What Capitalism?

A great deal of the current political and social climate is fixated on systems of economy and government and the nature of Democracy, Republics, Communism, Socialism, and Capitalism, with much of the left convinced that Democratic Socialism will fix all our problems and much of the center and right believing we currently live in a divinely ordained Capitalist Republic. All y’all are so, so wrong.

The primary difficulty when discussing systems of economics and government is that words are often hollow generalizations which convey emotion and political ideology rather than earnest and intellectually honest characterizations of the actual policies, behaviors, and systems which are actually in practice and actually affect and run our daily lives. Trump supporters can scream Socialism! all they want but it doesn’t correctly describe Democratic Socialism, which is technically different than traditional Socialism in the sense that the latter is typically imposed by authoritarian governments and the former is democratically voted by the people. Far left and center Progressives similarly condescend and dismiss real criticisms of systems like socialism or communism and characterize capitalism as the primary evil of the world never mind the millions of people who have been slaughtered in the name of socialism and communism.

Both sides simply fail to understand the fears and needs of the Other, which motivate political ideologies which, in the end, are both the exact same simple desire for prosperity, security, and stability.

One of the biggest problems with current debate rhetoric is this errant idea that we currently live in a Capitalist society, which we don’t really, but not in a Libertarian all-regulation-is-anticapitalist Ayn Rand sort of way. Capitalism is not a form of government, but monetary and financial systems, but since economics are so intimately affected by and also affect government they are often so intertwined with government that it might as well be a system of government, and in practical sense governments in Capitalist societies exist largely to serve and regulate those capitalist systems and as such are an extension of Capitalism itself, further muddling the context of terms and phrases and especially irrelevant for buzzwords and reactionary political ideology and professional political outrage.

Capitalism in the broadest definition is a system whereby private citizens own industry and property rather than the government, and many of the evils attributed to Capitalism by progressive and left-leaning political ideologies are in reality just evils of human nature which exploit Capitalist systems, because that’s the system which is currently in place. A lot of people do not realize that much of the persecution of black Americans during the 60’s and 70’s was also fueled by anti-communist fears, because organizations like the Black Panthers also had Communist political agendas, because to people like black Americans or Russian peasants at the turn of the 20th Century, who are historically oppressed, view the systems which oppress them as the problem and see the strengths of an alternative as the means to freedom. But any evaluation of economic or government systems as either the problem or solution to our social, political, and economic problems is entirely deluded and, as history has demonstrated, it doesn’t matter what system is in place—there will always be problems with any system because it is human nature, not systems of economy or government, which is at the root of socieconomic and geopolitical conflict.

The irony of much of the geopolitical strife in America of late is that everyone in every camp want the same things. Fascists want control of government so they can feel safe and secure, and anti-fascists also want control of government so they too can feel safe and secure. The only difference between extremes of ideology is how we go about implementing control which, in the end, are always only superficially different and an excuse to exercise collective frustrations which have been building for some time against people we see as adversaries who in reality are nothing of the sort. The tragic encounter with the murderer Kyle Rittenhouse is an excellent example of this disparity of action and ideology where an angry, white, leftist male making clearly overt and violent threats to an armed, angry, right-wing white male ended in killing people. Many conflicts in our lives whether they are as extreme or not are usually just outlets to vent building frustrations, rage, and anger over our inability to feel effective in our lives, and the motivations or political ideologies are merely vehicles or excuses to direct and channel that rage and frustration which in reality is exactly the same on both sides.

Much of the economic and government activity in supposedly Capitalist countries is not, in practice, actually Capitalism. The United States for instance has a checkered history of prosecuting and breaking up monopolies because Capitalism is a system which relies on polyopoly, and when only a few organizations or people control markets the economic system transitions quietly into Oligarchy, which is neither Capitalist nor Democratic, and just because we buy shit doesn’t mean we live in a Capitalist society. One of the strengths of real Capitalism and one by which much of its benefits have improved society is that it engages corrupt and criminal people and businesses against each other, which over the long arm of time and history more or less neutralizes their collective monopoly over the proletariat. Corporations don’t care about workers’ rights or wages, but in competing with other corporations are forced to adopt policies which incidentally benefit workers. Social moral priorities can also be exploited by opportunistic corporations who probably don’t care at all about the causes they exploit but the exploitation does end up having real world benefits. This innate nature of Capitalism worked especially well in post-war America when industry really took off and many were able to earn amazing wages, afford homes, cars, and accrue other material success which lifted untold numbers of human beings out of poverty unprecedented in human history. But this is also why we have exorbitant prices for things which used to be cheap like internet access, or experience widespread power outages even though we are one of the richest countries in the world, because monopolistic and oligarchic control of utilities such as occurs in most of the country is expressly anticapitalist and as such does not respond to market forces. While there are many legitimate arguments against Capitalism such as how some wealth came at the expense of other nations in the form of ongoing Imperial and colonialist exploitation, these behaviors have existed for millennia as a common characteristic of humanity and are not expressly unique to Capitalism. At all. Likewise, many of the problems we see in today’s Capitalist economies such as less aggressive dissolution of monopolistic conglomerates is a failing of Government and complacency of an uninformed population numb to the political successes and privileges won by previous generations securing workers’ rights and benefits as if our two-day weekends and 8-hour workday are inherent to daily life and not a condition hard won by the very real sacrifices and suffering of our grandparents.

