Why I’m an American Anti-Capitalist
A Discourse on Political Economy & Returning to My American Heritage
I wear very few, if any, political labels, and generally think of myself entirely independent of political ideologies, thinking about the issues themselves as they crop up with an objective lens, rather than an imperative based upon party-lines and popularity contests, but one thing I can say is: I am an anti-capitalist. Capitalism is curious in the fact that so many people have so much blind faith in this system, yet, so few seem to understand what it is or why they believe in it so much. Most people have a vague notion that capitalism is pretty simple to understand, we make stuff, we buy stuff, we own stuff, we trade stuff, capitalism brings us our phones, capitalism secures our homes, capitalism gives us work, and capitalism provides us with an abundance of consumer goods so we never have to go without. I’d like to challenge all of these notions and suggest that capitalism does the exact opposite of all of these things. Capitalism arose against the classical and genius economic virtues of the day, economic virtues which were largely found in three very anti-capitalist thinkers, John Locke, Adam Smith, and Thomas Jefferson, all three of which I occasionally refer to as “The Original Marxists,” which, judging by their extant writings, they all very much were.
The other objection I get from people whenever I’m met with skepticism about my anti-capitalist stances is expressed in the question, “Well, what else is there?” I mean, after all, Communism failed, the U.S.S.R. collapsed under its own weight, thus, Marxism is dead, the antithesis destroyed, we can all celebrate now, right? Wrong. I’d like to address this claim first because I think it’s the most important, and I think that it’s easy for anyone to complain about large societal structures, it’s very difficult to propose solutions. Let’s discuss some alternatives to capitalism, starting with the lead figures from the economic systems that capitalism replaced. So what is capitalism, then?
Capitalism
Capitalism is, by my definition here, a system that emphasizes private ownership (as distinct from personal ownership) of property. Your car, your house, your bed, your pets, etc., are all not private property according to this definition, and, I’m pretty sure that every single economic system has featured people owning these things throughout the entirety of history.
What makes capitalism different, however, is that we’re able to legally own things we’ve never touched, never even seen, and never even used. Under capitalism, I could log into the internet tonight and buy a house on the other side of the country, post an ad in the classifieds, transfer the keys to the new tenant, and never even visit the place, yet, collect a monthly rent check from the tenant who lived there. This is private property.
Capitalism basically values the things that someone else can own and not use more than the things that we own and use. Ever feel like you’re nothing more than a number or commodity? Well, that’s because the system isn’t designed for us to labor, make our own way, and live comfortably at some point. Investors predate, banks foreclose, and companies own most of the property in America, leaving the individual out to dry. But it wasn’t always this way. Capitalism really came into existence in about 1830, when the roots of the Industrial Revolution were just getting firmly established and technological advances rapidly expanded productive capacity, not unlike the advent of agriculture, so that a select few individuals were capable of lording over the many.
Private property can’t be used by its owner, for instance, a factory that a single person or entity owns, there’s just no way that a single person or entity could use an entire factory, it would need help, and that help should come in the form of laborers who are also entitled to the ownership of the factory. This isn’t a new idea or some radical Socialist ploy, this is a very old idea that’s humble beginnings started with the English philosopher John Locke.
John Locke
Where does property come from? What gives us the right to own our property and not the right to steal the property of others? What gives property or commodities that we know and love value? Most importantly, what is property? Long before the American Revolution, one very important figure who’s been obscured by the towering popularity of the American Founding Fathers was a man who’s directly quoted in The Constitution of the United States, the 17th-century political philosopher John Locke.
Property, thought Locke, was given its value when a human being transformed the natural world into something that’s socially useful and desirable. A piece of wood is just a piece of wood with minimal value, at most, it can be burned, but that’s about it, it needs to be shaped, formed, widdled, or otherwise altered to become a table or perhaps a violin. It is through the effort of labor that a thing is embued with its social value and as such, the person who commits the act of labor and foresight necessary to plan and construct his commodity is the one who should have the rights to his creation. This makes sense to us on a very intuitive level, if I make something, it should belong to me. This is called The Labor Theory of Property, it claims that the person who thinks up and creates a thing is entitled to the right of that thing’s ownership.
Sentimentally, Locke felt that a person’s blood, sweat, and tears went into forging a violin and as such, there was an intangible part of that person that was quite literally transferred into the violin — it was his because it was his idea, his creation, and his labor which widdled it into existence. Just like a painting, there’s a part of the artist that’s transferred into every work of labor.
