There is No Such Thing As:
CAPITALISM
There is no such things as Capitalism. Though now embraced by a variety of interest groups from libertarian free-marketeers to neo-liberal charlatans, the word is—at its root—a caricature of economic laws and descriptive market principles. It does not take much effort to unearth this reality. All one must do is consider the root concept, capital, and notice that its borders were drawn by men with broad and shallow vision.
Definitions
So, what is capital?
It depends on who you ask. Modern, western notions of capital include any goods or wealth which are in turn invested to return a profit—viz, wealth used to produce more wealth. However, if you ask a Marxist (or some other form of socialist), capital is specifically currency used for the generation of further wealth and not used to acquire consumable goods—viz, money invested in business as opposed to money spent for personal use (Marxist.org).
If the reader has scruples about either of these definitions, good. Neither have any basis in realty, because neither possesses limiting principles which prevent their definitions from exploding.
For those who are unfamiliar, philosophical explosion occurs when a definition incorporates too many concepts or elements to any longer serve its function. It explodes, in that sense, like an over-inflated balloon. Most atrociously, this occurs when a definition incorporates its own opposite, creating a term in contradiction with itself—negating itself and imploding under its own weight.
How is capital vulnerable to such explosion?
Both definitions are built upon the concept of wealth. Whether wealth be defined as only money or by also including tangible goods of value, wealth is a weak point which itself is vulnerable to expansion—though perhaps not explosion and collapse. To reach this conclusion, all one must do is keep digging (the secret method of self-deceiver is to stop his thoughts early—short and narrow vision).
But what is wealth really? If it is money, then that begs the question, “What is money?” Rather than appeal to some authority, it is more objective to observe the function of money to understand what it is; and it is a medium and means of tracking exchanges of value while simultaneously circumventing entropy (the fact that goods often perish over time). That is to say that money is not merely symbolic. We value it because of its function, a function predicated on the objective fact of our subjective valuation of perishable goods and services.
From the prior observation, it becomes apparent that the Marxist definition actually contains the common western definition if we are honest about what money and therefore wealth is. And what are they both? Literally, anything of value which can be invested in to produce more value.
And now the explosion becomes apparent. For there is no reason to stop at money, nor land, nor private property. The truth is that wealth as a concept runs all the way down to a person’s body and mind. Examples are easy. If a man is a model or an athlete, then his body is his means of making a profit. Any money or bodily effort spent investing in his health and physique are reinvestments in his means of generating further wealth—are reinvestments in his capital. The same can be said of an author or professor. When he spends money or time on books or journal subscriptions to further his education, he is increasing his mind’s ability to be used to generate income for himself. His mind is his own capital. Even something as intangible as reputation functions in this way. Investment in one’s reputation can and often is investment in one’s ability to generate more wealth for oneself, even if that isn’t the person’s primary interest.
The Fallacy of False Systems
—ism’s are, more often than not, Towers of Babel. They are imagined constructs with no grounding in reality, no basis, nothing real beyond out subjective preconceptions. Such is the case with capitalism. As a cursory investigation reveals, all from the comfort of an armchair, capital refers to literally anything which can be used to produce a profit for the person or group investing it. That means that anything and everything can be or is already capital. The definition includes so many concepts that it doesn’t point to any one thing in particular. That makes it useless and therefore defunct.
So what is being referred to when one utters the word capitalism? No system, surely, for no society nor social structure is necessary for a hunter to invest his time and energy crafting a spear or bow. What is being referred to then, is something which applies to man even in the Liberal Enlightenment’s false historical conception of the State of Nature: and that is mankind’s innate ability to dispose with his mind and labor as his volition wishes so long as this does not violate the volition of another man.
This makes capitalism synonymous with any manifestation of a free-market, that being any collection of trading or exchanging between individuals or groups in which their natural rights are not infringed. That is to say that when there is no system of violence or coercion, when men come together and abide by the laws of nature and reason, a market is free; people are able to buy and sell property or labor (a product of self-ownership) with either the desire to indulge in consumable luxury goods, or to directly reinvest to achieve greater monetary profits—though, remembering our athlete, it can be said that the line between reinvestment and consumption is tenuous at best.
So we see, the words capitalism and capital add nothing to the conversation. They are not tools of the honest man but are instead levers for those who require leverage to makes themselves equal in power to those who are more competent than themselves. They are hexes and curses as part of the word sorcerer’s arsenal to bewitch the babble-mooks into gibbering noises which imbue them with a sense of virtue.
Capitalism is, in truth, a pejorative which lies about the nature of free-markets. When uttered, the charlatan relies on the listener’s assumption that the participants in the market are not trading of their own volition. The liar requires those listening to assume cronyism and exploitation—the former’s presence disqualifying a market from being free, and the latter concept being both ill-defined and misplaced.
A necessary aside on exploitation: the word evokes in the common man images of conmen, liars and cheats; but the word sorcerer will include any unbalanced power relation in any trade—a presumption here is made that power equity is possible; it’s not. Any interaction will include numerous uneven variables the significance of which are inconsistent and incalculable—e.g. a boss might hold the power to fire an employee, but the employee likewise has power to quit, the power to convince others to go on strike, the ability to besmirch his employers reputation, the ability to start up a competitive enterprise, the ability to relocate and copy his employer’s business model, the ability to become an indispensable contributor to the business model and thereby demand increased wages or responsibility, etc..
Which party has more or less power depends on the situation, which is constantly changing and at least slightly different in each case. There are no firm grounds to describe power imbalance as exploitative unless one introduces violations of one party’s natural rights. Any other reasoning misplaces the blame—even in such cases as starvation and healthcare, for food and medicine are not rights given to man by his nature; they are acquisitions, contingencies and necessities of life, but they are not rights (see essay, “There is No Such Thing as: Civil Rights”).
Redundancy or Deception: Mooks or Charlatans
In most cases, the misnomer capitalism is a noise grunted by members of the herd who like to hear themselves mimicking the noises of those occupying positions of institutional prestige. It is a signal of team membership and / or a pretense of comprehension (or both). In other cases, the use of the word capitalism is the deliberate manipulation of language by latent tyrants who wish to disguise their impotent authoritarian impulse even from themselves.
Of course, and as mentioned, the word has been embraced as synonymous with free-markets. In that sense, capitalism has been reclaimed, though its reclamation does not undo its power over a population of mooks. It would be best for the word to fall out of favor across the English-speaking world; however, it is unlikely that is going to happen. The best that can be hoped for is that those literate enough to read this essay take note when the word rears its ugly head—that they know to look out for imminent babble-mookery or else the subtle deceptions of a real world word sorcerer.