Posts Tagged ‘capitalism’

‘Historical Materialism’

September 26, 2024

This is a (hopefully) fairly simple explanation, rather than the full deal, and like most simplifications probably has major failings

Historical materialism

Historical materialism is the theory that history is primarily driven by material forces rather than by ideas or ‘great men.’ The theory that history is the working out of ideas alone can often be called something like ‘historical idealism’

Marxism asserts Ideas arise out of the human conditions of life and are generally spread by ‘class representatives’. “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas”. The ideas of the ruling classes get promoted and distributed, whereas other ideas tend to be persecuted or ignored. However, in conditions in which the ruling class is destroying itself, or a new class is rising, alternative ideas can arise out of existing class conflict. Hence Marxism itself was supposed to be able to challenge capitalist ideology, through the rise of the working class and through expressing their understandings and experience of life.

It seems to have failed dismally as, nowadays, most people have no idea what Marxism stands for or argues, they simply know what their rulers and the rulers’ representatives tell them about it 🙂

Important factors in history

Important factors in material history include the ways that people gain survival through the “organization of the means of production.” So the fundamental questions for a Marxist are:

  • How do societies produce food and other products?
  • How do they distribute or trade food and other products?
  • What groups of people does this organization allocate control over the distribution?
  • Who does the system allow to accumulate more than other people?
  • How is this inequality preserved?
  • How does this organization protect itself and enforce itself?
  • How does this organization undermine or destroy itself? These ways of self-destruction are usually called “contradictions.” Marxism implies that contradictions are binary (the “dialectic” because of Hegel :), but there is no reason to assume this is correct. Contradictions could involve multiple forces acting at the same time.

In capitalism, capitalists (deliberately?) confuse capitalism with exchange and trade, which are universal. For Marxists capitalism is a particular set of forms of organization of production, technology, labor, trade, distribution, allocation of prosperity, power and so on. Capitalism is not trade in itself. Otherwise bureaucratic state communism would have to be classified as capitalism, which is not useful, even if both are oppressive in often different ways.

Example: the history of capitalism

The capitalist idea of history is that people become rich because they, or their ancestors, worked hard, were virtuous or brilliant having great ideas. This set of ‘ideologies’ (ideas justifying a particular social organization) feels right to capitalists and makes capitalism ‘good’ which is pleasing to them. It is well known and well distributed. Every American, Britisher, European, Australian has probably heard this ideology repeated over and over until it sounds like common-sense.

Marxists would tend to argue that capitalism arose through violent theft of land by those in power (aristocrats), and through expansion of the aristocracy in the UK to include people who owed their wealth directly to the crown through services they performed. Many of these people used that land to accumulate capital, and start investments in newly invented operations like corporations. These people had the military power and technologies to continue their plunder throughout the world, moving on when they had destroyed land, stealing valuables like labor (slavery), gold. silver and other resources, often with the co-operation of other powers (such as local rulers).

This process of dispossession and investment, created a working class in the UK and elsewhere, who could no longer support themselves through their own food production and farms, craft or traditional labor. The self-reliance of the people was destroyed by capitalism and turned into reliance on transactional capitalist bosses. Eventually traditional aristocrats had to move into business or marry into business, because their lands no longer brought in enough income to live at the level required by their culture and forms of social power.

The State acted to support the rising capitalists and enforce this dispossession and impoverishment. This allowed the workers to be exploited in factories often with working and living conditions so bad, that capitalists were also stealing the health and lives of the workers as they were with slavery.

Eventually this similar experience lead to the working class unifying and struggling against bosses who extracted riches from them, and forming unions, fighting for political rights, political participation and decent working and living conditions

Marx expected these processes to lead to revolution and the abolition of capitalism and its State. There is no capitalism without a capitalist State. Marx rather naively seems to have thought that Communism without the State, would have few contradictions.

However, the processes in the West first led to the post war semi-socialist welfare State, as a defense against the possibilities of revolution, but capitalists fought back, and restored their dominance, as their control of wealth production enabled them to support ‘free market’ ideas through sponsored think tanks, fund politicians, persuade the State to make union life much harder and to repeal the taxes which allowed the welfare state to exist.

This set of pro-corporate political and economic actions is often known as ‘Neoliberalism.’ Some say this counter-revolution happened because capitalists were still afraid of workers’ revolution or the political influence coming from the new freedoms of people to participate politically, or because capitalism had become less profitable. I don’t know what is the case.

Liberty for ordinary people, collapsed and we are now living in a capitalist in plutocracy which is slowly destroying itself by impoverishing the people, destroying the competitive market, and destroying functional ecology. The only ‘solution’ being proposed for current capitalist contradictions seems to be authoritarianism, suppression of dissent and keeping people exhausted at work. Similar solutions were previously tried in the 1930s and did not work that well. There is no reason to assume they will work now.

However, information has been shown to be important. In my experience, many people still believe that the Mueller Report cleared Trump, did not find anything wrong with his behaviour or was a fraud. That Trump is being conspired against by the establishment and the FBI. That Putin is scared of Trump and campaigns for Democrats. That Harris slept her way to the top and is a communist who organised the assassination attempts on Trump, and that a vote for Trump is a far safer and more sensible than a vote for her. This may well give the US election to Trump and have massive effects on world history and the rush to collapse. The relationship of ideas and social forces, may ultimately depend on material forces, but ideas can give victory, although a pure materialist could point out these pro-Trump ideas are driven by corporations. However other corporations oppose them.

Conclusion

Historical materialism claims the main driving factors of history are material ones: material conditions, material and social organization, the possibilities of technology, and the allocation of violence. Ideas are largely secondary to these processes. History is not the expression of Spirit, great men, or God’s will.

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Ruskin on perfection and alienation

October 2, 2022

Imperfection and disorder are necessary for satisfaction

I have made the point previously, that for Ruskin the economic creation of illth (opposite to wealth) is not just a matter of environmental damage, pollution and so forth, it is also and importantly the destruction of human social capacity, of ‘soul,’ virtue, helpfulness, creativity and vitality.

Here, in an early analysis Ruskin takes illth in labour as stemming from demands for perfection, and the demands of machinery, which restricts human error, and hence creativity. I ask people to note, but ignore the sexism of the language, this obviously is intended to apply to women and men equally. I also apologise for the length of the quotations, but sometimes it is easier to read the originals.

Hitherto I have used the words imperfect and perfect merely to distinguish between work grossly unskilful, and work executed with average precision and science; and I have been pleading that any degree of unskilfulness should be admitted, so only that the labourer’s mind had room for expression. But, accurately speaking, no good work whatever can be perfect, and the demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art

Ruskin Stones of Venice: works vols 9-11. 202/845.

In this particular passage ‘art ‘refers to labour of builders and sculptors.

