epistemic status: I digress

the Old Man of la Chapelle-Aux-Saints’s skull, a Neanderthal who lived about 50k years ago, tells something interesting. the 50-60 year old spent a good chunk of his life, teethless. he also had arthrosis. he was buried and certainly given care by his community for decades.

to not be surrounded by such deep networks of mutual trust and caregiving is a fairly recent circumstance in our history. it is one of the most deep and stark contrasts between our current, built environment and the ones the vast majority of our ancestors lived in. and I believe it is The Resentment which runs under the anti-capitalism that’s commonplace in my age group - late Millenials, early Zoomers, born in the mid 90s. the anti-capitalist frustration is, in fact, a misplaced & justified frustration with Industrial Society itself.

“what would you do for a living if it weren’t for capitalism?”

I’ve seen this question being posed enough times to accept that many, many educated people truly believe: (i) there is such a well-defined thing as “capitalism” with its own material-historical dynamics. (ii) there are real, well-defined alternatives to it that can be implemented through collective action. (iii) survival being contingent on work is a specific feature of capitalism. this sort of question is predicated on those 3 assumptions, right? should we be under any alternative, entire lines of work would become viable e.g. commune poet, profitless grocery store owner. right? this means that alternatives do exist, they can be implemented. right? well, if that’s the case, then…

what even is capitalism

your material well-being is intimimately tied to the lives of people you don’t and won’t know, and we usually take for granted just how much voluntary cooperation is behind literally everything surrounding you. think of the people who grow the tomatoes and wheat that goes into your sandwhiches, the people driving the dozens of transportations routes involved in getting that to your local grocery store. the people who design, build and maintain all of the machinery used in the process. the people who work in labs, doing R&D to increase gas efficiency, find better seeds, optimize delivery routes to squeeze an extra % price discount. the people doing hr/admin work, moving paperwork, making sure payment rolls are dealt with, taxes are calculated and paid. every time you eat a sandwhich, you’re witnessing the end-product of an untold number of people, across different continents. they don’t know each other, yet they cooperate.

humanity always traded, transported goods over long distances, and divided work. it did that to feed people, to achieve grand construction projects, to wage war. surely capitalism the market economy did not invent the sort of cooperation behind your sandwhiches. it is an ancient practice, developing way before controlled fire use, and natural language. in the deep past, such cooperation was intermediated by lifelong-acquaintance, multigenerational family ties binding small groups of humans. in the not so deep past, and particularly in (post-)modernity, it is mostly intermediated by money - a legal document, a token upon which all participants agree to denominate exchange in.

which is to say… “capitalism” - whatever it is - can’t be defined in terms of private property, long-distance trade, profit, the market economy. these are “natural”, in the sense that they are implied by our behavior. we keep reinventing money not because it has metaphysical properties, but because there are obvious gains in simplifying the exchange of goods and services across time and space - something we’ve been doing for eons.

so… if those terms aren’t appropriate for a definition of capitalism - because they describe ancient behavior… then what feature is connecting 18th/19th Century industrialized Western Europe to current-day Brazil, Sweden, South Africa, Iraq, Russia? what is this all-encompassing phenomenon called “capitalism”? Marx witnessed tremenduous change in his life-time. in labor relations, in productivity, in technology, which states exist in Europe. what is there, that he was able to notice, analyze and diagnose, that persists meaningfully in our day and age?

I’d honestly say: nothing interesting. any concept that aptly describes such different circumstances must be, by definition, low-information. it can’t tell you much. precisely because capitalism applies to such wildly different times and places, it cannot be used to distinguish much of interest. because it is so dominant, whose alternatives are said to be beyond conception, it can’t possibly refer to anything worth refering to.

so how about deflating it altogether? what if there are no “laws” of capitalism distinct from whatever “laws” are there for economic activity itself? all theoretical tools that can account for a hunger-gatherer or a feudal economy apply piece-by-piece to a modern, post-industrial economy. a “mode of production” is nothing more than a specific arrangement of legal, technical and cultural restrictions. all which interact with inescapable realities of opportunity cost, time preference, cognitive constraints & biases, etc.

“The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist.” - Karl Marx, in The Poverty of Philosophy

it feels to me like the most honest conception of capitalism is as a shorthand for that early Industral Revolution equilibrium that was prevalent in most of Europe, and the Americas, from the late 18th Century to World War II. spheres of influence, colonies and metropolises, disenfrenchasied workers, an anemic middle-class, in mostly agrarian, illiterate societies. the modern democracies most of us live in are as distinct from these circumstances as they were distinct from the feudal economies of yore. the personal computer in everyone’s pocket gives you whatever we’re living in.

yeah it’s called Neoliberalism, dumbass

if by that you mean we don’t live under “capitalism”, but under something else entirely, I’m fine with it. if by that you mean that the all-encompassing concept has distinct flavors and this is one of them…

large organizations

have you ever had a job? God I hope so. if so, I believe you’re quite aware that large organizations have certain modes of failure. by “large” I mean anything with more than two layers of hierarchy OR any group of more than 100 people - however horizontal it may be. most of us are members of a large organization, by will or necessity. they’re perfect benchmarks for why most things suck. is there anything done by more than a handful of people that works as well as it should? no. there is a price to be paid.

your cohesive, small group of people with a shared vision achieved something worthwhile? kudos, this group now attracts people due to the worthwhileness of its achievements - even tho what made it Good and let it achieve whatever it did manage to achieve in the first place was the fact people were there for reasons other than some existing achievement. there are two responses for that, none of them are good.

one is gatekeeping. which is fine if you have a nice group chat, or a hobby, but awful if you’re running a Communist Party trying to instantiate Luxury Space Communism. I mean, the Party needs bureaucrats, doesn’t it? wanna let people in and bulk out your ranks? well, you can do that at the cost of widespread incompetence and misalignment… or… you can define a uber-meritocratic, cut-throat organizational culture and hope it doesn’t get weaponized by some entrepreneurial individual who wants to rise within the ranks.

during the Revolution, being a member of the Party is a death warrant, something for true believers with enough morals to die for a Cause. the moment the Revolution succeeds, the Party becomes a career path. the same way a metric stops being useful the moment it becomes a target, any successful org becomes something else entirely the moment it turns its success into member-count.

nobody’s flying the plane

do techno-fascist VCs have what they truly want? does anybody? we must resist with every fiber of our bodies the notion that there are “rulling” anybodies out there - be it jews, women, Big Pharma, the military-industrial complex, or even techno-fascists. if Peter Thiel could Thanos-snap and get the world he desires, what would change? how about you, reader? is there any single person or interest group alive that would cause no changes?

from my admitedlly limited POV, it seems like nobody’s satisfied. some people are happy, some are not, but nobody’s fulfilled. power is real, assymetry of power is even more real. can’t deny that, won’t deny that. but that perception should coexist with the undertanding that whatever we get from reality is a result of chaotic, continuous negotiation. and that elites are not some monolithic, orchestrated group, but a quilt of varied interests.

educated people are not supposed to like anything that actually exists

how else would you employ what you’ve gained from those years catching up to the Western Canon, and Critical Thinking? would you willingly put yourself in the same field as those people, you know… who like *gestures vaguely* all this? this is the curse of the higly educated, to be in favor of nothing that actually exists. real things are… bad. bad because of large organizations, because nobody’s in charge, because they don’t usher in utopia and Peace in Our Time. I really mean it, real things suck. real things have contradictions, they don’t live up to expectations, they have bureaucracies. who in their right minds would defend the here and now?