PART ONE

If you’ve kept up with these radical ramblings for these past few weeks, you may have incorrectly arrived at the conclusion that my sole purpose in life is to dismantle the capitalist system like some kind of idiot child who missed the moral at the end of Aesop’s “Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky do Marx.”  

Let me be abundantly clear:  I am not here to tell you (or anyone else) that they cannot be capitalists.  I’m here to tell you that this isn’t capitalism.  

Alright, boys and girls, who can tell me where capitalism comes from?

And it isn’t when a mommy businessman and a daddy businessman hate each other very much and start rival businesses.  

The idea is (arguably) the brainchild of Adam Smith, who wrote, “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations” in 1776.  Perhaps it’s unsurprising, given the portentous year, that the new American Experiment would become enamored with the Scottish thinker who could rightly be called the precursor to all academic thought on the topic of economics.  The prevailing economic theories of his time were manifestly bad for human beings.  The first was Mercantilism, borne of the medieval guilds of tradesmen and dragged awkwardly into the era of the Enlightenment by wealth that was difficult to displace.  The other was the theory of “God’s Will” driving the distribution of that wealth.  While the second point is easier to dispute without deep thought, the former merits further clarification.  Mercantilism is the end result of the market unduly influencing the various columns of the estate.  More expansively (and courtesy of Wikimedia’s permissive use policies):

“Mercantilism is a nationalist economic policy that is designed to maximize the exports and minimize the imports for an economy. In other words, it seeks to maximize the accumulation of resources within the country and use those resources for one-sided trade.

The policy aims to reduce a possible current account deficit or reach a current account surplus, and it includes measures aimed at accumulating monetary reserves by a positive balance of trade, especially of finished goods. Historically, such policies might have contributed to war and motivated colonial expansion. Mercantilist theory varies in sophistication from one writer to another and has evolved over time.

Mercantilism promotes government regulation of a nation’s economy for the purpose of augmenting and bolstering state power at the expense of rival national powers.”

Most proud capitalists would beat their chests with pride to read that they proudly represent a modern system dedicated to dismantling these horrible government overreaches.  I’d be right there with you.  As a matter of fact, I am.  I’m actively upset by our modern economic policy which is the most mercantilist of any developed nation and which has supplanted “God’s Will” with a lazy mutant offspring of Social Darwinism as its backbone.  

Adam Smith’s positions can be aligned loosely around five “poles.”  These are the areas of the prevailing mercantilism which he believed to be most in need of correction.  They are:

1. Economic inefficiency of mercantilism: Smith criticized the prevailing economic system of mercantilism, which emphasized state control, trade restrictions, and the accumulation of gold and silver. He argued that this system led to inefficiencies and hindered economic growth.
2. Limited understanding of market dynamics: Before Smith, there was a lack of comprehensive understanding of how markets operate. Smith sought to explain how individuals acting in their own self-interest could lead to overall economic benefits for society.
3. Role of government intervention: Smith questioned the necessity and effectiveness of extensive government intervention in the economy. He argued that the “invisible hand” of the market, driven by self-interest and competition, could regulate the economy more efficiently than government policies.
4. Division of labor and specialization: Smith recognized the importance of the division of labor and specialization in increasing productivity and economic growth. He used this concept to support his argument for free trade and the benefits of larger markets.
5. Free trade and international commerce: Smith advocated for free trade and the reduction of trade barriers between nations. He believed that free trade would lead to increased competition, lower prices, and greater economic prosperity for all countries involved.

Consequently, every supposed capitalist picks one or two of these talking points from a grab bag and warps their intention until they can justify the Starbucks they’re putting next to the other Starbucks, across from the Panera, down the street from Caribou Coffee.  An as-yet unmentioned and fundamental aspect of Smith’s thinking, which I’ve left out now for dramatic effect–and I welcome you to gasp audibly–is that the role of the government is to establish the equal playing field necessary for a market to be “free.”  

I don’t know if you knew this, but it’s nearly impossible to win a race when you’re asked to start half-a-lap behind everyone else.  There are edge cases to refute this thinking.  Usain Bolt, in his peak, maybe.  However, the sheer reality is that second and third place would be unduly enriched to the point that everyone’s competition is invalidated.  Apply that same logic to the last spoiled, nepo-brat you chatted with and tell me if you feel like the market is actually “free.”

But I’m getting ahead of myself.  Let’s jump back to where this capitalist train got knocked askew and plowed into the basic premise of human decency with all the insight of a mole optometrist.  

