Capitalism Isn't Accumulation. Get It?

Because I've been reading around Marxist economics recently I have developed an allergic reaction to the word "accumulation." Marx and his epigones are always using the word in respect of capitalism, as in:

Primitive Accumulation: Marxists say this started with the enclosure of land and the expulsion of the resident population to create a landless proletariat. OK. Good point. Only it wasn't the capitalists that did this but the feudal nobles who, upon being disarmed by the absolute monarchs, kicked the peasants off their land because they couldn't use them as soldiers any more. By the way, Sir James Steuart, quoted by Marx, was a mercantilist who believed in a ban on the export of gold and silver (thus encouraging their "accumulation.")

Capital Accumulation: In Marx's notion (from La Wik), 

capital accumulation is the operation whereby profits are reinvested into the economy, increasing the total quantity of capital. Capital was understood by Marx to be expanding value, that is, in other terms, as a sum of capital, usually expressed in money, that is transformed through human labor into a larger value and extracted as profits.

Do you see the problem here? Marx and his epigones assume that capital accumulation is simply a mechanical or hydraulic operation. You pump your profits back into the economy and it accumulates as more profits. But it's not that simple.

Let us start with the profits from an investment. What should the capitalist do? Should he spend the money on a yacht? Should he reinvest it in his existing business? Should he put the money into creating a new line in his business? Should he start a completely new business? Should he invest the money in stocks and ETFs? If so, which ones? Should he invest the money in government bonds? The point is that his profits from this year do not just "accumulate." They must be spent or invested in a good idea, a good idea that works. To talk about this as "capital accumulation" completely misses the point.

Over-accumulation: According to the Marxists "A crisis of overaccumulation of capital occurs when the rate of profit is greater than the rate of new profitable investment outlets in the economy" and this is what causes capitalism to self-destruct and lead to socialism. I think that what he means here is that opportunities for profitable investment tend to reduce over time, leading to a crisis of capitalism.

Of course, there is a grain of truth in this. A General Motors may grow itself into the biggest automaker in the United States, but then what? What does it do for an encore? What does it do when the profits in auto-manufacturing start to level off and even decline? What does it do when business turns down and it can't afford to pay the above-market wages its workers have come to regard as their birthright? What does it do when the talent of its CEOs and managers reverts to the mean? 

We see this all the time in business. Any big corporation tends to be tuned up to do one thing. And then the world changes. And the corporation drops out of the Dow Jones Industrial Index of 30 top corporations.

OK. Enough about Marx. Let's talk reality, and the reality is that accumulation has nothing to do with the case.

"Intangible Capital:" The naked truth about capitalism is that that it bares the facts of human cooperation. Nothing is guaranteed; nothing works forever; even hard work isn't enough; good luck doesn't go on forever. You must serve the consumers or go broke.

And the biggest fact of all is the fact in the World Bank's study of capital: "Where is the Wealth of Nations?" Guess what: in the advanced nations, 80 percent of "capital" is so-called "intangible capital."

In other words, if you want to understand "wealth," the biggest part of it is not "natural capital," like oil or gold or silver or land. It is not "produced capital," like factories and industrial plants. It is the knowledge and know-how, the "intangible capital" that humans carry around with them between their ears.

Let's create a little table from the World Bank's Appendix 2 on the Per-Capita Wealth of Nations in 2000.

National Capital in $ per Capita

Country	Natural Capital	Produced Capital	Intangible Capital	Total Capital
Iran	$14,105	$3,336	$6,581	$24,023
Ireland	$10,534	$46,542	$273,414	$330,490
United States	$14,752	$79,851	$418,009	$512,612

Yipes. Notice how our three candidate countries all have about the same amount of "natural capital." But that don't mean nothing. Hey, "produced capital" ain't beanbag, but it is still second tier. The only thing that matters is "intangible capital."

So put that in your pipe and smoke it, Chuck old chap. And the same to all you Marxists and lefties and all the ships at sea.

