Within the capitalist psyche exists an obsessive neurosis with islands, from which all capitalist ideological development, both economic and social, has boiled down from. Through Hegelian and Marxian tradition, we are given a window into the reasons why islands have appeared ceaselessly within the capitalist “imagination” as symbols of spaces where social structure can be reborn, exploitation justified, and both metastasized as the foundation of a social organization moving forward. In childishly simple fashion, the capitalist believes the island to be a place where the core assumptions of their (unbeknownst to them) deeply imprisoned mind can unfold in a yet unmarked sandbox. The capitalist mind condenses misread, complex social relations into nothing more than pageantry. These new norms are implemented as a grotesque bastardization of the order the capitalist mind believes to exist in this world as naturally as the sun rising in the east and setting in the west, where they believe they’ve naturally come to sit atop the hierarchy of freedom, labor, and ownership.
We understand history to be written through contradictions which generate new forms of social organization, and through these new social organizations come new understandings of freedom. Within capitalist thought, where rewriting social orders can mean more profitability, islands are an item of obsession. Islands exist, to capitalists, in both a physical sense as land being bound on all sides by water, and a sociological sense as a place, people, or group bound on all sides by second or third parties/objects that act akin to water in the form of a barrier which prevents straightforward intermingling. Within these pockets, largely isolated from new input, appear spaces in which a new social order can be imagined from the beginning. Their geographical and sociological isolation implies a breakwater exists to contradiction. The island becomes philosophical blank slate, upon which society can be rebuilt. When given “new” land, from which society can be rebuilt, the capitalist class seeks to create its most desired order. In what is ostensibly a search only for the highest profits, the capitalist class inevitably recreates some form of landed gentry and working/peasant/slave class relation. Which exact form of labor class is implemented depends only on what the capitalist class believes it can sustain through whatever means are necessary to transform this “new” land into the most profitable land.
In this, we see that the development of capitalism necessarily depends on the process of primitive accumulation. These processes naturally include colonization, seizure of land, forced movement of populations, and the creation of new forms of labor discipline, all of which are far easier to carry out in true isolation. Historically, we have seen islands become the sites where strict exploitation economies were established with the most extraordinary intensity. Because islands are bounded, the powers that be could impose radical economic transformations at radical speeds, and thus, the island plantation became the model of capitalist production in which land, labor, and commodity circulation were all oriented solely to maximize profit. From these islands, the bourgeoisie learned how to distill capitalism down to its most concentrated form. Enslaved labor, monoculture production, practices brutal to both mankind and the land they worked, brought unimaginable wealth and status to the capitalist class of European empires. The chaining of status and wealth to exploitation became engrained in the psyche of capitalist ideology, and lasts largely untouched to this day, down to the places that are glorified themselves.
The lasting ideological dimension of this brutal history is pervasive through nearly all social systems, passively guiding society by its hand through its ongoing cultural indoctrination. The “freedom” of islands, the idea they are the ideal place to relax, to get away from it all, to briefly forget your life full of suffering, all prop up this cultural framework. If they don’t present the image of an empty territory simply waiting to be developed, they present an image of a place you can go and be waited on by an order prebuilt to cater to you. Hidden underneath this is the reality that many of these islands never stopped being designed to recreate the lavish lifestyles of the capitalist class. The workers themselves, only marginally more enfranchised at best, remain a commodity in a production process designed to create a livable fantasy for a select few.
And yet, despite many people being fully aware of this, why does the allure remain? Do these fantasies drive our desires? Perhaps for the disenfranchised and less enfranchised, they do. To this group, the fantasy of existing in a place that only caters to you is, indeed, nothing more than a well known fantasy. Similarly, we see within this group that the idea of being a castaway on a desert island certainly functions as another such fantasy, where the simple desire to exist in a space outside the shackles and pressures of society feels inherently liberating. These are two circumstances where the disenfranchised can experience absolute sovereignty. Now what of those who largely live lives free from order, regulation, bureaucracy, and social constraint? What of those people where fantasy is allowed to be their only desire?
We must start with the fact that this “island of freedom” fantasy contains an obvious contradiction: the island is imagined as independent from the world, but its survival always depends globe-spanning labor, technology, and trade. The contradiction continues into the capitalist ideology behind the drive to create the fantasy island. The capitalist mind, poisoned via the normalization of sickening exploitation, can’t fathom freedom beyond their false, personal liberation, propped up by servitude. The historical loss of colonial projects by the empires of the capitalists during the twentieth century adds a sociological fold to this concept of freedom. The capitalist class in colonial countries engrained the idea of these tropical places being paradises for them for centuries, and that too became the desire of the classes beneath them. When direct state control over these island territories disappeared, their symbolic and cultural significance did not. Instead, it often took on a nostalgic form. Tourism, the “all inclusive” resort culture, and personal luxury island/yacht ownership attempted to produce a sanitized version of this colonial fantasy. To the mind of the capitalist, the island continues to represent a place where ordinary rules are able to be suspended, and where their wealth can construct the private world of their fantasy.
They yearn to intermingle with the society of the disenfranchised only to the minimum amount that allows them to remain unshackled to it. They seek to construct their systems from scratch, like the capitalists of the past. Unlike the capitalists of the past, the capitalist of the modern day truly need not want. A globalized world means all that is fathomably reachable to them is accessible. To many, the greatest fathomable fantasy is true freedom to operate how they’d like. That includes vast tracts of remote land that function as islands, yachts which function as movable islands and can operate entirely outside all forms of state power, and physical islands that may receive no state oversight. Modern capitalist ideology is able to exist in decadence unimaginable to the early capitalist, which necessarily had to dedicate much more of their time to the pursuit of the same profits, exotic goods, or freedoms. The modern capitalist exists in a world that caters to making profits as easily accessible as possible to those who sit atop the social order, so they may spend more of their time pursuing their fantasy world. These fantasies depend on the belief that somewhere there exists a space outside society where pure freedom can finally be realized. An island.
Viewed through our philosophical lens, islands reveal themselves as drivers of ideology deep within the capitalist mind. They are where our bourgeois subject fantasizes about its imagined freedom. Historically, they are where capitalism, much like the rum it produced, was distilled into its purest form, the lessons of which are used to maximize modern day worker exploitation. Culturally, islands sustain hegemonic belief in capitalism through the sanitization and perpetuation of the lasting structures of colonialism and worker commodification in the modern tourism industry. Psychologically, islands persist as fantasies of an exceptional zone in which the constraints of society can supposedly be escaped. Insofar as they pertain to capitalist ideology, through islands we can clearly see the grotesque capitalist modernity that was built atop an equally grotesque past; a past which many believe to be far removed, though it has never been more present. In reality, we see capitalist ideology constantly seeking new “islands” to exploit. Taking the methods it first perfected on actual island colonial projects, it seeks to divide up groups of workers, plots of land, and nations into islands of their own, each one a miniature colonial project in its own way. From these divisions, capitalist ideology is able to more brutally apply its vicious exploitation of resources and commodification of workers, and from these same divisions, capitalist ideology feasts. Anywhere a fracture is to be found, a capitalist waits nearby with a pump of water, for workers are never easier to exploit than when they are on an island.
