Below is an excerpt of Palestine 1492: A Report Back, by Linda Quiquivix
In business school, it is clear to everyone there that capitalism is a system where money is supposed to make more money. Far more than just about having money, it is about capital, about money that makes more money, and it doesn’t matter how. Not everybody says that last part out loud.
People raised by capitalist societies are taught to confuse capitalism with simply using money or with buying and trading at a market, at a tianquitztli, at a souq, at a mercado. These are human activities that have been around for thousands of years, well before capitalism, which they say is only a few hundred years old, younger than Columbus and Them.
Down below the streets know that money is far more than just money. Money is power, an overwhelming power. Capital is about turning power into more power, but not just that. It’s about extracting it from others and accumulating it, about taking others’ energy and claiming it as one’s property. And it doesn’t matter how. To do it legally or illegally is merely a question of tactics. The corporate banks and the narcotraffickers who depend on each other today teach everybody this. The deception on behalf of capital is neither moral nor immoral; for capital, the deception is purely pragmatic.
Capital cannot stop itself from wanting to grow. Stealing energy is its defining logic: war. Anywhere where there’s energy is its desired domain. Anything that gets in its way is its enemy. Capital compliments societies that believe eating at the top of the food chain should be life’s goal. Capital’s promises to uplift those on the menu to a seat at the table if they work hard enough can be seductive illusions. When all one knows is that those above live in some kind of stability, control, and even fun while crushing you down below, desiring to be just like Them can be an overwhelming temptation.
It can be difficult to have an intelligent conversation about capitalism among people raised by it. In the United States, the discussion often starts and ends on whether selfishness is human nature, yes or no. The answer is supposed to determine whether capitalism is human nature, yes or no. One looks around. Reality points to yes. The conversation ends.
When our selfish potentials are rewarded and our collective potentials are suppressed, it is difficult to agree that selflessness is also human nature. In capitalist societies, selfishness is not only rewarded, it is made to be envied. Caring for the other is devalued, ridiculed, forgotten, exterminated. Capitalism makes sense among highly traumatized societies forced into scarcity, among those disconnected from land and community, forced to fend for themselves, forced into acquiring food for themselves where it doesn’t matter how.
In the United States, most who are made dependent on capitalism and come to defend it are not capitalists themselves, although many wish to be. Most don’t have money to invest somewhere to have it make more money; most need that money just to buy some food. It is the type of money that runs out right away rather than reproduce itself. The disconnection to land makes them dependent, so dependent that they defend it. When they see no alternative, the defense of capitalism is for many a basic question of survival, a necessity more than it is an ideology. Displaced from the land, the dependent ones find it impossible to live without also becoming cannibals. A generation later, they forget it’s even possible to live differently. Two generations on, they find it easier to imagine the end of the world than imagine the end of cannibalism.
Not everybody who thinks they are anti-capitalist understands it this deep. The anti-capitalist position from above, the one most often amplified in capitalist societies, only talks about the battle between the capitalist and the worker; it does not bring up the greater war between capital and the earth. The anti-capitalist position from above takes aim at the capitalist, not at capital. This position believes the revolutionary subject will be the worker, and by this they don’t mean everybody who works. They mean the waged worker, not the rest of the earth. Their ire is directed at the boss for not fully compensating the waged worker, which the boss can get away with because the boss owns the means of production, by which they mean the factory. They don’t know much about land as a means of production. They don’t know much about land. The anti-capitalist position from above does not see the earth as anything other than an object of property, a resource: a repository of energy, power, food. They see the earth the way the boss sees the earth, not in it or part of it but above it.
Capital’s formula where money makes more money is M–M’, where M equals Money and M’ (Money Prime) equals more money.[1] In addition to this insight, Karl Marx also showed the formula for when the worker serves as an intermediary between money making more money: M–C–M’. This is where the capitalist invests money in a place, such as a factory, and the worker produces commodities, the C. The capitalist will sell those commodities for more than the worker’s wage in order make more money. That the worker is not fully compensated for their labor value is how in theory the capitalist is supposed to make more money.
The C is not always necessary to get to M’. The goal of capital is not to create jobs for the workers; the goal of capital is to make more of itself. M–M’ is the more direct path. The labor of the workers, the C of the equation, is a mere intermediary, a partner sometimes, an adversary most of the time. If capitalists could skip over hiring the troublesome C they would, and they increasingly do. Playing the stock market, speculating on real estate, and engaging in other forms of gambling are some of their favorite ways to M’ without the troublesome C. Replacing the workers with obedient robots is another.
Not everybody who thinks they are anti-capitalist understands it this deep.
What happens under capitalism when the worker gets transformed out of existence? Is it still capitalism, or is it something else?
The anti-capitalist position from Above often defines the battle between the capitalist and the waged worker as the main contradiction, the main dialectic of capitalism. They compare it with other exploitative systems in Europe that preceded it:
Slavery: master vs. slave
Feudalism: lord vs. serf
Capitalism: capitalist vs. worker
From here, they conclude the worker will be the revolutionary subject in overthrowing capitalism. Yet in the history of anti-capitalist struggles, it is difficult to find an example of workers overthrowing capitalism.