A Marxist Misinterprets History

I first read Ellen Meiksins Wood's The Origin of Capitalism: a longer view back at the end of 2015 and wrote my review here. But then a month or two I picked it up again. Because.

It's an odd thing, to read a book by a Marxist, because Marxists live in a different universe, and they use the language of Newtonian mechanics -- moments, laws of motion -- that Marx used when he wasn't being all materialist with Feuerbach. Oh and "self-reproduction," presumably as in Darwin.

Oddly, when I reread the book I seemed to have no recollection of reading it previously!

Wood's narrative is basically this. Back in the old days, humans lived through "non-market access to the means of self-reproduction, and specifically land." Thus, "traditional ruling classes... passively appropriat[ed] rents from dependent peasants." But then, with the "improvement" movement, in which landowners started to want to make money on their land, people became proletarianized, they became "market-dependent;" they became wage slaves. Today people live under a "market imperative."

But, Wood notices, the English aristocracy was "demilitarized" before the lords in the rest of Europe.

I can see why I reread The Origin of Capitalism with new eyes. Because, you see, in the intervening years I have read about what this demilitarizing of the aristocracy was all about, and why it led to "improvement."

See, back in the day the feudal lords were basically mini kings and ruled their estates as royalty. And the peasants that tilled the land on their estates were not just there for the convenience of "passively appropriating" rents. The peasants, or at least the male ones, were there to constitute the army of the lord, what the notables in Shakespeare's Wars of the Roses plays call "our powers."

But when Henry VIII disarmed the nobles he effectively dissolved their mini-kingdoms and their mini-armies. See what that means? Back in the day, the idle peasants were useful as cannon- or at least arrow-fodder. Not any more. So that's when the lords started kicking their peasants off the land and enclosing the common land, and trying to make money with "improvement." As Marx put it:

A mass of free proletarians was hurled on the labour market by the breaking-up of the bands of feudal retainers, who, as Sir James Steuart well says, “everywhere uselessly filled house and castle.” ...

Well, they were useless now, but not back in the day when they were part of the feudal host, available to march to the battlefield. Then they were useful as soldiers, as part of the lord's power projection.

Wood talks about how the proletarians live today under the "market imperative." So they do. So we all do. They must prostitute themselves in the labor market and work for wages -- and the wages are determined by the market, the ebb and flow of supply and demand for human labor, and not justice. 

Yes, but back in the day, "traditional ruling classes... passively appropriat[ed] rents from dependent peasants." So they did. And they allowed to peasants to scratch around and utilize "common lands" and the peasants worked out a communal approach to share the use of the common lands. And everything worked out for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Until the day that the lord needed the peasant and his billhook in the lord's army. Jolly good fun, unless the lord lost the battle and some other lord came to lord it over the peasant, and maybe loot the lord's land and kill the peasants and sell the peasants' wives into slavery.

Of course, in our day the peasant is not completely living under the "market imperative." He or she can subordinate himself or herself to the ruling class and get passively appropriated benefits from his or her loving lord. Call if living under a "political imperative."

The last word in Wood's book is telling.

The hope of achieving a humane, truly democratic, and ecologically sustainable capitalism is becoming transparently unrealistic. But although the alternative is unavailable, there remains the real alternative of socialism.

 Do you see the utter head-in-the-sand determination not to see what is right in front of you?

For I would say this:

Two steps forward and one step back, the economy of the free market has performed the miracle of increasing the real income of humans by 30 times in 200 years. Meanwhile all experiments in socialism have been criminal, murderous failures. What is wrong with people that can still conjure up a vision of "the real alternative of socialism" despite the evidence of 100 million dead in 100 years?

 Socialism is not a "real alternative." It is not sitting there, waiting to be tried. Instead it is a proven failure. Because every time it has been tried it has been a failure. No, not just a failure, but a bloody failure, a starving failure. And it's about time that lefties admit it.

What Do You Do About Christopher Lasch

In a piece at American Greatness Roger Kimball ponders the case of Christopher Lasch, a writer/intellectual that started out as a full-on lefty but ended up not quite so left.

I myself have a copy of Lasch's Revolt of the Elites, but I can't remember what it was all about.

