I apologize for losing my patience yesterday. You seem very knowledgeable and I like what you’re trying to do.
I think that capitalism theoretically can only happen with a massive concentration of wealth held by an ultraminority that the supermajority relies on but does not control.
Out of curiosity, could a version of capitalism with limits potentially prevent exploitation? Currently, the rich are able to use their resources to influence laws that keep the wealth gap growing. But what if the laws were written to prevent grotesque wealth accumulation, or if technology was somehow applied to create a currency that reports every transaction (like a non-mineable cryptocurrency) where each person is allotted a certain amount and is not allowed to exceed a certain cap? The purchasing power could be adjusted based on the population size. Something where every person could afford a home, but no one can purchase a mansion, for example.
Downsides might include a lack of privacy, every transaction would have to be on record. And if you purchase a house and it counts as part of your wealth, what happens if it gets destroyed in a storm? Maybe the government would appraise the damage and either reclaim the materials and refund the owner, or restore the house to its valued amount. I don’t have a clear vision, just some scattered ideas.
Thanks again for the challenge.
You are welcome. Thank you for the thoughtful responses.
I’m not entirely satisfied with my response, but it’s an initial set of approaches that I think point in the direction I’m facing.
The part that has me thinking is the distinction between capitalism as descriptive and communism as prescriptive. But history is complicated, sometimes it is difficult to draw a line between the start and end of events or processes. I think of communalism as being similar to communism, and multiple tribes from around the world naturally discovered it. Is communism a new phenomenon, or a return to what we had before? Maybe humanity is undoing a long-standing mistake.
Personally, I wonder whether we could develop a society with no need for money. If the average person could understand that cooperation is better for us all, we could share workloads and resources with no currency to hoard. We already have sufficient technology to track need and production, the internet allows humans all over the world to communicate almost instantly with each other. We would want to be very careful about how we quantify needs and deeds, but maybe something like that could work.
Thank you for your patience. You don’t have to dive too deeply into my hypotheticals, they might not hold any weight and I don’t want to waste your time.
Out of curiosity, could a version of capitalism with limits potentially prevent exploitation?
It really depends on how you define terms. “Exploitation” as communists use it is not a moral hazard as much as it is the name of a relationship between two components in a system. Step out of economics and morality and look at an ecosystem. The reason any given species thrives in an ecosystem is because it occupies a “niche”. That niche is predicated on exploitation of specific source of energy (or whatever needs the organism has) which is exists in sufficient abundance as a result of some other ecological component. Bees do not make flowers, but they require flowers for their energy source. The flowers produce that energy in abundance, so the niche that bees occupy entails exploitation of the excess energy from flowers in order for bees to exist. If flowers did not produce available energy, or if they suddenly stopped, the niche would essentially close and the bees would cease to exist.
When we bring it back to economics, exploitation is a the mechanism by which a “species” (i.e. a specialization of a broader category e.g. bees are a speciation of animals or life) maintains its existence. In the Marxian analysis, human society specialized into classes and the mechanism by which the owning class maintains its existence is by exploitation of the abundance of commodities produced by the working class. If the working class did not produce a surplus, or if it suddenly stopped producing a surplus the owning class would cease to exist.
So can capitalism exist without exploitation? That depends on whether you think capitalism can exist without an owning class that does not work. Generally speaking, I don’t think there’s a way to frame capitalism without an owning class that does not need to work. Once you have the concept of surplus and combine it with private property, you have the ability for private persons to accumulate surplus and cease to work. If you eliminate the right to private property, I would think most theorists would agree, you no longer have capitalism.
But what if the laws were written to prevent grotesque wealth accumulation
If you mean that the state could appropriate surplus and redistribute it, you’ve essentially truncated the right to private property and limited it to a centrally planned definition of what “enough personal property” is. With that surplus appropriated, you then need a central planning function to determine how to redistribute it. I think you immediately leave capitalism as soon as you suggest this.
I think of communalism as being similar to communism, and multiple tribes from around the world naturally discovered it. Is communism a new phenomenon, or a return to what we had before? Maybe humanity is undoing a long-standing mistake.
Yes. 100% However, it’s important to distinguish between types of continuity and types of rupture. For example, if the Europeans had genocided all of indigenous cultures in all parts of the world, and the world was 100% white people, eventually we might re-evolve darker skin around the equator, but this would not be the same as saying that we have returned to what we had before. It would be a new instance of immanent phenomenon.
Even if indigenous forms of communism existed, it would be inaccurate to say that the Russian revolution was a part of that historical process. The ideas transferred and produced a new instance of the phenomenon, but they do not share a continuity in the same way that Dutch and American capitalism share a continuity.
