Max Tallberg & Petri Lahtinen
The nature of capitalism
When writing or talking about capitalism, few people bother to define the concept anymore, because it has been so prevalent for so long; indeed, many people assume that people more or less understand what capitalism means. On the other hand, there is also the general difficulty of providing any more general definitions of capitalism that would be able to encompass all its historical and regional variations. Karl Marx already understood that modern capitalism is not an eternal or immutable structure. This insight must be understood in two different senses. First, capitalism is not an immutable structure which some revolutionary or, more generally, subversive action or act would succeed in changing or dismantling in one way or in one right way. Second, the capitalist system is itself subversive, since it is constantly changing its methods of production, its organisation of labour and production, and through them social relations, systems of power and political movements. Built into the ontological logic of capitalism is a mechanism which forces it to constantly expand, conquer new territories and mutate in order to ensure its own survival. As a result, new systems of control and domination are constantly emerging within capitalist society, taking over a wide variety of resources and desires that transform societies. It would be absurd to attempt to develop any kind of universal and all-encompassing definition of capitalism in such a short text. Despite the fact that capitalist production has constantly changed – and continues to change – its basic principles and operating logic may be argued to have remained relatively unchanged. These can be summarised in three main features: first, in the capitalist system, goods and services are mainly produced for the market rather than for the needs of the economy or the community. Second, capitalism has built-in competition and the pursuit of profit, which also implies a social contract with private property. The third feature of capitalism is the transformation of the ontology of work into wage labour, which must be understood in practice as the sale of one’s time and human labour to the capitalist, that is the owner of a business, and the means of production, in return for a monetary payment which the worker can in turn spend on the market to buy various goods and services.
It is an undeniable fact that capitalism is now spread to every corner of the world and every aspect of life. Capitalist society can therefore be characterised as a totally mobilised society in which productivism or economic totalitarianism prevails, in which the aim is to mobilise and exploit everything, both material and immaterial, by understanding the whole world and existence as resources and raw materials to be used. Indeed, capitalist totalisation has gone beyond the critical and irreversible limit that, according to thinkers such as Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Zizek, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. The philosopher Mark Fisher called this capitalist realism: it is a widespread sense and experience that capitalism is not only the only possible political and economic system, but that it is impossible to imagine a coherent alternative to it today. Capitalist realism can be compared to a pervasive climate that conditions not only cultural production but also the regulation of labour and education. At the same time, it acts as an invisible barrier, restricting both thought and action. While many in power and those who enjoy the accumulation of capital and wealth want to believe in the omnipotence of capitalism and its somewhat self-correcting nature, more and more people are now raising the problems of the capitalist system. The moral critique of capitalism, which stresses that capitalism leads to suffering and the destruction of natural life, seems ironically to only reinforce capitalist realism. Biodiversity loss, injustice, mental illness, poverty, famine, wars, etc., which capitalism creates can be presented as an inescapable part of reality, while a hope that these forms of suffering can be eliminated is easily seen as a naive utopia. Capitalist realism can only be threatened if it is shown to be in some way inconsistent and unsustainable – in other words, if the apparent realism of capitalism is revealed to be something else entirely.
The historically significant transformation towards a capitalist logic was the development that led to conditions in which human labour, production, the means of production and the results of labour are removed from the immediate essence of the agent doing the labour and transferred to the monetary economy, capital, private property and the pursuit of economic surplus value. Work and production no longer serve the energetic demands and basic needs of people to nourish and protect themselves, their relatives and their communities. Instead, work and production are understood first and foremost as resources that are harnessed to generate (consumer) goods and services. At the same time, capitalism is closely related to the market economy, where economic decisions are driven by an ostensibly free market. In a capitalist system, the market is a space where human labour is sold as a commodity and product – in both material and immaterial terms – for consumers to buy. Because capitalism is a totalitarian system, it has a built-in drive towards the maximisation of profits, efficiency and productivity, which is justified by appeals to endless (economic) growth and progress. It says much for the strength of capitalist realism that economic growth has become an almost untouchable and sacred idea in the capitalist system, which not even the left-wing parties – or at least those of them that are running for government – dare to question. Indeed, capitalist realism has successfully installed a business ontology in the world, according to which it is self-evident that everything in society should be treated as a business. The free market has created conditions in the economy that resemble the pre-social contract state of nature outlined by many social theorists. This is why, for example, liberalists who believe fervently in capitalism might easily describe the free market as a ‘natural’ state of the economy and think of the market as self-correcting and self-regulating. Indeed, free markets create a ruthless economic playing field in which businesses compete with each other for capital and economic profits. In order to maximise efficiency, the aim is to turn every object into a consumer product, a mass product that is neat, clean, easy and ‘maintenance-free’. A consumable item is neither maintained nor repaired, because when it is worn out, it can be replaced by an identical one. Historically, capitalism, the free market and the neoliberal economy represent a development in which areas that previously existed outside the market have been transformed into economic opportunities. This has given rise to phenomena such as the platform economy, micro-work and cognitive capitalism.