But Lasch hated capitalism. Back in the Sixties

he informed us that we now faced “an unprecedented crisis” wrought by capitalism, “giant corporations,” and other familiar villains... He concluded that “It is clearer than ever that radicalism”—which he went on to identify with socialism—“is the only long-term hope for America.”

But in his last book,  The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics, 

Lasch mounted an attack on the “ideology” of progress, which he saw as a natural coefficient of the free market (a phrase I shall henceforth prefer to “capitalism” since “capitalism” is a negative epithet baked in the oven of Marxist imprecation).  

“How does it happen,” he asked in his preface, “that serious people continue to believe in progress, in the face of massive evidence that might have been expected to refute the idea of progress once and for all?”  

I can help wondering, after reading all this, that "what is his problem?"

The first problem is to stigmatize the culture of the market -- free or otherwise -- as "capitalism." That tends to characterize capitalism as a cultural or political movement, which it is not. If there is an "-ism" to capitalism it is the realization, after the fact, that something just changed. That was what classical economics was all about, a first effort of trying to figure out what was going on in the economic sphere.

The second problem, in my opinion, is to imagine -- as intellectuals tend to do -- that anyone can grab control of the process of capitalism, politically or culturally. Really, we don't have a clue what is going on.

When you develop an ideology of "progress" or develop an opposition to "progress" you are taking a huge leap into the unknown. You are imagining that you can even come to fully understand the ways of human life and culture.

Why did "capitalism" arise in the late medieval era? And why since 1800 have we experienced what Deirdre McCloskey calls a "Great Enrichment?" Why did feudalism die out? And why did lefty totalitarianism, with its attempt to command economy, politics and religion, all in one, emerge in the 19th century?

Really we don't have a clue. But we can all have a grand old time speculating about it.

Why, for instance, did slavery become a scandal in the 18th century? And why are almost all educated people working in semi-serfdom as salaried employees for Big Business, Big Government, Big Education, Big Activism?

Why are we seeing a cultural meltdown on race right now? Why are people panicking over a teensy weensy increase in global temperature?

Yup. It's a mystery. So more research is needed.

Actually, I do understand somewhat the rage against capitalism. It comes out in Marxist Ellen Meiksins Wood's The Origin of Capitalism: a longer view. Her big thing is the "market imperative," that for people living under capitalism you have to conform to the dictates of the market -- i.e., its prices -- whether you like it or not.

But what Wood never really faces is: compared to what? Because the alternatives are all subordination to the "imperative" of some sort of landowner or ruler or priest. At least in the market economy there is a a certain freedom to use your talent to make a living, never mind who your parents are. And if you are a despised minority, well, maybe your income will be a bit lower than it should be. But then, you can always find a job by lowering your salary demands. Because the evil capitalist boss is always going to be tempted to make money on you rather than keep the proles down.

I suppose that is the biggest problem humans face: the problem of not being in control of your fate. There must be a better world where everything will turn out for the best.

Hope and Change, as a famous political philosopher once said.

Our Liberal Friends Won't Know What Hit Them

Let us interpret the last five years as a continuous desperate attempt by our liberal friends to Stop The World I Wanna Get Off.

Because Trump should not, could not have happened. Not unless the Ruskies did it. Not unless FoxNews and Newsmax and OAN flooded the highways and byways with conspiracy theories and misinformation. Not unless "hate."

It has been helpful to me that several years ago I abandoned my conventional understanding of the world through logic and reason and reality and facts and accepted the German Turn that we don't know what reality is. In "reality" we humans, like the rest of creation, are stumbling and bumbling along in our lives, doing the same-old same-old until, all of a sudden, we nearly get killed by something.

It could be a truck at an intersection that nearly ran us over. It could be a cold spell in Texas that shut down all the wind turbines. It could be an Orange Man Bad that got elected President of the United States. It could be a theory that space and time aren't absolute, but relative.

When an animal or a human gets blindsided it responds in one of four different ways.