This distinction is hard for me to articulate well. Because if the ideas transferred, then clearly there is some sort of continuity at play here. Two armies in two totally different parts of the ancient world fighting for completely different territories are two discontiguous processes, even if they both informed their strategies by reading Sun Tzu. If those two armies formed an alliance and captured territory together, their discontiguous histories would merge at some point, and the present would be contiguous with each of their histories independently, but the histories would not become contiguous retroactively. If the armies, instead of forming alliance, entered into combat and one destroyed the other, then the history of loser would continue only in so far as the victor failed to completely terminate every subprocess of the loser’s history.
It’s an area I don’t honestly have a full grasp on. There’s a book on it I’ve been meaning to read, “Continuity and Rupture” by JMP, but it’s on my list.
the niche that bees occupy entails exploitation of the excess energy from flowers in order for bees to exist
Right, I would probably avoid the word “exploitation” if the one being “exploited” isn’t actually losing anything. Flowers benefit from bees and bees benefit from flowers.
human society specialized into classes and the mechanism by which the owning class maintains its existence is by exploitation of the abundance of commodities produced by the working class.
I would say it is only exploitation if the commodities are coerced out of the working class instead of freely given.
If the working class did not produce a surplus, or if it suddenly stopped producing a surplus the owning class would cease to exist.
What if, hypothetically, the owning class used their vast resources to replace the working class. Then the owning class owns the automated workers and all production, not just surplus.
That depends on whether you think capitalism can exist without an owning class that does not work.
Theoretically it can. But maybe not realistically, I don’t know.
Once you have the concept of surplus and combine it with private property, you have the ability for private persons to accumulate surplus and cease to work. If you eliminate the right to private property, I would think most theorists would agree, you no longer have capitalism.
I think this is a good point. Capital only makes sense if the system permits investing in and reaping rewards for work you yourself do not perform.
With that surplus appropriated, you then need a central planning function to determine how to redistribute it. I think you immediately leave capitalism as soon as you suggest this.
Good point.
Even if indigenous forms of communism existed, it would be inaccurate to say that the Russian revolution was a part of that historical process. The ideas transferred and produced a new instance of the phenomenon, but they do not share a continuity in the same way that Dutch and American capitalism share a continuity.
I agree, although I would probably also agree if someone said “communalism has come and gone throughout history. Here is how it found resurgence in Russia.”
Because if the ideas transferred, then clearly there is some sort of continuity at play here.
Yes. Everything is connected. Nature doesn’t provide neat lines for us to categorize things between. We do our best, but it’s never perfect. Useful, though!
Thank you again for your in-depth responses. Mt main takeaways are that labels can be reductive and misleading, capitalism on Earth has always been racist, and reasonable cooperation has always been part of human history. I hope it is also part of human future.
Right, I would probably avoid the word “exploitation” if the one being “exploited” isn’t actually losing anything. Flowers benefit from bees and bees benefit from flowers.
This is now a terminologically dispute. The question is less about whether or not its exploitation and whether one part is losing something. That’s what the word exploitation means, and the reality is that flowers direct energy into producing pollen and nectar and the pollinators do in fact take it and the flowers lose that energy when they could have spent it on producing other cells. The flowers do benefit though, even those they lose something. That’s why the “problem” isn’t exploitation, it’s parasitic exploitation, wherein the exploitation is only one-way beneficial.
The owning class under capitalism, and under feudal society, and under slave society are parasitic. And runaway parasitic processes destroy entire species and sometimes entire ecosystems.
I would say it is only exploitation if the commodities are coerced out of the working class instead of freely given.
This is a difficult distinction to make. Some people focus on the specific individual transactions. I say “will you let me work and draw a wage today” and you say “yes”, that looks freely given when we zoom in. When we zoom out, though, the entire process of wealth accumulation has been violent historically, and the PROTECTION of that accumulated wealth is ALSO violent. That’s why imprison people for stealing bread but fine people for wage theft. The entirety of domestic police forces is fundamentally predicated on being a standing army to protect the vast amounts of private property that a single owner can accumulate but never defend personally. Private property is entirely predicated on “what rules allow me to kill someone for preventing my wealth accumulation”. That’s why we have a nice fiction that the whole point is to give individual home owners the right to shoot invaders, but the reality is that it’s primarily about the legal framework that allows someone to own 8,000 acres of land in the middle of nowhere and then call the standing army we call the police and have the police go coerce the trespasser into police custody with escalation protocol up to and including field execution.
What if, hypothetically, the owning class used their vast resources to replace the working class. Then the owning class owns the automated workers and all production, not just surplus.
