If you received an education in a capitalist country, then chances are you were educated towards liberal philosophy. The interesting thing about such a doctrine is how it comes with a presumption of perfection. There is no morality in such an education, because morality is seen as an emotional appeal. Liberalism only concerns itself with rational appeals.
And in doing so they can stick to offering not justifications for how failures occur, but rather ambivalent motives. Particularly on the topic of poverty, but also exploitation.
The rational motive for exploitation is simple: Some work is in lower demand, and so, they get lower wages. All labour and economic exchange exists on the basis of supply and demand, and we’re all beholden to this system.
That’s what I was told in any case.
And to be fair, within the broader understanding of nations, institutions, markets and finances, supply and demand can explain a lot. But when you look at human beings, then supply and demand is actually quite irrational and not to mention outright immoral.
I think liberal philosophy has conceded the fact that they have no moral argument for why human worth is delineating. They’ve decided it’s a fixture of their reality, and that the invisible hand is a kind of deified entity.
Moreover, I feel like should we allow a moral argument against superfluous hunger, illness, crime and violence, then it would be a very short one. I would simply make an appeal to democracy. Ask most people “Do you wish to live in poverty?” and they will say “No. Of course not.”
So instead let’s examine the scientific argument against capitalism and liberal philosophy. Because there is actually a very vital science entirely dedicated to disproving capitalism and class structures, and such a science is known as medicine.
We can objectively measure the wellbeing of a human being. We can establish criteria of care, nutrition, hours of sleep, social needs, and even stimulatory needs pertaining to everything from education to sports and entertainment. Medicine can offer a very clear and very scientific understanding of the nominal conditions that are necessary for every human being.
So where does wealth fall into all of this? Or even supply and demand for that matter? Where is the science that delineates who should be rich and who should be poor? If we examine supply and demand to its roots, then it is really just a collective expression of judgement. Various economic administrators and functionaries behave according to certain patterns of judgement, and then proceed to act in ways which create economic activity.
So really the liberal philosophy and its basis for who should be rich and who should be poor comes down to “Because we said so.”
Supply and demand is therefore a dictatorial model of economic management. Industry leaders, CEOs, bosses, executives, politicians and so on dictate the conditions of supply and demand, and the cycle of trade and production, and we’re all meant to accept it as the word of God.
And it’s true that you can compartmentalise the moral weight of this. The corporations can blame government regulations, the government can blame corporate lobbying, the bureaucrats can point their fingers at the policymakers, the policymakers can point their fingers at the campaign donors, the campaign donors can point their fingers at the policymakers, and so fourth.
When it’s everyone’s fault, then it’s no one’s fault. No different from how firing squads are given a single rifle that fires a blank.
But take a moment to ask those who are condemned. When you do that, then you quickly realise there’s a problem with this moral analysis. Because it’s entirely focused on the punitive aspect of morality. As though the most vital thing is to find someone to blame, and punish them.
And that’s understandable. That’s how any corrupt system survives. The system is always perfect, all you need is a series of faulty individuals to blame as to deflect broader critical concerns.
And capitalism, much like feudalism, has made an industry out of manufacturing scapegoats. Welfare queens, lazy millennials, street gangs, drug dealers, single mothers, communist sympathisers, trade unionists, catholics, muslims, jews, black people, immigrants… the list is long.
In fact, I defy you to find a period in the history of capitalism where you didn’t have a flavour of the month enemy or foreign threat. You won’t find one.
That’s also why the two party system exists. That way, you can always blame democracy for the failures of capitalism.
Whether it’s pollution, war, poverty, unemployment, crime, foreign debt or corruption, capitalism proclaims “With no power comes full responsibility!”
And then they hire some academic to figure out the sufficient mental gymnastics to tie unregulated subprime loans to the Ayatollah or Kim Jong Un.
That’s how such a system survives.
But let’s ignore the punitive aspect entirely. Let’s say the slate is clean, everyone’s off the hook, but only on the condition that we actually begin to follow the rational course of action.
So now the argument is restorative and instrumental.
So the question then is, what purpose does poverty serve? The answer is simple, poverty creates wealth. When a corporation pays lower wages, it experiences higher profits for the capitalists. That’s a simple volumetric principle of scarcity and mathematics.
That’s why a sweatshop worker in the third world can make Nike sneakers that are sold in the first world for thousands of dollars, all in a single day, and only get paid cents for it. Poor people produce the most wealth. If you want to know the breadwinners of the world, then don’t waste your time with Elon Musk or Bill Gates, go visit the tantalum mines in Congo. See how those kids will break their backs to create more commodity value in a day than you would in a month.