Capitalism deviated from this in suggesting that labor had nothing to do with the value of commodities, but rather, commodities themselves. Capitalism intentionally ignores the laborer and places all of the focus on the commodity itself. We see the outgrowth of this is two bizarre ways. The first of which is the mistaken notion that under capitalism the cost of production influences the price of a good. “If it costs more to produce,” we reason, “then it should make sense that the price goes up.” This is natural and understandable for us to intuit, but it’s not the way that capitalism works. Capitalism has detached the cost (and labor) involved in making something and claimed that supply and demand should set market prices, not the cost of production. This is how profit comes into existence (the extraction of surplus value). This is why a heavily processed soda often costs less than a bottle of the same water used to make the soda, much to our dismay, and a salad often costs much more than a hamburger with the works. We know that it costs much more money to raise a cow, slaughter it, package it, and serve it as a hamburger than it does the vegetables, but we never really delve into why, and the reason is because capitalism actually insists that the retail price of goods should not be reflective of the cost of production. This could be seen as a fundamental law of capitalism.
Under capitalism, eating healthy costs money and it costs money because there’s a demand for people to be healthy, which means being healthy is going to always cost a premium.
Capitalism also assumes, against John Locke’s better sensibilities, that there will always be a massive group of people to basically enslave and force to work for next to nothing in order to make the commodities we consume. In America, once upon a time, it was the slaves of African Americans, and once this kept on until the 1970s after the 1960s brought equal rights and eliminated Jim Crow laws, when the big shift then took place to China, India, and other developing nations without any labor laws whatsoever. I think most Americans dislike the fact that children work for bare-bones subsistence so that we can enjoy luxurious things like iPhones, but I’m here to say, as John Locke said several hundred years ago, that this system isn’t necessary.
Every single day, people in the United States and other countries go to work as John Locke rolls in his grave, putting forth tremendous effort to create products that ultimately their bosses and companies will own. They basically pay, with the profits from the things they create, to rent the equipment necessary to create whatever it is they create. An American goes to work and makes violins for a large violin company all day, they might create 10 violins per day, costing their employer $100 for their labor, while the company turns around and might sell those same violins for $100 each, even if it only cost them $10 each to make. The $90 difference, according to Locke (and later Marx) should belong to the laborer, not the company, but under capitalism, that $90 difference is charged for the rent of the space and equipment used, a problem that wouldn’t exist if everyone had their own land and access to equipment. More on this later….
Adam Smith
Much of the work of Adam Smith would be later augmented into the work of Karl Marx, as was John Locke, and the Labor Theory of Value was no exception (not to be confused with the Labor Theory of Property of John Locke), which held that the price of a commodity should reflect the amount of socially valuable labor required to bring it into existence. Capitalism, as we know, detached the idea of price from the idea of labor, and Marx, writing long after Smith and Locke, basically drew upon these old ideas and applied them to what he saw as a bastardization of the hard-won economic theories.
It’s no surprise that capitalism grew up largely in the United States and Europe, two continents with an abundance of slave labor to take for granted, and two continents which still have an abundance of slave-labor to take for granted. Imagine for a second that we had to return to the old system of harvesting our own food, building our own commodities, and trading each on the open market for the things we need…how much would our lives change? How much would our lives change if the trade war with China heated up to the point where they outright refused to sell us goods anymore? While you might be thinking that the price of the everyday things we buy and use would go up, since, after all, American labor is more expensive than Chinese labor, this actually isn’t the case — because the difference between American labor and Chinese labor in terms of input costs which go to the creation of a commodity isn’t reflected in the price the consumer sees when we make purchases — no, that’s taken off of the top by the profiteers who retail the commodities we buy. I remember working for Express for a short period of time, a company that allowed its employees to see the cost of creation of their goods before they were sold, so we would know how much we could discount a product before losing money for the company. At the time, in 2007, the Express Producer slacks for men cost the company a little over a cent to make, according to the computer and they were sold to the consumer for about $100.
This is what Adam Smith took issue with, the detaching of labor from prices is not only dishonest, but it makes a wholly artificial economy where the price of a thing is only viewed through a relative lens of the other prices of other things. At this point, much of what we use in the American and European economies could be produced and purchased for much, much cheaper, but that isn’t good for the big business interests who’ve used low prices and marketplace dominance to stifle competition.
Thomas Jefferson
I’ll add Thomas Paine, the other founding father of the United States, as a man who deserves an honorable mention, here, as the two men both envisioned a world quite unlike their own and quite unlike the one we inhabit today. Thomas Paine supported a Universal Basic Income, namely in the form of a piece of land that a person would be granted so they could always be guaranteed to never have to turn to banks, they could grow their own crops, and live completely free from the hustle and bustle of society should they so choose to — how many people I know would like this sort of life today.
Jefferson was a bit more radical, taking his great admiration for the Native Americans who had lived in the United States before the Europeans arrived, Jefferson proposed that we treat land like they did, as land which was a part of the commons, a public good available to whoever might tend to it, nurture it, and use it to create food, shelter, and other commodities. Capitalism values private property, something Locke explicitly stated he was against when he suggested in his Labor Theory of Property, that simply putting a fence around a piece of land doesn’t constitute laboring the land and thus didn’t entitle one to ownership. Jefferson agreed, as did Paine.