Resources cannot replace the working class. Only the working class can do that. Commodities are inert. This question is the exact mistake that the West is making. Money is not an abstraction of labor, it’s an abstraction of resource distribution. You can put piles of rocks anywhere, pile them high, low, wide, deep, and they will NEVER do work for you. The same is true with money. The owning class cannot use their vast resources to replace the working class, they can only deprive the working class of life necessities by militarizing a portion of them and paying them a wage to protect the food, and then distribute the food on an if-and-only-if basis - you get to eat if-and-only-if you make the robots that will replace you and your fellow workers so that we can kill all of you and never have to deal with you again.
Hypothetically, you’re talking about violent coercion on the grandest scale possible ever on a single planet followed immediately by a mass murder of over 90% of humans.
[Can capitalism exist without an owning class that does not work?] Theoretically it can. But maybe not realistically, I don’t know.
It can’t in theory either. As you concede in your next point:
Capital only makes sense if the system permits investing in and reaping rewards for work you yourself do not perform.
Exactly.
I agree, although I would probably also agree if someone said “communalism has come and gone throughout history. Here is how it found resurgence in Russia.”
Totally. What we don’t have is a history where Capitalism has come and gone. Capitalism emerged and assimilated. There are no disparate independent emergences of capitalism outside of the very very early years and they were all assimilated into the capitalism we live in now.
reasonable cooperation has always been part of human history. I hope it is also part of human future.
It’s the only way a human future can even exist. Even in the case of the owning class killing every one else off, that would require cooperation.
Hypothetically, you’re talking about violent coercion on the grandest scale possible ever on a single planet followed immediately by a mass murder of over 90% of humans.
Exactly. I’m worried the rich are working toward this end.
It can’t in theory either. As you concede in your next point
I see these as two separate questions.
I said:
Capital only makes sense if the system permits investing in and reaping rewards for work you yourself do not perform.
Is there anything about that which demands exploitation? I think I’m leaning onto that purely academic sense you mentioned. There could theoretically be a version of capitalism that includes investing but not exploitation, but it’s so far removed from our reality (and maybe human nature itself) that we struggle to imagine it.
It’s the only way a human future can even exist. Even in the case of the owning class killing every one else off, that would require cooperation.
Capital only makes sense if the system permits investing in and reaping rewards for work you yourself do not perform.
Is there anything about that which demands exploitation?
By definition yes, but let me take both my understanding and your understanding into account. By definition, reaping “rewards” for work others did is exploitation. They worked, you got the work product. This is the same thing as a bee getting nectar that the flower produced or the tapeworm consuming nutrients from food it did not pursue.
So first, it’s exploitation by the ecological definition. But I think the question your asking is whether it is symbiotic or parasitic. I think that’s a really difficult question to answer. We can obviously see how the accumulation of resources enables larger scale work efforts to occur than would otherwise be possible. That’s why accumulation predates capitalism - it serves a purpose in human society.
And this is an important point. Cyclical accumulation -> investment -> accumulation is not capitalism. It’s classism. Accumulation of rewards for work one did not perform is the entire basis of slave society and feudal society. So one question we need to answer is “what makes capitalism a distinct form of classism?” and another question we need to answer is “could we go from a non-parasitic society directly to capitalism?” and then finally “can a form of capitalism exist that does not exhibit parasitism?”
What makes capitalism a distinct form of classism?
Wage labor - workers and investors are fully divorced from each other in society and become bonded to each other only under an agreement of wage compensation in exchange for appropriation of all work product
Private property - wealth is accumulated by individuals who are sovereign (at least in part) over that which they accumulate
The Commodity Form - society is driven primarily by the production of goods and services to sell them on a market, and the drive includes expanding the process of commodification for the purposes of profit
So in slave society, the slave owner was directly responsible for the survival of their slaves. In feudal society, landlords were directly responsible for the survival of their serfs. Employers under capitalism have no such obligation as all workers are unburdened by any permanent obligations to anyone and employers are unburdened by any permanent obligations to anyone. Workers become replaceable without expenditure of accumulated wealth, whereas slaves required purchasing and serfs required an exchange with other lords.
Private property means that wealth accumulation is no longer something that is decided by government, and is therefore unburdened by obligations to the maintenance of society. Land, money, food, etc can be violently guarded on behalf of land owners and that land can then be transferred to any other person at the prerogative of the owner, which means it can be inherited and kept away from the rest of human society for generations, potentially forever.
And the commodity form drives turning everything into something that can be owned as private property. Slaves were originally communally owned, by the government that won the war and took the slaves. Eventually they were bought and sold in markets. And then governments stepped in and banned the commodity form of slaves, though as in the case of the USA they still use prison slave labor, despite the slaves themselves not being traded as commodities. The drive for commodification means turning everything possible into an enclosure, because you cannot profit from abundance. When one can get water from the lake, no one can make a profit selling water. But if you claim ownership of the lake and build a fence around it and pay people to kill anyone who climbs the fence, now you can make a profit by commodifying water.
