[New Player Added] I enjoy your stories, was reading over your asks etc. Why is it that you hate capitalism? I completely understand how many problems it caused when company towns were a thing, however once that got sorted out, our world became what it is today- almost every luxury we have is the product of capitalism: fresh water/plumbing, every appliance, mechanical methods of transportation and roads. Even during feudalism, despite servants and apprentices not necessarily paid, only their 1-

Here’s the full question, which got broken up:

[New Player Added] I enjoy your stories, was reading over your asks etc. Why is it that you hate capitalism? I completely understand how many problems it caused when company towns were a thing, however once that got sorted out, our world became what it is today- almost every luxury we have is the product of capitalism: fresh water/plumbing, every appliance, mechanical methods of transportation and roads. Even during feudalism, despite servants and apprentices not necessarily paid, only their

needs were supported. And even people getting land for labor, they still needed to sell items to support themselves. With only communism, industry wouldn’t exist. There used to be people who specializes in clothe making, blacksmithing, etc. But there would be no manufacturing. No organized work unless they were all servants under one name. Capitalism isn’t that different from Feudalism, just instead of land it’s industry. So again, why is Capitalism evil and Communism above it?

   

First of all, even Marx thought that Capitalism was a modern marvel. Capitalism has generated a lot of great advances in general quality of life. But Capitalism has done a lot of terrible shit too–colonialism, human trafficking, environmental destruction, police states, world wars, nuclear weapons, etc. etc. You have to take the bad with the good here.

But beyond that, it’s important to remember than traditional Marxism functioned on a version of Hegel’s theory of history, which…well, it’s doubtful that it’s very true, but it provides important context for the theory. For Hegel, and for Marx, history is a story of human progress, and to them, history has an end point–a level of human civilization where, essentially, we all, as humans, finally figure our shit out. For Hegel, this was the advancing Napoleonic Empire (that was a pretty hot take) and for Marx this was a future economic system he called Communism.

The difficulty with trying to describe Communism is that Marx was never very specific about what, exactly, it would look like in any of his writings. To some extent, this makes sense–after all, if we’re assuming (in his framework) that Communism would be the pinnacle of human progress, if we knew now what it would look like, then, necessarily, shouldn’t we be able to create it with the snap of our fingers? Under the Hegelian view, we would, essentially, know when we saw it, but we could take some guesses.

Mark gave some rough guidelines himself. Communism would be fundamentally egalitarian in nature. Because each previous economic system was toppled by a collapsing of class hierarchy, and because the end result of Capitalism (to Marx) was the collapse of all of human society into two classes–a small percentage of wealthy capitalists and a huge mass of workers–that the revolution at the end of Capitalism would necessarily result in a single, unified class of workers. This is probably a pipe dream, but it’s what he thought. Mostly, the fundamental ruling principle of Communism would be that the means of production is owned and operated by the workers–no one is alienated by their own labor, and the false consciousness of class ideology will have at last fallen like scales from our eyes.

So is Capitalism evil? I would say so. Capitalism has created a system where the vast majority of the global population live in relative poverty compared to a small collection of wealthy corporations and individuals. This division has only grown more stark in recent years. But setting aside the question of evil, a better question is whether Capitalism is sustainable. This, I think, is the more powerful argument that Marx puts forth, in his third volume of Capital. Capitalism is fueled by consumption–because the fundamental economic drive of the system is the accumulation of resources, Capitalists have to constantly be searching and squeezing out every last chunk of surplus wealth people and the world have to offer. The result is a constantly escalating series of economic booms and busts, the complete destruction of the environment, and massive consolidation of wealth.

Personally? I think this is unsustainable. I think Capitalism will, at some point, collapse under it’s own weight. I doubt that the result will be communism, because I don’t think history runs on rails. I think it’s probably too late for humanity, given the rapidly approaching crises of climate change, sea level rise, and global war.

But hey, we have appliances, right? And plumbing.

Yay.