Everything is about ideology, for those who wish to care. Or it is not, for those who remain lazy enough to not care. And it seems, without much investigation, that even enlightened men without ideology are often overtaken by the proclivities of simple men with a strong command of ideology. One such ideology came to Africa and, indeed, many parts of the world from the caves of distant lands. Primitive troglodytes with the pomposity of intellectualism without substance caved their way into Africa by accident and forced civilized men to cave in to their wanton treachery.

To cut a long story short, it seems that too many economic issues of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have been left to cave-dwelling troglodytes possessing nothing but parochial ideologies so much so that to maintain the current fashion of indifference—even in the face of the threat to nature by cave economics, or caveonomics—is to remain apathetic to justice itself.

The monomania of caveonomics that confronts the world, the planet and in fact the universe today concerns the capitalist ideology of “value creation.” In its infancy, this idea seemed palatable to the simple man, logical even, and straightforward to grasp without the deeper, more telling concern for what the implications of its unrepentant, destructive meaning might unleash on our organic existence. For to create value presupposes that the caveman possesses an ability to create new things out of nothing. Even the seemingly innocent idea about adding value equally presupposes that the caveman and his brother, the “primitive accumulator,” can conjure additional value out of thin air.

Although when examined, nothing new is created. All that happens is the transfer of energy from one good to the next, from one item to the next and from one place to the next. Take for instance the making of sugar. On one hand, to the caveman, from whom most of the “primitive” ideas about nature stem, sugar production may as well be called sugar creation. Accordingly, these troglodytes have every reason to believe, even amidst their ignorance, that sugar is in fact a new “thing” conjured into existence. This analytical extraction of nature’s components for their insatiable appetites is the method they so hype as “value creation.”

In this crudeness, the caveman’s tools of analysis—reminiscent of the cave dwellers’ tools for hunting rats—leads him to insinuate that the more the sugar is wanted by those indifferent to comprehend its poison, the more value this sugar adorns. This reasoning, perhaps because it was stated in English, or French or Portuguese or some other caveman language escaped the astute attention of Maatocratic Civilizations.

However, times are changing. And the more we read about caveonomics, the more we unearth the nature, size and structure of the cave from which the troglodyte has emerged. So, to the Maatocratic Economist, who inherits his knowledge from the ancient portals of Africa’s 12,000 year old civilizational history, sugar is nothing but an extraction. Nothing new is created. Except that a component of sugar cane, or honey, or beet or any other organic good possessing sugar has been so dismantled from its original stable components and turned into a poison. Extraction, simply then, is itself a destruction, a wasting of energy since the resultant components of that destruction are of less use, if not exceedingly harmful, to the environment from whence the organic materials came.

Hence to speak of value creation in this instance is to annex the God of stupidity into one’s pantheon of unthinking Gods! The appropriate terminology for this wicked process is “value destruction.”

The clarity for assessing caveonomics in this light is also equally absent in current colonial thinking. One can spot the monomania with value creation around the colonial world today. Everywhere one looks, “primitive accumulators” or more simply, troglodytes, have caved and scavenged organic life to extract materials for their use and abuse. They call it “value creation” when it is in fact, by all logic, by all traditional wisdom, the surest example of destruction.

Look no further than the idea of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). This idea represents the mythical, unnerving achievement of staunch new believers in the ideology of caveonomics. GMOs represent the brightest achievement of troglodytes. Consider that a farmer puts one seed of maize in the soil. He waters this seed for a period of time and watches his planted corn germinate, bloom and produce cobs, all of which grant him some 5,000 more seeds. To the human, the maatocrat, the farmer merely attempts to do what nature does on its own without much interference. This to him is not value creation, but an enabling of the organic chain of nature. Traditional life then attempts a balance with nature in this homeostatic regard to enable the dictates of nature along its cause.

But “primitive accumulators,” predisposed with the appetites of inhumanity, cannot think so. For how else can they claim their godly touch of genius; how else can they claim their patents to life and the living, if not claim to be able to create, from out of thin air, new goods, hitherto foreign to the very environment in which they must be consumed? To this end, the monomania of caveonomics would insist that producing 5,000 seeds from one is itself a method of “value creation,” and therefore this idea must be extended, scientifically, to the creation of new plants, new crops, new seeds, hitherto unknown, uncultivated, and unconsumed any place else.

This belief ensues naturally from the doctrine of “value creation” which now has an army of monsters busy at not the production of what nature does organically but rather busy at modifying, deleting and extracting what nature does not do. And why? For the simple reason that they can call themselves “value creators”—and more, to fulfill the dictates of their ideology. For all ideologies have an overarching goal, thus only judging them by their methods without judging them by their mission leaves us all at risk of missing the predominant point.

The “primitive accumulator” believes in “value creation” precisely because it is central to his claim to the good, it is central to his claim to the patent, and consequently it is central to his rise to accumulating wealth through his several “creations.” Therefore, the maize seed that has been traditionally planted for millennia can no longer serve his purposes. The genetically modified organism that he now specifies as FGT-345-T-Gene Maize, a GMO seed, is now his property, to be owned and distributed in place of the original maize seed.

Further, when the market refuses his “creation,” when the market disrespects his “patent,” for good reason, he does not go away. He buys the governments of the people with the wealth he has amassed through his earlier deceit of created value. Through the publications of his pseudo-scientists who are instructed to claim that GMO crops are more resistant to pesticides and have higher yields, the troglodyte makes more public friends, not more enemies. Of course, none of these claims has to make any sense, none has to be even logical, but insofar as the science performed at the various centers of education, is equally and so “magnanimously” funded by him, governments bend to his pressure and impose the Law of GMO crops on their citizens.