Obviously, these are examples that highlight the parasitism. So let’s move to the next question:
Could we go from a non-parasitic society directly to capitalism
This would require a society without wealth accumulated by slavery or serfdom, first and foremost. That would mean a society that collectively joined together to accumulate collective wealth until it reached a point where allocation of resources became too complex to be centrally managed and thus required caretaking by a distributed network of private property owners. The transition point from a society that collectively accumulated wealth to a society that individually accumulated would necessarily entail distribution of the accumulated wealth. This could be in 2 modes: even distribution or uneven distribution. Under even distribution, the conditions for capitalism collapse, as there is no longer a pool of accumulated capital large enough to invest in large projects. Under uneven distribution, specific private persons would be selected for distribution of the total accumulated of wealth of the society thus far. This would certainly be quite difficult to do without resentment, but we can imagine perhaps a process of either sortition (random assignment) or fair electoralism (like ranked-choice voting).
The problem with this is when we introduce private property. Under what we understand to be private property law, accumulated wealth + incorporation means wealth never goes back to society unless the owner of the wealth believes they would personally benefit. That’s the path to parasitism. Maybe we could change private property law. Maybe the first people who get allocated their portion of the society’s wealth gets it as a formal corporation, and the formal corporation returns everything it has back to the government as soon as the person who was first allocated the wealth dies. But of course, the parasitism can survive by spending all the wealth on durable commodities and then transferring the durable commodities to other corporations. However, if not other corporation is allowed to be created, then at some point the wealth HAS to go back to the state for reallocation. But then, you don’t have a stock market.
And I think this answers the third question “can a form of capitalism exist that does not exhibit parasitism?” If we can’t, in theory, devise a form of capitalism that is both capitalism and non-parasitic from the starting point of a pre-capitalist non-parasitic society that has somehow accumulated a massive amount of surplus wealth communally, then I don’t know how we expect to come up with a form of capitalism that is non-parasitic in the real world.
I don’t see capitalism as that distinct from classism. Points 2 and 3 are the weakest. Private property and econmic marketplaces absolutely existed before capital-c Capitalism. I’d say the biggest point 1, isn’t so much directly related to capitalism as to the state, which is tasked with keeping workers alive so corporations can benefit from their labor (walmart food stamp employees).
I don’t see capitalism as that distinct from classism
It’s a form of classism, so it’s not distinct, but it is distinct from feudalism and slave society.
Private property and econmic marketplaces absolutely existed before capital-c Capitalism
Sort of. This is where the technical distinctions start to matter. There’s a reason why John Locke wrote about private property as the foundation of liberalism. Prior to Liberal philosophy, private property wasn’t even conceived of in the same way. Land was allocated to aristocrats/nobles by the royal sovereign. It could not be bought and sold. Sure you could bribe the sovereign, or you could offer a huge sum to get a title that came with land, but that’s not the same as private property and a real estate market. Peasants were able to buy leaseholds from their lords, usually lands that were considered “wastes”, but the royal sovereign owned that land and the Lord still controlled it. A peasant who purchased a stretch of wastes could not sell that land to another lord.
There’s also a reason that mercantilism developed as a distinct historical phase between feudalism and capitalism. Yes, marketplaces have always existed at all levels. But they were not integrated structurally, they were in fact structurally disparate.
Serfs had local marketplaces where they could exchange their work products with each other. Some of that was importa that low-level traveling merchants bought from larger merchants, but larger merchants were looking at serf markets as markets. Large merchants trade large volumes of commodities at national and international markets. But the serfs didn’t sell their individual work products to the merchants. Serfs worked the land and produced goods that were owned directly by the lord. The Lord then allocated those things as they saw fit, and then they took surplus goods and sold them to the large merchants to take to the international markets. This was a deep structural rift. Peasants could not sell directly to merchants.
Liberalism emerged in the merchant class for just this reason. No matter how rich a merchant got, their money couldn’t buy their way through the system of nobility, all of the laws of the land prohibited it. The eventually founds ways around it - saving a noble family by marrying their daughter in exchange for a huge sum, buying a charter from a king to build their own city (like chartering a boat), becoming the royal bank, etc - but it took a very long time for these exceptions to produce the conditions for mercantilism and liberalism to emerge as transitions to capitalism.
I’d say the biggest point 1, isn’t so much directly related to capitalism as to the state, which is tasked with keeping workers alive so corporations can benefit from their labor (walmart food stamp employees).
