Earlier in December, The National Post ran a series of articles defending “capitalism”, which was a fun provocation and some top notch trolling of Twitter activists. People who live in countries like this one do need reminding sometimes that they have it pretty A-OK and that a system of capitalist wealth creation within the liberal democratic system of government is indeed the least bad deal of all the available deals. Often even excellent. Or “awesome”, to echo the NP’s use of twitterese.
Is there an agreed upon definition of capitalism that would include say both Finland and Texas – let alone countries with the weaker liberal-democratic side of the scale, like Chile or South Africa or Montenegro? But let’s pretend the concept is a unified one. Let’s look at it as an Ideal Type.
The best way to trip up any social democrat (and I speak from experience) is by asking the question, OK but how is wealth to be created? How do you propose those tax coffers are going to be filled and those jobs created?
Capitalism is a setup that enables the creation of wealth and profit by aligning capital with some form of satisfaction of a human want or need.
A lot of the genuine human needs are not identical to the wants and desires that we may have at any given point in life. Some of these wants stem from the worst parts of ourselves. Others lead to addictions and are reproduced by them. Capitalism doesn’t really have much to say about that finicky distinction. Someone is willing to pay for something? We’ll make it happen. A lot of people are willing to pay for it? Excellent, let’s go for it. Anything could be a commodity; and anything could call for investment of capital. The extraction of irreplaceable elements like gold, cobalt or lithium for the making of millions of smartphones. Betting on someone’s health and longevity – and on someone’s reliability as a driver. Keeping gazillion cows pregnant and lactating all the time. The $5 t-shirt. The videos of strangers having sex. Strawberries in January. Facelifts. Painstakingly detailed TV series about a royal family which is more expensive to produce than a year in life of the actual royal family in question. OxyContin. Cigarettes. Cheese in a jar. $100-a-minute legal advice. Farmed salmon swimming in its own feces.
But also: clinical trials for covid vaccines and therapeutics, and their manufacturing and distribution on the necessary scale and speed to stop the once-in-a-century pandemic.
Capitalism is pretty agnostic about values. We used to think that capitalism can only thrive in a stable and predictable liberal democratic state – and that one would fuel the other in a virtuous circle – but we now know that capitalism can also do extremely well under authoritarian regimes that suppress basic human rights. A number of people can get very wealthy and powerful, without the benefits of this wealth spilling over to the rest of society. As the current crop of the most powerful corporations demonstrate, capital can even adopt the rituals of wokeness if this leads to a more frictionless operation. It can make dastardly sophisticated spyware and then sell it to Orban or Modi to spy on journalists and human rights activists. It will make explosives and sell them to the Saudis. It’s not in its job description to worry about the question of the good and bad, democratic and its opposite.
Capitalism rose in parallel with the rise of science and technology; the two have been so symbiotically tied that a lot of the twentieth century philosophy wrestled with the question whether scientific truth untouched by political and economic interests could even exist, or if science and technology ~by their constitution~ are bound to be instruments of power. Marx wrote that capital “all that’s solid melts into air”, but perhaps the saving mercy is that this happens in a staggered manner; we’ve had journalism for some time but oops, it’s bottoming out now as unprofitable. We had manufacturing for a couple of centuries, but it eventually got shut down and moved to cheaper pastures where workers can be paid $1 an hour. We had small scale farming once. And once long time ago it appeared that the internet would move in the direction of the non-profit public-good spirit of Wikipedia. But capital is restless and it needs to expand.
Classics, philosophy, poetry have never been of use to capital. Opera. All these could be gone tomorrow and capital wouldn’t be inconvenienced. Some societies decide to fund some unprofitable yet important things through taxes and state funding, but approaches differ wildly. Public or for-profit education, insurance, elder care? Responses vary.
Of the many peculiar things that someone who grew up in a communist country finds about capitalism the strangest must be its second, ghostly tier, the financialization. Why do companies go public? Yes, OK, greed; not growing means being in decline; wants instead of genuine needs, perhaps. So capital obliges. Going public effectively means designing a phantom company somewhere in the financial sky which sells its phantom value on the phantom gambling markets? And today, financial products are traded by computers at unimaginable speeds. Your pension funds are out there, as are your EI payments. Not only your savings, but probably your chequing account too, living the life of a brat on a Daytona Beach spring break. Oh look, right this moment your RESP is making out with some cutely bundled mortgage debt from Arkansas.
Growing up in a small town of a communist country meant life was stable and predictable. My mother never changed her job, and neither did my father, after a couple of initial changes in his youth. We never moved apartments or changed cities. There has certainly been a lot of action in the early post-war years, as the first stable middle class in the region was being created. But once the dust settled, factories established, five-year plans followed one another, people tended to stay put in jobs and places of residence. The system in which I grew up was built on satisfying the basic needs and diminishing or ignoring all other kinds of want or need. The system where I live now is based on the proliferation of wants, and the profiting off their satisfaction. Many among those are completely artificial wants. Some are self-destructive. Others neutral. Others a mix of need and want. And when genuine needs and what’s necessary for human thriving align with the will of the capital, by golly, things get magnificent. When they are misaligned, we may end up acquiring wants that invent us in turn. That make us into a product. Desires that rearrange our lives and rewire our brains. Reduce our capacity for sexual imagination to one bleak script of domination. (I owe this last thought to Nina Power’s recent substack on porn.)
So yes, capitalism can be awesome. But terms and conditions apply.