by Paul Cudenec
Throughout my adult life I have tended to describe the thing to which I am primarily opposed as “capitalism”.
Over the last couple of years, however, I have started to wonder whether this is quite the right word.
Not only does it hinder communication with people used to different political terminologies, but it is looking increasingly outmoded as the powers-that-be try to push us into a harsh new totalitarian era.
I have gradually stopped using the term and, when I share pieces of my older writing which contain the word, I feel slightly awkward and don’t quite know how to reply to people who feel it is not altogether appropriate.
The funny thing, though, is that my views have not actually changed. The entity which I have spent my life combating remains the same, regardless of the label I might stick on it.
It is not really an “-ism”, an abstract ideological concept which mysteriously casts our societies under its motivational spell, but a real and physical system, built on capital, which is maintained by real and physical players.
It is an arrangement by which a tiny minority of extremely wealthy people possess all the power and privilege in the world at the expense of the vast majority of us, whom they regard as both dangerous and dispensable.
It is accumulation for the few, dispossession for the many.
It is a plutocracy, a dictatorship of the ultra-rich hiding behind the rhetoric of democracy while knowing that real democracy would be incompatible with its ongoing supremacy and thus doing all it can to prevent it from ever flourishing.
It is an organized religion of greed, a cult of power. It is an octopus, a monster, it is Leviathan.
It is the rule of gold, of usury, of filthy lucre, of pelf, of Mammon.
It is a mega-organization, an empire which has deliberately and consciously expanded its domination and control to the point where it can now imagine this becoming all-inclusive and permanent.
It is a spider’s web of carefully-woven manipulation and deceit, a vast and complex conspiracy which has concealed its existence behind layer after layer of lies.
It is the complete capture of state power by financial interests and the violent imposition everywhere of that illicit and non-consensual authority.
It is a scam, a racket, which has gradually taken over the world’s institutions to the point that its insatiable greed for ever more “growth” and “development” has been written into the legislative infrastuctures of our society.
It is an ongoing crime on an unimaginable scale, a slow-motion robbery of 99.9% of humankind and the rape, pillage and pollution of the natural world.
It is the corruption of our societies, the poisoning of human relationships, the paralysis of our organic capacity to live together in mutual aid, solidarity and freedom.
It is the enslavement of the people of the world by the money power, the stifling of our vital breath.
It is the denial of beauty, truth, justice, nature, poetry and the mystery of existence in the name of a stale dogma of sterility, materialism, pseudo-science and artifice aimed at reducing us to a condition of powerless and abject submission to authority.
It is the endless acceleration of the reign of quantity, our descent into a grim grey future from which all that makes our lives worth living will have been banished by our vile vitaphobic overlords.
Even if I may now definitively ditch the term, all this is in fact what I have always meant by “capitalism”.
And this is the odious global system which we have to expose and destroy…
winter oak 
The thing that holds this ‘hell’ together and always has is ‘Respect for Authority’. Voting confirms your right to be ‘ruled’. Sadly the most significant supporters of slavery are our fellow slaves.
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Thanks, Paul
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Good post that echoes my thoughts too.
Still not sure that we are not being sucked into a Fourth Reich. Many of todays players have more than a whiff of Born Again Nazi stamped on their foreheads.
Of course that could also be a smokescreen….but covering what?
What can be worse than a reappearance of them though?
Alien life forms?
I say that tongue in cheek btw
At least I hope I do
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This is all so Paul. The C-word is now almost useless. We see Corporate Fascism or indeed what Sheldon Wolin described many years ago as en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
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I’m a bicycle mechanic and bicycle retailer of over 32 years.
I have now opened my own bicycle store.
I buy bikes and parts, markup the prices, make money, pay my expenses and especially, taxes, and hopefully pay myself.
Am I the “capitalist” you speak of? No, I’m sure I’m not…
So yes, a different term is needed…
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Some people (Chris Hedges, for example) would call you, approvingly, a “mom and pop” capitalist. Such distinctions are necessary, IMO. But a Marxist might call you a bourgeoisie capitalist and urge you to share your profits equally with your employees and maybe the community too. I like worker-owned cooperatives, but labor and capital investment both deserve fair compensation for time/risk–as Henry George so eloquently noted. Marx said dismissively that George was the last hold out for capitalism. Tolstoy studied them both and preferred George.
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A fine paper Paul! I thoroughly enjoyed it.
