1. Capitalism: The Ghost in the Machine
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Terry Leahy 2023
A phrase you’ll often hear is ‘system change, not climate change’. This book explores that idea. How could we change the system? The capitalist system, the patriarchal system, the racist system. Systems that are destroying the planet. How did these systems come about? What connects them? So, this chapter and the next concentrate on capitalism as a key system of modern societies. But I will also consider the connections between capitalism and other social systems.
Capitalism
I have called this chapter ‘capitalism, the ghost in the machine’. Why am I talking about ghosts? Let me start off by saying what’s wrong with conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories have the idea that there’s this shadowy elite that’s up there pulling strings. If you look at capitalism in that way, it is quite obvious that the capitalist class is that evil elite. People like Rupert Murdoch, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and the like. The one percent that the occupy movement talks about.
But what this analysis fails to grasp is the coherence of capitalism as a social machine. A social machine operates through the combined actions of the whole population. Including people that are not part of that elite class. People in general are caught up in this social machine and participate in its construction.
I like to use the phrase ‘the ghost in the machine’ to get to grips with how a social machine can operate without being controlled by a conspiracy at the top. Gilbert Ryle, a philosopher talking about mind-body problems, coined this phrase to talk about a theory he wanted to challenge. But I want to use it more positively as a way of thinking about the nature of societies. French writer, Cornelius Castoriadis argues that societies are animated by a set of imaginary and largely unconscious ideas. Almost all people in any society take these ideas for granted. We can think of this ‘ghost’ as the basic assumptions that animate a social machine. And I think of a social machine as operating like a game of chess or football, with various positions and rules. These constitute the background assumptions through which the game, as you see it on the TV, is played out.
You can look at this in terms of a variety of theories. Using the language of Foucault, we might refer to the ghost as a dominant discourse. Or in a Marxist framing, we might think of the ghost as a dominant ideology. The way Castoriadis frames it, this ghost is a set of largely unconscious assumptions about reality. These assumptions are in fact imaginedand created over time by human actors. His example is the idea that you can buy someone’s capacity to work. He says that idea is no less imaginary than thinking that your ancestor is an owl.
The ghostly construction of capitalism
Looking at capitalism like this, capitalism is an invention of the human species, another kind of class society. Capitalism follows the model of earlier versions of class society, also invented and governed by a set of ghostly assumptions. Not that different to ancient Egypt or the Incas in many important respects. In the terms of Marxism, capitalism is a ‘mode of production’. A way people relate to each other around the production of material items. But behind this is a set of imaginary ideas, a largely unconscious agreement to play the social game in a particular way. To allocate social positions and capacities in relation to the rules of that game. Thereby creating a social machine — predictable and expected social actions and relationships.
The approximate dates of capitalism are from 1600 to the present time. Not that long really. And lots of people think it will never go away, which seems to me very unlikely. I am sure it will, eventually! So let us begin to look at this ghost more closely and describe the key animating ideas of capitalism. The following account is a way of interpreting some of Marx’s analysis.
The first aspect of the ghostly construction of capitalism is that things that produce useful material items, are owned privately. What Marxists call the private ownership of ‘the means of production’. And can be sold on the market. So, this is quite different from other class societies. For example, in Feudal Europe, the lord of the manor could not sell the manor, his land and residence. He had to pass it on to his heir, usually the eldest son. In turn, he had received it from his father and so on. Ultimately in theory, it was the king who owned the manor and all land in his kingdom. The king lentthe manor to the lord, who swore allegiance to the king. So, in Feudal Europe these complicated understandings about land imply that the means of production are not available on the market.
This is different in capitalist society. The basic means of production can be sold on the market. If you’re the owner of a factory, a farm, a bank, a power grid or whatever — ultimately, you can always sell it.