The tradition of liberalism favours in particular private property and the power of the commercial world of thought, whose influence also enables governments, banks and companies to adopt the same models and strategies as in other areas of capitalism. The aim is to put a price on the entities and beings of the living world and to create commodities, products and services that can be bought and sold. In particular, neoliberalism conceives of the world as a vast global market, full of potential, in which the production and exchange of consumer goods, in order to maximise economic profit, supersedes other dimensions of relations between peoples and between other individuals. In the capitalist system, being liberal is to be characterised as free and individual, economically self-sufficient and free through private property. However, private property should not be understood as an unambiguous and immutable phenomenon; for example, Marx identifies two forms of private property based on two different forms of labour. First, one can speak of property based on one’s own labour, where the worker expresses and displays himself. In such work, one’s own inherent humanity and what Marx termed species being is shown to other people. Work itself is humanity, or at least an activity that expresses humanity. Another category of private property is property based on the exploitation of the labour of others, which expresses the power and might of the owner of money and capital, that is the investor. This form of property corresponds to subordinated labour, which is not done for oneself or for the fulfilment of one’s own humanity, but for others and in subordination to some end. Private property-based notions of freedom and economic self-sufficiency are secured by maintaining and developing the power involved in capitalist production and transactions, but also by occupying new territories for investment and producing endless consumer goods for the enjoyment of consumers. Neoliberal capitalism seeks a world in which transnational corporations and banks control and manage people’s lives through compulsory and international managerialism.
The illusion that the one selling one’s labour or the consumer has the freedom to make their own free decisions is perpetuated by ostensible consumer choices and labour market opportunities. However, production and markets very cunningly and unobtrusively steer consumer choices and desires in the direction that suits them. At the same time, capitalism encourages – or rather, pushes – entrepreneurship in the name of the so-called new work. The new work that emerges from the capitalist system is characterised, among other things, by impatience, restlessness and insecurity. The historical proletariat in industrial capitalism is transformed into a precariat by cognitive capitalism. To survive, the precariat must assume the identity of the entrepreneur-politician, ready to ruthlessly exploit any opportunity at any given time. Its skills are no longer based on any technical prowess or innovation in production, but rather on the ability to combine different aspects of production and work which no longer form a coherent temporal or spatial continuum. Work itself becomes a ‘product’ or an ‘opportunity’ and can be ‘sold’, as it were, to the worker. In this case, the risks of the job, i.e. the responsibility for the final product and economic profitability, are also shifted to the worker. This is the drive of capitalism towards the private entrepreneurial model of work, which at the same time creates social and economic competition to see who can always perform the work or product best, i.e. most efficiently and at the lowest cost, so that one can dream of maximising profits. Within the “natural laws” of the free market, work becomes a question of who is able to buy his own survival for the least amount, who is willing to sell himself to provide the most “added value” for his labour to the labour buyer. Liberal capitalism itself justifies entrepreneurship by appealing to the basic human need for freedom and the new innovations that entrepreneurship generates, whose self-serving novelty value is believed to be directly derived from the growth of economic and social welfare.
When free markets operate within communities based on social contracts but operate with an illegality that is itself similar to the natural state, contradictions inevitably arise, manifesting themselves as inequality and injustice. When services that were previously part of the public sector, such as health care and education, are fenced off to the private sector and forced to comply with the laws and regulations of the market economy, structures are created that generate and maintain inequalities. At the same time, the quality of these services can be seen as secondary, as long as the service itself manages to deliver benefits that can be measured in one way or another in terms of economic surplus value. In recent years, for example, alongside cognitive capitalism there has been talk of academic capitalism within the scientific community, which manifests itself in the form of tuition fees and the pressure to fill quotas for graduates and peer-reviewed publications. In a capitalist system, free markets and private property lead to unequal accumulation of wealth and capital as well as other unjust structures. All this generates and sustains a widespread decline in individual well-being, social unrest, instability and the erosion of democratic institutions. From the perspective of human justice, it is therefore crucial to ask whether a more evenly distributed welfare and wealth can be created within the capitalist system. One solution that has been put forward is the inclusive collectivisation of production and stock markets, whereby all those involved in production would share in the means of production, the outcomes of production and economic surplus value, thus reducing the alienation from human labour created by the capitalist production system. However, it should be borne in mind that such a move requires significant social and economic changes, since the collectivisation of traditional capitalism and the market economy for the benefit of all requires a reorganisation of the accumulation of wealth and a redistribution of existing wealth. In this way, optimists who believe in capitalism think that wealth can continue to grow but can also be distributed more fairly.