As the 2008 recession crisis demonstrated, we do not currently have a system of Capitalism but one which is a blend of Capitalism and Corporate and Elitist Socialism, where banks, companies, executives, and rich people who fail at their jobs are rescued by taxes and government handouts and given lavish tax breaks and allowed to cheat the system unmolested instead of being equally subjected to the law and market forces as the average citizen. This is why arguments for or against Capitalism are usually ineffective because it either assigns or ignores characteristics of human nature to an economic word whose meaning is only relevant to the person wielding it. Many people in Texas extoll the virtues of Capitalism while living in as nearly a Theocratic Oligarchy as can exist in the United States and put up with crap like their power grid failure and corrupt government officials just so they can feel vindicated in their personal moral convictions.

Capitalism also needn’t be exclusively stock-centric, executive-centric, investor-centric. Cooperative Capitalism is a dynamic Capitalist option which puts ownership of economic productivity directly in the hands of the workers who make the value in the first place and in turn gives them the majority of the profits and benefits which come from their own labor. Co-op operations often try to accomplish this, and is most common in the USA as operations like sad, tiny independent grocery stores. But in reality Cooperative Capitalism can be extremely large-scale such as the Mondragon Corporation in Spain, which employs 80,000 workers and does about 16 billion dollars of revenue every year, and didn’t lay off any employees during the 2008 recession because layoffs are usually just a way to inflate stock price. Because Cooperative Capitalism is owned by workers it is more economically stable, more profitable for workers, provides better job stability, and often results in higher performance and better quality production because quality control isn’t sacrificed to elevate stock price the way it is in typical stake-holder corporate conglomerates.

Cooperative Capitalism also doesn’t require revolutionary change. It only requires that likeminded workers organize and start their own businesses rather than waiting for corporate executives to hire them. It can also get a hand from philanthropists which could establish such cooperatives and put workers in control, for instance buying up failing businesses and reforming them to be profitable and turning control over to workers instead of investors. In this sense many of the problems we see in Capitalist systems are also supported by our own behavior and choices as workers actively supporting the very system we supposedly dislike—for instance I used to work as a motion graphics artist at companies in Los Angeles owned exclusively by executives which exploited workers, paid terrible wages, and produced poor quality products to save costs and make themselves more money. A collective of artists, producers, and agents could instead set up a design cooperative to share ownership as an entity and produce far better work and earn much larger salaries for themselves. Because so much of our economy is moving toward service oriented occupations, setting up cooperative businesses is even easier, often requiring only the participation and talents of workers and their own equipment and resources rather than needing large investment funding, which is often the catalyst for exploitation by shareholders. A restaurant for instance could be started with a minimal staff and owned by everyone as a collective and produce better food and service than one where a single owner exploits the labor of the workers who are actually making the value. I have personally been trying to start a video game cooperative for several years, but the problem I always run into is that most people do not want to invest the time and energy into building a business, and just want to be exploited by a corporation and paid a miserable wage for exhaustive and unrewarding work. Video games can make a lot of money, and since most of the overhead for games is really just paying salaries a cooperative video game company is one of the best possible vehicles for cooperative capitalism and would make its members extremely rich, rather than its executives and shareholders, if their product is a success. But the difficulty in trying to get others to participate is a perfect demonstration about how problems with Capitalism are not a result of the system but of human nature, which can and do show up in any system.

Authoritarianism is not a system but is the better descriptor for the problems often attributed to the actual systems of government and economy which are hotly debated. Oligarchy for instance facilitates authoritarianism by consolidating power over markets and industry. But authoritarianism can also exist in a person’s ideology even if they don’t have power, and most often those who rage against power and authority are just mad that they don’t have that power and would behave exactly the same as the people they criticize, because again the problem is not the systems but human nature. Our individual histories of trauma, pain, and frustration are what actually facilitate these kinds of problems, because crime, exploitation, control, dishonesty, and other harmful human behaviors originate from the fears and insecurities born of our experiences of shame, pain, and neglect during childhood, which is discussed in my book The Perfect Child, and understanding these dynamics of human psychology can help you be more effective in your own life.

Certain economic policies meant to address inequality like minimum wage laws are ineffective and meant only for political theater rather than lasting change. Police are often exploited by systems of oppression to promote authoritarian interests and our policing systems need to be reformed. Universal Guaranteed Income can be an effective tool to stabilize our economy, and prioritizing other things of value than only money can bring more happiness and satisfaction when opportunities for economic success are limited.