New Discourses Bullets, Ep. 64
Capitalism is a Marxist creation. It sounds crazy to say that, but Marxists don’t mean competitive market economies or even free-market economies when they say “capitalism.” They mean an overarching ideology of limitless capital accumulation as the fundamental organizing principle of society, which most people who promote “capitalism” wouldn’t recognize as what they mean by the term at all. In this episode of New Discourses Bullets, host James Lindsay shows you in their own words what Marxists mean by the word “capitalism,” which is a revealing and ridiculous strawman of market economics. Join him to learn all about it.
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A recurring theme with the Marxist cultists is that they make a totalizing ideology out of an intellectual study that is properly confined to academia. Economists study economies; in order to do that they come up with concepts like capital and productivity… but most people who are participating in the economy don’t think that way. Same thing with Literature you can come up with various tropes and genres to categorize stories; but those narratives don’t necessarily hold water in the real world. people who study language can come up with gender to explain difference in how words are used to describe people but that doesn’t fundamentally change who people are. Biologists can look at a pack of wolves and designate an alpha male to explain their behavior… etc. and so on. They create a conceptual model of how the world works and then they forget that its only a model.
Econ grad student here. Here’s another way to identify that they are marrying truth to a lie.
The guy’s argument about limitless capital accumulation is actually impossible according to standard neoclassical economics. Why? Because capital wears out! It depreciates over time.
I won’t get too technical, but the first macro model we learn is called the Solow model which shows how diminishing returns and depreciation to capital interact to create a long-run steady-state point (another term they abuse, but that’s a topic for later). All this means is that at some point in the long run, our capital stock will be depreciating so fast that we can just barely replace it with new capital such that our net balance is 0, hence the name steady state.
To make it more mathy, he is effectively claiming that capitalist societies are trying to pursue a capital-to-output ratio of infinity. By accounting identity, that ratio is equivalent to a ratio of the average rate of depreciation to capital and the national savings rate. But if both depreciation and savings rates can only exist between 0 (0%) and 1.0 (100%), then practically speaking we will never get to infinity. Even absurd numbers like .99999/.00001 = 99,999.
This also means we can’t expand productive capacity beyond a certain point because we are running so fast just to stay in place. The Solow model also tells us that transferring capital to other countries, as is common in communist literature, just makes the burden of maintaining that capital even greater for those countries such that their best move is to rent it right back! In other words, the foreign aid programs have low, and likely negative, marginal effects.
In summary, the guy is catastrophically wrong, but we already knew that.
More on the Solow model here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVAS-t83Tx0&list=PL-uRhZ_p-BM5gdx2twZlv9dB5s8tlk7mQ
The Japanese Communist is making a point about economic growth that many non-Marxists are also making. On this point, I don’t think Critical Theory or neo-Marxism has a monopoly on the idea of “degrowth.”
The idea of limiting economic expansion on Earth seems, these days, to have a lot of popular support and seems to stand on its own “logic.” So here may be a popular idea that the Marxists are just trying to appropriate to make their own ideas sound better.
A smart criminal doesn’t complain too much about economic growth or surpluses, because that’s what he lives off of. So I think the degrowth idea comes from a deeper and more demented place.
It is totally true, however, that most anti-Capitalists have no real idea what Capitalism is. These people are haunted by evil spirits, essentially, that they struggle to name. And that is worth realizing.
Hey James, with “sustainability” you’ve seemed to figured out that this is a dog whistle of sorts towards a communist agenda. What are your thoughts on the “net zero” 2045/2050 agenda? What are they really doing here?
The “sustainability” agenda is a demand by communists and other Statists (socialists and fascists) to their “inferiors” (all who are opposed to Statism) to leave the earth entirely alone, to leave all natural resources untouched and unused by human beings–except themselves. The “net zero” agenda demands that “inferiors” stop using and emitting the “poison” of carbon and carbon dioxide for the sake of Gaia (earth) and its climate. Both agendas, in essence, demand that “inferiors” commit suicide, which would spare the Statists the trouble of slaughtering them.