As already stated, the structures of capitalism cannot be altered and dismantled by a single revolutionary means. One way of eradicating the economic inequalities generated by capitalism is to increase the taxation of capital income or, even more radically, to redistribute wealth. On the other hand, a social security reform such as the basic income could respond to many of the current problems: the mere demand for a basic income as a fundamental social right reveals the fundamental contradiction of capitalism, where the free market and those who benefit from the labour of the proletariat – or now the precariat – constantly try to externalise the costs and risks of producing economic surplus value to society. The implementation of basic income can itself be understood as a revolutionary act: it is not only a new form of social security, but the basis for a new diversity of forms of life, which the totalising economy of capitalism is trying to force into an inappropriate unity. The guaranteed basic income can be understood as a weapon to be seized in order to escape the logic of capitalist valorisation, to assert the autonomy and independence of pluralism and the fundamental exile from the state. At the same time, it is a weapon for the new mobility of pluralities, which can be effective if it succeeds in spreading across the planet as an innovation like the global basic income. The proletariat in the past and the precariat in the present want to reclaim their human capacities for creativity, movement and change. One of the purposes of basic income can be understood as the desire to liberate these human capacities from the limits imposed on them by capitalism. The limits of capitalism, and the borderlands around them, are the manifestation of its own crises of abundance, multiplicity of possibilities and free movement, which the capitalist would like to harness for his own profit-making. The free production of the basic necessities of life, free housing and free movement mean that goods or production no longer translate into money or economic surplus value, since these basic needs and necessities of life can be obtained outside the limits of the monetary economy.
The environment and capitalism
Injustice and inequality are problems that have been with capitalism since its inception, and equally certain thinkers have been aware of them from very early on. Today, however, people are waking up to another problem created and sustained by capitalism, which in its magnitude and urgency poses an acute existential threat to all living life on Earth. In fact, it is not true to speak of the problem as a single entity, but rather as a complex network of problems linked to natural environments. Above all, the capitalist system and its logic cause and accelerate the destruction of biodiversity, pollution and anthropogenic climate change. The logic behind this is inherently the same logic that generates exploitation, alienation and injustice in capitalist society: if capitalism perceives labour and productive forces in all their many dimensions as resources in the case of human work, the same logic is repeated in the case of natural reserves and the common good of nature. The concept of resource within capitalist logic is problematic within planetary boundaries, because in all its one-dimensionality it relies on an overly straightforward way of thinking, in which the world is fragmented and broken down into seemingly easily manageable and exploitable parts.
A significant part of the environmental problems created by capitalism currently can be traced back to the discovery and widespread exploitation of fossil fuels. In particular, there is talk of how an environmental problem such as climate change is driven by a type of society based primarily on fossil capitalism. Fossil capitalism, in turn, is made up of networks of actors whose purpose is to make economic profit from fossil fuels. Historically, this turnaround can be dated back to the rise of steam power in the United Kingdom, which displaced more traditional energy sources, but it was the discovery of fossil fuels – and oil in particular – that marked an irreversible turning point in human energy history. Mankind found itself in a situation where oil was constantly becoming more and more available, giving rise to a false confidence that there was no longer any need to worry about energy supply. This epistemic fallacy, in turn, made possible a new kind of calculus that was totally severed from the question of the renewal of natural resources. We have already described the capitalist system in this text as a totalitarian economic system, but the totalitarianism made possible by oil has two unique characteristics: first, it seeks to harness, or totally mobilise, all life for profit, and second, this momentum is directed towards a single plan, ideology and objective, in this case that of capitalism. Productive production and its machinery, dreamed up by capitalism and set in motion by oil, have required four conditions to be in place: first, it must have been preceded by an intellectual climate, a community sufficiently disposed to total mobilisation and to the transformation of itself and nature in the name of production, whether it be economic growth, progress, comfort, profit or gain – however the ideology sees fit to present it to the masses. Second, the right social conditions were needed, i.e. a capitalist social system and the social technology, education and training, legislation, bureaucracy and information technology that can sustain the necessary division of labour, population and economic growth. Third, oil and fossil fuels have required the right technology, i.e. the material instruments and tools to harness them for energy production. The final condition is, of course, the existence and availability of fossil fuels themselves.