Under feudalism and slavery, promises that someday the below can become the above if they just work hard enough is not a built-in mechanism. By contrast, under capitalism the worker is constantly made to believe one day they can become the capitalist. The few examples where that happens are over-represented as general reality, but the promise is helpful in encouraging the workers to work harder, a deception that is neither moral nor immoral for capital; the deception purely pragmatic. It’s just business, as capital likes to say.
Rather than seeking capital’s overthrow, we have plenty of examples of workers seeking to improve it through economic reforms. The workers fight for “a piece of the pie,” as they like to call it, a piece of capital. That more pie for them will require more wars, not everybody likes to say out loud. Rather than seeking capital’s overthrow, we have plenty of examples of workers defending it against the ones defending the earth from capital’s wars.[2]
Rather than seeking capital’s overthrow, we have plenty of examples of workers seeking to improve it through economic reforms.
It is built into capital’s logic that if one is forced to hire workers into order to get to M’, then the more easily exploited workers will be the most desirable. It’s just business. In business schools, labor is the most tempting place to cut costs. For essential domestic work like agriculture and care taking, skilled workers with the least rights are the most desirable. In the United States, only a couple of generations ago these jobs were filled mostly by descendants of enslaved Afrikans, who fought bloody battles for their rights and then more bloody battles just to enforce them. They were soon replaced by others who don’t have rights: undocumented workers. Labor unions in the United States, the ones who fought for a piece of the pie, in the 1990s witnessed their bosses move the factories to foreign countries, leaving many them now out of the American Dream, as they like to call it. To cope with the loss, they say many are addicted to drugs now. Some politicians tell them everything is fine, and they are the problem. Some politicians tell them things are not fine, and foreigners are the problem. Maybe one politician might tell them the capitalists are the problem. No politician will tell them capital is the problem. Politicians don’t get hired or keep their jobs by telling the truth about the boss.
It is built into capital’s logic that if the undocumented migrant, the overseas worker, or the robot is cheaper, the capitalist will go with the one that’s cheaper. It’s just business.
There’s another saying that goes, Don’t hate the player, hate the game, but even those who say it aim their ire at other players and not on the game.
There’s another saying that goes, Don’t hate the player, hate the game, but even those who say it aim their ire at other players and not on the game. What happens under capitalism when the big player, the boss, gets transformed out of existence and the worker remains? What happens when the workers take over the means of production and kick out the boss? Is it still capitalism, or is it something else?
Let us illustrate. I produce pencils, you produce paper, and we want to exchange. How do we figure out this exchange? Time is money, capital likes to say. It takes me one hour to produce five pencils. It takes you the same amount of time to produce ten sheets of paper. We trade my hour for your hour, my five pencils for your ten sheets of paper, and we’ve conducted our exchange.
We have carried some familiar assumptions in this transaction that we’ve learned from somewhere. One, we consider each other equal: one hour of your labor time equals one hour of my labor time. Two, we consider each other property owners: I own what I produce, and you own what you produce. Three, we can make and keep a contract with each other, an agreement: we exchange ownership and can be trusted to respect the transfer.
Is this still capitalism, or it is something else? Whatever its name is, What about the tree? Nobody compensated the tree. Nobody consulted the tree.
Didn’t the tree also work to help produce those pencils and that paper? What would be the compensation for the tree, and how would we quantify that? A lot of other workers have contributed to making the tree: the soil microbes, the wind, the water, the carbon dioxide, the sun. How do we compensate them, how do we compensate everybody who works?
Capital’s answer is to compensate the least number of workers you can get away with. Valuing the work of the earth to zero is its foundation. If the goal is to get to M’, compensating everybody sends back their energy and cannot be accumulated. Compensating the earth for its work will not concentrate the earth’s energy in the hands of a few.
Like the capitalist, the anti-capitalist position from above does not consider the earth, only the human worker, and by this they do not mean all humans. The enslaved human is considered to be part of the earth and is thus considered to be property, just like the earth is considered to be property. The labor of the enslaved is not considered equal to the labor of the waged worker, the one allowed to freely sell their labor power or refuse to work, the one allowed rights to ownership, the one allowed to engage in respected contracts. The master owns the enslaved’s labor power. The enslaved is not a property owner; the enslaved is property. The enslaved does not engage in contracts; the enslaved is forced to work.
Like the capitalist, the anti-capitalist position from above does not consider the earth, only the human worker, and by this they do not mean all humans.
In business school in the 1990s, even as the globalization of capital was becoming the answer for everything, we were also being taught that globalization was not sustainable, that there are too many people on earth, they were saying, and if everyone on Planet Earth lived the lifestyle of the United States, we were taught, we would need four Planet Earths. That statistic is today five Planet Earths.
When this fact was mentioned then and continues to be mentioned today by the above, it is not to blame capital’s ravaging of the Earth. It is instead to blame something called “overpopulation,” a reframing of the problem as “there are too many people on Earth and not enough energy for everybody.” Those who say that do not count themselves among these supposedly “too many people.”
This reframe often comes from those who can imagine the end of the world before they can imagine the end of capitalism. This reframe often comes from those so displaced from the land, so traumatized, so broken it is a terror for them to imagine the end of capitalism.
This has been an excerpt of Palestine 1492: A Report Back, by Linda Quiquivix
Footnotes
[1] Karl Marx, Capital Volume I: A Critique of Political Economy (1867)
[2] Marxism and Native Americans, edited by Ward Churchill (South End Press, 1983)