To maintain the value of your means of production, you must put that means of production into play. You can’t just sock it away under the bed, just leave it in a bank. The value of any item of the means of production changes. You must put it out there and make it work. Say you have a factory. If you just leave it and do nothing with it, it is not realizing its potential value. It is not making money by producing things for sale. As well, the equipment you have starts to date. The original value of your factory declines. The minute you start making things and selling those things on the market, then your factory has value. In capitalism, the value of means of production is their potential to make money. To demonstrate this potential and maintain value, you must continue to make money.
The second aspect of the ghostly construction is that there’s a distinction between employers and employees. Employers own the means of production. They pay people to work and produce value, by making objects or services, which the owners can then sell on. Employees do not own the means of production. They cannot live by using means of production to produce the things they need. Instead, they must sell their working day to an employer. — so they can use their pay to buy what they need.
I have identified two basic social positions in the capitalist social game – employers and employees. People who are notemployed and do not own the means of production occupy a third social position. They are scraping by at the edge of survival. These people are potential employees. If they could possibly get a job, they would. Marx refers to them as the ‘reserve army of labour’. In today’s world, these people are much more likely to be living in the global South. There are a billion people who are going hungry and another billion who are suffering from food deficiency diseases, wasting, anaemia, and the like. Because their income is insufficient to purchase a good diet. Colonial governments took their ‘means of production’ and these are still in the hands of a rich elite, connected to global capitalism. Intense competition for work in those countries means that capitalists can pay the lowest possible wage to the people they do employ.
A third aspect of the ghostly construction of the capitalist social machine is that labour is sold on the market. As ‘free’ labour. The employee owns their capacity to work and can sell it like any other commodity. They can choose their employer. This is completely different to other kinds of class society where the labour capacity of the subordinate class is not theirs to dispose of. For example, in feudal society, each landlord has control over ‘their’ peasants. That landlord had the right to command their labour, to produce a tribute. In a slave society like Ancient Greece, the slave owner commanded the work of the slave. Owning the slave and their labour power.
Nevertheless, as Marx says, while employees in capitalism may be free to choose their employer, they are slaves to the capitalist class, taken as a whole. To live, you must sell your labour power — so you can buy what you need on the market. In selling your labour power, you lose the right to decide what to do with that capacity while you are at work. Your employer commands your labour. The contract to sell labour is regarded as giving the employer a moral right to expect obedience. Just like if you buy an orange, you have a moral right to eat it.
A fourth key feature of this ghostly construction is the way the social machine extracts a surplus from employees. In other words, a surplus over and above the value of what they are being paid for their work. People get paid a wage, but the wage is not the full monetary value of what they produce in their working day. So, they might produce $300 worth of extra value to the capitalist firm, but they’re only getting paid a hundred dollars of that value.
In other class societies, the extraction of a surplus is more transparent. The slave works on the master’s fields and is only given a small portion of what they grow for their own use. Or the peasant in feudal society works on their own field for four days a week and works on the lord’s field for two days a week. Arrangements like that make the extraction of a surplus product obvious. For example, as bags of wheat carried up to the lord’s house. In capitalism, this extraction of surplus is concealed. The labour contract appears to involve two equal players who agree on a price for a labour service, a price determined by the market. But this apparent equality obscures the reality of class exploitation — the monopoly of the ownership of the means of production, the unequal deal of the wage contract, distribution by market processes.
This extraction of surplus is part of what produces the inequality that characterises capitalism. As the capitalist extracts surplus value from their workers, they can use that surplus to grow their means of production. The monopoly game in action. Let us look at some figures that give us a handle on this situation. For example, the richest one percent of the global population owns fifty percent of global wealth. The richest ten percent of the population accounts for 85% of household wealth.[1] The average wealth of each adult in the top one per cent is more than 300 times the average wealth of someone in the bottom ninety per cent.[2] So, wealth is very unequally distributed. These figures include wealth in private personal possessions — such as houses and cars. The degree of inequality is even more extreme if we take those private possessions out of the equation. Just looking at disparities in ownership of the wealth used to produce goods and services. The extreme skew of these figures backs up the basic analysis of the Marxist account – the ruling class owns the means of production in capitalism just as surely as it has in other class societies.
