Capitalism is Beautiful in its Horror

Over the past few centuries Capitalism has become the driving force in this human world overturning all that stood in its path. Few aspects of the essence of Capitalism still require explanation.

       Nassim Nicholas Taleb has written extensively on an idea called “Anti-fragility”. In simple terms, an anti-fragile system is one which gets stronger each time it is hit. As a system Capitalism has been challenged many a times with continuous collapses, cartels and attempts from old systems of control to subdue it. Each time capitalism yet again emerged stronger than before.

       Two things must be addressed here. Anti-fragility within a system does not render it invincible, it can be broken with a strong enough blow. It means that there is a natural time between the blow and the recovery. As we see the crises confronted by capitalism, we can clearly see that its recovery usually takes less time. For instance, the Great Depression lasted decades. The recovery of Europe and Japan post World War 2 under the Marshal’s Plan and the Japanese Economic Miracle were both shorter and more successful than the plans to end the great depression. The rise of China was even shorter, and India is said to be set on the same path. The economic crises launched by the Coronavirus pandemic is expected to last an even shorter time. The time period and the strength of the blow required to take down capitalism is only increasing with time.

       If capitalism is truly a system which is Anti-fragile in its nature, then what are the causes of it being so? Firstly we must address what has been called a rival economic system to understand what the causes of Anti-fragility are; “Communism”. Karl Marx in his writings extensively explained and described the system of capitalism and broke it down to three basic components: Capital, Labor and Land. He also expected that the final stage in the evolution of Capitalism would be Communism. He was correct. Communism comes with nice slogans but in reality it meant that the ownership of everything was given to those people who owned the state. The people were told that they owned everything but in reality, they did not even own the very clothes they wore. The entire state was controlled by a tiny minority, not in the sense of today’s capitalism, but literally. All houses, clothing, food and even social security were administered by a small minority on top with no hopes for none in the bottom of the pyramid. Capitalism compensates for this with social mobility, places such as Europe have achieved 11% social mobility from the bottom strata to the top strata with the US lagging behind at 8% but that is enough, considering that the theoretical maximum: if we take into account randomness is 20%. This data was obtained from the Economist Social Mobility Survey published on 2021-11-6. Functionally, Marx was correct but in reality, he simply conceived of a system which was a reformed version of capitalism, instead of a separate entity.

       Why is this important? Because the reform of Capitalism intended to end the exploitation of the masses. This is important to understand. Capitalism functions because it exploits weaknesses within the system. Is there not enough health care? It allows you to build hospitals. In turn, those hospitals contribute money to the owner of said hospitals and the system of capitalism only gets stronger. The same goes for any flaw in the system, each emergent crisis is automatically rebranded as an opportunity for people to make money from it as long as they solve it. Not enough food? Make more farms, sell more food at higher prices and you are rewarded with money.

       If Capitalism were a person it would say: “Please exploit me and the people, I will reward you for it and get stronger”. It is nigh unbeatable. There are repeated stories of people talking about Late-stage capitalism. Lest it be forgotten, Marx said he was in late-stage capitalism. So did Lenin, so did Mao and so do we today. However Capitalism is not going anywhere, it gets stronger by the day and it will stand for the next thousand years. Issues such as climate change too will be confronted, each crisis is an opportunity to exploit the system and it will be done.

       What now? Truly speaking we have no alternatives. The problem with Marx was not that he was a radical but that he was not radical enough. We do not even have a system which could conceivably replace capitalism. The only path to the future lies through Accelerationism as said by Nick Land. The path to the future must be even more radical than we can imagine it being today.