While mindless consumption in the First World drives most of the ecocide and genocide in the Third and Fourth Worlds, privatizing colonialism is mostly accomplished by private equity investments, subsidized by state corporations. Even discounting the militarization of neocolonial privatization enforcement, state investments like the UK Commonwealth Development Corporation serve mainly to recolonize former empires through capitalist means.
As Jennifer Kennedy reports, one of the UK-based investments, in Guatemala — an electrical energy utility — is now caught up in furthering atrocities in what is already a hotbed of class warfare between a modern state and its indigenous nations. While not directly responsible for the Guatemalan Army’s recent murder of six Maya protestors marching against excessive electricity rates, the private equity investors that prey on the world’s poor cannot hide behind the fact that the parasitic system they benefit from is undeniably murderous.
While as individuals we can curb our consumer appetites for goods produced by ecocide and genocide, as citizens we can contain our government’s appetite for control of other people’s lives to prop up the system of consumerism. As human beings, we can confront private equity, that now devours our common wealth as well.