3.

Welcome to the Jungle

Capitalism is supposedly the economic system most in sync with basic human instincts like competition and selfishness. It seems to me that if societies are based on aspects of human nature, it would be more logical and pleasant to build a new one around the love and laughter, but no, that’s not what is meant. Capitalism fits the way we used to live when we were wild: dog-eat-dog, law of the jungle, and all that.

But dogs don’t eat other dogs, and jungles have many laws, such as maintaining sustainable ecosystems and individual sacrifice for the good of the colony. How come capitalism doesn’t involve any of that?

The whole civilization-as-jungle thing is a bizarre concept. Why did we spend the last ten thousand years discovering fire, painting on cave walls, developing writing, building Rome and Timbuktu, and creating philosophy and astronomy if the whole point was to eventually figure out how to live like we were back in the wild? And how could we possibly understand what laws jungles have when we are so busy chopping most of them down to build more Cinnabons?

Ever since the theory of evolution was laid out by Charles Darwin, it has been distorted into an illogical justification of capitalism known as “Social Darwinism.” Evolutionary theory holds that species are constantly in the process of changing to better adapt to their environment—which itself is also constantly changing. Social Darwinists proclaim that nature favors the strong over the weak, and therefore the gross inequality of capitalism can never be changed.

You can’t have it both ways. If capitalism is the result of evolution, which is dubious—after all, giraffes didn’t evolve by writing economics textbooks arguing that longer necks will produce 50 percent greater leaf consumption—then it also follows that capitalism is not the perfect system that we have finally discovered for all time but one more phase of evolution that will eventually be replaced by something more suitable. Social Darwinists want to include certain aspects of evolution and leave out others. Just as plantation owners used to want their slaves to hear the Christian parts of the Bible about being meek and turning the other cheek but not the angry older Jewish parts about rising up against Pharaoh and escaping to freedom, today we are meant to read the book of Darwin right up until it gets to the present day and then slam the book shut and shout, “and everybody lived happily ever after—the end!” But there are still more pages in the book—hopefully.

Socialists are big fans of Darwin—not just because his natural history makes more sense than the Bible’s six-day create-a-thon, but also because it is a wonderful illustration of dialectics, a philosophical approach based on change and contradiction. Dialectics stresses that things are both what they appear to be and a mess of conflicts underneath the surface that might eventually turn them into something else, sometimes over millennia and sometimes in an instant. A seed is a seed until one morning it is a plant. A population of apes evolves into a new species of early humans. Societies are also in a process of constant change, usually slow and barely detectable but sometimes explosive as conflicts beneath the surface come bursting out.

Capitalism emerged—slowly in some places, explosively in others—in parts of Europe from the 1300s to the 1700s. It came into being within the confines of feudal societies, which in their best-known form were dominated by large landowners who used peasants to grow food and knights to fight with other landowners. The internal conflict inside feudalism that eventually produced capitalism was between these landowners and a growing class of merchants who generated wealth through trade and investment. Merchants had been around for thousands of years, but these ones happened to live in a historical moment when Europe’s conquest of the Americas and enslavement of Africans created unprecedented opportunities for wealth and power for those who weren’t born into landowning families. This is how Marx put it in Capital:

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.

As Marx’s dark sarcasm indicates, capitalism exists today not because it is the best of all possible economic systems but because history happened to work out in a certain way—which included some of the greatest crimes in human history.1 This fact by itself doesn’t prove that capitalism has to go. But it does mean that the notion that capitalism came about “naturally” is either ignorant or, much worse, a justification of European (and Euro-American) tyranny over the world—as well as the tyranny within Europe of a small capitalist class. As an aside, this is why efforts to recognize the crimes of history—such as reparations for the descendants of slaves or renaming Columbus Day—are far from pointless exercises in “political correctness” about events in the distant past, as conservative critics claim, but an important part of understanding the world we live in today.

