Capitalism: the shift from need to Social Control and Planetary Destruction

warning: 3451 words!

Malthus is not famous for being a clergyman in the Church of England his fame is from a Darwinian theory about population growth and carrying capacity.

Natural Selection works because there is huge natural mortality weeding out the least "successful". Its a tautology as the definition of "successful", or "fit" as Darwin called it, is whether an organism survives. But on the principle that mortality is linked in some way to an organisms ability to survive (and wow is all that theory really socially loaded!) Malthus argued that human population would increase until all resources were utilised and starvation and poverty limited further growth. Yet we don't see massive population growth in the rich, if anything it occurs in the poor. Populations in the West are actually falling while those in poorer parts of the world are exploding. And there are other things about Darwinism that don't seem right.

A detailed dissection of Darwinism and History follows with the eventual conclusion that really Social Structure is what is driving these theories and Economic Theory much more than anything natural, scientific and necessary.

Having studied Zoology I always found Darwin's theory a bit odd--yes of course we can code genetic algorithms that use a metric to determine who makes it to the next generation, or who is lost from this--but that "metric" Darwin called "Fitness" turns out to be fabulously ill defined. Dawkins thinks he did well by envisaging rowers in a rowing team and the captain having to weed out the least successful through testing multiple combinations. For rowers read gene. But Arrows Impossibility Theorem shows that even in trivial situations there is no optimal solution. Even in rowing the captain needs to review power/weight ratios. He may have the option of heavier but more powerful teams, or lighter less powerful teams. Combine that with experience, stamina, injury, water conditions, personal time available/other commitments, personality and it all starts to become difficult which team to pick. You see this in all team sports as arguments break out about who should play, and who plays well together. And in football this is just 10 pitch players. Imagine an organism with 10,000 genes like a human, and with billions of individuals all interacting in unfathomably complicated ways. How can you possibly work out fitness without just a try and see. So "fitness" is a poorly defined idea, and one we shouldn't take too seriously. Yet in the field of social engineering in the 19/20th this idea became central to ideas of "master races" and social performance. All the prejudice of the Class System which stratifies humans into classes and "worth" found its apparent "scientific" basis in" fitness." And that led ultimately to the Holocaust. But continues today in Capitalism with the idea that humans must "prove" themselves worthy of wealth and status. You see how absurd these ideas are when you consider that the British system as a whole hands out as much free money in Dividends to the rich as it does in Welfare payments to the far more numerous poor. Yet while there are a million voices questioning whether the poor deserve it, there is only this blog really asking whether the rich deserve it. In both cases people who did not work for it, and prove themselves in anyway, are being given free money. Capitalism is exactly the fraud by the rich over the poor, this self-entitlement to free handouts that continues from the very first days of debt and tribute.***

*** everything needs a caveat. So traditionally this status quo has some justification. Essentially its a protection racket. The powerful engage in warfare and take over a region. They then tax that region (usually of 50% of its productivity) and in return they stop anyone else taking over. This seems extremely unfair. But people tolerate it because paying taxes for peace is usually a better solution that constantly being at war. We saw this in Iraq. Saddam Hussein may have been a tyrant but he had all the troublemakers in prison and Iraq was peaceful. The moment the idiotic yanks banged the hornets nest, killed Hussein and opened the prisons there was civil war for a decade and not a person in Iraq is not not traumatised and longing for Pax Husseini. England saw exactly this during the Civil War which inspired Thomas Hobbes to write his Leviathan justifying Monarchy if only so people could have Peace. This idea had its inception with the Magna Carta of 15th June 1215 signed down the road from here in a beautiful meadow. Unfortunately the Americans have spoiled the area with some pointless building work that I hope is dismantled soon as it was not an act of democracy itself, but overseas Imperialism, and seriously degrades the area.