By the way capitalism doesn’t really exist. Not as its supporters define it anyway. Capitalism is a free economy regulated by the equilibrium between offer and demand. And this is an economical myth. It’s totally imaginary. No such thing exists outside the dogmas of modern economics… There is only a struggle for power out there on the suposedly “free market”, to control either the offer or the demand.
All the best
Matt
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We live in a world where people can’t even clearly define the meaning of the words they use for their own declared ideological preferences. And we’re not talking dilettantes here, I’ve seen essays at places like the Mises institute where people suffer the same intellectual collapse. Partly, these people are trying shed the baggage of the extraordinary crimes committed in the name of their ideologies. We’ve seen this most clearly with the term ‘fascism,’ but ‘capitalism’ is a good example too.
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You are simply describing the details, consequences, symptoms, of …… CAPITALISM. This system’s dominant social relation is not feudal, nor is it chattel slavery. It is CAPITAL, which is not a thing, but a social relation, one which involves the social means of producing our subsistence needs. They are viewed as money, the way exchange value appears. Capital is a sum of money or its equivalent in means of production, resources, … which are combined with human labor power to produce goods or services for exchange on the global market, with the aim being a larger sum of money or its equivalent than initially existed.
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What do you say to Henry George who pointed to the hoarding of land, finite resources, and community infrastructure as the sources of poverty, not capital investment?
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VN Alexander: Henry George simply wished away the actual origins of capitalism, pretended it was the outgrowth of trade, that it began in the cities, and was the natural result of human evolution. Could not be further from reality. Another piece by Ellen Meiksins Wood on how capitalism is not the “natural” and inevitable result of human evolution. On Eurocentrism and Anti Eurocentrism.
https://www.solidarity-us.org/node/993
Also see this by Yasha Levine on Michael Perelman’s The Invention of Capitalism
http://www.filmsforaction.org/news/recovered-economic-history-everyone-but-an-idiot-knows-that-the-lower-classes-must-be-kept-poor-or-they-will-never-be-industrious/
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You must have read a different Henry George. Don’t recognize his work in what you say.
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VN Alexander: Henry George believed in the essential naturalness of wage labor and capitalist social relations. Doing so precisely amounts to a lack of understanding of how these social relations and their eventual dominance arose in history, rather than in theory.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/letters/81_06_20.htm
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You’re citing an opponent of George to explain what George said.
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VN Alexander: Feel free to cite George to demonstrate he opposed capitalist social relations and wage labor. You yourself have stated a preference for worker-owned capitalist enterprises, demonstrating a similar inclination and a lack of understanding of capitalist social relations, which are not about “rich capitalists” in their essence, even if that’s the inevitable consequence and a symptom.
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George argued that it is the ownership/hoarding of finite natural resources (particularly land), not capital, that led to monopoly power, economic disparity and poverty. I am not going to “cite George to demonstrate he opposed capitalist social relations and wage labor” because he did not.
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In that case you have a problem. State capitalism, in the most extreme form the USSR in the first few decades, functioned like any other capitalist entity, as if a company nation (plenty of examples of company towns, cities, and even states in the US), without any “ownership” of the natural resources, which were all owned by the state, and this is true of many other clearly capitalist nations, especially ones with social democratic regimes in their history. And this not prevent the worst symptoms of capitalism from erupting en masse. Ownership has zero to do with capital’s dynamics, its structural crisis tendencies, or its increasingly rapacious behavior.
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I guess you never played Monopoly as a child.
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Nobody but Agricultural workers who supply our food should own more than 30 acres. 30 acres are enough for any one family to grow and raise food for their own families.
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Yes, that’s probably a reasonable idea. Currently it would be tough to make a living at farming with only 30 acres, but only because of the dysfunctional system we have in which landlords and bankers (and a lot of useless salaried men) make so much more money than essential farmers. Farm subsidies have killed agriculture by keeping food prices low. I think it makes sense for everyone to own a subsistence plot of land as a home tax free. It’s really unconscionable that the poor and middle class are taxed at all. What we need (in the US) is a return to Lincoln’s Greenbacks, and for the public to be charged sliding scale user fees for all gov services. Maybe we could decide whether or not we want to contribute to the war machine too!
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Lovely, Paul. Great reading, too.
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Oh very good! I thought it was myself writing for a moment. We think alike
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I have been on much the same trip; as my gaze took in more of the scene and I realised that corporations, markets, even hedge funds, are just instruments, I had to look for new words. I always try to return, though, to the way that these people have used capitalism as their primary tool of control. The game of using money to make money made a hell of a trap. And they still need the money to flow. Thanks for introducing me to Fredy Perlman. The worm Leviathan is the ultimate analogy.