1. Nothing to see here, move right along.
2. OMG It's the End of the World!
3. It's Evil Spirits (or racist-sexist-homophobes)
4. Wow, maybe I'm doing something wrong.

I did a long post about this when I was reading Jordan B. Peterson's Maps of Meaning. "Maps of Meaning: What Failure to Respond to Chaos Looks Like." As I interpret Peterson:

You put a rat into a new cage, or introduce a cat into its life and it freezes up in terror. For a while. But then it starts to explore and figure out what the new situation means and where the dangers are, and it starts to relax.

See the difference between a rat and a human? A human has the ability to ignore the new situation and just carry on in the old way. Or, of course, it can imagine that it can destroy the threat. Part of the reason for that is our conscious mind. We humans can construct a theory of the world consciously while your average rat cannot.

Now, I believe that our lefty friends have built up a whole world view on the idea that we can and should live in the good old way of pre-market culture. They have an imagined Garden of Eden in which everyone lives in equality and community, and everything is shared and equal, and everyone is benevolently advised by evolved, educated liberals. They experience living in the market system as living under the tyranny of the market. 

Thus Ellen Meiksins Wood in The Origin of Capitalism argues that in the pre-capitalist world many rural humans lived in a world of "customary use rights... or the right to subsistence." But then along came capitalism and "market as an imperative:" Everyone had to surrender to the dictatorship of the market. Yes, but. In the pre-capitalist world everyone lived under the dictatorship of a feudal lord. If people were enjoying "customary use rights" it was because the feudal lord was too busy playing politics with the other feudal lords to exploit his lands -- and his peasants -- to the full.

Actually, I get it. Wouldn't it be loverly if we could escape the treadmill of the market and live in a simpler,  more companionable way? Yeah! Imagine there's no market, as the Beatles might have said. Thus the whole nostalgic culture of the left's Great Reaction, its yearning for a lost world of perfect community.

(Notice how Jordan B. Peterson deals with this fantasy with his "lobster" narrative. Animals don't live in equality; they live in hierarchies, and the reason for hierarchies is that they reduce the need for violence.)

All this is fine. Our liberal friends managed to make the Trump Effect go away by... Well, we are not allowed to say this, but mainly by skewing the system, by censorship in the media, by mail-in voting and I know not what.

But I think that the worst is yet to come. Sorry liberals.

Whatabout the anger of the small businessmen and women screwed by the COVID lockdowns? Whatabout the folk that have given up and gone homeless? Whatabout the folk that have stopped paying rent, and now have to face making up the arrears (estimated at $70 billion nationwide) or eviction? Whatabout the people on the receiving end of the current anti-white witch-hunt in our schools and corporations? Whatabout the rage of people confronting $4 a gallon gasoline? Whatabout the rage of people in blue states that find out that they have been screwed, and that the red states that reopened early made the right decision.

Let's set up the bleachers, because it's going to be quite a show.

Marxist Wood -- Contents

The Marxist Economics of Ellen Meiksins Wood

1. Marxists in the Garden of Eden
   
   
2. The Real Failure of Our Ruling Class
   
   
3. "Fools, Frauds and Firebrands" Building Their Secular Theology
   
   
4. Our Liberal Friends Won't Know What Hit Them
   
   
5. What Do You Do About Christopher Lasch
   
   
6. A Marxist Misinterprets History
   

"Fools, Frauds and Firebrands" Building Their Secular Theology

When commentators say that people are losing their faith in religion, I like to say: what are you talking about? Since the supposed "death of God" about 200 years ago we have seen an explosion of militant secular religions that have inspired billions of humans with their visions of a better world. And the most militant and vibrant of those secular religions has been Marxism.

So I ordered Roger Scruton's latest, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left with anticipation. I have a lot of respect for Scruton, not least the fact that it was his horse that introduced him to his wife (it's a charming story).

Having read the book I confess myself a little disappointed. Scruton dismisses a lot of the lefty thinkers as purveyors of "nonsemes," or nonsense memes, and he discounts a lot of their writing as merely what we now call virtue signalling that communicates their reliability and orthodoxy to the others of their lefty faith.