This for two reasons, both based on everlasting laws. The first, that no great man ever stops working till he has reached his point of failure: that is to say, his mind is always far in advance of his powers of execution, and the latter will now and then give way in trying to follow it; besides that he will always give to the inferior portions of his work only such inferior attention as they require; and according to his greatness he becomes so accustomed to the feeling of dissatisfaction with the best he can do, that in moments of lassitude or anger with himself he will not care though the beholder be dissatisfied also.

I believe there has only been one man who would not acknowledge this necessity, and strove always to reach perfection, Leonardo; the end of his vain effort being merely that he would take ten years to a picture and leave it unfinished. And therefore, if we are to have great men working at all, or less men doing their best, the work will be imperfect, however beautiful. Of human work none but what is bad can be perfect, in its own bad way.

Perfection is impossible and dissatisfaction is an inevitable part of the creative process.

The second reason is, that imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life. It is the sign of life in a mortal body, that is to say, of a state of progress and change. Nothing that lives is, or can be, rigidly perfect; part of it is decaying, part nascent. The foxglove blossom,—a third part bud, a third part past, a third part in full bloom,—is a type of the life of this world. And in all things that live there are certain irregularities and deficiencies which are not only signs of life, but sources of beauty. No human face is exactly the same in its lines on each side, no leaf perfect in its lobes, no branch in its symmetry. All admit irregularity as they imply change; and to banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality. All things are literally better, lovelier, and more beloved for the imperfections which have been divinely appointed, that the law of human life may be Effort, and the law of human judgment, Mercy.
Accept this then for a universal law, that neither architecture nor any other noble work of man can be good unless it be imperfect; and let us be prepared for the otherwise strange fact, which we shall discern clearly as we approach the period of the Renaissance, that the first cause of the fall of the arts of Europe was a relentless requirement of perfection, incapable alike either of being silenced by veneration for greatness, or softened into forgiveness of simplicity.

Disorder is inherent to life and to vitality. Requirements for perfection are harmful to human nature and we should allow people to fail.

I have already enforced the allowing independent operation to the inferior workman, simply as a duty to him, and as ennobling the architecture by rendering it more Christian.

We invite in failure to build art. It is necessary, and helps incorporate people’s variations, capacities and freedom into the work.

Wherever the workman is utterly enslaved, the parts of the building must of course be absolutely like each other; for the perfection of his execution can only be reached by exercising him in doing one thing, and giving him nothing else to do. The degree in which the workman is degraded may be thus known at a glance, by observing whether the several parts of the building are similar or not; and if, as in Greek work, all the capitals are alike, and all the mouldings unvaried, then the degradation is complete; if, as in Egyptian or Ninevite work,

Ruskin’s point is so important that he condemns Classical Greek work which was often thought the epitome of style and to be aimed for.

How much the beholder gains from the liberty of the labourer may perhaps be questioned in England, where one of the strongest instincts in nearly every mind is that Love of Order which makes us desire that our house windows should pair like our carriage horses, and allows us to yield our faith unhesitatingly to architectural theories which fix a form for everything, and forbid variation from it. I

Ruskin goes on to make sure that his audience do not take him to be advocating for complete chaos, even going so far as to praise “our commerce” which shows this is an early work.

Work and Creative Labour needs some chaos

Earlier in the book he remarks of a stone mason, and points to the chaos of creativity

you find his work perfect of its kind: but if you ask him to think about any of those forms, to consider if he cannot find any better in his own head, he stops; his execution becomes hesitating; he thinks, and ten to one he thinks wrong; ten to one he makes a mistake in the first touch he gives to his work as a thinking being. But you have made a man of him for all that. He was only a machine before, an animated tool.

Ruskin Stones of Venice: works vols 9-11. 192/835.

Recognising this creativity in imperfection, the necessity of space for thought and feeling, and the necessity of the risk of failure is to free people. The opposite is to destroy people.

And observe, you are put to stern choice in this matter. You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both. Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions. If you will have that precision out of them, and make their fingers measure degrees like cog-wheels, and their arms strike curves like compasses, you must unhumanize them. All the energy of their spirits must be given to make cogs and compasses of themselves. All their attention and strength must go to the accomplishment of the mean act. The eye of the soul must be bent upon the finger-point, and the soul’s force must fill all the invisible nerves that guide it, ten hours a day, that it may not err from its steely precision, and so soul and sight be worn away, and the whole human being be lost at last—a heap of sawdust, so far as its intellectual work in this world is concerned: saved only by its Heart, which cannot go into the form of cogs and compasses, but expands, after the ten hours are over, into fireside humanity. On the other hand, if you will make a man of the working creature, you cannot make a tool. Let him but begin to imagine, to think, to try to do anything worth doing; and the engine-turned precision is lost at once. Out come all his roughness, all his dulness, all his incapability; shame upon shame, failure upon failure, pause after pause: but out comes the whole majesty of him also; and we know the height of it only when we see the clouds settling upon him. And, whether the clouds be bright or dark, there will be transfiguration behind and within them

Emphasis added

This applies obviously to disciplined factory work of the type common in the modern world. Again, we might have to scrape by the rhetoric on other forms of slavery; they also involve soul destruction, perhaps in different ways, perhaps in similar ways. The point is that there is no care for humanity in these processes.

And now, reader, look round this English room of yours, about which you have been proud so often, because the work of it was so good and strong, and the ornaments of it so finished. Examine again all those accurate mouldings, and perfect polishings, and unerring adjustments of the seasoned wood and tempered steel. Many a time you have exulted over them, and thought how great England was, because her slightest work was done so thoroughly. Alas! if read rightly, these perfectnesses are signs of a slavery in our England a thousand times more bitter and more degrading than that of the scourged African, or helot Greek. Men may be beaten, chained, tormented, yoked like cattle, slaughtered like summer flies, and yet remain in one sense, and the best sense, free. But to smother their souls with them, to blight and hew into rotting pollards the suckling branches of their human intelligence, to make the flesh and skin which, after the worm’s work on it, is to see God, into leathern thongs to yoke machinery with,—this is to be slave-masters indeed; and there might be more freedom in England, though her feudal lords’ lightest words were worth men’s lives, and though the blood of the vexed husbandman dropped in the furrows of her fields, than there is while the animation of her multitudes is sent like fuel to feed the factory smoke, and the strength of them is given daily to be wasted into the fineness of a web, or racked into the exactness of a line.

Ruskin tends to make a point repeatedly, but repetition can be good.

Let me not be thought to speak wildly or extravagantly. It is verily this degradation of the operative into a machine, which, more than any other evil of the times, is leading the mass of the nations everywhere into vain, incoherent, destructive struggling for a freedom of which they cannot explain the nature to themselves. Their universal outcry against [riches], and against nobility, is not forced from them either by the pressure of famine, or the sting of mortified pride. These do much, and have done much in all ages; but the foundations of society were never yet shaken as they are at this day. It is not that men are ill fed, but that they have no pleasure in the work by which they make their bread, and therefore look to [riches] as the only means of pleasure. It is not that men are pained by the scorn of the upper classes, but they cannot endure their own; for they feel that the kind of labour to which they are condemned is verily a degrading one, and makes them less than men. Never had the upper classes so much sympathy with the lower, or charity for them, as they have at this day, and yet never were they so much hated by them for, of old, the separation between the noble and the poor was merely a wall built by law; now it is a veritable difference in level of standing, a precipice between upper and lower grounds in the field of humanity, and there is pestilential air at the bottom of it.

