Capitalism looks good on paper but it doesn’t work in real life. It’s just human nature. These academics talk about supply and demand curves, but after hundreds of years they still can’t even provide evidence that one exists. I’d love it if markets were free and efficient. It would make society so simple and everyone would get what they needed most. But people aren’t robots, you know? They don’t consume rationally and all the money ends up going to the guys at the top who use it to make themselves more powerful. It’s called tragedy of the commons. Markets can start out efficient, but people steal shit and force people to stop competing, which fucks the markets up even more.
Unlike the revolutionary political innovations of the 20th century, capitalism didn’t first exist on paper before being put into practice. It evolved out of the ways in which people in growing societies naturally interacted when exchanging goods and services.
Once a society starts accepting tokens as a representation of economic effort - be they conch shells, precious metals or government-backed IOUs - mechanisms will emerge whereby the tokens become unevenly distributed, and with that the power the tokens hold.
The fact that i capitalism has evolved from natural behaviour means it has strength, that it is fit for purpose. It doesn’t mean it’s perfect though, in particular it does not mean it is just. The question is can we, as humans who are ourselves products of evolution, do better?
It seems to me that when it comes to life, there is one rule of nature that underpins all others - the strong have dominion over the weak. In relation to the current economic status quo, how can we prevent the strong becoming so strong that the weak become their slaves?
The answer is you cant. Slavery is the natural endpoint of the current economic system.
That is not even a rule of nature though btw, “strong” and “weak” are meaningless. Its about ‘fitness’ and that doesn’t always mean the same thing. Its about proliferation but also balance with the rest of the ecosystem.
If strong and weak are meaningless, then so is fitness - in the context of genes, evolution selects genes which give their owner greater chance of reproducing, therefore causing those genes to survive over many generations. In other words, “survival of the fittest” merely says “those best at surviving will survive”.
There is also no requirement, in nature, to be in balance with the environment. The fossil record tells countless tales of species which have caused their own downfall by over-exploiting the environment.
The point I’m trying to make is that we can’t look to nature for guidance on morality. It can be easy to daydream of days gone by, when we humans lived peacefully in smaller groups, in harmony with nature, happily singing songs in the firelight. Those times never really existed - there was no harmony with nature, nature is red in tooth and claw, and we have always had to steal our survival by spilling the blood of others. Never was that blood freely given.
So we can’t find easy answers in nature, we can’t simply step back to a rosy-tinted past of harmony, we have to move forward. We have to take what we have, look objectively at its faults, and equally its benefits, and strive to make small incremental changes to push the system towards one which is more fair and just.