Jefferson even expressly stated that the point when the land of the United States can no longer be labored by the constituent People who live here, when we can’t just go out onto our property or into nature and start creating violins, a revolution was not only preferable but entirely justified. Jefferson claimed that so long as people in the United States couldn’t find work, any amount of them, and so, too, couldn’t support themselves by living off the land, everything the United States had been established to promote — namely liberty — had been lost. We’re there.
Capitalism doesn’t really address this without resorting back to a sort of slavery argument that employment is good because, well, without it, everyone would be unemployed. We hear this every time someone calls big corporations “job creators” even though we all know this isn’t true because the social need and socially valuable labor (like Smith discussed) would both still exist without massive corporations to pay the people to do the things that the other people need. It’s basically a big sham.
Like David Harvey once said:
“At times of crisis, the irrationality of capitalism becomes plain for all to see. Surplus capital and surplus labour exist side by side with seemingly no way to put them back together in the midst of immense human suffering and unmet needs. In midsummer of 2009, one-third of the capital equipment in the United States stood idle, while some 17 percent of the workforce were either unemployed, enforced part-timers or ‘discouraged’ workers. What could be more irrational than that?”
Jefferson sought the cure for this long, long ago, by demanding that everyone have the ability to labor, earn their keep, be left alone, and produce socially valuable goods. Capitalism further prevents this from happening by forcing small-time producers like this to compete with big businesses such as Walmart which can easily either buy those small businesses up or compete them out of the market using economies of scale. If I’m a small violin shop, I need to sell at least 10 violins a day to support myself, at $100 each, but seeing as a large chain like Walmart might sell 1,000 per day at all of its locations, it’s able to mark those violins down to $30 and push me out of the market. All of this would be resolved, of course, if labor was determinant of both the right to property and the price of it. In short, if Walmart didn’t actually produce anything with its own two hands (what hands?) it wouldn’t own anything.
Supply and Demand
Supply and demand is basically the crux of the capitalist system, or so the story goes, that capitalism works by making supply meet demand, always invigorating the supply chain with fresh new products and services achieved through competition, forever lowering prices so that things are plentiful and affordable. Nothing could be further from the truth.
First, I’ll start with supply and demand and say that capitalism is the worst system possible for supply to meet demand. This is the case because under capitalism there is no adequate measure of demand. What reflects demand, under capitalism? Nothing, nothing at all. You might be thinking that money reflects demand, a demand being a need for something, but it doesn’t at all: homeless people have a need for a house, they just have no money to buy one. What money represents under capitalism is purchasing power, an idea which is wholly inconsistent with the idea of demand. This becomes obvious when we look around at all of the vacant houses and pass by a homeless person asking for change on the streets every single day.
There are six vacant homes for every single homeless person in the United States. Six. This is because the goal of capitalism is never to deliver commodities into the hands of people who want, need, or can best use them, it’s simply to deliver commodities into the hands of people who can most afford them. This is evidenced by the fact that in 2016, 76% of all vacant homes in America are owned by investors, not homeowners. Who are these investors? The banks, mostly, as well as some property companies. The thing is, we’ve allowed capitalism to play long enough that fictional institutions, large, publicly-traded corporations, are significantly wealthier than almost all human individuals. And, thanks to capitalism’s insistence on competition, we individuals have to compete, be it in our vocations or with our purchasing power, up to and including our votes, with these massive corporations. We’re horribly outgunned, bringing a slingshot to a war zone.
Meanwhile, the competition only purges human individuals from the market and augments smaller, new, and fresh companies into the larger conglomerates, and it will always continue to do so. When profitability is no longer an individual venture, profitability becomes increasingly difficult, as massive companies who’ve contributed to a tremendous amount of social good have recently realized, with Uber completely falling short of making any profits and Twitter barely squeaking by with a little bit of profit for one quarter in 2019, one time in it’s nearly-14-years in existence. The consolidation vacuum never ceases, because when private property is the focal point of an economy, everything else is laid to waste.
We the People don’t matter, our property does. The State becomes little more than the enforcement arm of private property rights. Housing ends up unused and sectioned off by big banks, as to commercial properties which we can see vacant on the corner of every road we drive down if we’re careful to note the downfall of the shopping mall, the shopping center, and other brick-and-mortar locations, all the while Amazon receives HALF of every retail dollar spent on the internet — one company. Consolidation is the name of the game.
Conclusion
These may serve as a basis for the fundamental tenets of anti-capitalism, though they’re by no means complete. For further reading, I suggest the works of David Harvey, such as A Companion to Marx’s Capital: The Complete Guide and Marx, Capital, and the Madness of Economic Reason. Both are available through the links provided on Amazon. If we continue down this path of the delusion of infinite growth, money detached from material commodities, consolidation, and isolation, I fear that our world will get a lot more expensive very, very quickly — if we want to pretend we support supply and demand as a fundamental economic precept, we must also realize that this means that the ensuing disasters of climate change, peak oil, and other instances of natural-resource-burn-out will likely bring about serious destruction. It’s imperative that we adopt new economic models to ensure the future of our survival, and that starts with at least being able to understand and consider them. That’s the intention of the aforementioned work.
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