a written record of property ownership, land value, livestock, and how many people lived in each household so he could figure out how much tax to charge. Censuses have been used to track population size, resources, household numbers and owed taxes. Today, the census is supplemented by Registries of Birth and Death, giving a much more accurate overview of the population’s productive capacity and its future growth.

Knowledge production is socially, politically and environmentally constructed. Writing in his prison cell in Mussolini’s Italy, political theorist Gramsci argued that what we consider common sense is fluid, shifting, and not necessarily held together by truth. Rather, our common sense is our way of making sense. Without the appropriate information, we tend to fill in the gaps ourselves. In the case of conspiracies, conspiracists are often unaware of the one major assumption fuelling their jump, that capitalism is incontestable. The very thing they seek to expose is the one thing they do not interrogate. It is easier to believe in being the victim of evil plots then the victim of basic economics. The first fuels a certain narcissism, the second opens a gulf of existential despair.

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