trashgender-neurotica:

delearyus:

trashgender-neurotica:

Not all trading is capitalism. Otherwise we wouldn’t need the word “capitalism”, we’d just say “trade”.

Capitalism involves forms of trade, but not all forms of trade are capitalistic.

Traditionally, direct trade has been a habit between groups of people who don’t fully trust each other to ensure they are not taken advantage of, while within their own communities the rule has been distribution according to need. This is not capitalism.

Capitalism turns resources (things that can be used) into commodities (things that can be sold) by introducing a value form, or in other words assigning a monetary value. The value form aids in trade by creating a standard against which all can be measured regardless of their actual function (or “use value”)

Some forms of capitalism, especially Neoliberal and Austrian School Capitalism have tried to subject all things to commodification by the capitalist market system. Environmental credits, video views, subscribers, gallons of gas, ideas, and cell phones are all interchangeable because they can all be assigned a monetary value. In this way, money becomes the medium of all value.

The result is the disappearance of what was once shared in common, a process called “enclosure”. 

Before the enclosures of the land in Europe there were many communal towns. These towns saw the sharing of common tools, lands, livestock, spaces, and resources. The communities were exploited by the lords as a group through the system of taxation and not individually through profit like the bougie to the modern isolated prole.

The enclosures imposed via colonization were often carried out against peoples who lived in a similar communal style (usually even without the layer of warlord exploitation via tax). And where empires already existed the colonizers were always willing to impose further enclosure, to the point of causing famine and other man-made disasters.

This process continues today. Often we see images of starving children in sub-saharan Africa with some white savior charity asking us to give a little. What isn’t mentioned is that these starving children are victims of the colonial regime’s enclosure of what used to be common resource. These sustenance villages lived good and self-sustaining lives for centuries at least before Coca Cola claimed the water and Nestle claimed the soil. This is the violence the charity means to cover up, like whitewash over a bloodstain.

And this is the case everywhere enclosure is imposed and commodification becomes the rule. Starvation, poverty, sickness and death. This is the Irish and Indian Famines. This is the suicides in Chinese factories. This is homeless camps in every major city.

This is Capitalism.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe that commodity production is necessary but not sufficient for a capitalist society. A capitalist society is one in which the means of production are monopolized by a class of capitalists in pursuit of profit (from which it follows that everything would be commodified). A commodity-producing society which did not have this quality would not be capitalist (by the Marxist definition anyways, which I assume is the relevant one here). For example, Adam Smith’s ‘primitive society’, in which people produce commodities and sell them to one another on the market, without the involvement of capital, would not actually be capitalist. (Ironically, this simplified society is what Smith bases his ideas of social harmony and ‘the invisible hand’ on, he actually was unable to expand them to apply to a real capitalist society and agreed that real capitalism actually tended to promote class conflict, but this was kind of edited out by economists who ‘refined’ his work)

Haha wow that had way too many parentheticals and tangents sorry

No you’re totally right, I completely forgot all but the faintest reference to class analysis.

Also tho, afaik there’s no evidence that Adam Smith’s “primitive society” ever actually existed in real history.

I haven’t read it all, but Debt: The First 5000 Years has had some good things to say on this subject.