The welfare state is not how capitalism originated. Feudalism was a welfare state. The nobility was obliged to ensure for the care of their peasants and they came together when problems affected the lands of multiple nobles simultaneously. Under liberalism, this obligation was dismantled and replaced with limited government with the sole purpose of protecting rights. Peasants stopped being serfs with a patron and became laborers who lived or died by their ability to make a wage. There was no state obligation to keep workers alive. That’s why communism emerged as a response to liberalism and why welfare capitalism emerged as a response to communism. Liberals believed that total freedom from government tyranny was all that was needed to secure everything necessary for a good life, despite all the evidence that confronted them when they implemented their plans. After nearly every liberal revolution that overturned a monarchy, there was a long period of extreme hardship for the vast majority of the people including starvation, chaotic violence and crime, slums, mass deaths, and horrible wars.
Liberalism destroyed the social safety net that nobility had come to understand was necessary to prevent revolt. And then had to put down revolts violently, often using the military to put down mass revolts. This is why the labor movement is called what it is, not because of unions but because liberalism maintained the same class society of feudalism, with owners replacing entitled nobility and free peasants replacing bonded peasants. Labor refers to everyone who did the work in society and it was in contrast with the liberal merchants and landed professionals.
So you’re correct that class division is a constant, but the way the system functioned was different, and the three things I listed are the generally accepted group of characteristics that make capitalism different from feudalism and slave society despite all of them being class-based.
And it’s important to understand these distinctions in detail and how they work mechanically, not just as ideas, because when people think about “what if we had capitalism but it was different because X?” we have to not only evaluate it as how would it change capitalism but also how does it interact with other systems to produce effects based on our knowledge of historical systems like feudalism and slave society and how does it compare to proposed systems lik communism.
I apologize for losing my patience yesterday. You seem very knowledgeable and I like what you’re trying to do.
Out of curiosity, could a version of capitalism with limits potentially prevent exploitation? Currently, the rich are able to use their resources to influence laws that keep the wealth gap growing. But what if the laws were written to prevent grotesque wealth accumulation, or if technology was somehow applied to create a currency that reports every transaction (like a non-mineable cryptocurrency) where each person is allotted a certain amount and is not allowed to exceed a certain cap? The purchasing power could be adjusted based on the population size. Something where every person could afford a home, but no one can purchase a mansion, for example.
Downsides might include a lack of privacy, every transaction would have to be on record. And if you purchase a house and it counts as part of your wealth, what happens if it gets destroyed in a storm? Maybe the government would appraise the damage and either reclaim the materials and refund the owner, or restore the house to its valued amount. I don’t have a clear vision, just some scattered ideas.
You are welcome. Thank you for the thoughtful responses.
The part that has me thinking is the distinction between capitalism as descriptive and communism as prescriptive. But history is complicated, sometimes it is difficult to draw a line between the start and end of events or processes. I think of communalism as being similar to communism, and multiple tribes from around the world naturally discovered it. Is communism a new phenomenon, or a return to what we had before? Maybe humanity is undoing a long-standing mistake.
Personally, I wonder whether we could develop a society with no need for money. If the average person could understand that cooperation is better for us all, we could share workloads and resources with no currency to hoard. We already have sufficient technology to track need and production, the internet allows humans all over the world to communicate almost instantly with each other. We would want to be very careful about how we quantify needs and deeds, but maybe something like that could work.
Thank you for your patience. You don’t have to dive too deeply into my hypotheticals, they might not hold any weight and I don’t want to waste your time.
It really depends on how you define terms. “Exploitation” as communists use it is not a moral hazard as much as it is the name of a relationship between two components in a system. Step out of economics and morality and look at an ecosystem. The reason any given species thrives in an ecosystem is because it occupies a “niche”. That niche is predicated on exploitation of specific source of energy (or whatever needs the organism has) which is exists in sufficient abundance as a result of some other ecological component. Bees do not make flowers, but they require flowers for their energy source. The flowers produce that energy in abundance, so the niche that bees occupy entails exploitation of the excess energy from flowers in order for bees to exist. If flowers did not produce available energy, or if they suddenly stopped, the niche would essentially close and the bees would cease to exist.
When we bring it back to economics, exploitation is a the mechanism by which a “species” (i.e. a specialization of a broader category e.g. bees are a speciation of animals or life) maintains its existence. In the Marxian analysis, human society specialized into classes and the mechanism by which the owning class maintains its existence is by exploitation of the abundance of commodities produced by the working class. If the working class did not produce a surplus, or if it suddenly stopped producing a surplus the owning class would cease to exist.