Central to the renewal of the capitalist mode of production is the constant demand for the accumulation of capital, which manifests itself in the widespread myth of continuous and endless economic growth. Under capitalism, the pursuit of profit and the accumulation of capital act as perpetual motion, and this is why capitalist relations transcend all others. This is the reason that makes capitalist relations both more stable and more destabilising than any other relationship. Under their power, the extreme socialization of nature proceeds in parallel with the absorption of an ever more pervasive material basis into the fabric of social life. However, from the perspective of strong sustainability, the capitalist system, continued economic growth, urbanisation, technologization and the ‘green’ transition or growth, and various reproductive and economic stimulus packages are not viable solutions in the face of large-scale ecological problems. Instead, they form a significant part of the crisis of civilisation and are currently accelerating the course towards a collapse. Today, more and more people are rightly asking whether the built-in logic of capitalism’s constant growth and planetary limits can be reconciled. From an ecological perspective, capitalism is viewed and criticised in a variety of ways and from a wide range of different angles. The most passive nihilistic position is represented by the so-called techno-utopian transhumanists, who believe in technological determinism to such an extent that, in their view, the current production and consumption patterns of the capitalist system need not be changed, even at the risk of environmental destruction, because technological progress will eventually lead humanity to a situation in which, according to the school of thought initiated by Francis Bacon, human beings will be definitively detached from the constraints of nature and biology. In our previous texts on ecological crises, we drew on Jorge Pinto’s division between environmentalist and ecological approaches to environmental issues. Although this division is crude and strident, we use it for simplicity when considering other approaches to the environmental crises caused by capitalism. The environmentalist approach assumes, in principle, that the production patterns of the capitalist system can, to some extent, continue to be maintained with certain modifications. To address environmental problems, it proposes moderate economic measures such as taxing environmentally harmful activities and developing technologies that reduce the environmental damage caused by production. In addition, the various international environmental agreements are important measures within the approach which should be strengthened in the light of impending environmental disasters.
According to researchers, the maintenance of a capitalist system and a market economy can lead to two alternative scenarios. In the first scenario, societies do not have time to develop sufficient ecological adaptability and effective reactivity while maintaining capitalism. As a result, existing societies will collapse and the preconditions for material well-being will be destroyed. The collapse may be sudden, or it may be avoided as best as possible by externalising misery from the rich to the poor, and the growing problems are contained by ever more overt power politics. Inequalities will grow (resulting in distrust in public authorities and more violent conflicts) and environmental crises will worsen, even if greenhouse emissions are reduced from the 2030s onwards. The most optimistic picture of the future within the environmentalist approach is one in which world governments realize the urgency of ecological crises and take seriously the threat they pose. Again, taxation plays a major role in the proposed solutions, with progressive taxation being proposed to reduce inequality, while public funds are invested in education, health and job creation, and social security reform such as basic income is introduced. At the same time, however, existing economic models and structures need to be dismantled to strengthen sustainability. Certain ecological measures are also required, such as a shift away from industrial agriculture, the adoption of a plant-based diet and the introduction of clean energy.
