Ask the nearest leftist what capitalism is and they’ll say something like “it’s a period of human societal development where the means of production are controlled by a class of people who extract value from the workers that operate those means.”
Of course, this is to the great benefit of the class holding these means.
Like any other way of organizing society, however, there are forces at work against one another. We call these “contradictions”. Your boss wants to pay you less, yet your landlord wants to charge you more.
The contradictions inherent in this mode of production, leftist political theory argues, will one day be so disruptive, society cannot continue to replicate itself in this manner.
Capitalism as a network
In Thousand Plateaus, Delueze and Guattari state
“…there is no capitalism in itself; capitalism is at the crossroads of all kinds of formations…”
Capitalism is manifested in a number of systems: finance, healthcare, education, law, distribution of housing, and so on. Nowhere in any of these systems IS capitalism. Capitalism isn’t a prescription, rather it is a description of the operation and mutual interaction of these aspects of a society.
The founding fathers of the U.S. didn’t say “let’s try out capitalism”. (though chattel slavery isn’t capitalism) Nor did Abraham Lincoln write in the Emancipation Proclamation, “it’s capitalism time, baby”. Even the great FDR forgot to put it in the New Deal.
Capitalism is an emergent property of the structural features of society, say Delueze and Guattari.
There isn’t a manager somewhere to complain to. The structure itself is decentralized, just like the Borg in Star Trek (before First Contact came out). One characteristic of capitalism is asignifying rupture- if you were to break it in half, it would grow back, like a starfish.
A Contradiction
At the time of writing:
- Of the over 111 million cases of COVID in the U.S., more than 1.2 million Americans died of the disease
- Earlier this week, UnitedHealthCare CEO Brian Thompson was shot in New York City
- Despite environmental expert warnings, we continue to frack for natural gas
- President Trump promises to bring back coal manufacturing and coal energy plants
- Rural hospitals are closing their maternity wards
- Women in states with stronger abortion laws are losing access to sexual healthcare in the wake of overturning Roe v. Wade
- The United States defense budget is still much larger than our renewable energy budget
Why?
The structures from which capitalism emerges do not allow for the efficient application of expertise to issues facing society. The machine gets in the way.
Doctors, academics, engineers, scholars and so on are too separated from policy making, too far removed from power to deal with these issues. They are not allowed to apply their intelligence to the problems.
This means OB/GYNs will be less and less able to assist women far from urban centers because the hospitals can’t afford to keep them on staff, economists and healthcare providers can’t find a way to provide universal healthcare for all because it isn’t profitable, despite many other countries having done so, and the United States has no direction or leadership on tackling climate change or securing a clean energy future. All this in spite of the fact it is still the premier place in the world to train to become a scientist or doctor.
Instead, we end up with Tommy Tuberville in the senate suggesting we don’t need to vet Trump’s cabinet picks, and billionaire Marc Andreessen telling the millions of Joe Rogan listeners that the consumer finance protection bureau is a terrorist organization that doesn’t allow for new startups.
Letting them eat cake
The response across the US to the shooting of Brian Thompson has been unequivocally positive. People are trying to sue the Hawk Tuah girl for some crypto rug pull scam, and Marjorie Taylor Greene has spilled the beans that establishment republicans are sex pests.
Are we starting to see some of the contradictions that will prevent our society from reproducing itself? If Trump gets his swamp creature Avengers team in the White House, will this thing continue to hold itself together much longer?
The contradictions we see coming to a head in modern society are lines of flight that will deterritorialize or reshape modern society and political structure.
What form will it take? What control do we have over that?
Can we meaningfully make connections with the people around us and try to build power together? If capitalism does “grow back” like a starfish, how do we make a more just and horizontally organized society?
Stuff Cam Wrote 