Cheaper Than Slaves

If you want to know what's wrong with capitalism, reading Marx would be the best place to start. He saw capitalism's crises coming a mile away; he wrote his criticisms more than a century ago, and today a lot of leading economists point to his work for an explanation of capitalism's inherent instability and how the system destroys itself from within.

_{source: Wikimedia Commons}

Marx is famous for pointing out the eternal struggle between the capitalists, the bourgeoisie, and the workers, the proletariat. He had available to him the great works of Adam Smith, the celebrated "grandfather of free enterprise." Smith's much fabled "invisible hand" was not just a result of market forces finding some equilibrium, like it's explained now, but the result of what Smith called "human sympathy"; he counted on the altruism found in any normal person, especially in his religious era, and expected the rich owners of the means of production to give back to the community that made them rich in the first place by taking care of the ones he knew would be left behind by the system. This is where Smith was wrong. He was right about capitalism's great potential for producing large surpluses, something Marx wholeheartedly agrees with by the way, but underestimated greatly the potential to cultivate and perfect "greed" by only counting on everyone's self-interest.

It all starts with stuff, material stuff, the stuff we need to survive; all this stuff was once owned by no one, and therefore belonged to everyone. Now imagine a forest; it's owned by no one, so anyone can gather wood to burn or build a house or something else. Such a forest was the starting point for Marx's career as a critic of capitalism. He was working as a journalist when he heard about a controversy; peasants who used to collect wood for fire, and have done so for centuries, were now suddenly being prosecuted for theft. The land owner declared it belonged to him, so the peasants should keep their filthy hands to themselves. And the owner was right of course; capitalism is all about private property, and the exchange thereof. And let me tell you, again, all big problems of the human race have come from said ownership, exchange and the pursuit of profits. This is Marx's materialism; he believed that humanity's relation to the material world was at the heart of everything, and concluded that private property has no place in a world where everyone's life depends on having access to a share of that earthly material. This was the first time Marx was confronted with common folk being denied their share of the planet, and it set him on the path of studying economics and eventually teaming up with Friedrich Engels to write Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto.

And he was right of course: our relationship with the material world we depend upon, drives so much of human interaction and lies at the heart of both economics and politics. We are now living in a ridiculous situation where every square inch of productive land is owned by someone, who can deny everyone else on the planet access to their private lot. And we have an economic ideology that forces them to do so, in order to maximize the potential for profits. This alone should be enough for anyone to seriously reconsider if capitalism really is "the best we can do." I don't believe that. On the contrary; I believe capitalism is a primitive and barbaric way to organize humanity's relationship with the fruits of the Earth, basically unworthy of sentient and intelligent beings, and that it has been with us for at least 12,000 years.

Bourgeoisie and Proletariat were once called "Lords and serfs" in feudalistic times, and "masters and slaves" before that, during colonialism; no matter the labels or titles, it's always been the struggle between these two classes, between the have's and the have-nots, between the owner class and the rest of the world. Marx saw this, but so did Smith.

Back to the forest; when it was owned by no one, anyone could gather wood, make furniture from it, and exchange that for food. Now that the forest is privately owned, this relationship has changed drastically; now anyone can work for the owner (becoming the proletariat), make furniture, let the owner sell that and pay only some of it back as wages. This is what economy really is; it's simply a matter of deciding how we go about distributing the fruits of the earth and labor. Now you might say that the transformation from slavery to wage-labor is in fact a step forward in a fundamentally flawed top-down ideology, but you would be only half right. Yes, we've stopped the whipping and rape, but no, this wasn't because the owner class suddenly saw the error of their way. On the contrary; they finally realized that owning slaves was rather expensive.

_{source: Wikimedia Commons}

Think about it: a slave needs to be housed, clothed and fed if you want him or her to stay productive. Medicine is needed in case of illness, which was plenty back then. Owning a slave is pretty damn expensive. Now, a very cold and calculating devil slaveholder might say that it's a matter of calculating a slave's replacement value to decide to keep him alive or not; if it's more expensive to buy medicine than to just get a new slave, just let him or her die... This is not how it worked in practice though; the slaves were, although terribly treated, part of the community, and in some cases even part of the family, as lots of interracial kids born in those days attest to. And even in the early days of the latest capitalist boom starting with the industrial revolution, big corporations built cheap housing especially for their workers; they still felt a sense of responsibility toward their work-force. Feeding, clothing, curing and housing your workers is expensive, much more so than to just let them work, send them home with minimum wage and let them figure the rest out for themselves.

Smith saw this. He concluded that slavery is highly inefficient; the "pain incentive" applied to a worker in captivity can never ever be as strong as the "wage incentive" applied to a free employee, and people who feel like they're free, will always produce more. There's no better slave than one who thinks he's free... And he also said that the cost of buying and maintaining slaves far exceeds the cost of wages. Now don't get me or Smith wrong: he was against slavery on ethical grounds as well. But Smith saw how slavery works in practice, and that this was an expensive way to go about producing stuff.

The early days of industrial capitalism are already far behind us now, and so is the capitalists' sense of responsibility toward their wage-slaves; they don't build cheap housing anymore, but go abroad in the search for even cheaper labor. To make things worse, technology has given us automation, artificial intelligence and robots, which are all great prospects for the owner class, as labor gets even cheaper. And we'll produce even more surpluses, damaging the Earths living environments even more. What I hope you take away from all this, is that there are no solutions for the problems of overproduction, rising inequality and the destruction of the Earth's resources to be found within capitalism. None. This is where Marx was right, even though he also saw capitalism's majestic potential to increase wealth, he knew what it's fundamental flaws were and that they are unsolvable. We REALLY need something else, not communism, something else. Even Marx saw capitalism's perks, and we are smart enough to not throw away the baby with the bathwater. We have the internet. We have AI. We have decentralized blockchain technology. We have all that's needed to implement a better way of managing our relationship with the planet's material, and with each other. We are better than capitalism and communism and we will one day be able to not do any work ourselves anymore, or very little at least. How will we organize our relationship with the Earth and each other? We once depended on nature, then we depended on the small group of people who own nature... What's next?

End of rant. If you've endured to this point, you have my genuine respect and gratitude, dear reader. Below is a somewhat neutral but incomplete history of capitalism; it also manages to explain only half of Smith's invisible hand, and focuses on the self-interest part of it like all modern explanations do, but on the whole it is accurate and illustrates how even the New Testament over time became a tool for creating and maintaining the mindset of the worker class. I also approve of the video's conclusion ;-)

_{HISTORY OF IDEAS - Capitalism}

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