Capitalism: The Boogeyman of Leftism
Karaçam
Introduction
This paper is about a myth, a boogeyman that has been concocted by leftists1 around the concept of “capitalism”.2 This myth veils the real reason (modern technology) for the problems that we face today (the destruction of Nature; the misery of modern life; the great dangers looming over us such as artificial intelligence, biotechnology, nuclear weapons, etc.). This boogeyman, by masking the real reason that creates (or at least aggravates) these problems, prevents us from seeing the real culprit and from contemplating an adequate solution to our modern predicaments. We will try to show that “capitalism” is only a result or another consequence of technological development. Focusing on “capitalism” and portraying it as the main culprit obfuscate the deeper inherent problems our technological society has –and will continue to have– regardless of its economic system.
During our discussion, we will compare “capitalism” and “socialism.”3 We should emphasize that, while doing this, we don’t say that one is better than the other. To our value system, both of these economic systems are bad. They appeared as alternative economic systems for the incipient industrial societies from the 17th and 18th centuries. Since we regard wild Nature as the most valuable thing and the techno-industrial society is the greatest danger wild Nature faces, it should be obvious that we see both “capitalism” and “socialism” as abhorrent. We only analyze these two systems to show whether focusing on attacking “capitalism” to protect wild Nature is a good strategy or not, whether the root cause of the problem is “capitalism” or not, and whether we really have a choice between “capitalism” and an alternative economic system given the continued existence of the technological system.
According to leftists, “capitalism” is responsible for all the evil things in the world: all the injustices, poverty, wars, destruction of the environment, the unhappiness of people, COVID-19, etc, etc. However, leftists hardly ever clearly define what “capitalism” is. We can only somewhat discern what they mean by it by all the “vile” things they attribute to it: They most frequently complain about the profit motive. Because the corporations operate in a “free market” with the sole purpose of making profits, they don’t care about the welfare, health, or happiness of the people; they don’t care about the inequalities, injustices, exploitation, and destruction of the environment that their profit-oriented activities inevitably bring. For this reason, according to leftists, capitalism cannot solve the problems that humanity faces. They also complain about the hierarchical nature of capitalism. Leftists claim that in “capitalism”, one class of people who owns the capital (productive forces) accumulates virtually all the material wealth the society produces, and exploits people who don’t have capital. They say that people at the top concentrate in their hands more and more portion of the social wealth, and leave the rest of the population in misery. According to leftists, because class divisions are inherent in “capitalism” and because it fosters competition and exploitation in all the domains imaginable, it also creates other hierarchical divisions such as the division between sexes (patriarchy), between races (racism), between the developed and underdeveloped nations (imperialism), etc. Therefore, leftists suggest, we should destroy “capitalism” and create an alternative economic system in which the sole purpose would not be to make profits but to satisfy the “real” needs of the people according to a global rational plan. With such an economic system at hand, we would eliminate class, sex, and national divisions; wars would be a thing of the past; and we would satisfy the basic needs of all people while ending the destruction of the environment.
Leftists create a boogeyman with their narrative about “capitalism.” This boogeyman is useful to them for several things. By focusing on this boogeyman, they can divert attention from the real and underlying cause (technological development) of some of the problems that they complain about. Leftists should divert attention from the technology problem and focus the blame on something else because technological development has a central role in leftist ideology: Technological development would eliminate poverty from the face of the world, free people from material hardships, and would create the conditions of a perfect, harmonious, and collective human society. The masses would be enlightened by the technologies of communication and transportation. Modern technology would harmonize all cultures, and humanity would live ever happily in universal brotherhood. Modern technology has all these potentials, but “capitalism” prevents humanity from using these potentials of technology. According to leftists, under the conditions of “capitalism,” technology is being used for the sole purpose of profits without any concern for the welfare of people and society and all the damages that are being inflicted on the environment. For this reason, according to leftists, humanity cannot benefit from the “progressive” and “egalitarian” potentials of modern technology. Modern technology is good or neutral in itself, they say; it only creates bad results because it is in evil hands.