Still yet, when pressure comes to bear on his deceit, and when the curtains come down on his lies and when his cunning is exposed, he comes around to supply the original seed, the millennia-old, naturally-hewn one, calling it “Organic Seeds” and hence creating “value” from the midst of the pervasiveness of his own GMO seeds. He cannot lose. His game of “value creation” is tight—he always has a win-win situation under control. Even when that is not enough to fill his imaginary purses, he attempts by his “scientific” theory, using the same scientists his philanthropic foundation funds, to control our very existence, to rename our human activities.

In much the same way that his earlier creation sought to create his perception of “value” as a “GMO seed” and the more value as “organic seed,” of course, as one would expect, all of the “primitive accumulator’s” creations come to the consumer at a premium—whether it is maize, GMO maize or Organic maize; whether it is water, or pure water or distilled water; whether it is food, GMO food or Gluten-free food.

The trickery and the monomania of caveonomics then is stunning. But the cunning is only lost on those who are without their own ideologies in protecting what they must safeguard. The craft is lost on those who are lazy to appreciate the overwhelming, debilitating effects of caveonomics. For alas, without one’s own formidable ideology to protect what one must have, what one must survive on, how else can one suspect an ideology of “value destruction” when it is packaged and sold as “value creation?”

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~ Success is a horrible teacher. It seduces the ignorant into thinking that he can’t lose. It seduces the intellectual into thinking that he must win. Success corrupts; Only usefulness exalts. ~ WP. Narmer Amenuti (which names translate: Dances With Lions), was born by The River, deep within the heartlands of Ghana, in Ntoaboma. He is a public intellectual from the Sankoré School of Critical Theory, where he trained and was awarded the highest degree of Warrior Philosopher at the Temple of Narmer. As a Culture Critic and a Guan Rhythmmaker, he is a dilettante, a dissident and a gadfly, and he eschews promotional intellectualism. He maintains strict anonymity and invites intellectuals and lay people alike to honest debate. He reads every comment. If you enjoyed this essay and would like to support more content like this one, please pour the Ancestors some Libation in support of my next essay, or you can go bold, very bold and invoke them. Here's my CashApp: $TheRealNarmer

6 COMMENTS

  1. Find here another enticing and exhilarating read from Narmer Amenuti. This time he takes on the idea of “value creation” in economic thinking, questioning its shaky foundation of extractive-re-combinatorial paradigm turned-and-voiced as a creative paradigm.

    More specifically, Narmer believes that there’s more to the mind-blowing ideology: the ideology itself, which captures the imaginations of even those who are by all marks more civilized than the ideologies over which they gawk. The power of ideology then is overreaching and its effects debilitating. To spot it and to fight it, one must wield an equally strong ideology. For to resist is to plant a stronger alternative.

    But the more I write, I spoil it. Please, engage!

  2. Caveonomics has truly been cunning in its treachery. Thanks Narmer for naming it, and for exposing its benighted thesis in such a brief essay. I can see how this piece could even be longer, much longer – it will put the morally murky and the invincible ignorance of caveonomics on notice. Although it seems that I carried away the feeling of sheer stupidity for having allowed myself to have been fooled this long, and this far down the line, for accepting without question the ideology of “value creation.” Excellent article!

  3. HMM!! So Narmer Amenuti, if I water the corn for months, with my labor and toil, and I weed around the plant and it becomes my 5,000 corn, I haven’t done anything? I haven’t created value?

    Take another reading of “value creation.” If, for the purpose of this assumption, we were to agree that the 4,999 corn has not be “created” by the farmer, why else can we not speak of the “added” value to him from the lonely premise of 1 corn?

  4. The question is Dade Afre Akufu: Did the farmer “create” value out of thin air from one seed to 5,000. Is he a magician? Does the presence of “value” insinuate that there’s insurmountable evidence that it must have been “created” by a person? And whom? Can the farmer then for his one purposes liberate 5000 seeds from nothing, if he can “create” 5000 of them from one?

    What makes him able to create from one one but unable to create from nothing. Can the “value” additions of water, his labor, and his weeding turn nothing into a seed? Lest 5000 of them? This is the crux of the matter. For to speak of a “creation” one presupposes that if one can create from one seed, then one can create from nothing. But, this is not only untrue, but patently a lie! If the farmer is incapable of creating from nothing, he cannot presuppose that he is a creator!

    Value creation then is a myth. But the myth is compounded by the need to extend it to the market. By accepting a debilitating premise such as a farmer being a “creator” then he becomes by all intents not just the only factor in “creation” but the major part of it! What is a seed worth without him? But this is untrue! Nevertheless, the ideology of “value creation” runs wild with the myth. Why? It grants them, the “primitive accumulators,” the chance and the public perception that indeed they are “important” when in fact they are not! More, it grants them access to fool around with the genetic makeup of the seed, since after all, it’s not the seed that created the 5000 other seeds but the farmer. Within this short paradigm then lies all the tenets for property rights and patents!

  5. Aah! Yet, I find little to criticize here, because you do it so clearly not in the benighted belief that we have ever really been free of such a paradigm as “value creation” but in the hope that we might one day be cognizant of it.

  6. Thank God, Narmer that you can now read and understand this senseless caveman language enough to let the rest of us know what it is they think and how it is they think the way they do! Awfully difficult for folks who have to learn the caveman language as a third, fourth or fifth language, and by the time they are able to comprehend it, there’s little time to read about the caveman’s philosophies. I have read in another article of yours, Our Historic Fall (https://grandmotherafrica.com/our-historic-fall/), that we need to rediscover our writing cultures in order to put a hard stop to these debilitating ideas as “value creation.” If we have to read and understand caveman language and then caveman economics in order to oppose, we will never be able to oppose it.

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