Ruskin goes on to make a point which will not be popular today, but he argues that obedience is not an oppression if it involves responsibility, admiration, and relationship. This reverence can be humanising, but it is not found in the modern workplace.

to feel their souls withering within them, unthanked, to find their whole being sunk into an unrecognized abyss, to be counted off into a heap of mechanism numbered with its wheels, and weighed with its hammer strokes—this, nature bade not,—this, God blesses not,—this, humanity for no long time is able to endure.

One final quotation relevant to sociology, and probably a reference to Adam Smith’s remarks on the production of pins. Ruskin emphasises the more profit, less soul and satisfaction aspects of production, which Smith also notes, but is less often quoted on.

We have much studied and much perfected, of late, the great civilized invention of the division of labour; only we give it a false name. It is not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided; but the men:—Divided into mere segments of men—broken into small fragments and crumbs of life; so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin, or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the point of a pin or the head of a nail. Now it is a good and desirable thing, truly, to make many pins in a day; but if we could only see with what crystal sand their points were polished,—sand of human soul, much to be magnified before it can be discerned for what it is—we should think there might be some loss in it also. And the great cry that rises from all our manufacturing cities, louder than their furnace blast, is all in very deed for this,—that we manufacture everything there except men; we blanch cotton, and strengthen steel, and refine sugar, and shape pottery; but to brighten, to strengthen, to refine, or to form a single living spirit, never enters into our estimate of advantages. And all the evil to which that cry is urging our myriads can be met only in one way: not by teaching nor preaching, for to teach them is but to show them their misery, and to preach to them, if we do nothing more than preach, is to mock at it. It can be met only by a right understanding, on the part of all classes, of what kinds of labour are good for men, raising them, and making them happy; by a determined sacrifice of such convenience, or beauty, or cheapness as is to be got only by the degradation of the workman; and by equally determined demand for the products and results of healthy and ennobling labour.

Overcoming the problems?

Ruskin goes on to emphasise this chaos and failure, as part of his solution to the problem of destructive work. Firstly:

Never encourage the manufacture of anything not necessary, in the production of which invention has no share.

If something is not absolutely necessary now, then the worker should have time and place for creativity.

He illustrates with the glass trade:

Glass beads are utterly unnecessary, and there is no design or thought employed in their manufacture. They are formed by first drawing out the glass into rods; these rods are chopped up into fragments of the size of beads by the human hand, and the fragments are then rounded in the furnace. The men who chop up the rods sit at their work all day, their hands vibrating with a perpetual and exquisitely timed palsy, and the beads dropping beneath their vibration like hail.

Neither they, nor the men who draw out the rods or fuse the fragments, have the smallest occasion for the use of any single human faculty; and every young lady, therefore, who buys glass beads is engaged in the slave-trade…
But glass cups and vessels may become the subjects of exquisite invention; and if in buying these we pay for the invention, that is to say, for the beautiful form, or colour, or engraving, and not for mere finish of execution, we are doing good to humanity.

The contrast is obvious.

Secondly we have to accept a degree of roughness.

never… demand an exact finish, when it does not lead to a noble end.

This is to protect and help the worker improve….

If you are to have the thought of a rough and untaught man, you must have it in a rough and untaught way; but from an educated man, who can without effort express his thoughts in an educated way, take the graceful expression, and be thankful. Only get the thought, and do not silence the peasant because he cannot speak good grammar, or until you have taught him his grammar….

Always look for invention first, and after that, for such execution as will help the invention, and as the inventor is capable of without painful effort, and no more. Above all, demand no refinement of execution where there is no thought, for that is slaves’ work, unredeemed….

on a [small] scale, and in a design which cannot be mathematically defined, one man’s thoughts can never be expressed by another: and the difference between the spirit of touch of the man who is inventing, and of the man who is obeying directions, is often all the difference between a great and a common work of art.

I suspect this request is a bit naïve as owning perfection will come to be associated with riches and status, if we have not changed society, as mechanical perfection is more easily evaluated than imperfect invention, and thus it will be demanded. However Ruskin continues with his glassware example, to make the point.

The old Venice glass was muddy, inaccurate in all its forms, and clumsily cut, if at all. And the old Venetian was justly proud of it. For there is this difference between the English and Venetian workman, that the former thinks only of accurately matching his patterns, and getting his curves perfectly true and his edges perfectly sharp, and becomes a mere machine for rounding curves and sharpening edges; while the old Venetian cared not a with whether his edges were sharp or not, but he invented a new design for every glass that he made, and never moulded a handle or a lip without a new fancy in it. And therefore, though some Venetian glass is ugly and clumsy enough when made by clumsy and uninventive workmen, other Venetian glass is so lovely in its forms that no price is too great for it; and we never see the same form in it twice.

Now you cannot have the finish and the varied form too…. If the workman is thinking about his edges, he cannot be thinking of his design; if of his design, he cannot think of his edges. Choose whether you will pay for the lovely form or the perfect finish, and choose at the same moment whether you will make the worker a man or a grindstone.

This is purely a social division again.

We are always in these days endeavouring to separate the two; we want one man to be always thinking, and another to be always working, and we call one a gentleman, and the other an operative; whereas the workman ought often to be thinking, and the thinker often to be working, and both should be gentlemen, in the best sense….

it is only by labour that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labour can be made happy, and the two cannot be separated with impunity.

The point is that the creation of real beauty, humanity and wealth does not degrade the producers, or anyone else. It requires time for reflection and allows the possibility of human failure. Capitalism, or industrialism, by their mechanical and time deficient productive processes generally create illth (physical and psychological) not wealth and thus, at the least, require modification (if that is possible), and this implies the production of less, if better, ‘stuff’.

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Towards a real ‘praxeology’ of capitalism

July 6, 2022

Praxeology is the attempt to define the underlying logic of human action both individual and collective. It was a fundamental hallmark of Austrian ‘free market’ economics. It’s advantage is that, if conducted properly, it should make our axioms, suppositions, hypotheses, observations, and deductions obvious and open to criticism, so we can progress our understanding as we encounter new events and new perspectives. However, Austrian economics and its followers seem to have continually ignored empirical observations which suggest that capitalism would not work as they wanted it to behave. Rather than deal with the problems of their assumptions, or of capitalism, they have appeared to have wanted to blame others for capitalism’s failures (such as people with ‘good intentions’, socialists, state interference etc). Hence, their free market economics appears as if it is an attempt to protect capitalism from democratic influence or responsibility.