Leftists cannot give up technology due to their psychological condition as well.4 Leftists, because of their psychological condition (feelings of inferiority and oversocialization are the two main psychological tendencies of leftists), want collective power. Modern technology is the best instrument to attain collective power. Without modern technology, you cannot create crowded mass organizations and lead those masses through modern indoctrination and manipulation technologies. Modern technology gives enormous means to achieve power over people. On the other hand, technology is essential for building a socialist brave new world. Building a socialist utopia would require enormous amounts of brainwashing, propaganda, discipline, and physical suppression of those people that do not consent to this type of society. Collective conditioning and physical coercion of the masses can only be done effectively by using modern technological means. Besides, the great majority of people revere modern technology. Since leftists try to establish a mass movement, they perhaps cannot reject modern technology from a strategic point of view as well. They don’t want to alienate the masses of people from their ideology.
The psychology of leftists makes it extremely hard for them to reject modern technology because modern technology and the associated ideas of progress (the welfare of humanity, creating better conditions for humans by the enlightened values of equality, security, peace, education, etc.) is the nec plus ultra of the current social system. Due to their oversocialization and inferiority complex, they cannot bear to be seen as reactionary barbarians who reject those values. They need to feel embraced by the social collective; they need social approval to balance the negative emotions created by their oversocialization and inferiority complex.
The story about “capitalism” presents a very effective tool to express social problems in the framework of personalized hatred, and this has some utility in several respects. It makes it possible to attribute all the blame to wealthy people, owners of capital, the upper classes, the “one percent,” etc. “The downtrodden,” “the oppressed,” and “the lower classes” are forced to live an awful life solely because of these "bad" people. They are poor, unhappy, unsatisfied, and unsuccessful because of the people who oppress them. The environment is being destroyed, there is still hunger in the world, wars are still going on, and some countries are underdeveloped because the “elites” only care about themselves and their profits. So “ordinary” people are “good,” and they are “victims” of some “bad” people. Thereby, the narrative around "capitalism" becomes a convenient tool to vent frustrations, usually generated by some impersonal structural reasons, to some “villains.” That soothes the inferiority complex that is so prevalent in modern conditions, both in leftists themselves and in public in general. Besides, it is much easier for most people to “understand” the issues when they are portrayed in a framework where “bad” people are culprits and good people are “victims” than in a more complex framework where people are cogs in a giant social system that works mechanistically.
Most importantly, the boogeyman about capitalism deflects attention from the real and most vital aspects of the system, from its real functioning and essence. It focuses attention on its secondary characteristics that don’t necessarily define its nature. Therefore, it acts as a defense mechanism for the techno-industrial system. It creates the illusion that there really is a critique of the existing social system, that this critique really portrays the system’s functioning and proposes a real alternative to it. On the other hand, the critique of capitalism points out some defects in the system’s functioning, defects (excessive inequality in wealth, excessive poverty that squanders some people’s potential, etc.) that, if the system finds some solutions to them, it will function more effectively. By doing this, it helps the system to correct itself. These are the reasons why we ever more frequently see the critique of capitalism on the system’s propaganda apparatus.
