By the mid-twentieth century, elites had to find ways to surmount the natural limitations to the basic and destructive imperative of the capitalist system—the imperative for unending growth and expansion—in order to continue the accumulation of vast wealth. They turned to the ideology of neoliberalism in a renewed drive for laissez-faire policies, in which government largely withdraws from "interfering" with the economy, leading to nearly unrestrained profit-taking. While capitalists were able to fend off or minimize government interventions proposed to create or improve the quality of life for countless humans, they were quite focused putting the power of the state to work to aggressively protect and advance their interests (i.e., "corporate welfare"). Through deregulation, tax breaks and the squandering of taxpayer dollars, large corporations and elites have flourished while masses around the world face harsh austerity programs. And in the United States, enormous public resources are diverted into the military-industrial complex and twenty-first century invasions and warfare.
American sociologist
The rise of the capitalist class in North America similarly was founded on terrible exploitation. Some enriched themselves through the killing of beaver, deer and other animals for their skin and hair, while other continued and expanded the deadly expropriation of the homelands of indigenous humans and other animals for ranching enterprises. Still others began exploiting children, women and men in mines, nascent factories and fields, where tens of thousands of people were ruthlessly enslaved.
Under the early capitalist system, genocidal invasions and the and other animals around the world continued. Spain ravaged what is now Latin America, Britain wreaked havoc everywhere from Ireland to Australia to North America, and the capitalist class in these and other nations of Europe scrambled to accumulate wealth through the plundering of Africa, with the bodies of countless humans and other animals left in their wake.
The capitalist system was and is not a benevolent social force created to best serve the needs of humans through the "marketplace," contrary to the propagandizing that has inundated at least the citizens in the West for a century and a half and that continues in educational systems and mass media today. Indeed, it would be impossible for an egalitarian, beneficial political-economic system to emerge from thousands of years of hypermasculine, violent, oppressive, and war-torn reality. In truth, capitalism, which morphed from the highly oppressive systems of "economic development" of the Eurasian past, simply represents a more sophisticated form of social relations in which the accumulation of wealth continues to result from exploitation, predation and violence.
The enslavement of other animals necessitated invasion and large scale warfare due to the need of fresh pastures and water, and their oppression enabled the widespread warfare due to the use of other animals was rations, laborers, and weapons of war. For thousands of years, violent patriarchal societies led by warmongering men continually seeking greater wealth and power did enormous harm to the foundation of human societies and to human relationships with other animals. Millions of humans and countless other animals suffered enslavement, torture and death—and their fates were deeply intertwined.
Humanity's systematic killing of other animals, as well as the subjugation of groups of humans, did not begin until males created weapons and began hunting other animals, approximately 50,000 years ago. The emergence of increasingly aggressive males, brandishing weapons, began to degrade the egalitarian nature of human societies, and the status of women and less powerful males began to decline. The corruption of human society was powerfully furthered 10,000 years ago, when humans began to capture and confine other animals and control their reproduction, and the consequences for human societal development were enormous and tragic.
Most humans know little about the daily oppression and suffering of other animals. Few ponder the sentience or experience of life of other animals; most are too busy trying to make ends meet financially, or merely survive day to day. Even among the relatively few human animals who do consider, grieve, and even protest their circumstances and those of the other animals on the earth, even fewer consider the underlying roles played by the capitalist system and patriarchy. Pervasive problems such as illness, warfare and inequality are thought to be merely the way of the world, perhaps the product of human nature, and simply not amenable to change. But such a point of view fails to explain why human animals lived relatively peaceably and communally with one another, as well as with other animals, For most of the 200,000-plus years that our species existed in its present form.
The oppression of other animals as food is unquestionably the deadliest practice; globally, more than 65 billion land-based beings are killed to be consumed as food every year, while the water-based other animals killed for food number in the hundreds of billions. The physical and emotional suffering from such horrific treatment experienced by each individual being, multiplied by the billions of individual animals who undergo it, results in a degree of severe distress and pain — every second — that defies comprehension