This is an attempt to describe human action without that particular bias.

This post will likely grow as I rethink it and rewrite it.

Capitalism is a set of social organisations of ‘forms’ or ‘systems’ of life:

Economic Life system: The organisation of exchange, trade, production, distribution of goods and wealth, property rights, ownership, credit, poverty, waste, pollution, extraction;
Political Life system: Relations of power and dominance, state organisation, taxes, active concerns, priorities, neglects, law, courts, regulation, policing, interaction with other groups, placing people in social categories to treat them ‘correctly’ (however ‘correctly’ is defined), warfare etc.
Informational Life system: Modes of gathering, producing, organisation, owning, distributing, suppressing or ignoring, information. Structures of communication. Modes of informational etiquette (such as abusing those who disagree) Modes of truth.
Energetic Life system: Labour, slavery, water, wind, solar, food, coal, wind, oil, nuclear etc.
Ecological Life system: Availability of resources, weather patterns, fertility, creatures, planetary boundaries etc…

  • [Capitalism also involves organisations of family, personal, educational and religious life (and so on), so that people can earn money, survive and find meaning within the overall system, but for the while we will ignore these factors, simply to make it relatively simple.]
  • [I have sometimes separated out the system of waste, pollution, dispersion, extraction and ecological destruction to emphasise its importance to current problems, and may do so again later. We can hypothesise that all economies depend on their systems of waste, pollution, dispersion and destruction.]

Despite coming last in this set of conditions, ecological systems are the fundamental basis of all life. Ecology is primary to all of economy, politics and energy use, although it is shaped by economy, politics and energy use. I’m not alone in asserting that politics and economics should be more focused on tending to the ecology, and keeping it healthy and functional, so as to help our survival. Functional, non-poisoned ecologies, in human terms, are vital.

All these forms or systems of life are bound together. You cannot separate them, and be realistic. Capitalism, politics, information, energy, ecology are all interacting complex systems. The imposition of one kind of order in one sphere, may generate unintended consequences or events, elsewhere, which are considered to be disorders.

Economic and political life are especially bound together. No capitalism has been observed without political life or without a State. Capitalism without States, may be possible, but so far it is a fantasy, and praxeology must deal with the real and observable, or be useless. Likewise no form of capitalism currently exists without an information system or without being within an ecology.

Proposition: All of these systems/forms of life have been impacted on over history, and this may affect their present condition and limit their probable futures.

The specific modes of organisation which define capitalism will become clearer as we progress, but the initial Primary guiding hypothesis is that the increase of monetary profit is the main drive and organising focus of capitalism – especially of neoliberal (current day) capitalism. Other forms and systems of social organisation, may not assume that monetary profit is the prime directive of all life. People may, for example, seek status (admiration from others) and power through displays of generosity or care.

A Secondary guiding hypothesis, which does not seem uniquely relevant to capitalism, is that the ruling elites (wealth or otherwise) will seek to maintain the conditions of their existence, and to increase their power (and profit). However, while they may have these intentions, there is no guarantee that they will succeed, or that they will not undermine themselves. The world is complex and escapes anyone’s total control.

Propositions on Profit

Definition: Profit is the extraction of money from the general economic process and its allocation to particular people in positions of business ownership, through legal means (ie political action), who then are said to make, and own, the profit. Profit arises within an underlying complex set of social processes or interdependencies (labour, provision of goods, provision of energy, regulation, interactions with other businesses, customers and so on). The law allows its separation out from this complex set of interdependencies. Recognised money makes profit ‘real’ and ‘storable’. As Ruskin suggests profit is not to be confused with wealth. Profit can also be a source of ‘illth.’

Question: Is there any form of what we call capitalism which does not require money?

Assertion based on the primary guiding hypothesis: Taking, and increasing, Profit is the fundamental underlying (and moral) principle of capitalism. The more intense the power of capitalists the more likely this is the case. Profit is needed for survival as a business.

Proposition 1: In capitalism, high profit (within the law) is considered good and less profit bad.

Proposition 2: The more costs of production can be lowered to increase profit the better.

Therefore: Workers are a drain on profit, and should be either eliminated or underpaid. The same may be true of suppliers. Likewise, pollution, poisoning, and unremediated ecological destruction are useful as they cut costs, and so are dismissed in capitalism as externalities. They are said to be external to the economic system, having no effect. Essentially externalities are the ways in which the capitalist class can freeload costs and suffering onto others to increase profit. One significant problem is that the planet and its ecologies are not external to survival and are finite. They have limits, and freeloading will eventually catch up with everyone. We have known this in theory since at least 1966, although the realisation seems to have been put to one side.

Question: Is capitalism more or less driven to destroy the ecology which supports it, through the drive to ‘externalise’ and ignore ecological damage, in order to increase profit?

The desire to continually increase profit, leads to growth (enlargement rather than development) being the mark of a successful business. Enlargement is not necessarily sustainable in all conditions for everyone – hence most businesses collapse, and only the most profitable (or ruthless) survive and eat everything else. To repeat, this increases the necessary power of profit, it keeps you in business, and that is more important than valuing ecology in this system.

Freeloading

Definition: Freeloading involves letting other people, or other companies, do the socially useful survival work (like not emitting pollution, feeding the workers), and avoiding the costs of that work and therefore increasing profits at the expense of those who don’t freeload.

Empirical generalisation: Corporate freeloading is often hidden by the information system, while worker freeloading is exposed.

Hypothesis: Freeloading is moral in capitalism, if it makes a profit and its done by the corporate class against the non-corporate class.

Question: Is there anything in capitalism, which prevents individualists from refusing to participate in the general costs of survival, by hiding their freeloading on those who do absorb those costs, then continuing with making the damage, making more profit and surviving when the other ‘responsible companies’ collapse?

If nothing opposes this, then all companies will be inclined towards freeloading for the sake of their survival.

Prices

It may be important to distinguish price from value, although they are often confused. Fresh air may be valuable but it may not yet be priced. Love may be valuable, but it may not always be priced. Price is the amount of money something can be charged for on the market.

It may be important not to assume that the value of anything is solely (and objectively) its price.

Proposition 1: In capitalism, high profit (within the law) is considered good and less profit bad.

Proposition 3: The higher the prices that can be charged to the customer, the greater the profit.

Therefore: Prices should continually increase until the products cannot be sold at a profit or potential customers move to products produced by other people with roughly the same function. This process is generally called competition.

Competition involves information. People have to know they can get the cheaper useful product for competition to work. Complete information is impossible, but fraud is possible. that is the cheaper product may not work.

Transactions with new businesses are risky. Companies are not providing exactly the same products. Cheaper may be cheaper, but they may not be good, the new company might break down, and leave you without a supplier, and so on.

Question: Do businesses generally regard competition as bad, and head towards monopoly, cooperation and/or suppression of information?

Empirical observation: Companies can, and do, create the illusion of competition by manufacturing different brands of ‘stuff’ at different prices.