Magna Carta was not a removal of the Monarch. Anarchists will be puzzled. Why didn't the Barons take the opportunity that Cromwell took on Tuesday, 30 January 1649 to execute the Monarch and be free? It's because it was a truce. The Barons were tired of fighting for supremacy and so the optimal solution was actually to agree on a leader. We all accept the same leader in return for stopping fighting. I believe this is an example of a Nash Equilibrium. This is why people accept the position of subjects to a King. Hegel offers another explanation. So you could argue that the poor accept the rich and powerful because social order and peace is preferable to war. And this is very much the status today where people are comfortable enough not to be bothered with war, and so accept slavery.

And that leads actually into the topic. In nature things are relatively simple. You have resource needs and you do what you need to attain these. For an amoeba this is as hard as it gets.

But organisms have two main possible reasons to get more complicated.

Firstly if they start to exploit the resource offered by other organisms they will enter an arms race as prey evolve to escape predation, and they evolve to predate. Obviously this is not what really happens, this is humans imposing predator/prey and arms race to the what they see. In reality predators are just those organisms that consume other animals. There is no "race" or "conflict" predators could leave that resource if it did not exist. And when prey evolve to occupy the space not yet occupied by predators they create a new resource for new predators. That looks like a "movement" or an "evolution" or a "pressure" in a direction, but its just static like separate frames of a film. Its not like an "individual" undergoes changes. There was no "fish" that decided to walk on land. There were new organisms that developed because there was an opportunity on the land, or actually the subtle regions between like mangroves and mudflats. True they came from what we call "fish" and bear lots of similarities, but all organisms are connected and these names are just human cataloguing.

Secondly in response to their colleagues. Interactions start to become significant in the lives of organisms. Really famous examples are lichens and corals where two completely different types of organism fungus/plant and animal/plant come to live together depending on each other. Multicellular organisms actually are like this with bacteria and animal cells becoming linked with mitochondria and chloroplast bacteria.   

So organisms are not discrete and develop together. This becomes the idea of Community where organisms form collectives which operate to the benefit of all. This reached its maximum expression in the idea of Lovelock's Gaia and the idea that the Earth as a whole operates as a huge society of organisms and nature. Not sure we need to go that far, I'm sure its a lot more random. But it is true that everything influences and is connected to everything. A butterfly flapping its wings in Australia really could start a hurricane in America, and an American switching on their car could kill a butterfly in Australia. But think then the incomprehensible complexity of all the interaction on the planet that everything is evolving to fit into and the try and calculate the "fitness". Darwin and Dawkins move over!

So what does all this have to do with Capitalism?

Capitalists sell Capitalism as just a continuation of the Natural World where things must work to survive. Humans must work to survive and so its a "natural" system.

But this is not true in anyway.

Organisms do what they need, no more and no less. There is no gain in an organism working all day to accumulate wealth. Just come back tomorrow. So what if there is no tomorrow? Well there will be because we are adapted to this. What if conditions change? Well things happen slowly, its not my problem. I won't live for ever anyway, why accumulate all this wealth I will never use. Ah perhaps I can give to my children? And then what will they do? Last thing a child wants if for their parents to "give" them a life. And what will they do anyway? Just accumulate more wealth? It's all pointless.

No nature does not worry about this things. Lets live for today for that is what we have.

But what of the Ant & Grasshopper Aesop fable from Greek oral tradition and written down around 300BC?

A fable about preparing for the future. But also controversial even in its time. The cicada sings all summer while the ant works and when the cicada comes begging in the winter the ant tells it to sing the winter too. But this is only one side of the argument isn't it. The fable of the Dung Beetle who works all summer to collect dung finds it all washed away in winter rains. We have today for certain, tomorrow is always uncertain, and the work we do for tomorrow is always a gamble.

