The absolute general law of capitalist accumulation is to create misery, slumdwellers.
[WS:] I fundamentally disagree with that interpretation. In my book, lumpen is a natural phenomenon not a deliberate product of capitalism. Its existence is due to the limited capacity of capitalist development to utilize all human resources, rather than a conspiracy to hold some people down.
I recently came to a conclusion that general malaise, misery, violence, dog-eat-dog competition, poverty, dysfunction, chaos, and general suckiness is a natural condition of all forms of life, be it animal or human. Everyone from a lowly mouse to a human being toils to survive and he dies, either falling to exhaustion, disease, or predators. That is the way it has always been.
Only recently a tiny portion of the human population managed to lift themselves a little bit above that general malaise of life and live lifestyles for the most part free of the usual misery that life throws our way. However, for the star-eyed intellectuals, that tiny part of the population, a fluke of history indeed, became the norm for all humanity. Not only that, it became the prime cause of the misery that 95% of the humanity suffers. So from a tiny fluke of history unable to help anyone but themselves, this small segment of population became a god-like omniscient, omnipotent force single-handedly deciding the fate of the entire planet.
I am sorry, but that is a delusion similar to the pseudo-argument blaming hospitals for deaths form diseases, simply because many people die in them. What is general impotence to effectively tackle the problems affecting human life, is spun into omnipotent force that single-handedly causes all those problems.
Of course, those interpretations are not new and were present in the religious discourse before our times. For Manicheans, evil was real force causing all the misery on earth, while for the Aristotelians (cf. Tomas Aquinas) evil did not have substantive existence, it was merely the absence of good, or the failure to achieve one's natural potential (that is, btw, probably the only aspect of Catholicism that I actually like.) This is a debate over interpretative frames, and thus cannot be solved rationally. One either accepts it or not. I thus do not expect to agree with anyone who rejects my frame seeing evil in the modern world as capitalism's impotence/inability to "lift all the boats," rather than its supreme power. Nor do I expect others to accept my frame seeing capitalism as the absence and privation rather than substantive cause of evil.
I would also like to add, that these two interpretative frames have different emotional appeals. The capitalism as the active cause of evil frame creates the illusion of power that controls the life forces. That power may not be in "our" hands at the moment, but it exists in the hands of "others" and thus can potentially be grabbed. The capitalism as a failure is more fatalistic, speaking to the general impotence and futility of human effort. It is definitely NOT for those who are NOT comfortable with chaos, irrationality, ambiguity, and Kafkaesque sense of alienation. The latter have a natural preference for the evil as a real force actively causing misery. It gives them the illusion of power and a sense of certitude that they desire deep down their psyche.
Wojtek