Leftism describes “capitalism” as a social system that has been intentionally designed and created by a certain social class (bourgeoisie, capital-owning or ruling class, economic elites, etc.). And it claims that this social class is now consciously perpetuating “capitalism” to the detriment of the other classes in society. Therefore, it must be possible for the exploited classes to destroy “capitalism” and build another social system in its place just like the present ruling classes have done with “capitalism.” Socialist leftists assume that it is possible to control consciously the development of a society; a social class, a certain segment of the society (the proletariat, the working class, etc.), or any indefinite collective “we” can create a desired social system based on a desired goal. This cannot be done, however, because human societies are complex systems. Complex systems are composed of many components that interact with each other. It is impossible to know the exact relations among these components and the consequences that would result from interfering with them. For this reason, we cannot design on paper a plan of an ideal society and successfully implement this plan in real life. Consciously controlling the development of a society is impossible. On the other hand and related to this, it wasn’t the bourgeoisie, ruling classes, or any other “vile” people who created “capitalism”. Because nobody can create consciously a certain type of social system. Societies evolve following mechanical, unconscious, and uncontrollable processes. The phenomena that are regarded as the main features of “capitalism” have evolved spontaneously without conscious design during the development of human societies. They are the results of the changes that occurred in the infrastructural components of human societies which in turn caused changes in structural and superstructural components.
The Three Levels of Human Societies: Infrastructure, Structure, Superstructure
The elements that constitute human societies or cultures can be classified under three categories or levels: infrastructure, structure, and superstructure.
Infrastructure consists of the technological tools and the rest of the material elements that constitute a human society, including people (demography), the artificial environment it creates and controls, and those spaces, materials, and energy human societies take from wild Nature and use. Technological tools are, among other things, steam, internal combustion, and diesel engines that transform chemical energy to kinetic energy; steam turbines that produce electricity; transformers, connection lines that distribute electricity; vehicles that are used in transportation such as ships, tankers, automobiles, trucks; highways, bridges, viaducts that these vehicles travel on; communication and information processing tools such as computers, mobile phones, satellites, cell towers, and deep ocean cables that constitute the bulk of the Internet network; pipelines that carry oil and natural gas. The physical environment is composed of the natural resources and the artificial things that are built by human societies: land and water used in agriculture; fossil fuels such as oil, natural gas, and coal; the fauna and flora the society uses (domestic animals, crops, or the wild species that a society exploits); buildings, cities, roads, shopping malls, parking lots, etc.
Structure signifies the organizational framework of society. Family structures such as extended or nuclear families; the roles people assume within these family structures based on their age and sex; the classes within the society and their positions relative to each other; the types of property ownership; the political structure of the society (states and their bureaucracy, the institutions of the state, the way these institutions are organized, etc.); the organizational structure of the corporations, their hierarchies; etc. In short, relations among people, their roles in society, and the resulting hierarchies (these hierarchies mean that people have different conditions in accessing wealth and different positions in the managing hierarchy) that constitute the social organization, the so-called “social order”.
Superstructure refers to the ideational aspects of a society. Ideologies, beliefs, and values that are prevalent in society: religious or non-religious beliefs, scientific theories, moral values, political ideologies, literature, the contents of the work of arts, etc.
In the long run and broadly speaking, infrastructure determines the structural and the superstructural levels of society. All these three levels might have some effects on each other, but in the long run and the broadest terms, what shapes the structural and the superstructural levels of the societies is their infrastructure. We explain why this is so in the section below.
The Deterministic Power of Infrastructural Factors
Infrastructural factors have deterministic power because human societies are subject to unchangeable physical laws. They need energy, materials, and space to feed their populations and conduct their activities. These needs drive them to certain activities pertaining to acquiring these needs, creating their motivation to act in certain ways and achieve certain ends. Without the necessary energy, materials, and space they would collapse. People can imagine whatever they want, but without the necessary resources and the technology to acquire and process them, ideas and imaginations amount to nothing in the real physical world. For this reason, the limiting factors in the existence and development of societies are infrastructural factors. Human societies contact Nature with their technologies and the series of changes that shape the other features of the societies start from this contact point. All the other aspects of human societies (their organizational and ideational features) spring from the relationship between Nature and their physical technological means.
