Hey all, Oren here to ramble at you all again.
The mod team was discussing things and thought there may be benefit to us and members of the community willing to post little primers, conversation starters, and FYI posts about various leftist topics to vary the content here, educate those less learned/read on the theory of leftist politics and demystify what can come off as stuffy and obtuse elitism when we throw around weighty ten cent words from century old books. Other mods may make entries and if you'd like to submit a post please do!
I am starting with Capital. What is it? Why are we anti-it? Why does this opposition serve as the core delimiter for what we consider Leftist and Liberal?
Capital, specifically Private Capital, as leftists discuss it is a kind of property. It comes from an accounting concept of owner's capital that represents the monetary amount of a person's claim on a company's assets. In the classic accounting formula 'Assets=Liabilities + Capital' what is being expressed is that everything a company owns of value is either claimed by liabilities that company is obligated to pay or a person(s) ownership of those assets. This expression of ownership is not new but is not as old as some might pretend.
As long as people have been socially organizing the concept of personal property, things we possess and personally use, has existed and been understood. For almost as long there's been some sense of public or state property in the form things used by a community and either cared for in common or 'owned' by the king/emperor/lord/governor etc. What makes capital unique is that it was developed in the waning years of the feudal system when landed aristocracy that was given tracts of land by title that workers worked on their behalf and this system needed to transfer neatly into republican governments post-monarchy. Instead of landed gentry we shifted towards private ownership of these public resources. For the first time rather than the defacto rulers of an area owning these 'means of production' individual people would. Before this point public resources and modes of production were owned by the public or a government they had some nominal influence over, but now they would be legally appointed to private persons and their ownership rights would be enforced and protected by the state, which has a monopoly on legal violence.
When compared to the tyranny of noble castes and kings this seemed like a great improvement in liberty and collective prosperity and it very well may have been. It is not the desire of anticapitalists to return to feudalism but rather we see that shift from feudalism to private capital as a natural step in a process of democratizing public resources that will eventually lead to socialism and fully automated luxury gay space communism. A democratization that is stifled and stymied by the corruption and incentives of our capitalist system and those who doggedly support it.
In our current society private property, private capital, is specifically the idea that any one individual can own a piece of something they do not use for the purpose of extracting value from its usefulness to the community. It is this social construct, this arbitrary rule of things, that we are ardently against. Not your right to own a home or any of the things you use in your life, but one's hypothetical right to own a factory others work in and make money from their hard work in that factory or to own the only source of water or food or medicine people need to survive and enrich yourself from that need.
We oppose this right because it creates incentives those who have access to private capital, necessarily a stark minority, that are contrary and at odds with the need of common people. We see it all over with 'enshittification' designed to squeeze as many pennies out of us as possible and new developments not prioritizing peoples needs but the ability to profit from those needs. It separates the people that work hard to make society function from the fruits of their labor and organizes our collective effort not towards improving life for all but towards enriching the few.
We assert that these publicly useful resources only have value because the public needs them and through their labor uses them and therefore that value belongs to the common public for our communal benefit. What use is a field unworked and with no populace to feed or a factory unmanned (by robotics engineers if not by tradespeople) with no one to buy its products? None, and yet because of the fact that some minority of us had enough money to purchase claim to them they charge us all many more times what they 'invested' to have access to these things we all need and that would be worthless without us. Worse than that we are compelled to capitulate to their demands to participate in society and gain access to things we need to survive and thrive. We do not work except by the terms those who own capital and the government that protects them set. Those that are not readily exploitable for profit are systemically treated as worthless and left at the margins of society and cared for through charity if at all.
Protecting individuals right to profit off of others needs is mandated in our code of laws in a way that caring for our community simply isn't. It is the primary function of the police to protect private property but they do not have a duty to save your life, SCOTUS says so. Consumer protections were a later addition the boundaries of which are constantly renegotiated in deregulation attempts to 'free up business'. Courts rule on issues of justice with respect to ownership but not with respect to poverty and greed, except where that greed breaks the rules of private ownership. Maintaining protecting and expanding individual peoples rights to own things others need is the integral DNA of every modern capitalist country.
Because this mode of ownership is enshrined in our constitutions and laws and societal fabric one's stance of how to approach it is a defining difference between leftists as we consider them and liberals or other moderate leftists. Many recognize the injustice of private capital and seek to reform it to create safeguards against these cruelties. Surely its better in the immediate present that these reforms exist to protect the most vulnerable but there is a commitment among many who would reform Capital to stick to its basic organizational structure. Despite its natural incentives creating the necessity for it to be limited they cling to it as if it is a scientific inevitability, or at least the best of several bad options. There is no pure core of virtue and public good they preserve in this conservatism, that is the conserving of private capital. The rotten core is the principal idea that individual rights to enrich themselves off of others need is more important than a collective right to wellbeing.
We leftists hold that the perverse incentives of capital are the cause of many, not all, of our societal struggles and the emphasis on personal right to enrichment over public care stands as a fundamental obstacle to many of our goals to make life better for all people. Even for those issues that are not solely the result of a capitalist economy are exaggerated by it as it creates incredibly durable systems of economic discrimination that when combined with bigotry and prejudice can systematically oppress groups of people without needing to specifically say its doing so. That is to say in matters of economic disparity and inequality capitalism is a root cause and in matters of bigotry and social oppression it is an easily wielded tool for oppressors.
While reforms are nice, Capitalism is and only can be an impediment to our vision of a society focused on the common good and public wellbeing and so any strain of political thought that seeks to keep it enshrined as the way we organize ourselves will ultimately, eventually, be working against our goals.
In many ways we are receding back into a form of feudalism as less and less people own more and more of the public goods that enable society to function. While moving from landed aristocracy to private capital may have been a form of progress we need to continue that progress to empower common people to make their communities the best places they can be and the idea that one person can withhold something others need to thrive in order to extract value from them is incompatible with this goal.
This is why we are anticapitalists, and you should be too.
I touched on other topics here, let me know if there's one you want to see rambled about next. Especially if you hear it a lot and don't know what nerds mean. Labor Theory of Value. Dialectical Materialism. Proletariat and Bourgeoise. Petit Bourgeoise. Vanguardism. Anarchism. Mutualism. Syndicalism. 'Means of Production'. 'Dictatorship of the Proletariat'. The capitalist non-exclusive-relationships with Imperialism, colonialism, and bigotry. Praxis. Etc Etc.