So can capitalism exist without exploitation? That depends on whether you think capitalism can exist without an owning class that does not work. Generally speaking, I don’t think there’s a way to frame capitalism without an owning class that does not need to work. Once you have the concept of surplus and combine it with private property, you have the ability for private persons to accumulate surplus and cease to work. If you eliminate the right to private property, I would think most theorists would agree, you no longer have capitalism.
If you mean that the state could appropriate surplus and redistribute it, you’ve essentially truncated the right to private property and limited it to a centrally planned definition of what “enough personal property” is. With that surplus appropriated, you then need a central planning function to determine how to redistribute it. I think you immediately leave capitalism as soon as you suggest this.
Yes. 100% However, it’s important to distinguish between types of continuity and types of rupture. For example, if the Europeans had genocided all of indigenous cultures in all parts of the world, and the world was 100% white people, eventually we might re-evolve darker skin around the equator, but this would not be the same as saying that we have returned to what we had before. It would be a new instance of immanent phenomenon.
Even if indigenous forms of communism existed, it would be inaccurate to say that the Russian revolution was a part of that historical process. The ideas transferred and produced a new instance of the phenomenon, but they do not share a continuity in the same way that Dutch and American capitalism share a continuity.
This distinction is hard for me to articulate well. Because if the ideas transferred, then clearly there is some sort of continuity at play here. Two armies in two totally different parts of the ancient world fighting for completely different territories are two discontiguous processes, even if they both informed their strategies by reading Sun Tzu. If those two armies formed an alliance and captured territory together, their discontiguous histories would merge at some point, and the present would be contiguous with each of their histories independently, but the histories would not become contiguous retroactively. If the armies, instead of forming alliance, entered into combat and one destroyed the other, then the history of loser would continue only in so far as the victor failed to completely terminate every subprocess of the loser’s history.
It’s an area I don’t honestly have a full grasp on. There’s a book on it I’ve been meaning to read, “Continuity and Rupture” by JMP, but it’s on my list.
Right, I would probably avoid the word “exploitation” if the one being “exploited” isn’t actually losing anything. Flowers benefit from bees and bees benefit from flowers.
I would say it is only exploitation if the commodities are coerced out of the working class instead of freely given.
What if, hypothetically, the owning class used their vast resources to replace the working class. Then the owning class owns the automated workers and all production, not just surplus.
Theoretically it can. But maybe not realistically, I don’t know.
I think this is a good point. Capital only makes sense if the system permits investing in and reaping rewards for work you yourself do not perform.
Good point.
I agree, although I would probably also agree if someone said “communalism has come and gone throughout history. Here is how it found resurgence in Russia.”
Yes. Everything is connected. Nature doesn’t provide neat lines for us to categorize things between. We do our best, but it’s never perfect. Useful, though!
Thank you again for your in-depth responses. Mt main takeaways are that labels can be reductive and misleading, capitalism on Earth has always been racist, and reasonable cooperation has always been part of human history. I hope it is also part of human future.
This is now a terminologically dispute. The question is less about whether or not its exploitation and whether one part is losing something. That’s what the word exploitation means, and the reality is that flowers direct energy into producing pollen and nectar and the pollinators do in fact take it and the flowers lose that energy when they could have spent it on producing other cells. The flowers do benefit though, even those they lose something. That’s why the “problem” isn’t exploitation, it’s parasitic exploitation, wherein the exploitation is only one-way beneficial.
The owning class under capitalism, and under feudal society, and under slave society are parasitic. And runaway parasitic processes destroy entire species and sometimes entire ecosystems.
This is a difficult distinction to make. Some people focus on the specific individual transactions. I say “will you let me work and draw a wage today” and you say “yes”, that looks freely given when we zoom in. When we zoom out, though, the entire process of wealth accumulation has been violent historically, and the PROTECTION of that accumulated wealth is ALSO violent. That’s why imprison people for stealing bread but fine people for wage theft. The entirety of domestic police forces is fundamentally predicated on being a standing army to protect the vast amounts of private property that a single owner can accumulate but never defend personally. Private property is entirely predicated on “what rules allow me to kill someone for preventing my wealth accumulation”. That’s why we have a nice fiction that the whole point is to give individual home owners the right to shoot invaders, but the reality is that it’s primarily about the legal framework that allows someone to own 8,000 acres of land in the middle of nowhere and then call the standing army we call the police and have the police go coerce the trespasser into police custody with escalation protocol up to and including field execution.
Resources cannot replace the working class. Only the working class can do that. Commodities are inert. This question is the exact mistake that the West is making. Money is not an abstraction of labor, it’s an abstraction of resource distribution. You can put piles of rocks anywhere, pile them high, low, wide, deep, and they will NEVER do work for you. The same is true with money. The owning class cannot use their vast resources to replace the working class, they can only deprive the working class of life necessities by militarizing a portion of them and paying them a wage to protect the food, and then distribute the food on an if-and-only-if basis - you get to eat if-and-only-if you make the robots that will replace you and your fellow workers so that we can kill all of you and never have to deal with you again.
