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.
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.