Its immense complexity notwithstanding, it can be said that capitalism stands on five major pillars on which I would like to briefly write here. These pillars are: private property, human exceptionalism, rationality, progress, and hard work(❖).
Private property
In order for it to exist, capitalism must, in the first place, appropriate land. Colonists in North-America were welcomed by the indigenous peoples with these words: “We belong to the land; it cannot belong to us.” Who could ever imagine that the living earth can belong to anyone? Four billion years of life on Earth brought us to now. How, then, can one view life as a private property? In fact this is only possible if one is a Christian, whether consciously or not. For the Christian god gave the Earth and all those living on it to Adam, so that he could rule over them and use them for food. This story is unparalleled elsewhere(*). Thus, only Adam has the land as his property (❀).
Human exceptionalism
Capitalism is a modern (and ultimately Christian) phenomenon. Moderns consider that the human species is special or superior to all others because they take humans to be rational in contrast to all other biological species. Humans, they believe, are the only ones who think and create, and hence they stand above all other living and non-living beings. This is another reason why, unlike other animals, moderns consider that they can own the land, that is to say, turn it into their private property.
However, do you know that seventy-to-eighty percent of our genes and cells are microbial, and that only thirty-to-twenty percent of them are “truly” ours (if it makes any sense to talk about your genes and cells in terms of private property)? The fact is that we are an assemblage of microorganisms. You yourself are a node in a web.
Also, do you know that your stomach can be viewed as your “second brain”? There is more and more research that shows that our stomach bacterias play a huge role in both our mood and our thought processes. Who is then thinking? You? Or the collection that you are?
Life is multi-central or a-central. Life is a continuum in which people are enmeshed.
Moderns believe humans to be special because humans use symbolic language. But what is so special about thinking symbolically? Dolphins can communicate in ways we can barely imagine. They are also special in their own way. Or should we organise a scale according to which one uniqueness is less than the other? One should keep in mind that life does not produce hierarchies, unlike the symbolically-thinking modern individual.
Rationality
Moderns claim to be rational, and rationality is traditionally (the nuance is important) considered to be free from emotions and other bodily attributes (it is somehow implied that the body is not implied in reasoning; reasoning is disembodied). A person who can reason well is said to reason without anything affecting her ideas (ideology included). As a purely mental process, rationality can be also described as calculation, deduction or induction, management, etc. It is a type of thought that stands in opposition to the world, and therefore that captures, dominates and subdues everything, as it watches the world from above (✺).
In the same way as rationality withdraws from the body, it withdraws from life. Some popular scientists say that brains work like computers because they think that brains reason. But to think and to reason are different things. Instinct is thought. Dancing is thought. Loving or hating is thought. Thought belongs to life, and reason is mostly a modern fabulation that aims at controlling the latter. Lost in his symbolic speculations a modern man orders to own (indeed, how would private property exist if one were not able calculate, measure, or manage life?). But life does not order, calculate, measure, or manage—and still (if you have a dog and a touch of sensitivity you will not doubt it) it thinks. Thought thinks life. Capitalism does not.
Progress
From a modern and capitalist perspective, before is always worse than the present or the future. The past is misery, a struggle for survival; the present and the future are a cure, safety, order, peace and plenitude. This is a fable that moderns have invented to justify themselves and their social and economic order.
In the Amazon forest, traditionally, indigenous communities worked around three hours a day. It was very easy to fish or to hunt. The abundance of the rainforest made food readily available. In fact, life and work were not separated, as what we would call “working” could be enjoyed. It was neither difficult nor tedious; it also did not isolate people from the socius but strengthened the community, as one does not usually hunt, cook, or build alone. The life of an Amazon dweller five hundred years ago would roughly consist of these activities: communicating with the spirits, teaching, dancing, singing, having sex, giving birth, taking care of the children, going to war(✤), hunting, eating, sleeping, dreaming, etc. Some sixteenth-century Europeans thought that the Amerindians lived in paradise, until the Brits invented what is called political economy and placed them (and other extramoderns) at the bottom of human evolution condemned to their mere want since they had little commodities (✼).
In comparison, modern life is a swinging journey between job and consumption, where the consumed and the consumer, the produced and the producer are confused (like artist Tetsuya Ishida illustrates in many of his paintings). The US is the country with the biggest amount of women taking antidepressants. Seventy percent of North Americans do not enjoy their jobs. This means, eight hours a day, five days a week, if not more, of slavery because one cannot survive without money.
Hard work
In order to progress, one needs to work hard. As Protestants say, the harder one works the more pleasant one is to God; and, if one is rich, s/he has the right to feel chosen by him.
Unlike indigenous peoples, for whom laziness does not exist, moderns, educated by the Christian tradition, both conceive of, name, and dislike laziness (❈). They always need to run, to do something—usually, to earn money and to spend it. And in the modern world such pleasurable things as the personal hobbies of each individual, like football or yoga, are different ways in which one can recharge her/his batteries in order to continue working well the next hour or day (❂). Also, thanks to the infinite entertainments of capitalism—which owe their existence to those humans and other-than-humans who are exploited to produce them—one forgets to do a really simple thing we all ought to do perhaps, namely: to stop and think what this is all about.
Further reading: Philippe Pignarre and Isabelle Stengers, Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell
(❖) For defining capitalism as a mode of economic production, based on the exploitation of work force, is not enough.
(*) Actually, it is originally a Jewish story, but only the Christians have fulfilled it.
(❀) Christians have an obsession with having and not having: I HAVE sins; I HAVE a body; I HAVE a wife; I HAVE LOST my pre-fallen Adamic condition; etc.
(✺) Thus, actually, it is a mistake to think that rationality alone is thought.
(✤) Capitalism is permanent war. See further Éric Alliez and Maurizio Lazzarato, Wars and Capital.
(✼) I am not defending the position that we need to go back in time and start living like our ancestors (although this is a possibility and not an unpleasant one!). I am defending the position that there is no back or forward. There are options, good living or bad living, mistakes, possibilities, and alternatives.
(❈) Moderns typically say: “Africans are lazy,” and then add: “this is why they are poor, they just want to dance.” One should reply: “You, moderns, colonise, destroy, name poor, and then want everyone to work!”
(❂) In many branches of Christianity, one needs to reject the present (that is, mortify the flesh and reject the pleasures of the world) in order to be rewarded in the future (that is, accepted to the paradise). The same logic is found in capitalism: one mortifies the flesh and rejects the pleasures of the world now (that is, works hard) in order to receive rewards in the future (that is, money, and with it, free time and material abundance). In both cases, life (which always takes place in the present) is sacrificed in the altar of an invisible idilic future.
If you think capitalism has any other major pillar I have not touched upon, please write to us at email@polymorph.blog!