These figures also suggest the existence of an important global middle class. One per cent own fifty percent of the global wealth and ten per cent own 85% of the global wealth. Meaning that the middle class of nine percent must own 35% of global wealth.
The fifth ghostly feature of capitalism is the process by which relevant players gain access to the various requirements of the game. For example, private ownership of the means of production. Where do these means of production come from? How do they enter the capitalist game and fall into the hands of capitalists? Likewise with free labour? Where do these people come from? This aspect of capitalism takes place off scene, outside of the game itself, as the condition that allows the game to take place. It is not in itself governed by the four ghostly rules described above.
As Marx uses the term, ‘primitive accumulation’ is the process by which the capitalist class first comes to own the means of production — which it then puts into circulation as capital. In the British case, the enclosure movement broke the tie between peasant agriculturalists and their land. In feudal Britain, lords owned estates that included peasant plots and common land used by villagers. The development of capitalism saw these peasants removed from their land and common land appropriated by the lords. This is what Marx is calling ‘primitive accumulation’. In the next stage of this process the lords became capitalist farmers, growing agricultural commodities for sale and hiring labour. What this process also provided for capitalism was free wage labour. The peasants who previously had a reliable access to food through the feudal system, lost their land. They were thrown onto the streets as ‘vagabonds.’ Available for employment. Forcibly ‘freed’ from their connection to land.
Marxists also use this term to refer to the acquisition of means of production in colonized countries. Governments and firms from Europe took land by force. Clearly, these thefts of the means of production enabled the growth of capitalist wealth in the global North. Products such as cotton, spices, silk, sugar, wheat, timber, gold, silver. Later minerals, oil, rubber, and more agricultural products. The wealth and ‘modernity’ of capitalist Europe and the settler colonies depended on these acquisitions. Samir Amin prefers the term ‘dispossession’ to the usual Marxist term ‘primitive accumulation’. This is because accumulation through dispossession ‘is a permanent feature in the history of capitalism’.[3] Historical capitalism, he argues, is imperialist by nature. It depends on these acquisitions. I will consider this at more length in the next chapter. One thing I like about the term ‘primitive accumulation’ is that it denotes a chronological relationship. Dispossession must happen first, before the capitalist social machine can operate. This happens many times over the course of capitalist history, putting yet new means of production into the hands of capitalists and yet new people into its employ.
Capitalism as a game
In many ways, the description of capitalism I have been giving follows Marx’s writings on this topic, for example in Wage Labour and Capital or in the Manifesto or Capital itself. Usually, we treat the features of capitalism I have been talking about as a ‘social structure’, an analogy with the built environment of bricks and mortar. That is fair enough to an extent. This description represents a set of repeated practices that create a social machine. But we can also look at this as Castoriadis suggests. Many elements of this description refer to things that are completely imaginary. For example, it is a fiction that someone can own a piece of real estate or a factory. That this can happen is an idea that some people dreamed up. What makes it real is the way people orient their social conduct and their relationships with material things to this imagined ‘ownership’. Similarly with concepts like selling and buying. The idea that we can buy something and by that change our practical relationship to that thing. Not to mention a whole set of moral claims going with that. Money itself, the most magical idea of all. That these figures, coins, pieces of paper have value and we can exchange them for the products of people’s work. This capitalist social game is no less an imaginary invention than a football match such as an AFL (Australian Football League) game. These white sticks of wood represent ‘goal posts’. The aim of this group of ‘players’ here is to kick this yellow leather oval between these posts, so ‘scoring’ a ‘goal’. As with capitalism, this social game makes perfectly good sense — because everyone is making the same imaginary assumptions and conducting themselves accordingly.
Other social machines linked to capitalism
Capitalism, throughout its history, exists alongside and in combination with other social machines. These social machines are articulated with capitalism. Capitalism, as it actually operates, depends on these links. It also intersects with these social machines to create ‘racist capitalism’, ‘capitalist patriarchy’ and so on.