Question: Is attempting to confuse the market (or the customer) a standard or vital tactic for business to help increase the price they can charge?

Historical Digression: Trajectories of Capital accumulation

Question: If there is no legal force which demands peace recognised, what crimes will be perpetuated in the name of profit?

Empirical observations: the East India Company. The Opium Wars. Tobacco companies.

Accumulation of capital, or the profit, to begin capitalism, has been historically brought about through violence.
Feudalism, conquest, colonialism, theft of treasure and resources (gold and silver from the Americas and India), ‘enclosures’ or dispossession of people from land, stripping people of their right to self sufficiency, slavery, cheap (but crippling or deadly) working conditions, downplaying the value of labour, reducing obligation and care to ‘money,’ together with repression of rebellion until this set up became taken as natural because people had never experienced anything else.

Capitalist colonialism has always attempted to eliminate non-capitalist ways of organising economic behaviour. Sometimes this destruction was deliberate (imposing wage labour, dispossessing people from land, or otherwise promoting the need for currency through taxes etc.) and sometimes it may have been accidental through the inability to understand that non-capitalist economic systems existed or had any virtues (ie through the capitalist shaping of the information system, and through the fact that not all these economies valued a constant increase in monetary profit at all costs). We might call this “The Natives are lazy” syndrome, found in Australia under Terra Nullius, which claimed that aboriginal people ignored the land and did not exist, which ‘therefore’ justifies taking the land, the destruction of non-capitalist people, ecologies and economies. Sometimes the destruction was by spread of disease, deliberate or otherwise.

Observation: The history of capitalist accumulation seems to be brought about by elites co-operating with each other and their ‘workers’, and doing far more damage than they could have done alone. There is no reason to assume that they should have become ‘individual’ operators after that success. (See ‘competition and co-operation’ below.)

Differences in capital accumulation are not just the result of virtue, or productive talent as claimed by most pro-capitalist economic theory, but of violence and theft.

Question: Does this situation continue today?

Empirical observation: We are still told the poor (‘Natives’) are lazy, untalented or cursed by God to be blamed for their own poverty, and that the ‘undeveloped world’ needs more capitalists, more enclosure of property, to buy more of our products (to make money for us), the help of international corporations and minerals being taken for very little in the way of payment. In America and Australia ‘our’ economic and state institutions still keep most of the land which was violently stolen.

The use of day to day violence was partially mitigated by the rise of worker organisation, the workers standing up to the violence, the rise of independence movements, the fear of revolution, and the general failure of fascism to stabilise capitalist power. Since the late 1980s this fear has diminished and workers’ organisation has declined. We may be heading into another round of ‘stabilising’ fascism.

Another factor in the lessening of repression was the realisation that workers with higher wages can form a viable market for products and hence higher wages can benefit all through increasing the scope of the market. However such a realisation was likely to fall, because of the temptation for individual capitalists to freeload on others, and to go back to undermining, deskilling and underpaying labour to increase their own profit and power in the market, at the cost of those who treated workers better to generate a good market.

Proposition: Human Competition and Co-operation

Empirical observation: People are both cooperative and competitive
a) They tend to cooperate within ingroups, or with people the person identifies with
b) They tend to compete with outgroups, or with people the person does not identify with

Empirical observation: People can do things through co-operation they could not do alone. They can often get more done through co-operation than by working alone.

Empirical observation: Competition often occurs through co-operation, as when group co-operates to ‘defeat’ another group or to increase their power and capacity.

Corporations are examples of human cooperation and competition (cooperation and competition both within and without).

Remark: Human beings don’t have to compete for money. Humans can compete for respect, acknowledgment, fame, power, obligation and so on – all of which can be beneficial to community life.

Many economic systems rely on ‘generosity’ of gifting, to build relationships and obligations. This can mix both competition and co-operation.

To ignore one of these factors in favour of the other, is to suppress awareness of human complexity.

Observation: Nothing that can be called an economy does not involve both competition and co-operation.

The limits of co-operation and competition are usually set by social convention and who is defined as ingroup and who is defined as outgroup.

Rejecting ideas of co-operation and non-monetary returns, means that people ignore vital parts of society, such as the building and design of the internet (free exchange in return for status and acknowledgement), long lasting commons and shared land, and even obvious fact, that most parents don’t kill, or seriously harm, their babies.

Propositions on power and economic action

Definition: Power is the capacity for both a) free action and b) control, or influence, over others’ actions.

Empirical observation (and axiom) 1: Unequal wealth = unequal power.

In a capitalist state, and perhaps in all States, wealth buys access to political processes, free action and control over others through organised violence or law. Wealth is a basis for power for free action and control over others.

Unequal wealth and power generates unequal liberty and unequal capacity for action.

Empirical observation (and axiom) 2: Capitalism generates massively unequal wealth (Usually justified by Praxeologists on the grounds of unequal talents.)

Therefore: capitalism generates massively unequal power, liberty and capacity to act.

Suggestion: Capitalist politics enforces this unequal liberty in order to preserve its system stability, to preserve the hierarchy of power and wealth of those who have it, and to engage in ‘capitalist pillage for capital accumulation’. See above and next section.

Hypothesis: The fundamental relationship in capitalism, is between Boss and worker. The worker must, in general, do as they are told so as to maximise profit. There is no necessary relationship between boss and worker apart from obedience and money. Capitalism is about obedience, and dependence on the employer, not about liberty.

Suggestion: Maximization of profit requires that groups who might want to share in the profit they helped produce, or who might increase costs through rendering pollution a non-external cost, have to be suppressed as best as possible, without leading to their revolt. This suppression may require the State, or co-operation between businesses.

Proposition: ‘Crony Capitalism’ and ‘State Capture’ are inevitable

The hyper wealthy will tend to identify with each other against ordinary people (see the proposition ‘Human Competition and Co-operation’, above). Hence they will co-operate against ordinary people and the ‘threat’ posed by ordinary people.

This is reinforced by the ‘need’ to diminish wages and working conditions and externalise costs onto others, so as to increase profit.

Statement: Employers, large corporations and wealth elites have more power than ordinary workers

Definition: Crony capitalism is co-operation between corporations or wealth elites so as to increase wealth, profit and power. This may make use of a political class, primarily a political class which identifies with the wealth elites, or is easily bought (because profit is the main social virtue).

Crony Capitalism is normal capitalism based in ‘human nature’ and ingroup outgroup behaviour. It’s easy and it is effective in increasing profit, and hence reinforced by the normal processes of profit seeking.

That corporate elites co-operate against outgroups, does not mean they will be unified with no internal competition, but that competition maybe suppressed in their cooperation against the “common enemy”.

Proposition 1: The corporate wealth elite has more power and capacity than the ‘lower classes’

Proposition 2: The elite will co-operate against the lower classes.

Proposition 3: The corporate wealth elite will pass this wealth and the advantage it brings to their children.

