A Better Capitalist
Demystifying economy
One part of being well-versed in Marxist literature and theory is to be able to demystify capitalism, which can make for a better capitalist. Contrary to popular belief, Marx wrote very little about socialism or communism. Just a few dozen pages, really, out of many thousands. No, 95% of his (and Engels’) enduring writing is about capitalism. A cold, objective analysis of how value is produced and distributed, and other relations of production. The culmination of their decades of work together was titled: Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, a three-volume tome with an accompanying, 400-page “outline” titled the Grundrisse. This was not a light undertaking, nor is it a polemic, as The Manifesto of the Communist Party (released 25 years earlier) was meant to be.
Just because he sees capital as an historical phenomenon that is bound to end, like all prior forms of production, people get upset. They don’t want to hear that the world as they have always known it will change, but that is what any empirical measurement of society shows us. The question is: What form will the relations of production take, after capitalism?
Logically, for the change to take place would mean the Ruling Class of the present era would no longer be a ruling class.
So what group will take its place? The other social class, because in capitalism, there are four gradients of social class, but only two class positions—owners and workers. One either owns a means of production or one sells their ability to put another’s means of production in motion. The owners claim a monopoly on value produced by the means of production by virtue of a wage system, where workers are paid an established rate that by calculation must be lower than the total value they produce.
And this happens with every worker, every day, all around the world. We get massive amounts of value transferred from labor to capital. Capital grows exponentially, labor-power’s price is suppressed, and we end up in a global society of the massively wealthy and mass poverty. It’s not sustainable and it will collapse upon itself, due to its own contradictions.
Simply, we cannot have a perpetually-expanding realm of production in a closed system. That is one reason why super-billionaires are so jazzed about space exploration and building extra-terrestrial colonies. Leaving Earth will open all the resources in the Universe, so it holds promise that capital will continue to expand, once it is no longer able to do so on Earth.
It’s standard practice for capital to privatize gain and socialize costs. Climate change is the result of the socialization of the costs of oxidizing carbon. Petroleum was made into the preferred energy source of the 20th century, as it was plentiful and available in colonized lands. It became another resource to extract value from, in commodity form. Society had existed for millennia without burning oil—whatever need there was for it came from the artifices of the economy and culture.
So-called “renewable” energy (a horrible term), describes capturing near-surface energies through solar cells, wind and water turbines, geothermal wells, and ocean tides. All of their energies can be substituted for petroleum’s, but their sources are freely available, and none can be commodified without creating an artificial restriction.
We engage in wars for oil (and would do the same for Uranium), because capital is inherently innovative in only one direction: Toward profit. That is why internet “anti-piracy” surveillance was prioritized and why, once information could be effectively monitored and corralled, we see the enshittification of all for-profit social media platforms.
Surveilling the internet ultimately means surveilling the users, which is why those who have made their fortunes from their control over the various fiefdoms and duchies have been eager to turn their tools upon the society at large. But society has no need for the artifice of the internet. The value of the technology to the ruling class’s rule should not be mistaken for the value of the technology itself.
While those who own improvisational algorithmic machines (“AI”) claim that we’re on the verge of a revolution, they are doing nothing revolutionary with them—they are merely seeking ways in which this technology may produce profit. That was revolutionary in the 1700’s, but no longer. The next revolutionary phase would involve utilizing such technology to liberate wage-slaves from their exploitation.
The tech capitalists understand this to be true in potential, but the only way they can find to explain it is crisis. They won’t need as many wage-slaves, and that’s a problem for the wage-slaves, not for them. They are adherents to the cult of individualism and fail to see the potential to expand the social class privilege of voluntary labor.
Voluntary labor is what happens when capital chooses to work. Notice they never choose to work for any company they do not themselves own. Elon Musk is not building cars (not that he’s ever labored in any serious way) for Ford, Bill Gates was never going to program for Apple, the Walton heirs will not get jobs at Kohl’s.
This privilege of laboring in a non-exploitive form could be expanded via AI and automation, but the assumption is labor must be coerced under threat of base impoverishment. It is a well-founded assumption, for anyone who understands the relations of production as they exist can see it is a suckers’ game. The wage-slave is told he is “free” to choose his place of employment, yet he is never free to choose not to participate in an exploitive relationship with any employer.
The solution, to the capitalist, is to magically amass capital and then start exploiting others.
Exploitive productive relationships are not new to capitalism. Nor is lifelong, bonded labor. While the proletarian is freed from the bond of the particular master, he is not freed from the bourgeois as a class. Nor is the bourgeois free from having to exploit others. The social class’s only means of survival is to maintain the relations of production, and to relentlessly pursue profit.
That is why Marx believed the proletarian revolution would free humanity as a whole; it would end the exploitation of workers by owners and it would thus also free the owners from their obligation to exploit.