Hypothetically, you’re talking about violent coercion on the grandest scale possible ever on a single planet followed immediately by a mass murder of over 90% of humans.
It can’t in theory either. As you concede in your next point:
Exactly.
Totally. What we don’t have is a history where Capitalism has come and gone. Capitalism emerged and assimilated. There are no disparate independent emergences of capitalism outside of the very very early years and they were all assimilated into the capitalism we live in now.
It’s the only way a human future can even exist. Even in the case of the owning class killing every one else off, that would require cooperation.
Exactly. I’m worried the rich are working toward this end.
I see these as two separate questions.
I said:
Is there anything about that which demands exploitation? I think I’m leaning onto that purely academic sense you mentioned. There could theoretically be a version of capitalism that includes investing but not exploitation, but it’s so far removed from our reality (and maybe human nature itself) that we struggle to imagine it.
Excellent point. 🙂
By definition yes, but let me take both my understanding and your understanding into account. By definition, reaping “rewards” for work others did is exploitation. They worked, you got the work product. This is the same thing as a bee getting nectar that the flower produced or the tapeworm consuming nutrients from food it did not pursue.
So first, it’s exploitation by the ecological definition. But I think the question your asking is whether it is symbiotic or parasitic. I think that’s a really difficult question to answer. We can obviously see how the accumulation of resources enables larger scale work efforts to occur than would otherwise be possible. That’s why accumulation predates capitalism - it serves a purpose in human society.
And this is an important point. Cyclical accumulation -> investment -> accumulation is not capitalism. It’s classism. Accumulation of rewards for work one did not perform is the entire basis of slave society and feudal society. So one question we need to answer is “what makes capitalism a distinct form of classism?” and another question we need to answer is “could we go from a non-parasitic society directly to capitalism?” and then finally “can a form of capitalism exist that does not exhibit parasitism?”
What makes capitalism a distinct form of classism?
So in slave society, the slave owner was directly responsible for the survival of their slaves. In feudal society, landlords were directly responsible for the survival of their serfs. Employers under capitalism have no such obligation as all workers are unburdened by any permanent obligations to anyone and employers are unburdened by any permanent obligations to anyone. Workers become replaceable without expenditure of accumulated wealth, whereas slaves required purchasing and serfs required an exchange with other lords.
Private property means that wealth accumulation is no longer something that is decided by government, and is therefore unburdened by obligations to the maintenance of society. Land, money, food, etc can be violently guarded on behalf of land owners and that land can then be transferred to any other person at the prerogative of the owner, which means it can be inherited and kept away from the rest of human society for generations, potentially forever.
And the commodity form drives turning everything into something that can be owned as private property. Slaves were originally communally owned, by the government that won the war and took the slaves. Eventually they were bought and sold in markets. And then governments stepped in and banned the commodity form of slaves, though as in the case of the USA they still use prison slave labor, despite the slaves themselves not being traded as commodities. The drive for commodification means turning everything possible into an enclosure, because you cannot profit from abundance. When one can get water from the lake, no one can make a profit selling water. But if you claim ownership of the lake and build a fence around it and pay people to kill anyone who climbs the fence, now you can make a profit by commodifying water.
Obviously, these are examples that highlight the parasitism. So let’s move to the next question:
Could we go from a non-parasitic society directly to capitalism
This would require a society without wealth accumulated by slavery or serfdom, first and foremost. That would mean a society that collectively joined together to accumulate collective wealth until it reached a point where allocation of resources became too complex to be centrally managed and thus required caretaking by a distributed network of private property owners. The transition point from a society that collectively accumulated wealth to a society that individually accumulated would necessarily entail distribution of the accumulated wealth. This could be in 2 modes: even distribution or uneven distribution. Under even distribution, the conditions for capitalism collapse, as there is no longer a pool of accumulated capital large enough to invest in large projects. Under uneven distribution, specific private persons would be selected for distribution of the total accumulated of wealth of the society thus far. This would certainly be quite difficult to do without resentment, but we can imagine perhaps a process of either sortition (random assignment) or fair electoralism (like ranked-choice voting).