Of course capitalism isn’t the only system that has seen horrible cruelties done to entire peoples. For crissakes, check out some of the things that God does in the Old Testament—and he’s the good guy! But it’s also not the case, as we are often led to believe, that human history before the modern era was just one long violent ignorant mess—minus a few heroic centuries in ancient Greece and Rome.

In fact, for most of our existence humans lived in small cooperative communities that some have called “primitive communism.”2 These are known today as “hunter-gatherer” societies, which had (and still have in a few cases) no classes or private property. These people weren’t any nicer or gentler than we are today—clans waged bloody war with each other, although how often is a matter of debate. They shared resources because it made sense to do so in a society in which everyone in the clan depended on one another for survival and happiness. Hunter-gatherers were nomads who consumed only as much food and clothing as they needed because they had no permanent homes to store any surplus. The Enlightenment philosopher Thomas Hobbes famously described life in these types of societies as “nasty, brutish, and short.” We now know that many of their lives were much longer than Hobbes supposed, and probably a lot less nasty than the lives of the poor in his England, which executed beggars for as little as stealing a few bird eggs.

Over thousands of years people learned how to domesticate plants and animals—in some places earlier than others—which gradually allowed them to produce more food than they needed and to store the surplus in case of future famine, which in turn led some people to stop being nomads and create settlements, which would eventually become towns and later civilizations. These developments, which are known together as the Neolithic Revolution, were both a historic advance and setback for humanity. They saved many from starvation during bad years and allowed for some people to be freed from daily toil to further develop our species’s art, technology, and belief systems. But as more centuries passed they also led to a more ominous innovation: the beginnings of a distinct ruling elite.

The creation of societies divided into social classes happened gradually over the course of many generations. The specific features of class society differed widely in various parts of the world but a few broad generalizations are possible. At first a subtle distinction set the new ruling class apart—often they were respected elders tasked with the deciding how to allocate the surplus grain. As these elites became more removed from the rest of society over time, however, they created new traditions and institutions to make their dominance more permanent and secure. They developed a new category of property that was not communal but individually owned (or “private”) to keep some of the surplus for themselves and the concept of personal inheritance to keep it within their families after they died.

Agriculture, private property, and inheritance led to a fourth development that Friedrich Engels called “a world historic defeat for the female sex.” Having many children is more useful in an agricultural society where they can be extra hands in the fields than it is in a hunter-gatherer society where they are mostly extra mouths to feed. Thus, women’s lives became primarily about having and raising children, which removed them from the status of being breadwinners (bread-growers, really) in the fields. On top of that, the tradition of inheritance increased the importance of being able to determine who was the father of each child. This led to women’s sexual monogamy being strictly enforced in a way it didn’t have to be for men, since it’s usually pretty obvious who the mother is at childbirth.3 And so began the development of the bullshit hypocritical morality around women’s bodies and sexuality that exists in most cultures to this day.

These concepts of private property, inheritance, and women’s subordination originated in the earliest ruling classes but eventually became accepted norms for all members of agricultural class societies—although of course the specific forms they took varied widely as human civilization spread and developed throughout the world. Over the past few thousand years many different types of societies came into being in which minority ruling classes have controlled the economic surpluses created by the masses and put them to different uses. In the ancient eras of Athens, Mexico, and Mali, small segments of the populace living off the labor of conquered slaves built astounding legacies of science, art, and philosophy. The lands that today are Germany and Japan saw feudal societies in which each wealthy landowner used the food and crafts created by his peasants to pay for elaborate castles and warriors to raid other wealthy landowners’ castles.

It was out of these types of feudal societies in Europe that capitalism began to develop, first through merchants and wealthy craftsmen,4 then through factory owners and bankers, and now through Oprah and Bono. Capitalism is by far the most productive and innovative class society because it is based not on land but on capital that can be reinvested, and on competition between capitalists, which forces them to take most of the capital created by their workers and invest it back into developing new methods of creating even more capital. This is why technology has developed much more in one capitalist decade than it did for entire centuries before the 1800s.5 It’s also why the European and North American countries that developed capitalism first gained an enormous advantage that enabled them to drag the rest of the world into their new system on quite unfavorable terms.