For reasons other than a jingoistic American perspective, 1776 was something of a major year for the globe.  From the dawn of the Age of Exploration until then, human beings had been undertaking a policy of colonial imperialism that breached the surly bonds of morality and snowballed rapidly into extractionist resource management and the advent of the chattel slavery system.  Now there was a country to embody that gross ethos for them.  By engaging with the USA, countries all over the world could now hold onto their cake and eat yours.  For the next nearly 100 years, the developed world had absolutely no qualms about either–in no small part due to the fact that the boots-on-the-ground beneficiaries in the Western World had little cause to question from where their newfound luxuries had come.  The period between the French Revolution and the American Civil War was famous for many things, but the advent of critical journalism as the fourth estate is perhaps the most enduring.  As writers turned their attention to the pernicious evils endemic to this misappropriation of Smith’s work, the public became less willing to engage in the system.  To combat that, some genuinely vile thinkers turned to the also-new scientific discoveries of one Charles Darwin to suggest that whereas “God” had given them their wealth, historically, it was now being delivered to them because the “heathens” from whom wealth was being stolen were “inferior.”  

Can you imagine a more winning strategy than telling people they deserve things because they are intrinsically better than someone else?  Nothing you or God could ever do would change the fact that, “some people are slaves because they can’t be anything else.”  Creating a “chosen people” is a fundamental fascist practice.  In that case, it’s often nationalism.  In America’s case, it was something even further removed from reality.  Instead of the already-nebulous concept of borderlines, we began to rank and score people based upon the accrual of fiat currency.  There was now a physical scrip the oligarchs above us could dole out to show which people were chosen and which people were not.  It’s unsurprising that most of these benefits only ever extended to people who looked and felt like those in power, already.  

The first time a human being was imported to the New World as property, we moved one step further away from the Free Market of Smith’s devising.  The natural flow of resources and specialization had been staunched by several thousand wealthy, white, landed gentry-men.  The market was approximately as free as the US Population in 1860, where both Mississippi and South Carolina had enslaved populations making up more than half of the total population.  55.2% and 57.2%, respectively, if you were curious.  

So, I’m sure the freeing of the slaves probably fixed that, though, right?  Since 1900, at least, we’ve been living in the free market, right?  

Wrong-O.  

We still had several issues to work out.  You may have heard of them:  Child Labor, unequal suffrage, the general disenfranchisement of women, and the continued accrual of most wealth in the hands of who used to be the slave-holding elite (who were not punished severely enough during the Reconstruction era) and burgeoning Northern industrial dynasties.  Furthermore, when the slave labor dried up, we took to the habit of calling for the “tired, the poor, the huddled masses” so they could be indentured as wage slaves and maligned by the emergent KKK, who took their faux-Darwinist exceptionalism to a fundamentally untenable extreme.  What wasn’t cheap immigrant labor was made up of sharecroppers and badly provided-for freedmen who took whatever unequal contractual terms they could get.  

Part and parcel of the corporate monstrosity is the capacity for infinite rebranding.  The emperor only has to be naked for a second before he’s, “empowering the human body by demonstration” and then suddenly a shadily-funded congressional edict comes down demanding everyone take off their clothes.  

The voices that needed change were so effectively quashed as to make the zeitgeist of the moment gilded.  A thin foil of something luminous around a rotten core of toxic, radioactive shit.  The accelerating snowball of oppression was reaching critical mass.  The great pyramid scheme had been perfected, and the creation of another marginally costless workforce was the only way to keep it going.  I’ve talked about that before, and won’t bore you again with the details, now (read the earlier post “Dawn of the Digital Plantation” for more on that).  Somehow, in the intervening hundred-plus years, we managed to repaint and rebrand the same kind of injustice over and over until we became numb to the torment.  

The original description of this economic system was called what? 

“Trickle down economics!”

Incorrect.  That’s some Hoover-and-Reaganomics rebranding; part of one of the most effective propaganda campaigns in the modern era.  They didn’t elect a president, they cast one from the backlots of middling Westerns.  The power of calling someone a “welfare queen” is amplified ten-million-fold when a handsome cowboy ‘awh-shucks’ his way through it.  Back to the original point, muckraking (read: noble & justified) journalists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries called this economic system “Oat-and-Sparrow” economics.  Why is that?  Well, if you feed all of your oats to a horse, he’s unlikely to digest all that insoluble fiber.  I’m sure he’ll leave some behind in scat piles for the sparrows to pick at.  

Are you satisfied with your life picking through Musk and Bezos’ shit for the oats to feed your family?  How about with your stagnant wages and growing tax and interest burdens?  Does it bother you to experience both while multinational corporations receive massive subsidies, government bailouts, and whose executives are collectively responsible for $160 billion dollars in annual tax delinquency?  

Capitalism, in Smith’s original postulation, is not presented as a panacea.  Human incapacity for nuance turned, “this is a nice way to get more things for less money,” into, “why don’t we decide who eats and who doesn’t this way?”  Capitalism is not God.  It isn’t even a little-g god.  It only solves the issue of non-essential resource allocation.  It does not exist in a vacuum or in a position superior to moral reasoning.  As a matter of fact, Smith lays out some pretty simple parameters to the contrary.  While he did advocate for a laissez-faire approach in the sense of limited government intervention in the workings of the market, he also recognized the importance of certain government actions in creating a level playing field.