Non-capitalist production relationships
In the previous discussion, I have characterised the exploitation of the subordinate class in capitalism as an exploitation of ‘free labour’. A trajectory between feudal societies with serf labour and capitalism. A break between the slavesocieties of the ancient world and the free labour of modern capitalism. But this is very misleading when applied to the colonial period. I will discuss this in more detail in the next chapter. But clearly capitalism as a global system at that time included the colonized countries — where most of the population were working as slaves. At the same time what they produced was integrated into the global capitalist market. Not just this, but countries that were part of the heartland of early capitalism were dependent on slave labour, an integral part of market enterprises. These non-capitalist elements of empire still have an impact. The slavery of the colonial period has by no means totally vanished. More commonly, a system of ‘feudal dependency’ or ‘debt peonage’ traps smallholder farmers in debt. They are tied to their landlord, owing them an unpayable amount of debt. Paying their landlord rents and servicing their debts, they scrape by in the most severe poverty. These situations are common in South Asia and the Americas. This is not ‘capitalism’ as I have explained it in the first section of this chapter. Because the farm workers are not free wage labourers. They’re chained down to a particular place. They are not the ‘free labour’ characteristic of the ghostly construction of capitalism. On the other hand, the things that they produce enter the global market as commodities, contributing to capitalist production in the global North. Cotton, sugar, rubber, tea, palm oil and so on.
Unpaid subsistence work in the global South also articulates with capitalism without being ‘capitalist’ labour. Let us look at how things are in the east and southern countries of Africa colonized by the British — such as South Africa, Malawi, Zambia, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Namibia. During the colonial period lots of the best land went to white farmers. Even to the present day, white farmers still own much of this land. Other areas were reserved for the black population — the ‘native reserves.’ In this arrangement, women and children are staying home on their household farm in the native reserve, growing food for the family. Unemployed or retired men are sometimes helping with this family work. This work is subsistence agriculture. They’re not selling that food. They’re just eating it. In the meantime, the father is going to the city to get a job, working on a large commercial farm, or getting a job in a mine. They are earning a wage, some of which is being brought back to the family.
The family depends on this subsistence production. The wage of the male ‘breadwinner’ is not enough to make ends meet. So again, the capitalist system is linked up to some other social machine. The system of community title customary ownership and the subsistence production going with that. From a purely economic perspective, there are clear parallels with unpaid domestic work. Where this division is strongly marked by gender, this subsistence work can even be seen as a kind of domestic work. As with that, the successful operation of the capitalist part of the economy cannot go on without this non-capitalist social machine. The owner of capital depends on cheap labour to make a profit. They need a next generation fed and cared for in the native reserve areas. They are not paying for the reproduction of this labour force.
Racism
And then there’s racism. I am taking it that racism is a social machine — in its own right. It is articulated with capitalism in various ways. Yet, the invention and dominance of racist thinking was not just an ‘ideology’ created to serve capitalism. It came out of European history, culture and science, all to a degree independent of capitalism. As I shall explain, there are certainly niches within capitalism where racism fits. The rules of the capitalist game drive competitive expansion. Capitalism as an economic system seeks resources and capitalists are driven to constantly expand markets and means of production. This pressure to expand markets has driven colonisation and the longer-term economic domination of previous colonies. The rules of the capitalist game certainly imply stratification within the subordinate class. Also, the inevitability of an underclass of underemployed people. Keeping wages down. So, these aspects of the capitalist machine create the contexts in which racism becomes culturally central.
At the same time, racism is its own social machine. A key version of European racism is based on a belief in the intrinsic inferiority of the racialized other – and a false theory of genetic endowment. More recently this overt genetic theory has been replaced by a façade of reinterpretation. This respectable version of racism attributes inferiority to cultural difference. Yet an informal reality identifies the racialized other as the ones who look different. All class societies dominate social groups that are constituted as ‘the other’. However, this version of ethnocentrism is a particular invention of European societies.