The ecological approach, which can also be called deep ecology, ecological realism or strong sustainability, is much more critical of capitalism. This approach considers that ecological crises are the result of capitalism’s excessive interference in and unsustainable exploitation of the Earth’s material-energetic processes, while the prerequisite for sustainable life is outlined as slowing down material-energetic ‘metabolism’. In practice, this means reducing overall production and consumption – especially in affluent societies, organisations and households – and moving towards a scarcer life. The ecological approach argues that technological development, capitalism and the growth of the human population, among other things, prevent the slowing down of metabolism and are therefore both socially and ecologically harmful. Instead, the ecological approach calls for sustainable actions such as decentralised small-scale production, the development of local communities and increased self-sufficiency. It is therefore clear, given the contradiction between the realities of planetary limits and current capitalist production and consumption, that something must be done about capitalism. Reducing production and consumption logically leads to the view that continued economic growth can no longer be the primary objective of the economy. The ecological approach has clear empirical and theoretical arguments for turning economic growth towards economic decline, degrowth, no-growth or negative growth, the main obstacle to which is the neoliberal economic policy ideology that is vital to capitalism. Free markets and the pursuit of economic growth seem to be strongly at odds with the concept of sustainability. In its critique of capitalism, ecological realism does not see the backbone of economic growth in corporate innovation and labour productivity gains, but in particular in cheap fossil energy and rapid population growth and the resulting multiplication of consumption and production. One might well ask whether economic growth in the modern sense is even possible without fossil fuels. However, it is clear that fossil capitalism should be driven down for the sake of the continuity of life. Ecological approaches should therefore be understood as a form of anti-capitalist rebellion that seeks in both concrete and figurative wildernesses, frontier areas, backwaters and secret places to escape from a capitalist system that destroys the conditions of life. People who have fled to these obscure areas of capitalism avoid becoming wage labourers and part of the machinery that destroys life. These areas, with their porous borders and holes in the enclosures of capitalism from which people can escape, cause problems for capitalism because they prevent the establishment and stability of its relations of production. The basic income already mentioned can also be seen as a means of reducing unsustainable consumption, if, properly implemented, it also manages to provide an opportunity for a more conscious use of natural resources and a conscious appropriation of one’s leisure time as something other than identity-affirming empty consumption.
At the same time, capitalism’s relationship with the environment is also strongly linked to inequality and injustice. The capitalist mode of production and the economic growth-driven social model it defines are qualitatively hierarchical, unequal, expanding and changing networks in which economic actors are nevertheless dependent on relatively stable political conditions and the support of social institutions and economic-political organisations. The local shift from former prosperity to a life of scarcity exposes the community to directly oppressive or at least highly unequal dependencies. Poor areas concentrated in commodity and low-value-added production are particularly vulnerable in this regard. As things stand, the poorest regions of the world will be the main victims of the environmental problems caused by the capitalist system, as natural disasters strike these regions and the reserves needed for the continuity of life dwindle. Historically, these natural resources have been exploited by the wealthy industrialised countries to increase their own standard of living. This is where the concept of sustainable eco-social well-being comes in, which does not require scientific and technical breakthroughs but a profound socio-cultural change. In the light of the ecological crisis, rich countries, societies, organisations and individuals living in affluence should reassess their real needs in relation to those of their fellow human beings living in poverty and to the rights of future generations to live a meaningful life. At the same time, however, societies should seek to maintain equal opportunities for education and work, a healthy environment for growth, and a functional, equal and just society. The transition to a more sustainable and equitable world, within the realities of planetary limits, means lowering living standards in wealthier countries and moving towards a scarcer, slower-moving world in terms of social metabolism. In such a world, the politics of distribution that emerged in times of abundance and plenty no longer work, and the world must be able to adapt and share scarcity. In global terms, this means in practice that a decline in the standard of living of wealthier people must become a possibility. As we give up the gains we have made, ensuring equity must become a core theme of both national and international policy. The measures of human well-being here must be the sustainable fulfilment of basic human needs, rooted in everyday life, in opportunities for fulfilling one’s life and in collective well-being, in which relations with other people and other species play a central role.
Conclusion
In this text, we have tried to present capitalism as a phenomenon in a concise and general way, but above all to address its main problems. If the thesis of capitalist realism is accepted, it is difficult to imagine a significant and comprehensive alternative to capitalism. Indeed, it seems that, for the time being, effective anti-capitalist action consists of relatively small-scale anti-capitalist resistance and various forms of escape to obscure areas outside the capitalist system. We have argued that capitalism could also be attempted to be corrected from within, through taxation and other socio-economic changes. However, it should be noted that the main beneficiaries of capitalism today are the elites in power, who mostly reap the benefits of the accumulation of capital and wealth. In the present-day world, financial wealth is still an important basis of power and influence, and history shows that people who have come into the grip of power are often very reluctant to give up the wealth they have acquired or even inherited. Similarly, the great masses feel entitled to the accumulated wealth and standard of living of previous generations, which is equally difficult to give up. The main obstacle to changing capitalism and freeing oneself from its unsustainable social and ecological structures is the human ego. Breaking away from hierarchical ‘self-evident’ and non-growth-oriented economies and moving to alternative systems requires time and skills, which in themselves require a psychological change in which renunciation and scarcity can be accepted as viable options. As long as we live in the midst of capitalist realism, changing or resisting capitalism is an ongoing activity which, like capitalism, must maintain its own reactivity and change in order to create real alternatives to existing systems and structures.
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