Parts of us
There’s all sorts of words we might use to precisely describe the dominant economic systems of the past couple of hundred years, but they’re all basically variations on the theme of Capitalism.
Many long essays, books, media, and orations have been written about all this, and if you’ve read or watched or heard them, chances are you already have a grip on what you think it is.
And, of course, both you and I also live in this economic system so have a perspective on it.
So with that in mind, I don’t pretend to have great new insight to add, but I did want to clear up one aspect of it that seems to go unacknowledged in the mainstream. The thing with trying to see past capitalism is, most people (understandably) focus on the money—the “capital” part—making it, spending it, growing it, and guiding the economy with it.
But we’ve long had trade and money in the world. So there’s something different about capitalism; the way it alienates and isolates the things under it. And, in doing so, changes how we value them.
It does use money to do this, but money is not strictly necessary. From Marx onwards, this general concept has bounced around as a way of explaining our political choices, social structures, inequity, and nearly anything else considered a bit shit in the world. But it’s a hard concept to grasp because, from our perspective, money just seems so integral to capitalism.
But, let’s back up with a basic definition of the system of capitalism:
Wikipedia describes it as “an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit.”
Most people settle on that “for profit” bit and call it a day. If you’re a good capitalist, you’ve acquired or developed things that people want enough to pay you for them. So, profit represents the simple individual motivation to do things to meet the needs of collected humanity and (hopefully) progress us forward.
That’s fine, and genuinely does summarise what we like about capitalism. But it comes up short when you start to ask why—if it’s actually that rational—we’re not all rich and enjoying jetpacks and flying cars yet.
That’s why the slightly more nuanced readers might be drawn to the “private ownership” part of the definition. Simply put, if you can possess something in a way that some ‘threat of violence’ ensures your fellow citizens will remunerate you for access to it, then you’re doing capitalism.
It probably sounds more dramatic than it actually is in (modern) practice, but you just need to understand that ‘violence’ in the civilised context is basically any stuff the government (“state”), with their suite of regulations and fines and police and military forces, can do to protect your property.
If, for example, you decided to stop paying rent for no good reason, your capitalist landlord knows they can depend on the singular idea that they are recorded as the ‘owner’ of the property so the state will have their back, and not yours. And, integral to this guarantee is the fact that we’ve collectively designated the state as the only entity allowed to legitimately ‘apply violence’ to resolve disputes.
That one taps into some of the challenges we give ourselves when we embrace capitalism. It starts to explain how insipid things, like corruption and wealth inequality, start and grow. But, it’s worth noting, using violence to protect your status is not actually unique to capitalism.
That means we need to keep working through the definition, and we pick up the “means of production” bit. This is a little more tricky because it’s clear that a lot of the energy that goes into capitalism now doesn’t really “produce” anything. Someone who buys a factory and raw materials and labour and manufacturing machines might be a quintessential capitalist; they sacrifice something (money) in return for the ability to combine other things together into something more valuable than the sum of its parts.
But a lot of capitalism is just extraction without adding any real value: Buy a thing then market it to make it appear worth more than it is, or monopolise either the thing or the supply chain for it, then charge for access. And, in doing so, this kind of capitalism actually obstructs productivity.
That’s particularly apparently in luxury goods markets. The same components, marketed up. They cost more because we might want them more, but it’s emotion not value we’re paying for; they are not dramatically better, or a source of more productivity. The money we spend on them, and the energy we put into working for that money, is paying for nothing but a feeling.
While it still doesn’t really get to the heart of what capitalism is, this last one starts to hint at what’s really going on.
So, what I think is the most important characteristic of capitalism, and the thing that still needs to be widely understood before we can progress beyond it, is the way it deconstructs the world in order to change how we value it.
There is a two-step process required for a thing to operate inside capitalism:
Remove the thing—physically or conceptually—from its natural place, to turn it into a commodity.
Strip away all the costs from that commodity, until it is worth as little as possible.
Looping back to that Wikipedia definition for a moment, you need to break the world down into its component commodities so they can be put into “private ownership”—a key requisite for capitalism. You might not be able to own a continent or the combined working hours of a population, but you can own bits of them once they’ve been compartmentalized down into regions or blocks, and isolated from their larger context.
Then, once you’ve made the component commodities, you need to make them worth as little as possible, because capitalism is the art of making the sum of commodities worth more than its parts—via innovation, manufacturing, marketing or scarcity. So, the less the social value of the raw commodity is, the more potential value can be added, and therefore profit can be had.
Reducing the value of a thing is simply a matter of alienating it from what it actually costs.
This might sound counterintuitive, because some stuff under capitalism still seems to ‘cost’ heaps of money, like diamonds and central-city housing, but that’s not the same as their true cost.