There are two other types of racist discourse relevant to European imperialism. The early imperialism of the mercantilist period (1500 to 1800) was informed by a racist version of Christianity. The colonized were followers of the devil. They could be killed and exploited without qualms. Alternatively, colonisation was a sacred mission, to bring the gospel and convert the heathens. Later, racism based on genetic theory was joined to an evolutionary theory of human social development. A supposed law of social change. Successively more advanced stages of civilisation replace an original barbarism — culminating in capitalism. The highest stage. A strange bedfellow of genetic racism. Since it implies the common humanity of each stage of human social development. Current social science regards this evolutionary theory as outdated. Social change is the effect of random cultural inventions and interactions. What comes after is built on what came before. But it is not necessarily better. The claim that European imperialist capitalism is a ‘better’ social order than other societies is a myth. At the present time, facing climate extinction, it rings very hollow.
What has happened is that racist discourse has articulated with capitalism. Historically, racism justified the appropriation of colonial land in settler colonialism. For example, in Australia, the fiction of terra nullius, that Indigenous people did not really own their land. Or in the United States, the racist idea that the Native Americans had not improved the land. Likewise, racism justified colonial rule in countries where a white minority controlled a subordinate local population. The destiny of the white race. The ‘white man’s burden’. The ‘barbarism’ of the lesser races. The myth of the lazy native. And so on. Following this colonial history, racism justifies the existence of a racialized underclass in many of the rich countries. It privileges the white working class. They come to see their domination by capital as self-chosen. They flatter themselves that their relative affluence is an outcome of their superior work ethic, intelligence, and moral probity — all qualities of character that are of great assistance to the capitalist class. Like the taxi driver I met yesterday who was telling me that all the non-Anglo taxi drivers were cheating their customers — while he was a model of old school ethical conduct.
Historically and still today, the white working class acts globally as an intermediate class, providing the cannon fodder in wars that maintain imperial control in the global South. They are ignorant of the unequal relationships that provide them with a standard of living premised on the exploitation of the global South. This ignorance is fertilized with unexamined racist assumptions. The problems of the global South are because those countries are ‘undeveloped’, or people there have too many children, or they are lazy and ignorant. So, racism provides an ideological backdrop and allocates people for the role of an underclass within the framework of the global social machine.
At the same time, my view is that racism is not intrinsic to the capitalist social machine. Racism has its own history. Within global capitalist society, racist regimes can be overthrown, and capitalism goes on happily. People who are stigmatized as racially different in one century can be regarded as ‘white’ in another. Some racialized groups are elevated while new targets for racism are invented. In one country a difference of appearance that would be racially marked, in another country, is ignored. What all this speaks to is the partial independence of racism as a discourse articulated with capitalism.
We could end racism tomorrow and still have capitalism — with its underclass and its postcolonial global inequality. While this may be possible in theory it may be unlikely to happen in practice. We could think of it as path dependency. Capitalism has done well out of racism. Racism has become entrenched, more so in certain countries and certain racialized relationships. It is hard to see it being undone in these contexts without a challenge to aspects of the ghostly capitalist machine. The smug work ethic of the advantaged, the underemployed underclass, the exploitation of the global South, the legitimacy of distribution and production decisions via the market.
Patriarchy
An aspect of modern patriarchy attached to capitalism is the machine of domestic labour, including the work of raising the next generation. To a large extent, this labour is the unpaid labour of women. The social machine of patriarchy allocates this work disproportionately to women, enabling men to participate more fully in the capitalist labour market. And consequently, to dominate women economically through their greater share of family income. As with slavery and debt peonage this non-capitalist social machine is articulated with capitalism. The domestic work that women do is of course necessary for workers, both men and women, to enter the labour market, selling their labour capacity as a commodity. Even in shopping, women do the work of turning consumer goods into things that are useful to the household — thereby enabling the capitalist owner of the means of production to market goods and services to consumers.
To a certain extent capitalism, as a purely economic system, could do without patriarchy and without these arrangements. Men and women could both be paid as wage workers, with no gendered differences in income. They could share the work of housework and childcare. The surplus value extracted by the capitalist class need be no different from what it is now — so long as men were paid less than they are today, and women were paid more. The gendered inequalities that are so ubiquitous do not come about because of the needs of capitalism as a system. But as an effect of the intersection of capitalism and patriarchy.
