The (Dark) Origins of Capitalism
It's not the fairy tale we're all told
Hello readers,
Let’s take a step back from our daily lives and question something that all of us seem to have taken for granted: the system of capitalism and our relentless drive for growth.
What do we want at our jobs? Growth. What do we want from our investments? Growth. What do we want with the size of our wardrobes and the brag value of our houses? You get it.
Growth has come to dominate all aspects of our lives. But it’s not just ‘growth’ that we’re after.
We want perpetual growth. Endless growth. And therein lies the entire problem.
Where did this never-ending drive for growth come from? Is it really ‘natural’ and something that is borne out of human selfishness and greed? Not really.
To understand how this idea came along, we need to rewind the clock and go back to the hairy days of European feudalism. Or its aftermath, rather.
In a nutshell, feudalism was an oppressive system in which landholders dominated peasants, extracted a world full of taxes, and left very little for them. Soon, the peasants rose up in rebellion and overthrew the system, ushering in an era of egalitarian growth, higher equality and much better ecological balance.
It was quite an idealistic picture- peasants worked only as much as they needed to, had better incomes and even celebrated a lot of holidays. There was nobody to lord over them and they had some dignity and work-life balance for a change. Good enough to make us moderns kinda jealous, to be honest.
While the farmers were having a gala time, it totally pissed those elites off. Their entire wealth was built by exploiting these peasants and profiting from their back-breaking labor. Something had to be done to get these ‘lazy’ folks back and get them to work their bones off.
So in a convenient marriage, the nobles bandied with the merchant class and the church to initiate a violent takeover of all the lands that were being used by these farmers for subsistence. It was a dark episode in the history of Europe- with endless massacres, takeovers and peasants totally getting knocked out of the land that they had been using in a perfectly fair and judicious manner.
This move, known as ‘Enclosure’, sought to completely privatize all public lands with brutal force, purely to the benefit of the elites. Shocked into submission, the peasants had no option but to flee to the cities in search of work- where they became cheap fodder for the booming factories that were springing up right as the Industrial Revolution was taking off.
This is how the long arc of our capitalist movement began. With enclosures, with violent privatizations of subsitence lands that provided for the bulk of the people in an environment-friendly way. The enclosure movement was a great ‘fix’.
One must understand the underlying logic here. Using mass displacement and organised murder, the elites created artificial scarcity. There was enough land, there were enough resources and people could use all of it while staying well within their ecological limits. By violently usurping the land and restricting access, scarcity was manufactured- so people could then be made to work harder for lesser wages just to survive as they contributed to the eye-watering profits that a few rich people hoarded.
What began then was the drive to accumulate capital endlessly. It’s important to understand the fact that capital is not the end itself in this system but merely the means. “But the means to what?” you may ask. The answer is more capital.
Money only acts as an input into a process that generates more money, and the cycle repeats ad infinitum. A commodity may either be evaluated for its use-value or exchange value. Without getting into the philosophical tangles, let’s just understand it this way- use-value is when you use, say, a glass of water to quench your thirst- so the water was 'used’ to achieve a certain end. Exchange-value looks at a commodity in terms of the value it can provide- the quantitative aspect- if it’s exchanged for something else (like money).
Now, in the capitalist system, the entire point is to merely focus on the exchange value of things so one can sell them to turn a profit. When this logic turns into an endless loop, one quickly sees that it is a system designed to make all actors chase nothing but constantly growing profits. Capital can never sit still in such an arrangement- it has to be redeployed to generate an even greater profit and the cycle has to repeat itself over and over again, regardless of any other non-economic considerations. Like lives, livelihoods, happiness and much of everything else that’s key to human flourishing.
And herein lies the crux of the problem. Without really questioning if we really need this endless growth in profits, we have taken this idea for granted and let it run roughshod over the entire planet.
Just as enclosures were a ‘fix’ for the falling returns, there are several other disastrous things that followed.
Need a bigger market and/or cheaper labor? Just colonise other countries and begin slavery & indentured labor.
Need more resources from the forests? Just lobby against environmental acts and overturn them.
Need to reduce costs to boost earnings? Just get the minimum wage act removed.
The problem with this is that our endless drive for growth has led to disgusting consequences for everyone but a select set of people- much like the Feudal Ages.
Billions live in poverty and hunger. Countless animals are tortured and slaughtered. Oceans are ransacked and plundered. Forests are mowed down with disastrous ecological consequences. Workers are exploited and lead lives of stress and anxiety (and often even debt slavery).
All of this madness just because we need to grow profits.
The entire problem with this system is that all of these massive costs to the planet are not on the capitalist’s balance sheet. These costs are always externalised and are borne by exploited workers, unfortunate humans, trees, innocent animals.
Lives are reduced to commodities whose only purpose is to maximise profitability for some people. Just how the early proponents of this idea succeeded in shamelessly plundering the planet is a discussion for another article. (Spoiler alert: It has a lot to do with dualist philosophy taking precedence).
Simon Kuznets, the economist who came up with the idea of ‘GDP’, warned that we should not use it as the primary measure to evaluate our progress because it is a cold number that purely looks at what a nation produces- leaving out the deadly costs as well as softer aspects (like the joy of caring for elders or the happiness of people) that have absolutely no bearing on this metric.
Unfortunately, his advice was not heeded and we did exactly the opposite- focussing purely on growing that number and defending this thesis by saying that it’d lift the poor. Actually, it rarely lifts the poor up. The wealth gains are so disproportionate they’ll make you cry. The world doesn’t always need more of everything- we need better distribution of what we already have.
Clearly, this model of never-ending growth isn’t sustainable and has had wildly disastrous consequences for everyone. We need to take a step back and think of completely new ways of looking at the world and our place in it if we want even a fighting chance of surviving the coming planet apocalypse (assuming we continue at the current, reckless pace).
Some of the smartest minds in the world are thinking hard about this, though, and some radical solutions are clearly on the radar. One such idea is degrowth, which proposes that the poor countries be allowed to continue to grow while the rich, profligate ones (aka ‘The West’) work hard to reduce emissions while redistributing what they have in a better way. But even this discussion is for another article and I want to leave you to reflect for a bit on what you’ve just read.
Just think about your own life- how much ‘economic growth’ do you really need? Have you defined an endpoint for your needs? Have you ever thought of how you may be contributing to the deadly capitalist juggernaut and what you can do to make a positive contribution to the planet and all sentient life?
These are all questions that I have been grappling with, and it’s high time we engage in such conversations if we really want to avert the coming disaster.
After all, it’s not just a game of pointing fingers and occupying the moral high ground. The fate of the planet is at stake- and the actions of every individual will matter.
This article has been inspired by Jason Hickel’s fascinating book ‘Less Is More’ which makes a well-argued and rather urgent case for degrowth. I‘d strongly recommend it if you happen to care about these issues.
And if you want to try to become a better version of yourself, check this.