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Capitalism as Satan

You can blame all your problems on Satan without ever having to sort them, because you will never have to confront Him. If your kid has been taking too many drugs, you don't have to find out the causes and help them, you can simply blame Satan, and tell the kid to move towards the light.

We don't prove or show that something comes from Satan. We just associate certain things with His ways.

'Capitalism', works the same way. The nebulous, fictional entity lies where people make deals, and those deals go wrong. Trading corn with a neighbour never irritates the communists, but once corn-trading becomes large-scale, an instinct arises, and people start to say 'capitalism did this'.

Answers Block Questions

Blaming Capitalism points us towards stereotypes, which can obscure our thinking. The current problems with soy subsidisation in the USA can never be discussed under the banner of 'capitalism' in any way which makes sense, because nobody can think of government subsidies as a problem with unregulated markets.

When the UK pushes immigrants back, people pull out their Satan, and blame Capitalism. This not only flies in the face of the notion of Capitalism as a system which results from unregulated markets and consolidating power, it distracts from important questions.

Why* do UK politicians so desperately want to limit immigration? If this were simply about winning votes, then we need to ask why UK voters feel so strongly on the matter. Many will answer that people fear immigrants because the media tells them to, because powerful corporations and politicians tell the media to do so. This completes our circular argument. Now circular arguments can still work fine. Perhaps the whole thing *is* a cycle of politicians grabbing votes and voters encouraging them to grab votes this way.

Or perhaps this entire line of thinking has deep problems and we should look elsewhere for answers. I really don't know; but I know that if someone knows that the problem is 'Capitalism', they won't look any further.

Nobody wonders why Satan does what he does.

The Necessity of Supply & Demand

People speak of capitalism as if the Europeans invented some ideology, and never seem to acknowledge or understand the entirely necessary parts of trade, or how we moved out of a feudal society due to advancing technology.

While watching a documentary in an Anthropology class, I noted that the people had suffered some blight on tomatoes, so only one man had tomatoes left to sell. As a result, the price went up. But when I mentioned this to the lecturer, he rejected the idea, because these people don't live 'in a capitalist society'.

The lecturer didn't seem to understand Maths, and how certain it was that the tomatoes would naturally rise in price once so many died. Let me illustrate with an example.

Tomatoes Buyers

We have a few tomatoes buyers. One will spend €10 for a tomato, 10 will spend €5, 20 more will spend €1 and 100 more will spend €0.50.

If you have 1 tomato, you sell it at €10.
If you have 15 tomatoes, you discard 4, then sell 11 for €5 each.
If you have 25 tomatoes, you discard 14, then sell 11 for €5 each.
If you have 100 tomatoes, you discard all but 15, and sell them at €5, making €75.

This result does not come from some ideology, or some particular system. It does not even result from money, as the people in question were not trading with cash, but bartering various goods. Money simply makes the situation plain.

The result does not depend upon 'a culture of greed' - no culture (or mammals) exist which don't want something.

Greed Supersedes Ideology

Kings, capitalists, and communists - literally any type of government one could name - have profited from selling oil. When people protested the war in Iraq, they held banners saying 'no blood for oil', and certainly, we shouldn't fuel our cars from sources which demand blood. I have no problem with this thinking; but I have a serious problem with those jumping to add the addendum that this problem comes from capitalism, when kings exploit people and vie for oil with exactly the same lethality that any entrepreneur does.

We have plenty of routes to tackle this problem, such as alternative energy production, international agreements, or simply encouraging public transport. But once someone has focussed on 'end capitalism', they have given up on real progress.

Thinking Like an Economist

Economists use the terms 'command market' and 'perfect competition'
Different goods work better with different models.

Other Routes (Divide and Conquer)

Let's return to Communism. People speak about it vaguely, but we must agree on one aspect if we can agree on anything - that communism demands that workers own the means of production.

I want to put everything else aside and look at real ways of achieving this goal.

Co-ops

In cooperative organizations, the workers own the company. Some receive equal shares, other co-ops create other agreements. Co-operatives tend to survive their first five years more often than traditional businesses, so the business model clearly works fine.

Co-operatives

By refusing to look at any part of the system except for the system as a whole, people doom their efforts to pure theory. The praxis clearly works when people focus on a particular business, rather than the whole world.

FOSS (Obviously)

As we can see in the GNU Public Licence, anyone running libre software also owns the software.

The software serves people, rather than corporations. It doesn't show adverts, doesn't track people, and doesn't push people into irritating account-creation.

In fact, I have trouble taking any Marxist seriously who does not run libre software.