Capitalism: To the Trash Heap of History

by Troy Skeels

Eat the State, July 31, 2002

The real problem with the stock market is that capitalism is obsolete.

Reeling from the unfolding corporate scandals in early July [2002], capitalism’s partisans went on the record saying they were “not ready to give up on capitalism just yet.”

They recognize that the cries for corporate accountability, personal responsibility, honest accounting, and the same rules for everybody are extremely dangerous to capitalism as we know it. They know the current troubles aren’t the results of a few people taking aberrant advantage of their power and opportunity.

Capitalism is based on oppression and unfair advantage. It doesn’t work any other way. This doesn’t make it unique among economic systems, but it doesn’t make it a fair and just system, either. More importantly, it doesn’t make it viable for the future. The world capitalism was developed to exploit no longer exists.

Capitalism grew out of the feudal economy of Europe. This static land-based economy was transformed into a cash-rich capitalist economy by the mountains of gold and silver borne in the holds of Spanish flotillas returning from Mexico and Peru.

This was the startup capital that financed the machines and factories of the industrial revolution; a gift, sort of like how Dubya was able to start all those businesses with family money he’d never earned. It funded the corporations that undertook the exploitation of the resources and potential markets of colonized territories.

The English colonies that became the United States were founded as corporate, for-profit enterprises. Granted charters by the king, the corporation and the government were synonymous in their licensed territories. The corporate investors profited with governmental subsidies, including military force. Meanwhile, their activities aided the expansion of English influence and England’s economy.

Corporations profited from their colonial possessions by exporting raw materials to Europe. The residents of the colonies were also captive markets for goods manufactured back home. Manufacturers based in the colonies, however, faced impossible tariffs, keeping them from competing in the home market.

When the British East India Company arrived in India, for example, there was a thriving textile industry — soon decimated by rules that favored mass-produced cloth shipped from England. The raw fibers produced in India were exported and high-priced cloth was returned. The English capitalists pocketed the profit. It wasn’t “market forces” that generated this profit, it was simple force of arms. As such, Gandhi’s drive for Indian independence from the colonizers focused on the making of Indian textiles. Today, of course, the foreign corporations are back, in force.

In the North American colonies, where the English didn’t find what they recognized as civilization, the land was treated as a blank slate. The land was “cleared,” the useful resources shipped east and what didn’t seem valuable was discarded. It’s not an accident that the United States is the premier example of capitalis society.

The “Growth Economy” so necessary to capitalism is based on the impulse of expansion embodied in the westward expansion of the United States. With the conquest complete, capitalism has nowhere to grow.

Everywhere has been colonized. The easy resources have been exploited. Competing corporations can no longer find their own domains; they have to scuffle with each other or invent new ones. The ecosystem can no longer subsidize low-cost waste disposal. Venture capital doesn’t have anywhere to sail its conquistadors — except into your pocket.

Military conquest is no longer about opening up new horizons for exploitation. It’s now about fighting over dwindling resources and protecting vulnerable supply lines. That will just keep costing more and provide ever-diminishing returns.

Growth, in its classic sense, no longer has any constructive economic meaning.

Places like China are developing markets, to be sure, but the essential ingredient — low-cost plunder — is becoming scarcer and scarcer.

The “new economy” was touted as solving this problem of nowhere new to exploit. It offered the territory of the Internet and its World Wide Web — a potentially infinite expanse of virtual space, open for colonization. And it promised profit without actually producing anything — the logical extension of the service economy, and how over 90 percent of wealth is now generated in the United States.

Technology can offset the problem of more expensive resource acquisition — by more efficiently using less material. The “new economy” wasn’t interested in those things — like renewable energy. It was focused on secondary issues like “the desktop,” and the phone lines, neither of which, beyond a certain point, help use basic resources more efficiently or more cheaply. Nor does it open up new capitalis markets for those goods and resources.

That is to say, the new economy was solving economic problems that weren’t the real issue.

The new economy attempted to circumvent this confounding circumstance through, what else, social engineering. We weregoing to change our society to one that the chosen technology could serve. Lifestyle was the real arena of conquest. Broadband was the new Spanish Armada.

That we even needed a new economy was tacit admission that the old one was bankrupt. Now that we’re back to the old economic rules, we try to ignore that and get to work “restoring faith.”

It’s good to have faith. Misplaced faith in nebulous forces like “the market,” however, is the worst sort of voodoo. We’d better forget the stock market and have faith in a better idea.

Ejecting capitalism doesn’t mean the end of initiative or of rewards for hard work. It merely recognizes that capitalism’s necessary subsidies no longer exist. It recognizes capitalism’s need to exploit whatever and whomever is most convenient — and notices that we are might convenient. The growing disparity between the rich and everyone else in the U.S.A. is the result of reduced opportunities for the rich to exploit people elsewhere; and the result of reduced opportunities for the rest of us to share the profits of this exploitation elsewhere.

Rejecting capitalism means rejecting the idea of someone else directing your economics — present and future. It should be clear by now that it’s not good to let your money get too far out of control. That’s where the idea of the Average Joe as successful capitalist was a lie. Successful capitalists control their own money. They know what’s happening with it. Investors without that information are called “marks.”

What we really need is true free enterprise. And we don’t have to wait for someone to tell us how to do it. It’s better to invest close to home, in small enterprises that sustainably address real needs in real places, to invest in getting out of corporate servitude and into the kind of work you dream of. The most secure investment for the future is the one that sustains a community that you are part of.

Investments that rely on the misfortune of others or the good will of sharks are a losing proposition in the long term, whatever the quarterly earnings report says.

Republished with permission of the author.

Aug 12, 2003