Author: Ian Welsh Page 155 of 437

Let us revisit the definition of capitalism.

Capitalism, everywhere, is defined by the removal of capital from most ordinary people and the concentration of capital in the hands of a few.

Capital, in this definition, is not money. It is the tools required to feed, house, and cloth oneself.

Medieval serfs, in most areas, had access to capital. They had the right to land to grow food, to take firewood, and so on. They built their own houses, spun their own clothes.

Depending on the time and place, they were healthy and relatively long-lived.

As I have pointed out before, early industrial workers, as a class, were worse off than the serfs and peasants they replaced. They worked longer, ate worse, died younger.

Capitalism is accompanied by enclosure virtually everywhere. The old rights are taken away and the peasants are forced off the land.

“Forced” is the operative word: In both England and China, the land to which they had rights — for centuries — was taken from them. If they won’t go peacefully, armed force is used to remove them. There are many, many stories of peasants in China resisting the government trying to take their land so they can hand it over to other owners.

Many people get “better” ownership out of the process of moving to capitalism. They get a better bundle of rights in terms of “property.” But most people lose their rights to productive capital.

You see this in virtually every developing country. Peasants are forced off the land, whether by law, crashing crop prices caused by unfettered “free” trade (which isn’t “free,” even slightly; Europe and the US massively subsidize agriculture), or by force. They flee to the cities, forming vast rings of slums. They are worse off than when they were peasants, in most cases, but there are no other options.

In most cases, this is done so that their country can concentrate on a few cash crops, plantation style, with a few owners making all the money.

Enclosure.

A citizen in a capitalist economy is distinguished by having no independent ability to feed, clothe, or house themselves. They must sell their labor on “the market” or live miserably and likely even die. (People who live on the street long-term don’t, as a rule, live long term.)

The term “wage-slave” is old, used in the 19th century to talk about what was happening then.

A person who must sell their labor to another, then do their master’s bidding, is not free. Their entire working day is spent doing what someone else tells them to do. Only a very few people, under any capitalist system, have anything close to freedom. The majority of people are slaves in their daily life, free only to sell their labor.

Because most people are undistinguishable, they take the rates offered by the market, and those rates are determined primarily by how tight the labor market is, a factor that has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with any one individual worker.

Most workers in the world have miserable lives. Those reading this may have “good jobs.” In China, they make batteries by hand because it is cheaper than using machines. Other Chinese are now hand-pollinating crops.

That’s freedom for you.

People whose lives are lived doing what other people tell them are not only not free, but because their daily life is about obeying orders, they are not used to freedom and are conditioned to expect orders.

Being a wage-slave, taking orders is ordinary to them. It’s what they expect. They don’t know what freedom is because they have never experienced it (coming from a school system which is designed to turn people into obedient drones).

Real freedom is being your own master. It’s been a long time since that described most of the world’s population.

But capitalism, meaning wage slavery, contrary to the propaganda, has not been an unambiguous move towards freedom.

In the 19th century in North America, for example, if land was unused, you could simply go work it and after a few years it was yours.

You can’t do that now.

Capitalism is about taking the ability of the many to provide for themselves and putting it into the hands of a few. The argument is that this transfer allows for the creation of more goods and services than would be possible otherwise.

But we don’t need more — let alone the vast amount of surplus we are creating. We waste a third of the food we produce. We deliberately build “planned obsolesence” into the manufacture of goods. We are vastly overproducing past our needs, and because we distribute goods through corrupt market mechanisms, many people still don’t have enough to get by, let alone enough for a good life. We could easily provide for them if what we produced were more evenly distributed and not made to break down so we can make more.

Imagine a world with no planned obsolesence, in which everyone has a small garden (indoors gardens are easy to do now, and one pilot study found 10X yields from a basement garden with LED lights), everyone has basic maker tools, and every community has a few facilities capable of creating large appliances.

We can print buildings on 3D printers now (they could have been made well, prefab, long ago).

Freedom is the ability to make your own choices, daily, about what you do with your time and your abilities, without losing everything. It is the ability to support yourself.

Feudalism was no joy. But capitalism removed even more economic freedom than feudalism did. You don’t have to believe me, believe the people who lived at the time, who violently resisted the changes. They weren’t idiots, they weren’t fools; they knew their lives were being changed for the worse. That it worked out for some of their descendents means little: A century of technological improvement accounts for much of that.

Post-capitalism, if it is any good, will restore the ability to grow and make what they need to the people. Not like feudalism, but a craft-based, hunter-gatherer society. Work 20 hours a week to meet the essentials, spend the rest of the time as you wish and choose how and when to work those 20 hours.

More on this later.

Originally from April 17, 2016. Back to the top.