Look Beyond ‘Capitalism’ for Explanations: Social Changes are Complex

Many people critical of “capitalism” have no idea what the word means. Before returning to graduate school, I worked in real estate and finance. I was also a serial entrepreneur. Yes, I have a bias because our market economy lifted me and my family into the middle class.

Truth matters to me. Knowing facts matters. I’m not blind to the potential for any system to be manipulated. History, sadly, is populated by leaders who used every political, economic, and philosophical foundation to oppress others.

Markets, imperfect as they are, do force individuals to negotiate. There’s more to capitalism than markets, though.

Too many academic works and non-fiction books toss about “capitalism” as being the primary force responsible for social changes that occurred for many reasons. Reading a text on pedagogy, the authors blamed capitalism for the rise of specializations. A text on mental health blamed capitalism for the rise of medicalization, the impulse to make basic aspects of life medical concerns. Most academic conferences I’ve attended had a half-dozen panels with “capitalism” or “neoliberalism” in the title.

Let us consider the common complaints made against capitalism in the works I’ve been reading. According to these scholars, capitalism, more than other factors…

• Encouraged specialization skills and knowledge;
• Required the sorting of people into groups with labels;
• Shifted humans from communal to individualistic;
• Led to environmental exploitation;
• Caused and maintained colonialism;
• Reinforced gender roles; and
• Maintained slavery and other forms of oppression.

I won’t attempt to address all of these or the many other complaints lodged against capitalism.

I cynically caution students, “People stink.” We will do all we can to maintain whatever power we have, whatever possessions we own. We naturally favor our families and people like us over others. Most cultures have insulting words for outsiders.

More people should read the works of Jared Diamond. A lot of why one culture comes to dominate another is pure luck. If food is plentiful in nature, a community doesn’t need to develop farming. If a climate is temperate, a community won’t develop housing and clothes to counter extremes. Innovations happen because they “must” happen for a community to thrive.

Once a culture innovates, the knowledge can be (and often will be) used to dominate others. Today we make moral judgments about that. I’ve even read a condemnation of Homo sapiens committing genocide against Neanderthals. (Absurdly, the academic author claimed this was the start of capitalism.)

The attribution of any and all social conditions deemed negative by these thinkers to capitalism demonstrates an obsession with an economic system at the expense of recognizing other forces, some more powerful than any model of trade.

Changes in human existence could be, and probably should be, attributed to other factors.

Including “capitalism” in a title and making it the focus of an argument is what bothers me. I would not be as concerned if scholars were accurately writing that capitalism (and any economic system) can be used to reinforce other cultural trends, including forms of oppression.

People in power will use whatever they can to defend their standing, from claiming a deity gave them right to dominate others to rigging financial systems to maintain existing hierarchies. That impulse to defend dominance is not a feature of capitalism, but because we live in a hybrid capitalist society we tend to see how capitalism is manipulated.

In another society, with another economic model, we’d likely see the flaws of that model.

Specialization

When the first humans expanded from familial groups to larger tribes, specialization was already exhibited. Likewise, gender roles were emerging. Still, most humans were generalists because they had to be. Everyone knew something about hunting, cooking, gathering edible vegetation, and so on.

We domesticated animals, developed farming, and settled into small communities. Specialization continued and increased dramatically as the size of communities increased. A few people might be really good at constructing homes and animal shelters. Another set of people might be excellent with the animals.

As communities grow in size, the population growth allows people to focus their energies on mastering a skill and retaining specialized knowledge. Eventually, you might have a butcher, a baker, an ironsmith, a weaver.

If I try to be good at everything, I excel at nothing. Living in larger villages allowed people to get really good at some tasks. The entire community benefited because it would have been impossible for technologies to advance without specialists.

Specialization, therefore, was not a result of capitalism. Economic systems overlaid what was happening as humans formed larger and larger communities. If you live on an isolated farm or were part of a nomadic group, there was little opportunity to focus intensely on a special skill. Humans settled into groups, and those groups led to specializing in skills and knowledge.

Sorting of People

People began sorting themselves early in communal groups. The most common sorting mechanism was familial. Roles and labels were inherited. Other labels were earned. In some cultures, you might even receive a new name (or names) as you gained new roles or exhibited different traits.

Today, we do sort ourselves into more groups with more labels. We have our ethical labels, our gender labels, our educational labels, and our professional labels. This obsession with labels often comes from those most vocally critical of capitalism.

As I write this post, I just reviewed a social media thread by a scholar declaring at least six labels. The labels serve as a claim to authority. “I am this, so I know….” If anything, this also reinforces ideas of race, gender, class, and so on. By leading with labels one is giving those words and phrases extra power.

Communal to Individual

There’s no question that there’s a mythos of Individuality in the United States. However, that can be traced to Enlightenment thinking. During the Enlightenment, the belief in preordained roles and positions gave way to the concept of personal choice and freedom. (This freedom was for the middle-class males, yes.)

Individualism does seem to be inherently “Western” to me, but I’m not an anthropologist with knowledge of hundreds of cultures. My limited readings and interactions with the greater world suggest, however, that the Enlightenment notion of the “sovereign self” represented a European moment.

The Catholic Church began to lose power. Religion, in general, has slowly declined for the last three centuries. Philosophies emerged that emphasized the anxiety and dread of freewill. Individual experiences were valued over received knowledge. Eventually, Europe would give us phenomenology and existentialism within schools of Continental philosophy.

Even in a group, we’re alone. That’s a European concept. Continental philosophy is one long litany of “why we’re alone and miserable” even when we’re in communal groups.

Oppression in All Forms

Every economy is a hybrid of models. There is no pure economy in the West: we live within hybrids of various “isms” including capitalism and Marxism. There are statists and individualists. There are anarcho-capitalists and libertarian-Marxists. When we use labels for economic models, we risk implying parities that are unattainable and probably undesirable.

In theory, capitalism is anti-slavery and anti-oppression.

Capitalism’s model is producers freely engaging in the exchange of goods and services, including the application of their skills and knowledge. Slavery, by definition, excludes free will and voluntary trade. There’s nothing more diametrically opposed to the sovereign self than slavery.

Colonialism and monarchies went hand-in-hand, but monarchy wasn’t the cause of colonialism. The Catholic Church encouraged colonialism, but we also shouldn’t blame “religion” or “faith” for colonial conquests.

Gender oppression? Ethnic oppression? Again, none of these are inherent attributes of capitalism. However, people in power will manipulate capitalism.

Greed is not even inherent to capitalism. The desire to have more and more, to consume more and more, is cultural. In capitalism, you’re as free to not buy products as you are to buy them. Consumerism is a choice, within capitalism.

Capitalism does not give us our values. Human communities express their values within capitalism and other economic models.

People aren’t going to be persuaded that capitalism isn’t the primary cause of various injustices. The intellectual laziness involved is masked by the energy expended crafting critiques of capitalism, when we should be critiquing and examining every aspect of our culture. Focusing on one cause might be convenient, but it will make change and reform more difficult.

Adam Smith long ago wrote on The Theory of Moral Sentiments. He argued that without specific morals, any culture using any economic model was doomed. Smith emphasized the same values today’s critics of capitalism celebrate. The “father of capitalism” warned us that without sympathy and benevolence, a modern society would not endure.

Smith assumed all systems require moral behavior, especially a system based on free, voluntary exchange. That’s the theoretical foundation for capitalism: sovereign and moral agents engaged in trade.