DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

There is no such thing as ‘capitalism’.

Let me repeat that.

There is no such thing as ‘capitalism’.

‘Capitalism’ is a term created by Marxists in order conveniently to tag and condemn people that they disagree with. This is a well-worn tool in the Marxist belt; everything is ideological, so everything must be an ‘-ism’ because everything has an implicit ideological agenda. Hence Marxist writings are full of such terms as Revisionism and Deviationism and Trotskyism — even Stalinism fits this template, when it came time to turn their backs on him. (This Alinskyish tagging has a long history. Terms like ‘black market’, ‘price gouging’, ‘profiteering’, ‘windfall profits’ etc. are the spoor of people trying to get a rhetorical armlock on their political opponents.)

But in order to be an ‘-ism’, something must have an ideological component (think ‘environmentalism’), and there is simply no ideological component to ‘capital’ (even though most people use the term ‘capitalism’ as if there were).

Marx himself didn’t use ‘capitalism’ but he did use ‘capital’, and he used it in a very specific and restricted sense: To refer to the machines that were used to produce mass-produced goods during the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century, the distinguishing characteristic of which was that such machines were owned by someone other than the people who operated them. Prior to industrialization (a more accurate term for which would be ‘automation’), workers typically owned their own tools — think blacksmith, weaver, carpenter, mason — so there was no separation between ‘labor’ and ‘the means of production’. That separation came about during industrialization, and one might with good reason say that the use of such automation is the defining characteristic of ‘industrialization’.

Here we get into a vocabulary problem. ‘Manufacture’ strictly means ‘making by hand’, but everybody has carried the term forward to refer to things that are made by automated processes as well, which confuses things. A better term for the latter would be artifacture, and I hereby invent that word to make the distinction clearer.

A Capitalist, for Marx, was the guy who provided the machines necessary for artifacture, and hired laborers to operate those machines. These laborers may or may not have been sufficiently skilled to make the product the Old Fashioned Way — somebody who ran a power loom would not necessarily be a skilled weaver (although he might be, coincidentally). To Marx, stuck in his Labor Theory of Value, the existence of a Capitalist, who would take the profit from production and give only part of it to the worker involved, was therefore screwing the worker out of the fruits of his labor. (Don’t get me started on the stupidity of the Labor Theory of Value.) Therefore, in Marxist terms, a Capitalist was a Bad Guy by definition, an ‘exploiter’ (Marxists love to use that word), and deserved any bad thing that happened to him, such as Communists stealing his property.

Unfortunately, since Marxists wield intellectual clout out of all proportion to their actual ideas, the term ‘capitalism’ has become the de facto standard way of referring to our modern industrialized economy. But even a moment’s reflection will reveal that artifacture, far from being an expression of a particular ideology, is merely a necessary stage on the road from small-scale production to industrialized mass production (indeed, artifacture is the very cornerstone of mass production), and has nothing to do with politics at all. Even the old Soviet system, where the ‘people’ (i.e. the government) owned the ‘means of production’ (the machine tools), was ‘capitalist’ in the Marxist sense, the difference being that the government, rather than individuals, were the Capitalists.

But this confusion also leads to ‘capitalism’ getting tied up with notions of private property and freedom of markets and so forth that, strictly speaking, have nothing to do with who owns the ‘means of production’. This confusion has even worked its way down to the Underclass. If you ever watch the movie WOODSTOCK, one of the announcements made from the stage during the event is to the effect that somebody out in the audience had his hamburger stand burn down and ‘if you don’t think that capitalism is all that weird, you might help the guy out and buy some of his hamburgers’ — whereas, in fact, a hamburger stand is the precise opposite of what a Marxist would call ‘capitalism’, because the ‘worker’ owns the tools he is using to produce the food. That’s the sort of confused modern situation we live in, and even respected academics who ought to know better use the term ‘capitalism’ where ‘automation’ or ‘industrialization’ would be more accurate. We live in an intellectually lazy time.

So the next time you hear somebody use the term ‘capitalism’, you can now explain to that ignorant dimwit why capitalism is a myth.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 12th, 2018 at 08:09 and is filed under Think about it.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.