The dominant narrative at any stage of human history will inevitably seek to portray the
system it serves as the natural order of things. In the modern world, with its mass media spewing
forth a deluge of self-serving propaganda, the capitalist system, often shielded behind the term
‘democracy’ is promoted as being fully in tune with a thing called ‘human nature’. That
capitalism is somehow a natural phenomenon, that it’s simply human nature, is, however,
very much an ahistorical viewpoint, and today we’re going to examine why.
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Now, you’ve probably heard the claim that capitalism benefits the majority of humanity,
its exponents parroting the declaration that ‘capitalism made your iPhone.’ However, this
is completely incorrect. Labour makes all iPhones – ironically, under the direction of capitalism
which ensures that all are designed to break through inbuilt planned obsolescence. In fact,
beyond that which is provided by nature, labour makes all things under whatever system, the system
itself deciding who gets to enjoy the lion’s share of the profit generated by this labour.
There is also the promoted myth of there being a direct link between hard work and wealth, whereby
workers are harassed into loving ‘the grind’, while the world’s wealthiest do no work at all.
The delusion that ‘anyone can make it’ encourages the masses to sit in the dust and dream of
reaching the stars when we should be collectively throwing up ladders and storming the heavens.
Capitalism creates a paradigm that exalts greed as a necessity and portrays poverty as an
individual failure rather than an engineered part of the system. Wealth is passed off as merit
and capitalism’s ideologues justify punishing the sick and the poor as though their poverty
was a character flaw. Meanwhile capitalists create wealth like vampires create blood.
The economist John Maynard Keynes was no revolutionary, but his understanding of economics
reportedly led even him to the conclusion that, “Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the
nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work together for the benefit of all.”
Despite capitalist ideologues’ best efforts, reality can’t be ignored. Around 18 million
people die every single year from poverty-related causes, making up one third of all human deaths.
At the same time, global agricultural production can feed more than 1.5 times the global population
every day while an estimated 868 million people go hungry, causing 9 million deaths per year.
Michael Parenti observes that, “Most of the world is capitalist and most of the world is poor.”
There will always be poverty under capitalism because capitalism requires poverty to function.
The idea that this is an inevitable part of society that can never be remedied is
nothing more than a capitalist myth that’s been repeatedly disseminated through a 24/7
onslaught of propaganda. This takes place through its countless media outlets which
cultivate within each of us a supposed “common sense” – a “common sense” which just so happens
to coincide with the ruling-class’s interests. Prevalent among capitalism’s defenders is the
delusion that those who control the present somehow control the future, imagining the here and
now to be the end of history. This point of view was made flesh by Francis Fukuyama in his book The
End of History and the Last Man, an attempt to give a theoretical legitimacy to the capitalist
system that had, for all intents and purposes, appeared to emerge victorious from the Cold War.
Not surprisingly it was a theory constructed from narrow analysis that had scorned history
and so ultimately had no future. Fukuyama attempted to crudely weld Hegel to Nietzsche,
promoting the ‘will to power’ over the class struggle that capitalism’s enemies advocated.
But capitalism’s inherent laws couldn’t be denied, and over the three decades of the
descending zig-zag of booms-and-busts since its publication, Fukuyama’s endeavour has found itself
floating face-down in the waters of history. Lacking a reliable theoretical basis that could
appeal to the masses then, Winston Churchill’s assertion that, “Democracy is the worst form
of government – except for all the others that have been tried” was widely trotted out – here,
again, “Democracy” being used as a synonym for “Capitalism”. This glib foolishness,
masquerading as wisdom, functions as a thought-terminating cliché which closes
down any debate. Designed as a defeatist, de-motivational notion, in which this is,
‘just the way the world is,’ it marked a refusal to take an Olympian view which comprehensively
analysed the totality of the situation – of economics, of politics, and of history itself.
However, the amount of time and energy required to knock down such shibboleths is an order of
magnitude greater than that required to produce them. The notion that capitalism
is more beneficial to humanity than not is one of the greatest lies of the modern era.
It’s a hundred degrees Fahrenheit in the Arctic; 26 billionaires hoard half the earth’s wealth; and
up to 150 species of animal are made extinct every single day. In an age of supercomputers and space
travel we still need to work 40-60 hours a week just to avoid starving and freezing to death.
At a time when the world has already reached an era of global abundance, any scarcity that
currently exists is intentionally created by those that hoard all the wealth. Landlords don’t provide
housing. Instead, they deny housing to the people by buying up more properties than are needed,
depleting the market supply in the process. The hoarded excess is then rented back out
to people who now can’t purchase because house prices have consequently been driven up so high.