Which is another reason why supply and demand is such a nonsensical idea. Because the cutoff point always seems to be quite arbitrary. The CEO of Microsoft is apparently always in extremely high demand, and enjoys a great deal of wealth. But the millions of people on the production chain? Many of whom perform extremely dangerous and unpleasant tasks? Why are they in such low demand?
Being a CEO of an international conglomeration is a pretty cushy job. You can delegate most work to other people, and because you control such a huge portion of the market, you’re not exactly in a perilous position. It’s a very easy job that people can do with a basic business education, and most people would kill for the opportunity to do it.
CEOs are extremely disposable workers… or, at least they would be. But since supply and demand is a dictatorship, and since the CEOs among the dictators, they have deemed themselves in high demand.
But can you objectively justify such a decree? Can you scientifically prove that CEOs are necessary for Microsoft to make computers?
You can scientifically prove that the manufacturers are needed, that the supply chain workers are needed, that the engineers, developers and programmers are needed. They have a very straightforward and forensic relationship of causality to the procurement of computers. Their labours have physical results.
But what of the dictators? What do they do? What does an executive officer do exactly? For the most part, they order people around. They delegate. And sure, that has a logistical purpose, you do need to make sure that everyone is doing what they need to do. But we’ve had that talent since Mesopotamia. We’ve performed large scale organising for thousands of years, long before the existence of capitalism.
So it still doesn’t justify why they’re in such high demand, given how their special abilities to industrial economics predate the invention of bronze.
In fact, it doesn’t even require much of an education. There’s been thousands of books written over thousands of years that could inform someone on how to be a CEO. You don’t even need a degree to do it, just a library card.
Can the same be said for an engineer? Or an assembly worker? That kind of training generally requires some degree of facilitation and instruments. You can’t just read your way to becoming a programmer. Sooner or later you’ll need a computer lab to learn how to program.
And that’s because even under supply and demand, it is generally the poor who are in high demand, and the rich who often have to struggle to find new ways to avoid being obsolete.
You never heard of a poor person hiring a public relations firm to explain how good and useful they are to society. You don’t see a lot of poor people start charitable foundations named after themselves and make media appearances to remind people of how their existence has value.
Patting yourself on the back in front of TV Cameras is an activity that’s exclusively performed by the rich. These supposedly high demand individuals.
And then we can look at the poor, and what happens on their end of the spectrum. Because there’s a lot of strange efforts to always produce more poor people, and this process is commonly known as fascism.
We see all these puppet dictators appear in the third world who have a lot of friends within the military and intelligence sectors of capitalist countries. We see how capitalist countries will give weapons and training to these third world dictators in exchange for a cheap and exploitable workforce.
Even within liberal countries we see a constant effort to manufacture poor people in the form of student debt, inflated housing prices and austerity. We see how pensioners are being forced to go back to work because of social security cuts. It seems like capitalism can’t get enough poor people.
And look at what happens during periods of prosperity such as the post-war boom. Suddenly there’s a lot of social mobility. People are moving up in the world. The people who were begging on the streets during the great depression are now living in suburban homes with high paying manufacturing jobs. Especially in the US, but also in Europe.
So what happens then? What happens when capitalism runs out of poor people? Then it’s time for both corporate and government intervention. Suddenly there’s redlining and segregation to manufacture poor people. Suddenly there’s outsourcing and mass-layoffs to manufacture poor people.
To create a vast pool of labour that will not work out of a Maslowian desire of purpose or fulfilment or social participation, but rather out of white-knuckled desperation.
We see how schools set up grading systems to restrict good grades. So that only a select few can have good qualifications. Schools are now set up not to be nurturing, or to develop, or to help students find their role as they set out for adulthood, but rather to be selective. To pick out who should be rich, and who should be poor.
And interestingly enough, these high demand, invaluable, indispensable people who are given mountains of money for their work are always quite scarce. One would think that the market would do what it always does with a high value item, namely, to increase its supply until there is a point of equilibrium between supply and demand. But that kind of stuff only applies to poor people it seems.
Because you can tell that something is very scientific and very rational when it will arbitrarily make exceptions like that. Just like how the law of gravity will let rich people float when they jump off a building.
Gravity notices them and says “Oh I’m sorry Mr. Dupont, I didn’t realise you were jumping from the penthouse floor, my mistake.”
My point is, when it comes to the labour market, it seems to valuable and high demand stuff is quite scarce, and it’s the supposedly useless and low value stuff that’s being absolutely saturated in terms of production.