I think the problem is that Scruton analyzes thinkers from Althusser to Žižek as if they were philosophers, when I think it is more sensible and accurate to describe them as secular theologians. For instance, one of Louis Althusser's books is Reading Capital, i.e., Marx's Das Kapital. The sensible way to understand such a book would be as an analysis of a holy text.

It is telling, as Scruton tells us, that these leftist thinkers do not reference any writers or sources outside the holy family of Marx and his epigones. I experienced this myself recently when reading the Marxist The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View by Ellen Meiksins Wood. There is not a whisper in Wood's book about post-Marxian economics. Everything is analyzed from the holy texts, in terms of commodification of labor, exchange value vs. use value, surplus value, and class conflict. There is a word for this kind of thing. Fundamentalism. Don't bother me with the latest in science and research. That old time religion is good enough for me.

Now many of of the thinkers that Scruton analyzes I have never read. But some of them I have, including Foucault, Horkheimer, Adorno, and Habermas. I am sorry to say that Scruton, to me, does not allow them the benefit of the doubt. For instance Scruton dismembers The Dialectic of Enlightenment by Horkheimer and Adorno as an attack on not just the bourgeoisie and capitalism but, hysterically, Enlightenment itself. OK, but I read Horkheimer and Adorno as saying that it is not just capitalism that threatens us with domination, but reason itself. Reason is not just a means to understand the world, but to dominate it. That is what they mean by "ïnstrumental reason." What they begin, Jürgen Habermas follows through, and by the time he has finished, in my view, the whole edifice of the revolutionary left is in ruins. Scruton criticizes the thinking of Habermas as labored and bureaucratic. But I think that it rips open the heart of leftist thinking. It says, in The Theory of Communicative Action, that instrumental reason is a domination can only be checked by inter-subjective communication between equals that trust each other. No doubt Habermas has to smother this idea in bushels of lefty orthodoxy to make it palatable to his lefty readers. And no doubt in his later Between Facts and Norms, Habermas utterly fails to show how his theory of moderating instrumental reason with intersubjective trust could be achieved in a big-government context, and submerges his failure in snowdrifts of bureaucratic waffle. But that is the point. Once you have opened the can of instrumental reason and begun to critique it, you have unwittingly exposed the impossibility of Marxism and socialism which are built on using people as instrumental pawns in a project of internal colonization. And no amount of beating around the bush can really hide it.

Now I choose to read Fools, Frauds and Firebrands through the reductive lens of my Three Peoples theory. I believe that lefties are People of the Creative Self and that their secular religion is an attempt to find meaning in this world for the creative life. That, to me, is the meaning of Sartre's existentialism and his idea of good faith and bad faith. Good faith is being a creative thinker; bad faith is repeating someone else's idea. Take Alain Badiou's idea of "the Event." He means, of course, the transformative political revolutionary event that every leftist longs for. But you can also see the Event as the creative breakthrough that every creative artist lives for. What Badiou calls "generic procedures"  I would call creative process.

Badiou identifies just four areas which admit of 'generic procedures', and in which the call to fidelity is heard: science (including mathematics), love (by which he means erotic love), art and politics. And it is only by through fidelity to such a 'generic procedure' that we achieve the good.

I understand this as a manifesto of creativity. Good faith is the creative act. To Badiou's creative self the only thing worth living for is the creative act, the invention of something new in science, love, art, and politics. The moment of creative inspiration is very heaven. Hell is unthinkingly regurgitating other peoples' ideas.

Very good. But to me Badiou's vision is crippled. Why just include science, love, art and politics as the sources of creativity? What about business? Has there been a more stunning creative achievement than the iPhone, brainchild of Steve Jobs? What about children? Is there anything more creative that joining with a woman to create and then to raise a child? And what founts of creativity are waiting undiscovered to the parent and the child as both set out on the journey of growth and discovery?