It’s not that society can’t feed, clothe and house the poor, it’s rather that
capitalism can’t satisfy the rich. But it doesn’t need to be this way and
it is both possible and necessary to uncover and analyse the origins of the oppressive institutions
that have given rise to this situation so that they may be overcome. Karl Marx explains that,
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
Historical materialism teaches that all societies in origin develop out of the level of productive
forces, and the relations of production that accompany them. Friedrich Engels in his work,
‘The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State,’ traces the stages of human
development that eventually arrive at capitalism, demonstrating how history is driven by humanity’s
relationship to production. As a society’s tools and understanding of the world become
more and more advanced, humanity gradually moves towards the next stage of economic development.
Anatomically modern humans as we know them first make their appearance around 200,000 BC, but it’s
not until 1600-1700 AD that capitalism begins to arise – meaning capitalism has been around
for less than 0.5% of humanity’s existence. Now, five main types of historical modes of
production are recognised; that of primitive communism, slave-society, feudalism,
capitalism, and socialism (or industrial communism, in its lower or higher stages).
Under the primitive communal phase, by far the longest lasting in any society,
the means of production are socially owned, corresponding to the character of the productive
forces of this stage. Stone implements and later the bow are the primary tools, and in this phase,
man does not oppress man – or, people don’t oppress other people in any kind of systemic
manner. In such societies there was no material basis for the patriarchal oppression of women
and LGBT+ people, or any significant level of private property. Individuals owned tools and
weapons but land was held in common. Early humans were however, effectively oppressed by nature, the
harshness of survival obliging them to cooperate. Thus, common labour ensured the common ownership
of the means of production and such people might be forgiven for believing that cooperation
and the holding of the means of production in common was the natural order of things – quite
a different conception of “human nature” to that which pervades today. Such societies
flourished without private property, class, a state or a patriarchal family structure.
Engels next proceeded to look at the development of ancient Greece from gentile, or gens based,
into class society as an example of emerging slave-holding society.
At this time in written history, gens was based on patrilineal father-right (as opposed to primitive
communal matrilineal mother-right) due to the level of productive forces whereby agriculture,
herding and animal husbandry had now been developed. Such livestock were not tools
but represented a surplus that was owned by men and could be exchanged. This contributed wealth;
this new source of economic power. Earlier societies could only hunt animals, rather than
domesticating them. And because surplus livestock multiplied faster than the family of men,
slavery suddenly became not only possible – with all this extra food lying around from
agriculture and pastoralism – but in fact advantageous. At least, for the owners.
Thus, the development of classes brought exploitation. In slave-holding society the
basis of relations of production ensured that the slave-owner owned the means of production,
including the workers themselves. Such relations corresponded to the state of productive forces of
that period wherein society developed metal tools and weapons. The primitive husbandry of the hunter
transformed into pastural tillage, handicrafts and a division of labour. The accumulation of
wealth began passing into the hands of the few and a significant section of the population were
converted into slaves. The free labour of all members of society was replaced by forced labour
exploited by non-labouring slave-owners, and class struggle developed wherein people with
full rights, the rich, exploited people with no rights, the poor.
In the emergent Athenian society, the growth of commodity exchange and the division of
society into antagonistic classes, led to the need for a professional police force distinct
from an armed population to be served by a central authority to keep the slave population in check.
This structure regulated trade between other classes and protected merchants from bandits.
Laws relating to money, debt, credit, usury - phenomena arising from commodity
exchange - were drawn up and enforced. This state structure was an organ designed
specifically to suppress the lower classes and to mediate conflict between the exploiters.
Human development continued to advance, and under the later feudal system, relations of
production involved the feudal lord, who now owned the means of production. The landowner didn’t own
the worker, usually the serf, but still could exert great power over them. The serf differed
from the slave who had no interest in work, in that the serf had their own tools, husbandry
and some degree of interest in work that was necessary for their cultivation of the land and
for their payment to the feudal lord. This system allowed the serf to garner some small crumbs of
wealth from the land they occupied and worked. Under the next stage, capitalism, the capitalist
owns the means of production but not the workers. The workers however, the wage-labourers,
are personally free but don’t own any of the means of production, and, to avoid starving,
must sell their labour power to the capitalist wherein they’re exploited. In place of manorial
estates tilled with implements used by peasants, are capitalist forms of agricultural machinery and
urban factories. However, capitalism creates its own contradictions which it’s unable to resolve.