Capitalism has achieved amazing things, some of which are appreciated most of all by socialists, who aren’t blinded by the Social Darwinist propaganda that this is humanity’s natural state. It’s in the first part of The Communist Manifesto that you’ll find some of the most accurate praise of the capitalist class as “the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals.” These wonders—from railroads to vaccines to space flight—promise a future of widespread abundance and leisure time. Unfortunately, that future has been around the corner for the past hundred years.

The problem is that while capitalism produces so much surplus that for the first time in history there is enough for every single person to live and live well, it still requires—as previous class societies did—that surplus to be controlled and guarded by a small minority, so that the rest of us have to go to work for them and create more capital. In other words, capitalism has created a world in which capitalists should now be obsolete.

For almost all of our species’s history, our main problem has been not having enough: not enough food, fertile land, or drinkable water. Now we produce too much, which should be a cause for celebration but instead is a curse, because when capitalists overproduce they lose on their investment and lay off millions of workers. Our second-biggest problem used to be disease. Today we can produce and distribute vaccines and treatments for the most widespread illnesses around the world, such as malaria and AIDS, but we only do so for those who have the money to afford medicines and treatment. But you don’t have to live in sub-Saharan Africa to experience the outmoded irrationality of capitalism. Just go online.

The Internet is the most important technological development of our lifetimes. And yet because it is a system of communication based on information, ideas, and art being instantly shared and collaboratively developed across the world, the main concern that capitalism has had with it is how to turn it into something that can be privately hoarded and sold. This process has been relatively smooth for some traditional businesses that have simply shifted their focus to online sales. But many of the biggest Internet sites are entirely based on content created and shared by users. Some, like Wikipedia and Craigslist, have embraced the noncapitalist model. But others like Google and Facebook spent years trying to figure out how to convert their usefulness into profit, until they finally found a way: by selling user information to advertisers who can now track our every online move.

It is common knowledge in the tech world that “if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.” Google and Facebook are essentially spying on us every day, not because this was their sinister plan all along,6 but because that was the only way capitalists could figure out how to make the Internet worth their investment. Decades ago comics like Yakov Smirnoff used to do “Russian Reversal” jokes: “In America you can always find a party! In Soviet Russia, party always finds you.” Maybe somewhere today a comedian is working on her American Reversal routine: “In Capitalist America, Google searches you!” The transformation of these tech capitalists from a ragtag bunch of fairly anti-establishment computer geeks into creepy Orwellian overlords was not a “natural” process of evolution but a nonsensical path created by capitalist rules that no longer fit the environment that the Internet has created.

It’s time to take charge of our own evolution and have the majority who create society’s wealth control how it is distributed. We now have the ability to combine the egalitarianism and democracy of preclass societies with the material abundance and technological capability of twenty-first-century capitalism. We can realize the dream of all of humanity: being part of the same clan.

 

1. And there would be more crimes to come: child labor, colonialism, sweatshops, Robin Thicke . . .

2. The word primitive has been misused against not-at-all primitive peoples to justify colonialism and slavery, but its literal definition—“early” or “untouched by civilization”—is accurate in this case.

3. If you’re not sure why this is, ask the kids at school to draw you some pictures.

4. Yes, craftsmen and not craftspeople. I never use man to refer to people and I apologize in advance for some people I quote in this book who do, as Marx is about to in a few paragraphs.

5. The phenomenon of everybody over the age of thirty-five feeling hopelessly intimidated by the latest technology is a recent development. No farmer ever needed to ask his seven-year-old daughter “how to work this new-fangled steel plow thingy.”

6. That would be our government. More on that in chapter 5.