An equally important aspect of the articulation of capitalism and patriarchy is cultural and psychological. My argument, following second wave radical feminists (and most anthropological writing) is this. Patriarchy is not an invention of capitalism. More than this, it is not an invention of class society. It has also been typical in stateless classless societies, normally referred to as ‘egalitarian’ because men were equal to other men. Like radical feminists, I believe that this inequality has been rooted in women’s role in reproduction. In social conflicts with men, women have been disadvantaged by wet nursing, birthing, pregnancy, and emotional ties to their children. Men have constituted themselves as a gender class and have been able to take power. While class society has not invented patriarchy, it has depended on it.
- An experience of family life in which the father and mother are radically unequal players. Creating an expectation that social life will embody these patterns. The desire to be led, as well as the desire to dominate.
- The relative absence of adult men within the lives of young boys leads adult men to become anxious, competitive, and insecure adults. They seek to gain advantage to establish their masculinity.
These two factors linked to patriarchy have provided the psychological preconditions for class society. In other words, necessary but not sufficient causes of class society. A refusal of empathy, a toxic masculinity, sustains every power dynamic of class societies. The ruling class distances itself from the subordinate classes and from foreign enemies. The army keeps a lid on the subordinate classes. They celebrate toxic masculinity as they go about the work of the ruling class. Putting down revolts, expanding the empire, and fighting off rival states. The ruling class are the ‘fathers’ of the society. One owes obedience, as to a patriarchal father. They implement their power through hierarchical chains of command. Every petty commander acts as the supposedly benevolent ruler of the next link in the chain.
The capitalist machine in practice
What I’ve now outlined are the ghostly features, the rules of the game of capitalism and its links to two other systems of domination. Now, I’m going to look at various effects of these rules as they operate in the machine in practice.
Market competition
Goods and the means of production can be sold on the market. They are privately owned. The way to make money and to become rich is by putting out goods for sale on the market. In fact, the only way to maintain the current value of your means of production is to use it to produce goods and services and market them. That means that different firms are in competition with each other. They must sell what they produce, and they aim to get a bigger share of the money that consumers have available. Some degree of monopoly ownership changes this to an extent. Firms may collude on pricing. Large corporate monopolies invest in very expensive infrastructure. They cannot afford for this to become obsolete. They introduce new products that make use of the infrastructure they already have. They invest in patents to protect their market share. They ensure sales through manipulating the market, taking over rival firms. They attempt to avoid disruptive interventions from smaller players. On the other hand, there is always the possibility of money going to another branch of industry. For example, people may spend less at the supermarket and more on video games. The consequence is that money floats around, unpredictably to a large degree.
Accordingly, firms are necessarily in competition and must succeed in making a profit to be viable. You never know whether what you produce is going to do as well as you might hope. There is always the danger that sales could be lack lustre, that your loans will be hard to pay back, that your investors will desert you, that you may end up losing everything. It never makes any sense to aim for anything less than the highest possible profit.
One of the ways that capitalists do that is by adopting new technologies to reduce labour requirements. Paying less for labour. Doing that, they can put their goods on to the market at a lower price, increasing sales and market share. Getting more profits through that. Usually, by using more energy and raw materials for the same number of working hours in production. Likewise, they can bring in new technology to produce a new and attractive product, also increasing market share. A new line in bread, a new kind of toothbrush. A totally new product, like the mobile phone. The implication of all this is that private ownership of the means of production drives competition. In turn this drives the constant technological productivity and innovation that is such a feature of capitalist societies. By comparison the class societies of the past were technologically stagnant, despite some brilliant technological achievements.
Environmental damage
A related effect of this competitive pressure is endless economic growth. If every firm is competing to sell more and to produce more with less costs, the end result is growth. Of course, this growth, in itself, creates an environmental impact. The economy makes more stuff, uses more resources, and produces more waste. At a rate of three per cent in annual growth there is a doubling of the economy every twenty-three years. So, by 69 years the economy is eight times as big.