Producing large numbers of commodities and reducing their prices, competition
becomes intensified, destroying small and medium private producers. By expanding production and
concentrating it, along with a mass of workers, in huge mills and factories, capitalism creates
a social character, bringing its workers together – meanwhile, the product of this socialised labour
is pocketed privately by the capitalist. Social production, private appropriation.
Periodic crises of over-production are unavoidable wherein capitalists, finding no demand for their
innumerable goods due to the impoverishing of the wider population, are forced to destroy
vast quantities of goods. This means that relations of production have ceased to correspond
to the state of productive forces due to coming into irreconcilable contradiction – which is
where we find ourselves right now. As W.E.B. Du Bois states, “Capitalism cannot reform itself;
it is doomed to self-destruction. No universal selfishness can bring social good to all.”
Capitalism therefore has revolution burning within it so that socialism will be brought forth by the
working class that capitalism has created and exploited – the proletariat. The most acute form
of class struggle exists under capitalism, and the capitalists, heavily engaged in their class war
through their attempts to suppress wages, evict tenants that are unable to pay their rents,
and invest millions in information outlets assuring their class enemies that “human
nature makes socialism unworkable”. And so when the many mouthpieces of
the establishment continuously seek to assure us that capitalism is part of our human nature,
we’re inclined to believe them, hard-wired as we have been for millennia to trust one another,
as was all-important to our survival since the beginning of human history.
Mao Tse-tung, however, points out that “In class society everyone lives as a
member of a particular class, and every kind of thinking, without exception,
is stamped with the brand of a class.” When capitalists and their apologists claim
that capitalism derives from human nature, they themselves are staring into a Nietzschean Abyss,
not realising that it’s actually a mirror, reflecting back at them their own class
viewpoints, wishes and aspirations. In an era where the world’s eight richest people
have the same wealth as the poorest 3.6 billion, we can be reminded of William Z
Foster’s assertion that, “Never until capitalism appeared upon the world stage was such an anomaly
possible – Starvation in the midst of plenty.” Albert Einstein once said that: “The real purpose
of socialism is precisely to advance beyond the predatory phase of human development.”
If oppressive institutions emerge only out of certain specific material conditions,
then it’s entirely possible that these in turn will vanish or be superseded when conditions
change and these contradictions are resolved. That the world is run by a loathsome super-wealthy
elite is well and widely known. The many sources of this wealth and the misery this causes,
however, are safely obscured, and the masses’ rightful resentment of this section of society
is hand-waved away as bigotry brought on by envy. The world’s richest people, like Elon
Musk and Jeff Bezos, find themselves amidst a fierce tug-of-war in the minds of the masses
between being revered and despised - a reflection of the struggle between the rotten, corrupt,
dying world of capitalism and the aspirations for a better world that struggles to be born.
John MacLean presents the ‘human nature’ needed for tomorrow when he states that:
‘There are two classes of morality. There is the working class morality and there is the capitalist
class morality… What is moral for the one class is absolutely immoral for the other, and vice-versa…
[My] appeal is to the working class. I appeal exclusively to them because they and they only
can bring about the time when the whole world will be in one brotherhood, on a sound economic
foundation. That and that alone, can be the means of bringing about a re-organisation of society.’
As a self-serving mantra for the ruling class, the claim that the capitalist system is the
natural order for humanity is an assertion that doesn’t stand up to any kind of serious analysis.
The benefits of capitalism continue to be felt only by the small minority that is the
bourgeoisie, while its enormous drawbacks are experienced by the vast majority:
the exploited workers and oppressed peoples. The intellectual bankruptcy of capitalism’s apologists
find their defence not in reasoned argument, as this might drive opinions in a ‘wrong’ direction,
but in shallow thought termination clichés that preach defeat, creating familiarity and
general acceptance through casual repetition. Relying on a blind euro-centrism that primarily
uses the western individual as its test subject, this analysis further ascribes the
viewpoint of the numerically miniscule dominant capitalist class as being that of all humanity.
But – make no mistake – capitalism is not human nature. After all, capitalism has been around
for less than 0.5% of humanity’s existence, meanwhile our species lived in stateless,
classless, communal society for over 95% of the time that we’ve been on this planet.
Capitalism is not human nature, but in fact nothing more than
the depraved nature of the historically relatively new capitalist class itself.
Right, thanks very much for watching this
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