As a simple example, oil is a thing commodified out of millennia of stored solar energy. It also has enormous costs, including environmental or social damage during extraction; the energy required for its refinement and transport; the pollution and climate emissions resulting from its use; and more abstract costs like whether the ‘low cost’ of oil has added friction to our search for better energy or manufacturing materials, or whether our generation of humans has used more than our “fair share” of this banked energy and not been sensitive to the needs of future generations.
It should be self-evident that, under capitalism, oil companies want to avoid including these costs in the price that they sell you oil.
Alienate a commodity from its place and isolate it from its true cost.
If you criminally-simplify Karl Marx, our most renowned capitalist sceptic, he largely described alienation in relation to labour: The idea being that a person is just an isolated piece in a sequence of commodities, with as little awareness as possible of the other people, inputs, or outputs in the sequence.
For example, a factory worker quality checking screws as they pass on a conveyor belt would likely have no knowledge of the miner or refiners who extracted the metal, the designer who imagined the screw, the truck drivers who move them, the shelf-stocker who stocked it on a shelf, the person who sold it, or the unknown carpenter building a bookshelf with it for their unknown customer. These are all varied alienated cogs in a large machine, and all intentionally obscured from each others’ view.
In the ideal capitalist construct, the screw inspector would not even have a relationship with the machinist who formed the screw, 10 metres further back on the factory line.
It is in this way, that commodities are cheapened. Break the labour force into low-value “individuals”—via concepts like meritocracy, self-improvement, techno-optimism, and task specialisation—and actions like dismantling unions and austerity start to make a bunch more sense. After all, if you can’t see what you have in common with your fellow human—if, indeed, they appear to represent a threat to your own success—you have no incentive to join together with them to fight for collective wellbeing.
And this is why this idea of alienation—isolating everything into low-value commodities—gets used to explain so many of our political and social problems.
A clever political operator will just as readily break up citizens with nationalism, popularism, racism, fear or envy, as a clever business owner will break apart their raw materials, logistics, and labour. But none of these harms can take without first obscuring the full picture from its component parts.
So, an alternative definition of capitalism might be: An economic system that first deconstructs and isolates the components of the system, then blinds each component to the existence of the other components.
We already talked about labour and energy, but nearly every aspect of our lives is now commodified into low-value “parts” in order to on-sell, free of their true costs: The animals and fish we eat en masse, with minimal consideration for ecosystems; the personal data we give up without appreciating its worth, either now or in the future; the news and information we consume without a clear understanding of its bias or context; the gadgets we covet without any appreciation of how they’ve come into being; the space orbits we crowd with such numerous satellites to look back at us that we may lose sight of our place in the wider universe or our ability to escape into it; the human relationships we have to swipe into or pay for because we have forgotten how mutual benefits work; even money itself which is casually borrowed from our future selves in the form of debt.
Consider something as ubiquitous as your mobile phone. It’s made of dozens of different materials, hundreds of components, thousands of hours of labour, millions of questionable moments of exploitation. It would be impossible for any single person to produce this thing in a lifetime of work. Yet, you buy it for a few hundred dollars, use and abuse it, and replace it with hardly a thought.
What we have mostly allowed ourselves to be blinded to is the fact we live in an economic system—like all those before it—built of rock and wood, animals and people, environmental damage and social disruption, indignity and unpredictable consequences. If all you see is the capitalist billboards, you’d think it was made of aspirational lifestyles and 30%-off sales.
Mark Fisher only wrote the book Capitalist Realism in 2009, but it was a high-profile rebuttal to the prevalent attitude that “there is no alternative” to capitalism—a phrase typically attributed to Margaret Thatcher 30 years earlier, and one which had been floating around for some time before that in, especially, conservative circles. The reason it took so long to start mainstream conversations about this is the lack of an alternative is an idea that is hard to suppress. After all, what would an alternative to capitalism even look like, given how resilient it has proven itself in the face of many other economic “isms”?
This is the challenge we collectively face. What could come next? But it is a challenge that is deviously more difficult to think through from inside a tiny isolated cell.
Don’t get me wrong, progress and opportunity are excellent things. I’m not saying we don’t need some means to organise and focus our knowledge and skills together to build impossible things. And, I’m the first to admit, I can’t give you a faultless economic system here to replace capitalism right here and now! However, whatever it will be needs to start with first accepting that money and private property themselves are just tools of capitalism, and the reality of capitalism is built in parts of us.
-T
Excellent and very helpful post, Tim.
And, of course, we can thank Margaret Thatcher for encouraging us to believe that all men (and women) are, indeed, islands, and there is nothing that binds us together but the fiction of social connections.
“... and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first."
— Margaret Thatcher, 1987, ‘Interview for “Woman’s Own” (“No Such Thing as Society”)
Mark Fisher’s ‘Capitalist Realism’ is waiting in my not-yet-read pile.
Great perspective- as I listen to my Spotify, I notice that I have no idea who is singing, or what about. Another alienation.