Robinhood and the Dark Cave of Capitalism
Earlier in 2021, which could be late in the pandemic if you live in a rich country, or very early in the pandemic if you live in a poor country, armchair market traders were up in their armchairs over the perceived injustice of the trading app Robinhood. In short the app, which promised to “democratize” stock trading, hence its “take from the rich to give to the poor” name, instead barred the poor from doing anything to capitalize on the frenzy surrounding the stock for erstwhile mall-rat videogame store GameStop. Setting aside for a moment the irony that we must employ “democratization” to allow people to make money in an ostensibly free economy, this strange cultural blip tells us much more about what capitalism hides from us than what it shows us about ourselves.
In an economically-unequal society as riven by poverty as the United States, all rational incentives created by capitalism are pointed toward making money in non-traditional jobs while at the same time working traditional jobs. The stock market is supposed to be one place that anyone can enter the capitalist system and start to benefit from it. The reality is that the vast majority of people own no stock and never will. The stock market, like all other forms of capitalist speculation, benefits capitalists. Products like Robinhood are marketed to people with little disposable income, in an effort to separate them from their money with the promise of making money without doing any actual work. The other word for making money this way is gambling, which of course proponents of the stock market like to pretend is not what they are backing.
What are we not seeing? We aren’t seeing a society that is equitable as a baseline, one that does not require people to search constantly for “side hustles” and other ways of making money simply to make ends meet. What a culture steeped in capitalism does is create the need for frenzies around products like Robinhood while hoping that nobody will ever stop for a moment to ask, “Why do we live like this?” If basic needs were provided to all of us, as a result of the basic work that the vast, vast majority of people do in fact perform (despite the hysteric protestations of conservative market defenders) there would be scarcely any desire for the endless pursuit of money on the side. Imagine if you did not need side money; how would the priorities in your life change?
The GameStop frenzy itself was created by “little guys” trying to find a way in the market that they could profit. What they found was not a loophole or a bug, it was simply something that big capitalists had not considered because they in fact designed the stock market to exclude “little guys” all along. When it became clear that the artificial inflation of GameStop’s value would continue, cooler heads quickly stepped in to put a stop to the fun and protect the interests of capitalism. For the moment, GameStop had just as much “value” as any other stock, which all are imaginary reflections of what capitalists talking to one another deem to be real. But the sad reality of living with our capitalist blinders on is that the entire hierarchy, from top capitalist to tiny micro investor, wouldn’t have much value at all in a society that provided a basic standard of living to its people. Until we venture outside of the cave, we will never know that anything else exists. The next time a Robinhood moment comes along, let us hope that there are in fact many more people outside, shouting to be heard and anxious to lead into the light.