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Lewis Mumford, whose _Pentagon of Power_ I’m reading now, calls it the megamachine.
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I’ll make it very easy for you. You have been correct except for one part, democracy. We don’t live in one and never have. It is the breeding ground for sniveling cowards like the deep state, the military complex better known as the Pentagon before them. I have vast experience there. “Who will fund my next war and send young boys to their deaths?” Those in control will never come out and say that, but you can see it in their actions. Was America’s entrance into the Ukraine war necessary? No, war hawks overshadowed saner minds. Was there a need to spend countless money on already failed policies? Again no, and now Josef Stolen is he thinks secretly rebuilding Trump’s wall. So, democracy was your only mistake. I’ll love to see how the war shakes out now that China has joined Russia who really won in 48 hours.
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Of course we don’t live in a democracy!
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Right now, we’re closer to a tyranny, like Cuba.
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It’s not capitalism, but debt-backed currency created by private banks; it’s not capitalism, but investors who are not materially involved in the business; it’s not capitalism, but oligarchy. The real problem with capitalism is there aren’t enough capitalists; large corporations need to be worker-owned.
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The real problem is capitalism doesn’t exist. It’s a myth based on the imaginary equilibrium between offer and demand.
Large corporations shouldn’t exist.
But corporations should be worker-owned I fully agree!
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I would say that the “free market” is a myth. Also competition doesn’t spur innovation; it buys it out and kills it. I’m so tired of the label “capitalism” because it’s so vague.
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Capitalism emerged in late medieval England, long before there were any corporations. The first capitalist enterprises were agrarian. Its very emergence required massive dispossession, that’s what the Enclosures were about. Hereditary plots belonging to subsistence farmers, run for subsistence, not as small businesses, were seized, the owners expelled from the land. And simultaneously, the Commons, which had been open for people to hunt and gather in, were fenced off. This is how capitalist society was created, long before debt-backed currency, centuries before. Worker owned enterprises operate just like enterprises, run to be competitive on the market. Witness Mondragon, about which much has been written. See https://libcom.org/tags/mondragon And see The Agrarian Origins of Capitalism by Ellen Meiksins Wood, easily found online.
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Hi Jeffrey Strahl. Thanks for the reply. Everybody seems to be using “capitalism” to mean different things. You are using it here to point to the time when the landowners in England decided to go into the wool industry (instead of claiming part of the crops produced by the commoners living on the land) and put the commoners to work in the textile industry. A better word for that situation might be Feudalism, whose ideology was that the commoners didn’t own the land their families had worked for generations. Not having read the history you suggest, I can guess, based on what I do know of that time, that these land “owners” began selling their lands to people who had gotten rich as merchants. During these times the landed gentry were replaced by the merchant class. It was an extremely upsetting times for the commoners. The poetry of John Claire comes to mind. I was not saying, above, that in order for capitalism to exist there must be debt-backed currency. I was saying that debt-backed currency (created by the private banking industry) is a major part of wealth inequality and misery these days. So when we are looking for ways to get out of the mess we are in, we should look to the private creation of national currency as debt. I also think that property taxes should be abolished for average size parcels (and taxed high for excess size) so that people cannot lose their homes due to non-payment of taxes. Every human born on this Earth deserves to have access to a subsistence plot of land.
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VN Alexander: No! Feudalism is the social system which had been dominant for centuries BEFORE the Enclosures. Under it, peasants had hereditary rights to their lands. The Enclosures was the beginning of the termination of the feudal order. No debt-backed currency was involved. And no, merchants had nothing to do with this shift. There is a lot more to history than what you read in “Libertarian” web pages. As i said, Ellen Meiksins-Wood did a superb analysis of this transition in “The Agrarian Origins of Capitalism.”
https://monthlyreview.org/1998/07/01/the-agrarian-origins-of-capitalism/?fbclid=IwAR1blmLND8qFdONIblk1Vutv-4Eo-iUTEZyRmAvX7b8id_Ra9aoewuEY6S4
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Fully agree with your diagnosis, but how do you destroy capitalism? Many have benefited and supported it somehow, and still do.
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You cannot destroy capitalism, it is too huge and far reaching. What you can do is recognise it and fight it. Individually and in solidarity with others.
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The system/empire’s Achilles’ heel is its constant need for expansion, growth, exponential returns on investment. Slowing it down, blocking its advance, resisting every inch of ground it tries to steal from us, might turn out to be the way it can be destroyed.
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