The problem with this is when we introduce private property. Under what we understand to be private property law, accumulated wealth + incorporation means wealth never goes back to society unless the owner of the wealth believes they would personally benefit. That’s the path to parasitism. Maybe we could change private property law. Maybe the first people who get allocated their portion of the society’s wealth gets it as a formal corporation, and the formal corporation returns everything it has back to the government as soon as the person who was first allocated the wealth dies. But of course, the parasitism can survive by spending all the wealth on durable commodities and then transferring the durable commodities to other corporations. However, if not other corporation is allowed to be created, then at some point the wealth HAS to go back to the state for reallocation. But then, you don’t have a stock market.
And I think this answers the third question “can a form of capitalism exist that does not exhibit parasitism?” If we can’t, in theory, devise a form of capitalism that is both capitalism and non-parasitic from the starting point of a pre-capitalist non-parasitic society that has somehow accumulated a massive amount of surplus wealth communally, then I don’t know how we expect to come up with a form of capitalism that is non-parasitic in the real world.
I don’t see capitalism as that distinct from classism. Points 2 and 3 are the weakest. Private property and econmic marketplaces absolutely existed before capital-c Capitalism. I’d say the biggest point 1, isn’t so much directly related to capitalism as to the state, which is tasked with keeping workers alive so corporations can benefit from their labor (walmart food stamp employees).
It’s a form of classism, so it’s not distinct, but it is distinct from feudalism and slave society.
Sort of. This is where the technical distinctions start to matter. There’s a reason why John Locke wrote about private property as the foundation of liberalism. Prior to Liberal philosophy, private property wasn’t even conceived of in the same way. Land was allocated to aristocrats/nobles by the royal sovereign. It could not be bought and sold. Sure you could bribe the sovereign, or you could offer a huge sum to get a title that came with land, but that’s not the same as private property and a real estate market. Peasants were able to buy leaseholds from their lords, usually lands that were considered “wastes”, but the royal sovereign owned that land and the Lord still controlled it. A peasant who purchased a stretch of wastes could not sell that land to another lord.
There’s also a reason that mercantilism developed as a distinct historical phase between feudalism and capitalism. Yes, marketplaces have always existed at all levels. But they were not integrated structurally, they were in fact structurally disparate.
Serfs had local marketplaces where they could exchange their work products with each other. Some of that was importa that low-level traveling merchants bought from larger merchants, but larger merchants were looking at serf markets as markets. Large merchants trade large volumes of commodities at national and international markets. But the serfs didn’t sell their individual work products to the merchants. Serfs worked the land and produced goods that were owned directly by the lord. The Lord then allocated those things as they saw fit, and then they took surplus goods and sold them to the large merchants to take to the international markets. This was a deep structural rift. Peasants could not sell directly to merchants.
Liberalism emerged in the merchant class for just this reason. No matter how rich a merchant got, their money couldn’t buy their way through the system of nobility, all of the laws of the land prohibited it. The eventually founds ways around it - saving a noble family by marrying their daughter in exchange for a huge sum, buying a charter from a king to build their own city (like chartering a boat), becoming the royal bank, etc - but it took a very long time for these exceptions to produce the conditions for mercantilism and liberalism to emerge as transitions to capitalism.
The welfare state is not how capitalism originated. Feudalism was a welfare state. The nobility was obliged to ensure for the care of their peasants and they came together when problems affected the lands of multiple nobles simultaneously. Under liberalism, this obligation was dismantled and replaced with limited government with the sole purpose of protecting rights. Peasants stopped being serfs with a patron and became laborers who lived or died by their ability to make a wage. There was no state obligation to keep workers alive. That’s why communism emerged as a response to liberalism and why welfare capitalism emerged as a response to communism. Liberals believed that total freedom from government tyranny was all that was needed to secure everything necessary for a good life, despite all the evidence that confronted them when they implemented their plans. After nearly every liberal revolution that overturned a monarchy, there was a long period of extreme hardship for the vast majority of the people including starvation, chaotic violence and crime, slums, mass deaths, and horrible wars.
Liberalism destroyed the social safety net that nobility had come to understand was necessary to prevent revolt. And then had to put down revolts violently, often using the military to put down mass revolts. This is why the labor movement is called what it is, not because of unions but because liberalism maintained the same class society of feudalism, with owners replacing entitled nobility and free peasants replacing bonded peasants. Labor refers to everyone who did the work in society and it was in contrast with the liberal merchants and landed professionals.
So you’re correct that class division is a constant, but the way the system functioned was different, and the three things I listed are the generally accepted group of characteristics that make capitalism different from feudalism and slave society despite all of them being class-based.
And it’s important to understand these distinctions in detail and how they work mechanically, not just as ideas, because when people think about “what if we had capitalism but it was different because X?” we have to not only evaluate it as how would it change capitalism but also how does it interact with other systems to produce effects based on our knowledge of historical systems like feudalism and slave society and how does it compare to proposed systems lik communism.