Yes, business. This capitalism that the left reviles is not a matter of "accumulation", but a miraculous story of creation and discovery. a process in the last two centuries that has raised human per-capita income by 3,000 percent. There has been nothing like the Great Enrichment, ever, as Deirdre McCloskey writes in her  "Bourgeois Era" books. George Gilder talks about the capitalist process as "surprise", one surprise after another. What is this "surprise" but the creative act?

Now, I think the Left's secular religion of the creative self has made one huge error. It has taken for granted that the great era of creativity, the celebration of the Events of creation, must necessarily be built on the ruins of the old age of the responsible self, what we will call, for the sake of argument, the bourgeois era. This is a monstrous mistake. The age of the creative self must be built on the shoulders of the age of the responsible self, by revising and extending the achievements of the age of the responsible self.

In my view, the creative lefties are repeating the mistake of the classical liberals of two hundred years ago. The classical liberals thought, as the middle class coming to power, that they would replace utterly the old age of the subordinate self in which ordinary people were subjected in feudal subordination to the great landowners and nobles. Now everyone would be a responsible self and a middle-class householder. But the truth is that plenty of people don't want to be rugged individualists. They want to live secure, safe lives as the clients under the shelter of some great patron. They are people that want a lifetime job working for the government or some great corporation. And when the classical liberals tried to impose their age of the responsible self the subordinate workers said: no way. Anyway, the first thing that happened in the new age of the responsible self was the nightmare of subordination and regimentation of the factory worker to the factory boss. A bit of a cock-up on the economic front.

Here's how the world should work. The creative class should have every opportunity to create and invent and surprise us with their original creations. But their culture must coexist with the culture of the responsible self. The responsible class should have every opportunity to live their lives as responsible individuals, working and wiving and thriving on their own account and not as the clients of some great CEO or politician. But this responsible culture must allow and concede space for people that are not ready, or just do not want to be anything more than subordinate clients to some great lord.

Of course, our lefty friends ought to know better than to build their cathedrals of meaning and their monuments of secular orthodoxy on a program of destruction, of the great Event that will demolish the unjust order of capitalism and domination. In that great apocalypse they will destroy themselves. But they are, as we all are, all too human.

The Real Failure of Our Ruling Class

Yesterday I put out a piece on American Thinker advising America's Muslims not to become "little darlings of the liberals." After all, look what happened to the white working class.

But really this is just part of a bigger issue that has been rattling around in my brain for years. It has just come to the boil in the last few days as I've read a Marxist history of capitalism, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View by Ellen Meiksins Wood.

I've already blogged on Wood's book here, and I may analyze the whole book, chapter by chapter, later. The point of Capitalism is to point out that capitalism didn't begin with the Industrial Revolution and wasn't a natural evolution. "I was pushed," said Eeyore after finding himself in the river, and so were we in the agrarian capitalism of the 16th and 17th century in England, in which landowners and their tenants "improved" and enclosed their farmland and drove the surplus population off the land.

Everything is "exploitation" in Marxism, and Wood argues that capitalism replaces the age old exploitation by military and political compulsion of kings and lords and conquerors with a new, economic compulsion.

Stripped of its Marxist warpaint this argument is true. Eric Hoffer says it more elegantly when he says that we have two options when it comes to getting the world's work done. Either the boss tells us what to do, or we have to direct ourselves. In Wood's terminology, "the boss tells us" is how military and political compulsion works; "we have to direct ourselves" is how economic compulsion works.

Of course, by "economic compulsion" we really mean the market. The whole point of the modern global economy is that, instead of subordinate people sitting around waiting for the boss or the lord to tell us what to do, we go out and offer our skills and ideas to the world. The price system tells us if our skill or idea is any good. This is what a Marxist like Ellen Meiksins Wood objects to. As she writes in closing her Capitalism:

The hope of achieving a humane, truly democratic, and ecologically sustainable capitalism is becoming transparently unrealistic. But although the alternative is unavailable, there remains the real alternative of socialism.

