teglin 🌐: The worker and the planet are the real victims of capitalism: a response to Sman.

S-Man, an apologist for the capitalist system.

S-Man, a youtuber who describes himself in his twitter bio as a supporter of capitalism and the constitution, recently said in his video "the Anti-Capitalism Victim Complex" that we don't live in a capitalist society. (0:30)* According to this view the state influences the economy so that real capitalism can not flourish and the price signals and the magic of free markets cannot be attained. So when has real capitalism ever existed -- it is merely an anarchocapitalist vision with no practical reality. S-Man, who once said the writer took him out of context about gender (which I had in one instance), in his video about capitalism fails to put the economy and human society into context by considering our material reality. He only imagines the economy as an abstract system which promotes freedom instead of wage slavery and opening rifts in between society and the ecosystems we depend on. This definition of capitalism which he pulls from the dictionary, fails to say what capital is. And that is what Owen was trying to tell him -- it is the value created from the fruits of worker's labor that is recirculated into expanding the means of production in the future. 'Grow or die' is capitalism's imperative. So let me briefly go into a few areas in S-Man's video that I think need to be responded to, and the first is the claim that humans today don't actually live in real capitalism because of interventions by the state that prevent perfect competition in free markets.

Screen shot from sman's video about capitalism.

When considering capitalism's origins of moving peasants out of the countryside in rural European countries and some places in the ancient Orient around 1200 CE, people were forced off their land using vagrancy laws enacted by the state. This created employment for workers in factories in later centuries and an increase in urban poverty. Workers were moved off the land where they possessed the means of production and into the city where they formed the urban proletariat. Capitalism requires people to work in its factories, but it also needs people who have money to buy its stuff, not dispersed through the country but concentrated in an area. Vagrancy laws were key for getting people off the land and into the cities in capitalism's early history. And that depended not on the voluntary actions of producers but through laws enacted by the state.

De-peseantization is still occurring as countries face immense pressure to become urban-industrialized in India, Indonesia, and elsewhere in the global south. This idea of Marx has been carried forward by Marxist geographer David Harvey who documents extensively in his study of Second Empire Paris the turning of public goods into private property. What was once held in the public trust, land, is now private and we must now seek other forms of livelihood. Enclosure of the commons is David Harvey's concept which "entailed taking land, enclosing it, and expelling a resident population to create a landless proletariat, and then releasing the land into the privatized mainstream of capital accumulation". This is a general description of what we had seen occur when European peasantry were being forced into the city through vagrancy laws.

Understanding Society: Marx on peasant consciousness

De-peasantization has by itself never been enough to sustain the primitive accumulation of capitalism especially in 'developing' countries. Theft of land and theft of resources from indigenous people around the globe (Hernán Cortés being an example) has enriched many people in European countries. The global proletariat has been created through a process of enslavement. While Sman says the act of profiting off human labor has never killed anyone (2:03), Marx stated in Capital, "if money, according to Augier, 'comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek,' capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt."

in the historical development of capitalism, according to Marx there were two tendencies: 1) In Europe, the turning of the rural peasantry into urban proletariat, and 2) theft of land and labor from Africa and the new world. With regard to 2) example of European exploitation of Africa in the 20th century is given from a Marxist perspective in Walter Rodney's book "How Europe Underdeveloped Africa".

Peasants harvesting crops, by Flemish artist Pieter ...

Sman gives an example of planting a seed of an apple tree on his property that turned out such a high yield of apples that it would make them a 'huge money making scheme.' after processing the apples and selling them, is it not possible for the capitalist to make a profit without exploitation? sman asked.

I think Sman is trying to conflate the definition of petite bourgeoisie capitalism (given in the dictionary definition he used) with the political economic order of capitalism criticized by Karl Marx Of course there will be small shop owners and individuals producers in the future. Marx was less interested in that, and wanted to know, as owen attempted to explain to sman, the historical tendencies behind capitalism as a process where workers produce a commodity through their labor and the capitalist takes off the top of what is produced. built on top of the social needs of society is the exchange value derived from the labor of workers in capitalist society -- there exists the reproduction of capital embedded in social reproduction. I don't believe that owen was speaking, in reference to the quote above, about people who grow food for themselves or others. But I infer that he might have been criticizing the capitalist who hires other workers and depletes or pollutes the soil in an effort to get a few more kilograms of yield. Or the agro-producer who mercilessly murders poor animals in concentrated animal feeding operations. Under the world system of monopoly capitalism that is still powered by fossil fuels and the political power of large banks and large technology companies, we are becoming blind to the ecological destruction around us. The earth is exploited like the worker – both are the original sources of wealth. Owen's arguments in sman's video encapsulate the labor theory of value that is behind Marx's explanation of the division of the working day into labor that is performed because it is socially necessary, and beyond that – labor that is done for The Man each day. Capital does not create wealth, labor does. This is precisely the point Owen made in the quote above. Just as owen said in the stream “Do people that make iphones get any of the profit as a result of apple selling millions of iphones? People working in [the factories] make a fraction of what people working in Apple's higher tiers receive in seconds. … They do not receive the fruits of their labor. ” ~ (7:30 )

Owen Macdonald.

“Is this a just and fair system? Is profiting off commodities a good idea?” Owen asks. (1:07)

What we see after 9/11 after the 'financial katrina' of 10 years ago is that the state and capitalists are very interconnected through this historical epoch of neoliberal capitalism as described by david harvey et. al, where plutocrats in the united states -- pruitt, trump, many republicans -- are constantly supporting military procurement contracts for corporate donors (remember Halliburton and dick Cheney?), expansion of the fossil fuel economy to produce cheap electricity for bitcoin production. we see continued privatization of the public sphere -- the continuation of neoliberalism that could be seen in the attack on new york city by financiers in the 1970s when public hospitals and libraries had to be closed to pay back financial debts the city had accumulated and public worker unions had to put back part of their pensions into resolving the debt crisis so that city operations could continue. just one example of neoliberal capitalism squeezing working class people.

S-Man.

"life is not fair and it will never be, as long as we live in this thing called reality." (9:47) – S-Man

S-Man does not use the concept of a dialectic to examine the economy, which originated with hegel. if you asked sman -- what is a fish? he might tell you it is a biological organism and he might even dissect it to tell you about the insides of the fish -- how old the fish was, if it was diseased, etc. but the dialectician would look at the fish in context. it would study the fish in its ecosystem and how it interacts in its environment. when answering the question "what is this fish?" the fish is organism within a larger context.

people who employ a historical dialectical understanding of the economy and social history put people in human societies in context. the capitalist economy is not separate from political efforts of the right to establish right to work states, by allowing corporations to participate in political discourse after the Citizens United decision, by deregulation of media markets leading to massive commercialization of news media. poor individuals continue to be squeezed by landlords because housing is not a right in the united states and in many other countries. as seen in seattle washington, amazon fights even the modest efforts to combat the housing problems they create from raising rents ? one cannot separate all these factors from the history of capitalism's development in the 21st century. they are discussed more fully in david harvey's The Enigma of Capital and in the ecosocialist literature.

a question teglin asked sman about the environment a few days ago.

Owen believes it is important to put the economy into context. From there we can see the glaring contradiction in capitalism. That is, capitalists are always seeking to increase profit and sell things while degrading the workers and the environment at the same time. This is the 'engine of capitalist society.' This is the treadmill of capitalist production that threatens the planet.

teglin

@t3glin