What is obvious is that in an interconnected world we can always rely on the charity of others, and they on us. And this idea of slaving all summer to rest up for the winter is a myth. Its true in the North of the planet winter does mean people must prepare for the future, and that is engrained in the behaviour of things here from humans harvesting to squirrels burying nuts. And perhaps more famous are the 7 years of famine from the Bible that made Joseph of technicolour coat famous. Given knowledge of our conditions we accumulate to mitigate environmental variation. This is obvious. But it is quite different from just hoarding. Squirrels do not spend all their time burying nuts, and stealing from each other, and trying to corner the market so they can enslave their competitors in debt. The strategy they have evolved appears to just involve hoarded for the purpose of winter only, not for wealth itself.

And this is where Capitalism deviates from normal behaviour. In Capitalism humans work to control resources. You see this with territorial animals fighting for control of resources. It may be deer rutting to command breeding herds of females.

or chimpanzees fighting to keep other troops of their territory. Or chimpanzees also fight to seek dominance of the group and raise their access to resources like food and mates within the troop.

No longer does it start to be about need but rather social structure and control.

This is most obvious in the human distinction between working class and aristocracy, between slaves and owners. Or later in working class and capitalists. In both cases society is roughly stratified between those who do work, and those who instruct them, or own them, or at least the resources.

Proponents of the system will say that this is a natural division because those who "know" and are trained can instruct those who don't know what to do turning their "idle" hands to good use. Everyone benefits. The person who can build walls get work, and the employer can sign contracts.

But it becomes unnatural because all things are owned. There is a squirrel capitalist who has buried and hidden everything already, and seeks to bury more and more endlessly.

And because everything is buried and hidden by the squirrels everyone must go to them for food. We are all cicadas now whether we want to sing all summer or work.

Its not like the Cicada could start work. The ant has actively hidden all the land and means to work that land. The Cicada MUST go begging to the ant whether it is Summer or Winter. And the ant has it all in their power to say no to the Cicada. This is Capitalism.

Now proponents of Capitalist will say not quite. The Cicada can go the the next ant and ask for work. and since Capitalists are greedy and like making money to hide, some ant is going to say yes to the Cicada.

But this is absurd isn't it. The Cicada who actually has needs, must go to people who are wealthy with plenty already stored and who have no need, and who only create jobs on a whim. This is the fundamental imbalance that means Capitalism always creates poverty.

Protest say proponents. Global poverty has been crushed since the world moved to Capitalism.

But Capitalism started in earnest in the 1700s and no one looks at poverty before Capitalism.

We need only look at Dickens to see the widespread poverty and horrendous living conditions that Capitalism brought with it.

So this is actually a deep debate. In the UK the key shift was in the Inclosure Acts. Since the end of the Ice Age 10,000 years ago people have lived in the UK. Originally nomadic people became more tied to the land as their technology changed and they learned to farm areas. Once work was being done to raise food from the land people started loose property and territorial ideas. Conflict began to develop as stealing became a valid means of gaining resources. And warfare broke out as tribes contested regions and alliances. But fundamentally order reigned as everyone had a place to live and a mean to survive. Why waste lives fighting your neighbour when you have food in your own valley? Why spend all day sleeping in your round house when you could be out with your friends in the fields.

But then in the 1700 machines were made and owners of those machines started to need people to work them, and needed the land for industrial production and profit. Was this push or pull? that is the debate. Certainly original Capitalists did a lot to attract people. Wages were higher in the factories than on the farms, and they built whole cities of good houses that still stand today to house their workforces. Many people abandoned 1000s of years of life on tribal lands to take up modern lives in cities working in factories.

This paid dividends. New workers got wages that they could spend on new cheaper products that flooded the market place from all the machines.

But in case anyone thought this was all Shangri-la anyone who did not accept the new social structure had government orders to vacate the land. There may have been pull, but there was also aggressive push. Commons were set aside like Indian Reservations as a memory of how things use to be, but the rest of the country fell into Capitalist ownership to be exploited for profit and anyone who did not accept this was pushed to little settlements on cliffs and other lands unusable by the Capitalists.

Britain that had belongs to the people since first settlement, now fell under the ownership of a handful of ultra wealth capitalists whose only interest was profit.

