Thought Shrapnel

As promised, I’ve returned to e-flux with an essay from Charles Tonderai Mudede, a Zimbabwean-born cultural critic, urbanist, filmmaker, college lecturer, and writer. In it, he discusses the origins of capitalism, arguing that many have missed the point: capitalism is focused on luxury goods and their consumption, and therefore can never reach a steady state, an equilibrium where everyone’s needs are met.

It’s a long-ish read, and makes some fascinating digressions (I love the story about the tulip bulb misidentified as an onion) but what I’ve quoted below is, I think, the main points being made.

Indeed, the key to capitalist products is not their use value but their uselessness, which is why so many goods driving capitalist growth were (and are) luxuries: coffee, tea, tobacco, beef, china, spices, chocolate, single-family homes, and ultimately automobiles—which define capitalism in its American moment. It’s no accident that the richest man of our times is a car manufacturer.

[…]

Capitalism has never been about use value at all, a misreading that entered the heart of Marxism through Adam Smith’s influence on Marx’s political economy. The Dutch philosopher Bernard Mandeville’s economics, on the other hand, represents a reading of capitalism that corresponds with what I call its configuration space, in which the defining consumer products are culturally actualized compossibilities—and predetermined, like luxuries associated with vice. The reason is simple: capitalism would simply die if it met all of our needs, and our needs are not that hard to fill.

This is precisely where John Maynard Keynes made a major mistake in his remarkable and entertaining 1930 essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.” He assumed that capitalism’s noble project was to alleviate its own scarcity, its own uneven distribution of capital. Yes, he really thought that the objective of capitalism was capitalism’s own death. And indeed, the late nineteenth-century neoclassical economists universally believed this to be the case. They told the poor to leave capital accumulation to the specialists, as it alone could eventually eliminate all wants and satisfy all needs. It’s just a question of time. It is time that justified the concentration of capital in a few hands, the hands of those who had it and did not blow it. And this fortitude, which the poor lacked, deserved a reward. The people provided labor, which deserved a wage; the rich provided waiting, which deserved a profit. […]

What was missing in Keynes’s utopia? Even with little distinction from socialism, what was missing was the basic understanding that capitalism is not about producing the necessities of life, but about using every opportunity to transfer luxuries from the elites to the masses. This is the point of Boots Riley’s masterpiece Sorry to Bother You (2018), a film that may be called surreal by those who have no idea of the kind of culture they are in. The real is precisely the enchantment, the dream. Capitalism’s poor do not live in the woods but instead, like Sorry to Bother You’s main character, Cassius “Cash” Green (played by LaKeith Stanfield), drive beat-up or heavily indebted cars; work, in the words of the late anarchist anthropologist David Graeber, “bullshit jobs”; and sleep in vehicles made for recreation (RVs) or tents made for quick weekend breaks from urban stress, or for the lucky ones, in garages (houses for cars). This is what poverty actually looks like in a society that’s devoted to luxuries rather than necessities.

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Capitalism is not, at the end of the day, based on the production of things we really need (absolute needs), for if it was, it would have already become a thing of the past. Or, in the language of thermodynamics, it would have reached equilibrium. (Indeed, the nineteenth-century British political economist John Stuart Mill called this equilibrium “a stationary state.”)

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For example, an apparent shortage of housing—an absolute need or demand, meaning every human needs to be housed—could easily be solved. But what do you find everywhere in a very rich city like Seattle? No developments that come close to satisfying widespread demand for housing as an absolute need. This fact should sound an alarm in your head. We are in a system geared for relative needs. And capital’s re-enchantment is so complete that it’s hard to find a theorist who has attempted to adequately (or systemically) recognize it as such. This kind of political economy (or even anti-political economy) would find its reflection in lucid dreaming. Revolution, then, is not the end of enchantment (“the desert of the real”) but can only be re-enchantment. We are all made of dreams.

Source: e-flux

Image: Max Böhme