Capitalism is a design principle, not a market

I’m reading Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism. The post-election, post-UnitedHealth assassination has me excited and a little manic. I can feel the zeitgeist shifting and accelerating to the Left in a way not seen in my lifetime. It’s thrilling, liberating, and energizing.

My excitement means I bring up the idea of Ending Capitalism more and more frequently. The most common response is to ask what would replace it. When I start to describe the principles of Democratic Socialism–which contain markets–people say “Oh, you don’t actually mean ending Capitalism, then. You mean reforming it.”

No, I mean ending it.

Capitalism and markets are not synonymous. You can have markets outside of Capitalism. Capitalism is not just a means of allocating resources. It’s a set of cultural and societal priorities. It’s an assertion of primacy. It’s a design principle. It is a declaration of what matters, what’s important, what we should be seeking to achieve, who should be respected and why, what should be enforced, what should be punished, what should be tolerated, what should be condemned.

It’s an attempt to define normalcy, a singular worldview to which all rational people should subscribe and advance. It worships productivity, efficiency, the commoditization of human endeavour. Worse, the ridicule and dismissal of all other considerations as childish, immature, and illiterate. A mark and condemnation of naivete.

What did you get done this week?” – Elon Musk

He wields that question as an assault. It forces the exchange to operate on his terms. There’s no way to win because there’s no way to best the economic productivity of the world’s richest man.

The only way to win is not to play. To assert the primacy of other things beyond productivity.

And that is what it means to End Capitalism. Not eliminating markets or the adoption of Communism. Ending Capitalism means tearing down the idea that the allocation of capital to productive use is the one true god.