In “The Wealth of Nations,” (and again–the text that BIRTHED CAPITALISM) Smith argued that the government had a responsibility to provide certain public goods and services, such as education, infrastructure, and a legal system that enforces contracts and property rights. These provisions were seen as necessary to ensure that individuals could participate in the market on a more equal footing.  Almost as if a free market can only exist in a fundamentally free society.  Voluntary association is the foremost tentpole of Smith’s original reckoning and, much like the early church abandoning the individualistic bent of the Gnostic texts, the parts of the ethos which empowered all people were neutered and discarded.  

However, it’s important to note that Smith’s views on equality were shaped by the context of his time. I don’t want to provide the illusion that any great thinker should be considered a proud icon solely by virtue of his critical thinking skills.  Good ideas do not always translate to good men, generally.  For instance, among the great thinkers responsible for what little actual freedom there is in the Western World, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract is a boon to all mankind; his running, bare-assed in the street at women in hopes of an errant spank was not (look it up).  You are not required to be a paragon of virtue to be virtuous.  We are all an amalgam of the society which spawns us, and it’s hard to recognize that without the benefit of hindsight.  Judge not, lest ye be judged.  Going back beyond Smith himself, and regardless of anything else he ever did, his work’s primary focus was on removing artificial barriers to economic participation, such as monopolies and trade restrictions, which he saw as benefiting a select few at the expense of the general population. He believed that by removing these barriers and promoting free competition, individuals would have greater opportunities to improve their economic standing.  Full stop.

Which part of that sounds like the economy you live in?  

Social mobility is a myth perpetuated by the oligarchs who consume our lives as an excuse for when they find another unindicted co-conspirator to elevate to their parasitic equal.  Wealth is still distributed pursuant to “God’s Will,” we’ve merely traded in our gods for shitty, little, middle-aged men and their insulating field of cronies and bought politicians.  We let the wolf in sheep’s clothing pilfer the larder and run off with the flock.  He lends them back to us at a premium that increases annually for no reason at all.  At which point does human life become the commodity being traded back and forth in these shadowy backroom handshakes?  How many scores of human beings were entirely cut out of the economic picture during greased palm passing on board the Lolita Express?  This kind of wilful corruption is also evident in the increasing government-sponsored monopolization of key industries and services.

Name a search engine you used today that wasn’t Google.  Did you order something from anything *other* than Amazon, lately?  How about that really great array of affordable electric cars you have to pick from?  

The human capability to rationalize our own bad actions is almost impressive in its capacity to absolve oneself of wrongdoing.  Our willingness to rationalize the bad actions of others is a preposterous evolution of that concept.  It’s time we stopped justifying bad actors for the promise of eventual progress.  The ‘progress’ they promise is wildly unequal and it’s high time we stop supporting nefarious regimes out of complacency.  As much as I hate the reductio-ad-Nazism trend in modern rhetoric, it’s hard to pick a better illustration than the road to Bergen-Belsen being paved by apathy to injustice which does not impact you directly–at least not today.  The general trend in history is that if you do not stand up for others, there will be no one left to stand up for you when the spotlight of kleptocracy finally deigns to cross your path.  

So when you look at a political candidate, supposedly the face of capitalism, and you see that he received 100% of his fortune via inheritance and has made nothing of it–raise your eyebrows.  When the “strongest economy on Earth” is propped up with insane tariffs and anticompetitive practices, alongside a long track record of war profiteering as a national pastime–raise your eyebrows.  When campaign donations are undisclosed and unlimited–raise your eyebrows.  

Most of the things you supposed-capitalists are asking for would be the death of the free market and of what modicum of freedom and social mobility to the refusal of mercantilism allowed us, once upon a time.  

It’s time we reclaim our own economy, which is of and by the people, to be for them once again.  We’ve built empires solely with the power of outsourcing our externalities.  Whether by extracting resources elsewhere or by diminishing the populace of another place to create a marginally-cost-free workforce, we have made sure the only thing in our backyard is the above ground pool and truck on blocks. 

I ask you to resist that impulse; to consider the miseries endemic to the trappings of pitiful luxury that have trickled down to you as a pale, cheap imitation of something for your “betters.”  To build a functional democracy, we have to build it back in that neglected backyard.  Competition between equals takes place at a local level, removed from the concept of multinational chains and unchallenged mergers and acquisitions.  The individual is not supposed to be a data point amid millions; the individual is meant to be the primary unit of society in a civilization structured from the ground up, as a collection of independently operable and sustainable cells.  

Until the eventual catastrophic reckoning (whatever it is; I’m betting climate change), all you can do is start small.  Pay attention to your local elections.  Get to know the difference between a right and a responsibility.  Take on the latter to acquire the former.  Stop shopping big box until the government offers the same subsidies the big boys get to your mom and pop shop.  Resist the ongoing urge to grow infinitely and grow intimately, in a way that empowers the world immediately around you.  If everyone’s backyard is in order, purview entirely to their efforts and their efforts alone, the entire world becomes a quilt of beautiful squares.  

From Hell,

–The Strangest