For the Record: What Is Capitalism

Class Strugle--The board game. Via Wikipedia.

Covering some ground I'm afraid we may have covered before—

employees while the CEO keeps getting richer and takes rides into outer space in a flying penis rocket. But it also applies to Linda making a decent living by selling homemade cupcakes at the flea market. If she's selling something she produced and pricing it at...

— Ghost of Gene Rayburn of House Moderna🍸 (@ghostofgener) February 8, 2022

That is literally not capitalism. Linda is not an alienated wage slave selling her labor for the benefit of an owner sucking the surplus value out of it. She's an independent artisan who controls her own means of production, in a pattern from long before capitalism was invented.

— Against Yastronomical Odds (@Yastreblyansky) February 8, 2022

Also not a word about capital. It's a stupid definition, whose purpose is to crudely distinguish it from "socialism", which is historically backwards. The article is better in later paragraphs explaining where capital comes from. pic.twitter.com/SQFGF8rMdt

— Against Yastronomical Odds (@Yastreblyansky) February 8, 2022

Subtracting the inflammatory language about slavery and bloodsucking and so forth, the basic point is that most people including our interlocutor here think "capital" is just a fancy word for "money", and they are wrong in a very important way: it's only capital if you don't need it, to feed and clothe and house yourself, so you can send it out and put it to work. It's capital if you can invest it and let it make money for you.

There has always been capital, as long as there has been money, in that there's always been inequality and some people do have more than they need and others don't, and the ones who do have extended credit to the ones that don't, and early legal codes like the ones in Leviticus and Deuteronomy tried to regulate the process, but the ism, capital-ism, is where capital has become the organizing principle of the whole economy, in the historical process that went from Italy in the 14th century to England in the 18th, and Marco Polo to James Hargreaves.

Note that: Industrial capitalism REPLACED "the traditional handicraft skills of artisans, guilds and journeymen" like your cupcake friend.

— Against Yastronomical Odds (@Yastreblyansky) February 8, 2022

Capital arising from the profits of large-scale trade (not cupcake stands but shipsful of goods) and emergent banking system allowed investors to create factories in which armies of people made the stuff and investors took the money.

— Against Yastronomical Odds (@Yastreblyansky) February 8, 2022

And as Marx and Engels said in the Manifesto, and I'll never stop quoting this, capitalism was an extraordinarily powerful, revolutionary, and in many ways beneficial thing:

The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.

Capitalism is a bona fide miracle, according to the founders of communism ("It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades"), but it's not unproblematic. Around 1600 in Europe, everybody who lived in a town had bespoke shoes, you know, handmade and lasting ten or fifteen years, maybe a couple of pairs, one for every day and one for Sunday; nowadays everybody can have ten or fifteen pairs, but they're all trash imported from China and have to be replaced in a matter of months. In 1850 in North America, you could only eat a salad tomato in a brief part of the summer; now you can have one every day of the year, but they mostly taste like cardboard. 

And that's just from the consumer side; on the producer side, where Marx and Engels spoke of a radical simplification of the system, its reduction to just two classes, bourgeoisie and proletariat, there's the fact that most people even now never really accumulate any significant amount of capital; actual Lindas and their cupcake stands aren't likely to earn enough to buy themselves actual equity and bond portfolios. The progression from worker to owner imagined for every American by radical leftist Abraham Lincoln (who had himself risen from railsplitter through shop assistant to attorney and then congressman) doesn't really happen any more. Half the population has no capital at all other than a share in the Social Security Trust Fund, which mostly isn't enough money to live on, and hardly anybody has capital other than what they will be forced to spend when they have to stop being workers. We're a lot better off, even in the US, than our forefathers in the 1850s, but the gulf between the classes remains, and it remains huge.

All praise to Linda, but I'm afraid that to the extent she ever really existed she's been replaced by the dollar-a-bite Baked By Melissa franchise and the like, while her social status has gone to the Latina lady who sells cut mango at the corner of 6th Avenue and 34th St. The inequality between comics villains like Elon Musk and entrepreneuses like Linda is as great as it ever was, and in some cases a lot greater.