Therefore: workers are more limited in their response to opportunities. Competition between workers will always drive down wages unless there are workers with skills which are in short supply, and there is no equality or freedom of opportunity in capitalism for most people.

Comment: This competition between workers to earn enough to survive seems to be encouraged by pro-capitalist politicians to force down wages, and this perhaps unintentionally lowers the capacity of the mass market to purchase products and services.

What counts as belonging to who, is an act of negotiation and power. The more powerful the workers the more ‘belongs’ to them, the more powerful bosses and business, the more belongs to them.

Proposition: Collaboration between wealth elites will also occur in the wider political sphere.

Therefore: The hyper wealthy and the corporate sector will attempt to take over or capture the State, or set up a plutocratic state, to prevent the lower classes from acting against them. This State will regulate and structure the market in their favour in order to benefit their profit; it will allow more freeloading on others; it will attempt to prevent people demanding action which is socially beneficial but which could reduce profit, and it will police challenges to this order. This is personally beneficial for the politicians in capitalist ideology.

As a result, there is no possible capitalism in which the State does not interfere with the market, especially in an attempt to support the capitalist market. Hence the State is part of the market and cannot be blamed for the failure of the market alone – the behaviour of the State is part of the market in action.

Assertion: the form of State present in a capitalist society, will tend to support the wealth elites, support the location of profit with the wealth elites, while cutting back any support for workers, cutting back attempts to end freeloading by the wealth elites and demonising those who might agitate against the wealth elites in ways which could be effective.

Siding with the elites

Proposition 1: Living the worker life is insecure and low status.

Proposition 2: People tend to avoid positions of insecurity and low status if they can.

Therefore: People can hope to increase their wealth and apparent power, by siding with employers or corporations forming the managerial class which acts as a distractor and buffer between workers and wealth elites. However, low level managers (in particular) are still workers and discardable, whatever they might hope to the contrary.

Observation: Capitalism has to attract support to survive outside of perpetual warfare.

Power in the ‘Marketplace’

Following on from the earlier propositions.

Proposition 1: Wealthier players may have less of an immediate need for a transaction – they have the ‘capital’ to prolong survival, at a loss.

Proposition 2: Poorer players may have an immediate need for the transaction to survive and may have to agree to ensure that survival. They cannot survive the loss.

Therefore: All actors in the market do NOT have equal power in the market, and that transactions are not equitable, and are not equally satisfying.

Empirical observation: People who are not self supporting, and who need wages to survive may have to accept jobs at low wages, as low wages are better than non. Low wages may provide food, delay being thrown out of accommodation and so on. The employer does not have to care that much, as there will probably be someone else out of their luck and willing to accept the wages.

Employers can also co-operate to lower wages. cf Crony capitalism. They can also oppose livable minimum wages becoming law, because they are a recognised power block.

Likewise, in certain circumstances, a supplier can be desperate for a contract, and have to take a low offer because there is nothing else around, and the purchaser can hang in. In other circumstances the purchaser may be in the vulnerable position.

Mutual satisfaction in capitalist exchange is not guaranteed.

It is almost sanctified to rip off, or cheat, the other, unless it affects profit and repeat sales. Caveat emptor (buyer beware) is the principle.

Proposition 3: Small businesses can rarely undercut big businesses.

Proposition 4: Big business can often undercut the prices of small business for long enough to break the small business. They can then put up the prices.

Therefore: Big business can usually drive out small business, or non-established businesses, if the transactions are based solely on prices.

Therefore: An established oligopoly can generate conditions in which it is almost impossible for competitors to break into a market, even if the prices they charge are vastly inflated – especially given that the competitors usually have to consume capital to enter into the market in the first place, and are therefore likely to have higher costs to recover.

The risks of interacting with new players for old customers, is also a factor which supports the oligopoly.

Information system

All social systems have information systems.

The information a person has access too will influence the way that they perceive the world and its workings. Hence, control of the information system, or parts of the system is important politically, as it brings things to notice.

Proposition 1: In a capitalist society, the main media organisations and sources of information will be owned and controlled by the wealth elites.

Proposition 2: Nearly all contemporary people will gain information about the wider world, politics, ecology and economy, from media rather than from personal experience. The world is too big to know it all personally.

Therefore: the media will, in general, defend the wealth elites, their views, and their system of wealth to help preserve the system.

Note: this does not mean every player will automatically see the rightness of a particular defense, but defense and justification will be aimed at.

Proposition 3: As the media are corporate, the main purpose of the media is to make profit.

Proposition 4: the main source of media profit is corporate advertising.

Therefore: They will attempt to not alienate their advertisers or their audience. The primary aim of media is to attract audiences for advertisers’ advertisements, not to promote accurate statements.

Proposition 5: A secondary aim will be to discredit other media to stop the audience going elsewhere, and to keep advertising revenue high. This also does not contribute to accuracy.

Proposition 6: The function of advertising is to sell products, associate engaging fantasies with particular products, get people excited about new products or imagined products, attack existing competing products, hide cheaper competing products, increase profits, justify or naturalise capitalism, or protect a company from challenge, not to promote accuracy or accurate understanding. The Corporate Media is necessarily saturated in hype, falsehood and exaggeration from the beginning. And then there is the need to hide freeloading, or create ‘greenwash’, etc, to keep markets open against protest.

Reminder: It has already been suggested that false information about markets and confusion about prices of products can be useful to competitors on the market. If people do not know what they are buying, or how much they are paying, that can also be useful to competition. (Scot Adams: ‘Confusopoly’).

Proposition 6: People depend on the knowledge system, to learn about the world, to respond to the world and to situate themselves in the world.

Proposition 7: Confused people are more easily led to avoid problems and into further destruction by those who think they benefit from ignoring the problems.

Therefore: An information system which is completely messy will allow problems to accumulate or even encourage problems and destruction to continue, so as to preserve the power and wealth structures.

Empirical observation: the information system may distract people away from important information, in order to help the system pretend it is coping, and to prevent added challenges to the system. For example, controversy about the science of climate change is promoted beyond it statistical significance, while general agreement is not. Celebrity life is more important than climate change. This helps the system keep going (for a while). Likewise, non-capitalist economics is ignored, while the virtue of ‘free markets’ is promoted. Information necessary for survival may be hidden or attacked by the information system if it is seen as presenting an unacceptable challenge to capitalism.

Question: Are these kinds of information disruption systems present within the corporation itself?

Hypothesis: In general (but not always) people at the local level have a better knowledge of what is going on locally than people distant from them.

Therefore: Locals may tend to lie to the centre, or distant power, to allow them to act appropriately.

Remark: Pro-corporate analysts recognise that distant government officials can be out of touch, but generally do not recognise that corporate officials can also be out of touch for the same reasons.

Hypothesis: A punitive hierarchy will establish a system in which people below tell people above, what those below think those above want to hear, so as to protect themselves. The people above will only tell people below, what they think those below need to hear or know, and will lie to protect themselves, or to prevent resistance. Status depends on knowledge, so few people give knowledge away.