This kind of sentiment is based on the idea that before capitalism the rural poor lived a humble but decent life as retainers in the collective of some lord, and scraped a living with traditional rights of gleaning after the harvest and grazing on the common land. Maybe they did, although I have my doubts, particularly after reading Marriage and Family in the Middle Ages by Frances Gies and Joseph Gies. In their compilation of marriage practices and the various practices of dowries and dowers, you get the strong impression that nobody got married unless they had the wherewithal, and that usually meant land, either from the groom, the bride, or both. So it is likely that people that lived by gleaning and grazing on the Commons were people on the downward slide to nothingness, and always had been.

So I reckon that social humans always have and always will live under some kind of "compulsion." Either we live at the beck and call of lords -- or their modern equivalent, politicians and bureaucrats and CEOs -- or we live on our own responsibility. But in the context of a modern, interdependent economy based on specialization, that places on each of us the responsibility, the "compulsion" to find work that pays. Work is a service that we provide for other people, in return for which we get paid.

I just wish that modern elites and their nominees, the politicians, were honest enough to tell that to the people. Either you go to work for the government or a big corporation and do what the boss tells you or you develop yourself, your skills, your knowledge, and you figure out, on your own, how to contribute to society. Society, in the form of the market and the price system, will pretty clearly tell you what you and your skills and your ideas are worth.

There is no escape from this into "social justice" or humane and genuine democracy. There is no escape into "the real alternative of socialism." There is only working for a boss or working for the market.

And when our ruling class teases working people with raising the minimum wage, or retailing the fantasies of labor unions, or taxing the workers on one hand and giving them benefits out of the other, they are failing in their duty. In the context of today's global market, there is only submission to the will of the market. That is all.

Marxists in the Garden of Eden

Over the years I have learned to consider the Garden of Eden story as an allegory about the agricultural revolution. The serpent speaks to Eve and humans get sent out from the bliss of hunter-gathering into the hard work of plowing and sowing and reaping.

So let's think about the Marxist account of capitalism as a garden of Eden story about the Industrial Revolution. Imagine happy peasants living in collectives enjoying their traditional grazing rights on the Commons. Now imagine rich landowners enclosing the Commons and sending happy peasants into the hell of the proletarian city.

In The Origin of Capitalism author Ellen Meiksins Wood tells a grand story about how this happened and how the innocence of the pre-industrial world and its political and military compulsion was converted into the hell of economic compulsion under capitalism.

But Wood wants to propose an innovation. She wants us to know that capitalism started not with the Industrial Revolution and the growth of the factory but 100 years or more earlier when the rich landowners of England started converting their estates from feudal domains into profit-making enterprises. This "agrarian capitalism" was inspired by a culture of improvement that celebrates improving the land under your care in a productive manner and that, she says, goes back to John Locke and his linking of rights in property to the labor involved in improving it.

But there's a sinister aspect to this improving culture because it says that only he who improves the land has the right to own it. Thus the Native Americans in the North American continent that did not improve their land do not deserve it and the industrious white man that does improve it has a right to own it instead. Thus did John Locke and Co. justified  their conquest of the world. This all ties together capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism as one single grand exploitation project. Yay!

Thus does a Marxist enlarge upon the Marxian version of original sin and damn the modern west for everything. But we have to ask what happens next. After all, in the biblical version of original sin mankind somehow manages to carry on and by the time of Christ imagine a way to atone for sin. But what kind of atonement would the Marxists allow for capitalism? Well we know the answer to that. The only possible atonement is of course socialism and nothing else will do.

Let us concede the Marxist indictment but not the atonement. Because now we know two to three centuries later that capitalism yielded an increase in per capita income of something like 30 times the per capita income of the pre-capitalist era and that on a population of 7 billion humans on the planet. And we also know that socialism has yielded misery and poverty and conflict and military and political compulsion of extraordinary ferocity wherever it has been tried.

Yes, capitalism has put everyone on the earth under economic compulsion. But there's another way to describe this economic compulsion. It is that we all live under the principle of serving others before we serve ourselves. What could be more socialistic than that?

If it weren't for Marxists perhaps we'd have to invent them. Otherwise we could not know the worst that could possibly be imagined about the extraordinary world in which we live.