Environmental impact also comes out of this competitive context more directly. Capitalists externalize environmental costs to maximize profits in a situation of competition. In other words, the impact is ‘external’ to the accounting of costs and losses on their balance sheets. If it’s cheaper to produce things in a way that’s environmentally damaging, the capitalist will do that — despite the environmental impact. They are forced by competition to run their production in the cheapest way possible. If they do not choose the cheapest method, another firm can undercut them and take their market. So, this environmental damage is built into the structure of capitalism. It does not come out of simple greed and can happen even if all parties are aware of the damage they are doing.
Historically, capitalism has seen a change from an economy based on an agricultural surplus (in the seventeenth and eighteenth century) to one where the surplus put into play consists of raw materials accumulated over geological time. Fossil fuels, metals, phosphorus, even sand and limestone. This historical development comes out of the competitive economic structure of capitalism — as firms found new and improved ways of making money. The environmental consequences have been enormous, not to say disastrous[4].
Technological complexity
The last element of the machine in practice that I want to look at is the way technological complexity in capitalism requires the active participation of the workforce, an insight from Paul Cardan’s great book of the sixties, ModernCapitalism and Revolution. To participate is to be involved, to do things on your own initiative, to think about the way things are working, making little adjustments when necessary. In this respect, capitalism is quite different to class societies of the past. In those earlier societies the work of the subordinate class was much more straightforward. Technologies of production hardly ever changed, what you needed to do as a subordinate was laid down by tradition. It was easy for a supervisor to be on top of the whole process in every detail.
In capitalism, it’s not like that. Constant technological change means that working people must be on the ball and participate. They are highly educated, and also familiar with the practical knowledge necessary to run their part of the productive machine. Jennifer Pont was a student of mine conducting research in the mining towns of the Hunter region. She interviewed workers at the aluminium plant. Time and motion experts had recently been appointed to speed up production. Her interviewees scoffed at their presumption, calling these professionals the ‘theory wankers’. One of the aluminium pot lines, they explained, was out of date. They had to tinker with it constantly to make it work. They were the only ones who could understand its tricky requirements.
So, capitalism requires participation if it is to work with complex technology. The effect is that the consent of working people becomes a hidden necessity in any capitalist society. This power is manifested in formal or informal pressure on the ruling elites to take some notice of what ordinary people think. Representative democracy and informal political action can have an impact on the way the machine operates in practice. A recent telling example is the pressure ordinary Chinese people have put on their government to wind back the elimination strategy for Covid — that up until several weeks ago was an obsession of the ruling elites. Of course, ruling elites can always suppress discontent, so long as it is confined to a small rebellious faction. But the long-term cost is a loss of efficiency. The participation necessary to maintain a high-tech economy has been compromised.
Conclusions
This chapter has examined the construction of capitalism as an invented social machine. It is both that social machine, and also a ghostly presence based on shared imaginings. Capitalism has in practice depended on a variety of partially independent social machines. Whether these are necessary for its functioning is always a tricky question. But we can certainly trace the way that capitalism has relied on them in practice. The basic ideas underlying capitalism as a social machine have produced typical consequences in the way the machine works. The next chapter will show how capitalism has changed as the outcome of historical intervention. Capitalism as a game.
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[1] OXFAM, ‘An economy for the 1%: how privilege and power in the economy drive extreme inequality and how this can be stopped’, viewed on 14 March 2016, www.oxfam.org; UNU-Wider, ‘Pioneering study shows richest two percent own half world wealth’, in United Nations University, World Institute for Development Economics Research, viewed on 26 February 26, 2006, www.wider.unu.edu
[2] OXFAM.
[3] Samir Amin, Global History: A View from the South, Pambazuka Press, Capetown, 2011, p.166.
[4] Eric Pineault, The Social Ecology of Capital, Pluto, London, 2023.
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