When you buy information from a supplier to try and obtain accuracy, the buyer still faces the problem that the supplier is likely to try and keep the purchasing relationship going by providing you with what you might want to hear, rather than what is accurate, and their sources might do likewise. Think tanks are often quite overt about providing their customers with what they want.

Suggestion: to this market based information disruption, we can add the effect of the political propaganda also spread through the information system, in which various forces attempt to make the corporate sector or political parties and politicians look good or bad and provide them with the information that will change their behaviour in desired ways.

The capitalist information system is riddled with rhetoric, hype, lies, distraction, fantasy and confusion, not as an add-on or an easily correctable mistake, but as part of its normal operation.

The normal processes of the market and of customer purchase appear to disrupt the intelligence and information needed to make decisions in the market.

Eventually the whole system will collapse when reality does not match with what the people come to believe should be the case, and with how they should act. This is suicidal. The information system becomes a non-functional ecology, in human terms.

Hypothesis: this cultivation of confusion and falsity to gain and keep market advantage is one reason why economic collapses, market breakdowns and the like, always take almost all players in the market by surprise.

It has been said that the market is the ultimate and only information processor about the world. If a business gets something wrong and does not learn, it goes bust. However, markets are a subset of ecological interactions. It is the ecology which has the final say. And if the ecology collapses, it does not matter how successfully the market has operated in its own terms, it will likely go down with the ecology.

Question: Despite all this information disruption, can wealth can buy better information and therefore buy advantage on the marketplace?

Non-profit ways???

Markets, Relationships and Trust (Morals?)

Anthropological observation: Most systems of exchange are about building relationships (systems of obligation, trust, gifting, connection and status) between people to further co-operation. Humans are relational animals before economic animals, and long before becoming ‘monetary transaction machines’.

Observation: Relationality still exists when price is not the only determinate of behaviour.

People can build relationships with small companies, with corner stores, with favourite stores, with their children etc. that are more than monetary exchanges.

Relationship building seems to be one reason why ingroup and outgroup bonds are so easy to form.

Companies have often tried to take advantage of relationality, and build up a relationship between customers and products, as if it were two way, when its primarily entrapping the customer..

By trying to make price and advantage the prime mode of exchange, in which the payment of money terminates the transaction, capitalist ideology breaks down human relationships to other humans and to ecology (natural world).

This is deeply anti-human, destructive of awareness and preventative of spontaneous beneficial non-capitalist co-operation from emerging.

Building connections and co-operation within and outside capitalism, and outside its self-generated problems, is likely a step towards building a survivable and less catastrophic world.

Commons

Emphasising co-operation without pretending people are never competitive or self-interested. Common land, common tools, common property exists throughout the world. I’ve argued that common energy may be the best way out of the energy crisis, as it puts responsibility for energy and pollution squarely on those that use it. It responds to local conditions, builds functional local democracy and participation, and has to guard against freeloaders or the project will fail.

It looks as though successful commons require locally agreed upon rules of use, and sanctions for violation of those rules.

Uncertainty and experimental politics

Assertion 1: Uncertainty is fundamental in complex systems. No matter how good the information system we will probably never have certainty. Few precise predictions can be guaranteed. The system is too complicated to map completely. No information system carries completely accurate statements.

Assertion 2: Uncertainty is not fixed by imposing the certainty that free markets deal with uncertainty and always produce the best possible result. Free markets are entangled in relations of power and deceit from the beginning. The ecology is the only real marker of correctness, and its response may be violent.

Assertion 3: Due to uncertainty, most policies, ethical positions and proposed solutions are experimental, and have to be treated as experimental. We don’t, and will not, know the full result of a set of actions until after we have acted, and we need to refine actions based on the result and the feedback it gives – and recognise this may change.

Assertion 4: We do now know, that current day neoliberal capitalism does not appear able to solve the problems it generates, and largely sweeps them under the table. It’s day needs to be over, but we may not know what to replace it with. This adds to uncertainty and the need for experiment.

Returning to systems

Observation: People live within systems. They do not live as isolated individuals. They live as interdependent people. This is fundamental. Without being able to be dependent on other humans all infants would die.

Observation: People live in the interaction of numerous systems of human and non human systems.

Observation: humans live in and create complex systems…. this has consequences. (I’ve dealt with this elsewhere, but uncertainty is primary).

Hypothesis: Attempting to impose any single system on all the others can easily lead to disaster.

Imposing ‘individualistic’ capitalism, or the ideology of individualistic capitalism on everything, is causing disaster.

It does not even produce an adequate model of what happens in real capitalism or real economies.

Methodological individualism is a distortion of reality, which serves an ideological purpose alone, to help maintain the power of capitalism and to prevent co-operative innovation and moves outside of the destructive economic system.

This set of reconceptualisations, which is not claiming to be original, is important because

  • humans act in situations/contexts
  • with particular understandings.
  • Understandings are part of the information system

Humans are hampered and encouraged by the contexts they live within.

If they have fundamentally incorrect understandings of the situation then the hampering to action from that situation will win out.

For example, it is easily possible to allege that most politics allowed to participate in capitalism are politics which help the reproduction of capitalism. There may be disagreements about how this is done, ranging from pure fascist theocratic authority, to pure libertarianism, to having working social services, but the main idea is to keep capitalism and its ‘class system’ going, even if we add another class to it to help that happen.

However we could imagine a politics in which the main concern was regenerating relatively harmonious human ecological relations, so that we did came to not deplete the earth, destroy other species, or poison the world. A politics which realised that without a working set of ecologies which include us, we cannot survive let alone survive well. This would be a politics and economics which would either displace or transform capitalist destruction, and make a new more human economics. It would at the least challenge the type of assumptions that we make about the world within capitalism.

The understandings proposed here can be trivial or wrong, but I assert they are better for dealing with our situations than the ones which have informational dominance and which seem to be helping towards continuing and worsening the multiple crises we face.

….

Attempt to summarise this on the next page.

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The recognisable stages of capitalism

September 21, 2020

Capitalism is not the same everywhere, but in the English speaking world it has a number of stages, which might be described as: Theft and Conquest; Consolidation and Worker’s Rise; People’s Capitalism; Plutocracy and; Crisis and Fascism. All the stages can overlap, and they may not always appear in sequence.

People’s capitalism’ is probably one of the better forms of social life. Certainly it is better than militarism, theocracy, complete state control over everything. However, pro-corporate capitalist writers tend to move from this relative fact to insisting that capitalism is without significant flaws in every stage, and thus should be left alone.