It seems like the labour market can’t get enough useless labour. All those useless janitors and street sweepers and sanitary workers who keep the plague from coming back. All those useless construction workers who make sure we can sleep indoors. All those useless farmers and farmhands who put food in our fridges. These pointless appendages who mooch off of the vital and essential labours that we find in the board rooms of Wall Street and Madison Avenue.
For some reason we struggle with this paradox of labour under supply and demand, how it’s always the worthless stuff that we’re so desperate to expand.
And then someone will say “But that’s just the point, abundant supply means low demand!”
And that’s true, but the point wasn’t why we have abundance, the point was why we keep inflating that abundance. Now that the supply for all these useless sectors of industry and production have been met, why isn’t the schools spitting out more rich people? Why don’t we see more focus on corporate bankers, business executives, hedge fund managers and landlords?
And the answer to that is also simple, it’s because we cannot sustain a society full of rich people.
Which is exactly my point. Why do we have such high demand for labourers that need to be sustained? In fact, how can any worker even pretend to be productive when they require others to sustain them?
When a class requires economic sustenance, then such a class is objectively speaking parasitic. If rich people were truly the makers of wealth, then society would naturally produce more of them by the sheer momentum of their developmental output. But instead we see a far more reconciliatory pattern, one which is often called the 1%. Although since the Occupy Wall Street days looks more like a 0.01%.
But if the rich really did contribute then they would currently be the 10%. Because economic gain is inherently proliferatory. Look at any economic invention, from tools to factories. What happens? They spread. They spread like wildfire. When something is economically useful, it spreads and grows. So why are rich people in such high demand according to their self-appraised incomes, and yet in such low demand according to the observable facts of economic development?
There is only one answer to that, and it’s that they are a dictatorial class who uses their power to enforce a double standard, and they call this double standard freedom, and reason, and liberty and democracy.
But when push comes to shove, and we unravel this tapestry, then what we see is a great deal of hypocrisy, coercion and a game that is fundamentally rigged so that the children wealth succeed, and the children of the commons fail.
And when we ask ourselves why such a system is desired, then beyond the ambivalent motives, we don’t see much of a rational answer. And that’s because it contradicts the scientific basis of what an economy should do. Which is to meet the needs of the people who participate in it. The economy is a tool. It can only be valued by its usefulness. We have no rational justification for serving the economy. If we serve the economy, if we serve a tool, and sacrifice our wellbeing to maintain the functions of such a tool, then it’s no longer an economic instrument.
When a tool permits a small volume of individuals to control or harm a large volume of individuals who would otherwise successfully defend themselves, then we’re no longer looking at a tool. At least not a constructive one. Rather, that’s what separates the scalpel from the dagger.
The economics of capitalism is a weapon, one that permits a small strata of dictators to control a large volume of people and property in such a way as to subvert the historical achievements democracy’s victory over feudalism.
Because in the end, whether rational or “emotional”, there is no scientific or objective basis to justify poverty. But there is mountains of clinical and medical evidence to justify the removal of poverty.
Because from the human perspective the story is very different. You have a human being who goes to school, who is educated, who is instructed according to a doctrine, who graduates, who goes to work, who pays taxes, who follows all the rules.
And then one day, a flowchart from the London exchange decrees that this person is redundant to the market. So they get fired, take a lower paying job, go for days without food, can’t afford to visit the hospital, get sick, feel constant stress and eventually spiral further and further as they lack the means to survive and end up on the streets.
And it doesn’t just happen to individuals. It happens to entire societies. Outsourcing and automation are good examples of that. Detroit, Glasgow, Liverpool and Philadephia are good examples of places that used to be incredibly productive and incredibly prosperous, reduced to economic wastelands. Where millions of workers were collectively punished for the failures of rich people who found it more profitable to destroy industry than to create it.
This is why there is no rational argument for capitalism. Because capitalism will punish people for following the rules.
And moreover, the idea of supply and demand as it exists in liberal philosophy is completely world denying, because it only makes sense in a world without human beings. The highest demand that any human being has is to live in prosperity, safety and comfort.
Capitalism is only coherent within a worldview where you disqualify the needs of human beings, and selectively build a realism on the basis of what corporations need. The second you examine human needs the whole system falls apart.
And their only response to this glaring flaw in their doctrine is that by saying, in what is a quite dystopian sentiment, that appeals to humanity and the needs of humanity to thrive, are fundamentally irrational.
But I would urge you to examine the Marxist perspective. How, perhaps, it is the appeals to the abstractions of finances and exchange volume that is irrational.
