Thou shalt not kill capitalism--just castrate it

Two Cheers for Capitalism

This is not Irving Kristol's infamous Two Cheers for Capitalism, but I raise a similar point, the need to distinguish between the economic and the political.

Jason Hickel's 2020 book, Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World, is a clarion call for revolution to far-sighted citizens of a Marxist disposition alarmed by the impending climate crisis. I am sympathetic, and Hickel makes many strong arguments for economic policies that are urgently needed if the planet is to remain habitable, but his framing of the politics is naïve.

From his Introduction:
What makes capitalism different from most other economic systems in history is that it's organised around the imperatives of constant expansion or 'growth' ... And as far as capital is concerned, the purpose of increasing production is ... to extract an ever-rising quantity of profit.
A YouGov poll in 2015 found that 65% of people in Britain believe capitalism is unfair. Even in the US, it's as high as 55%. In Germany, a solid 77%. ...
It is now 2023, and all of that latent anti-capitalist sentiment has borne fruit in ... a war against Eurasia and Eastasia that is insanely popular in Oceania, not to mention profitable.

Hickel is sadly imprecise when he argues that the purpose of capitalist production is to extract an ever-rising quantity of corporate profit.

Jeff Bezos doesn't want Amazon to show a profit, because then he would have to pay taxes!! Dara Khosrowshahi doesn't want Uber to show a profit, because then he would have to pay taxes!! The problem we face isn't corporate profits; the problem is personal profit.

Similarly, there is noting inherently wrong with capital.  Even in Graeber and Wengrow's Dawn of Everything prehistoric and predynasitc cultures pooled their labor, for example forming the 'capital' for communal irrigation systems. And if such 'capital' turns a 'profit', it is a net good, so long as the 'profit' benefits the community.

You might argue that I'm quibbling over semantics: that ever since Marx the terms capital and profit have been understood to mean the capital and profit of post-Renaissance corporations. But semantics is the stuff of politics.

"Capitalism" is an abstraction.  Arguing from abstract, ideological terms leaves capitalists, who always control the means of instruction, leeway to redefine.  Capitalists simply instruct that they are the "job-creators" or the "best and the brightest".  When all else fails, they paraphrase Göring, telling the people that they (or blonde, blue-eyed 'Christians' who look like them) are being attacked.

On another front, arguing against 'corporate profits' makes it possible for shills like Joseph Biden to feign solidarity with the downtrodden by proposing to increase corporate taxes. Corporate taxes may be necessary for public health, as in cigarette taxes or a carbon tax. But in order for people on Main Street to have nice things, sovereign nations, whose debts are denominated in their own sovereign currencies, don't need any taxes for revenue.  This is basic Modern Monetary Theory, such as was and has been used to build and fund the Pentagon. Besides, without complementary regulation, corporate taxes will simply be passed on to the consumer.

Pace Marx and Hickel, the root problem civilization faces is not capital, profit, or their abstraction into the bogeyman of capitalism; the problem is greed, it is unfairness, it is unfair personal profit, it is the system of wage slavery, of debt, interest, and usury.  These are moralistic terms; their meaning may not be understood until it is painfully obvious, but they are the concrete terms in which the pain will be felt and shared; these are political terms. Abstract economic terminology may have its place, but until humans become humane, economics will not save us.

Giordano
December 2023