If left alone, then capitalism will nearly always become rule of the rich, or plutocracy. The theory of this is easy to understand. In capitalism, wealthy people are seen as virtuous and have status. They are largely admired for their success. Wealthy people also have much larger amounts of disposable wealth than ‘ordinary people’. Wealthy people can easily team up and promote legislation which supports what they see as their interests, without much opposition. They can buy politicians. They can buy laws and lawyers. They can buy “think tanks”. They control information through owning and controlling the media, large and small. Smallness of media is no guarantee of accuracy, or liberty from the control of wealth.

In capitalism, there is no source of power which cannot be bought from violence to religion. Consequently, wealth is the source of nearly all power, and of all differences in power. Wealth is used to support the wealthy and hinder anyone else from challenging them. This is quite natural. This does not mean there are no factions amongst the wealthy; some, for example, may have more sense of obligation to those ‘beneath them’ than others, but because the wealthy control the sources of information, these differences may be hard to detect accurately.

It seems fairly obvious, that regulation favouring established wealth will not always work out well for everyone. It will have unintended and harmful consequences. It can stop the best part of capitalism, namely the ability of new success to tear down the old wealth and power establishment, and set up new businesses, new technologies and new business models.

In plutocratic capitalism, owners, high level executives and directors tend to know each other, and support each other, and engineer the distribution of wealth, so having contacts rather than talent is rewarded. Established companies tend to receive heaps of taxpayers’ money during a crisis to bail them out and keep them running. They can also receive more favourable regulations, or lessening of regulation. That appears to be what is happening in the Covid crisis – especially with fossil fuel companies. In the financial crisis of 2007-8 there was plenty of money to bail out financial corporations, but very little to bail out ordinary people who had taken fraudulent, or entrapping, loans. Wealthy capitalists were protected from the consequences of their actions – and some parties claimed those companies receiving bailouts should not have to pay any of the gifted taxpayers’ money back.

In this plutocratic stage, it often happens that new industries which challenge established ones are regulated out of existence by established wealth, or find it much harder to operate than they should. Sometimes, as with large stores, established business can effectively use their market power to stop small business from being economic. Hence the crisis in small business today.

If there is a real crisis which will not fix itself profitably (such as ecological exhaustion, serious pandemic, decline of an important resource, massive inflation, stagflation etc), and the State is supposedly democratic, then many of the established wealthy groups tend to abandon any restraint in attempting to preserve their power and wealth.

They may attempt to split ordinary people by encouraging hatreds amongst the population, scapegoating minorities, misdirecting people’s anger against the wealthy into support for the wealthy, encouraging police violence and so on. They may find a nice demagogue – that is, a highly persuasive and unprincipled person – who will say anything to take lead of the State – with the violence against dissent getting more and more intense as this leader solidifies their power.

This is the beginning of fascism. Fascist processes are encouraged as an attempt to provide stability for a form capitalism in crisis. While the fascists build on the power of wealth at the beginning of their moves, they slowly take it over, usually through violence from the party and its militias. Some of the established wealthy manage to accommodate to the fascists. However, along with the scapegoats, some of the established wealthy people get eliminated, or realise they have stuffed it badly for themselves. But most of the wealthy were never in favour of democracy anyway, as it disrupts their power and their freedom, and they prefer the apparent discipline of fascism, the suppression of unpleasant opposition and the appearance of a solution to their problems, which should not cost them anything.

So there is a tendency for capitalism to end in violence when it hits a crisis, especially a crisis that capitalism generates itself – such as the increasing ecological crisis.

Violence is no stranger to capitalism. Some people argue that capitalism always grows out of violence and theft. For example, European and American capitalism, grew out of violent conquest, slavery, murder, dispossession of people from their lands (not only in America, Australia, India and Africa, but in the UK as well), the destruction of land, stripping wealth and resources from countries, the imposition of drug addiction in China by gunboats, and so on. It was an easy form of accumulation which provided some people with capital which they could use to start up business.

This violent theft gets legitimated, and turned into property by the plunderer’s influence in the State which made laws justifying the theft, or because this wealth collection is part of a State project to begin with. Sometimes State armies are used against people who protest against any of this. This period was not pleasant for those people who suffered and died to make capitalism successful.

Capitalism only seems peaceful because, over generations, people forget the violence, and people are not reminded by the capitalist owned media about the violence in their history, or the violence that is going on now. You have to do that research for yourselves. The point is that the capitalist wealthy are already used to violence, or ignoring their violence, and the violence of fascism can seem necessary if it seems to be protecting them from risk.

If the wealthy go the fascist way, then eventually the fascist leader, they have promoted or supported, becomes dictator and leads the country to war to gain new resources, to build the people’s loyalty and because the fascist rulers enjoy violence. That usually results in collapse, as the country extends beyond its military capacity, and generates more and more opposition from other powers.

So the major cycle goes: capitalism is born in plunder and dispossession, leading to massive wealth inequalities, which leads to plutocracy which aims to preserve the power and wealth inequalities. Plutocracy plus crisis leads to fascism, which usually leads to war and suffering for most people.

This cycle, can in theory be interrupted, by ‘people’s capitalism’, or to be more dramatic ‘socialist capitalism’ as found in the Nordic States or in the UK after the Second World war. People’s capitalism seems relatively precarious. It arises through political action from ordinary people, not through economic necessity, and is vulnerable if the wealthy decide that they have nothing to fear from the people.

Historically, it began to arise towards the end of the 19th Century, when workers began to organise and demanded better wages and conditions. Capitalists feared communist revolution – the “spectre haunting Europe”. As a result, a kind of truce occurred in the capitalist west in which wealth was somewhat shared, people got educated, the State became mildly helpful to everyone and protected people (to some extent) from misfortune. Ordinary people began to prosper a little, and social mobility increased.

The more that people share the wealth being produced, and the more governments act to help people to get opportunity and advancement, hinder the powers of corporations to exploit or poison people, set up competition to capitalist activities, and break up capitalist monopolies (or duopolies), then the longer capitalism will work and the people flourish.

This movement heightened after World War II and between the 1950s to 1970s capitalism was pretty good for most people, and it seemed to be steadily improving.

However with the collapse of the threat of revolution with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the wind down of worker organisation, plutocracy has been growing again. This plutocracy grew along with intense talk of free markets, attempts to destroy unions, and largely successful attempts to stop people from having much control over corporate activity as it interfered with the ‘free market’. Neoliberals successfully promoted the idea that the economy was the most important thing in life.

Given the many crises we face, the corporate world now seems to be heading for fascism again to preserve its wealth and power in the face of those crises. The choice is pretty clear. If, at this moment, a party supports action against the ecological crisis then it is probably not fascist. If it supports action which opposes ecological action or allows pollution to get worse, it probably is supporting the current set up at all cost, and will ultimately become fascist if it is not already.

It should not be a surprise that most pro-capitalist analyses of capitalism, such a neoclassical economics, or Austrian economics, tend to ‘forget’ the importance of accumulating differences in wealth and success, how this ends ‘free markets’, and the class politics involved in attempting to maintain, or lessen, that difference. Both of these factors are essential to understanding how the system works in the long term.

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