Once people had no where to go but houses in cities all built and owned by the factory owners the good times ended. There was no need to attract workers, they were all desperate for work for otherwise they now starved with nowhere else to go.

Homelessness was invented and became the ultimate drive for people to do whatever Capitalists said.

The poverty and desperate plight of people under Capitalism became so great in the C19th that large numbers of the wealthy started to see a need to do something to correct it.

Socialism was born with an emphasis on finding a way to give the non-capitalists some stake in society. With the majority of the population completely dependent on owners for their living something needed to be done so they had a chance to live.

Most workers it must noted do not have the money or assets to interest a bank in giving them a business loan. And anyone who enters debt is just adding to their poverty as they now need to support themselves and the capitalist who made the loan. The poor are fundamental disenfranchised from the system of Capitalism.

Many Socialisms saw the solution in democratic government. If the people once again got together to take ownership of the country and the factories then everyone could benefit from industry and not just the private owners.

Obviously the private owners have spent a huge amount of effort to denounce this idea that they are not the correct owners. Capitalist in the early C20th began a huge propaganda campaign to denounce Socialism and promote Capitalism enlisting the help of such powerful propagandists as Edward Bernays. And one advantage that Capitalists have is with owning the whole country and press they have the money and power to spread their message better than anyone. So countries in the West became stuck with Capitalism. And other countries that tried to break free were bombed to destruction killing 100s of millions of people. Nazi Germany being the most famous example, but Vietnam being another of many massive war crime caused by the Capitalists. The West likes to attribute the mass deaths in Germany to the system of Concentration camps. But its not controversial to say that the vast majority of these deaths was caused by starvation, and that starvation was caused by the war. Have a chat with ChatGPT about it to get some more details. It was the Wests attempt to stamp out German Socialism that killed these people. But Germans were no better and had their own wars with Russian Socialism which they saw as a threat the Germans. However that was odd. Despite loathing Russians and their Communist Revolution which was very probably trying to topple Germany and expand Communism West, the Germans went into a power sharing agreement in Poland. Churchill then recklessly caused war by invading Germany and most probably tricking Germany into thinking that Russia was an ally to break that alliance and the 10s of millions who died in the ensuing bum fight are essentially Churchill's fault. Either way Socialism faltered in Eastern Europe, and with the Cold War and America's continuing campaign against Socialism it faltered yet more and now people live under Capitalism across Europe.

So global poverty was caused by Capitalism and with the unbelievable productivity of modern technology it is simply impossible to keep people poor any more, so poverty had reduced to pre-Capitalist times or perhaps even further now.

But when you think each person alive today lives in a world where $12,500 is made for them, it means that every family of 4 in the world really has $50,000 share in global annual production you realise that we have moved beyond poverty to a world of complete abundance. And yet the majority of the world still lives far below this level and only because of Capitalism. All those machines working away producing things that the majority are unable to buy, and instead a few individuals have more money than their families could spend in many centuries. This is why we all still need to work. It is because Capitalism and the system of ownership works to reduce our access to resources like deer rutting. and our need to still go out and work has for a long time had nothing to do with need but rather control of our lives and what we can do.

And this social structure that control availability of resources for no actual reason, that keeps people in working lives, making this just to fuel capitalism is why the planet is racing to destruction.

We work not cos we need to, but only to maintain the social structure of ownership and inequality that is called Capitalism. It is self serving. Capitalism works to maintain and promote itself. But the cost is the Natural world and Life on thus planet and that is the unforgivable crime. The most precious thing in the whole know universe: a planet with miraculous life on it that occurred by means we don't understand and which has never happened again, the same event that gave birth to humans and ourselves  that complete mystery and immeasurable gift is under threat by an social/economic system that serves no purpose other than to control our lives and keep up working for owners who have taken everything so we have no other way to live. That absurdity is the world we live in, and very shortly won;t be living in because it will be dead.