Societies, with the aid of technology, can increase the amount of energy and materials they acquire from Nature. They need to use more powerful, efficient, or altogether new technologies to increase these amounts. However, we cannot create miraculous technological advancements and increase the number of resources available without creating consequences in Nature which in turn affect negatively the functioning of societies and increase the marginal cost of using these technologies. Technological development is gradual and takes time5, and every new technological advance needs to be integrated into a complex system (the existing social system and the ecosystem in which the social system exits) which is composed of numerous components. Social systems have inertia, and as their complexity increases their inertia also increases. As social systems get bigger and acquire more and more components, they become more bulky. It gets more difficult for them to change course. Think about their energy infrastructure. It is a complex network with power plants, pipelines, and electrical grids. It is not so easy to adapt them to a new energy source. As social systems get more complex, they become like big ships. It becomes more difficult to steer their direction. As a result, technological advances cannot change dramatically their current functioning. For this reason, game-changing technological advances are rare. Even if they occasionally come, they could only postpone some of the physical limits so far, creating bigger and deeper problems in the end.
Human social systems have a tendency to get bigger and more complex. They tend to increase the amounts of energy and materials they use and spread their functions geographically. As Marvin Harris points out,
Cultural evolution has had three main characteristics: escalating energy budgets, increased productivity, and accelerating population growth. (1) Over the long haul the amount of energy per capita and per local system has tended to increase. Cultures at the band level of development used less than 100,000 kilocalories per day; cultures at the level of tropical forest slash-and-burn farming villages used about a million per day; neolithic mixed dry-farming villages, about 2 million per day; the early irrigation states of Mesopotamia, China, India, Peru, and Mesoamerica about 25 billion per day and modern industrial superstates over 50 trillion per day. (2) Production efficiency, measured as energy output per unit of human labor has also increased, rising, for example, from about 10 to 1 among hunters and gatherers to 20 to 1 among swidden farmers to 50 to 1 among irrigation agriculturalists. (3) And human population has increased. There was a global density of less than 1 person per square mile in 10,000 B.C. Today there are over 65 persons per square mile. Settlements grew from 25 to 50 persons per band; 150 to 200 per slash-and-burn village; 500 to 1,500 per neolithic mixed farming village. By 200 B.C. there were more people living in the great preindustrial oriental empires than in all the world ten thousand years earlier.6
Social systems tend to develop and become more complex (more occupational and geographical specialization, more strict and diverse hierarchies, more sophisticated and diverse technological tools, more geographical extension and increased intensity of the functions of the social systems, etc.) not because it is good for humans and they desire it to be so, but because three reasons below “push” them to greater complexity.
1. The reproductive capacity of humans is greater than their capacity of acquiring food from Nature. For this reason, human societies tend to reach the carrying capacity of a given ecosystem provided by a technological level. Their population reaches a level that cannot be sustained by resources that can be acquired from Nature with a given level of technology. When this happens, certain manifestations of crises start to happen: famines, epidemics, wars (civil or external), uprisings, increased levels of infanticide, etc. To prevent these pressures and/or an all-out collapse, societies sometimes try to increase the amount of energy and materials they acquire from Nature with more sophisticated technologies.
2. Human societies are in a Darwinian competition with each other. This is an unconscious competition that just happens regardless of the intentions of the competitors. Those societies that have the best qualities to survive are the ones that continue to exist and propagate themselves. And these qualities are ultimately about how effective societies are in acquiring energy and material resources from Nature, using these resources in their metabolism, and expanding their activities in space. Since technology is the most important factor in acquiring resources from Nature and processing them effectively, societies tend to seek more sophisticated technologies. Some competitors are better positioned (or position themselves better through the use of violence, etc.) to acquire material and energy resources, and they are better at developing technologies that are more effective in absorbing and processing these resources. These competitors propagate themselves to the detriment of others who are less effective in these regards. This unconscious competition among human societies pushes technological development upward.
3. Technological development and greater complexity bring their own problems. This is related to the declining marginal returns of complexity and the consequences of intervening in natural cycles. Tainter defines complexity as below:
Complexity is generally understood to refer to such things as the size of a society, the number and distinctiveness of its parts, the variety of specialized social roles that it incorporates, the number of distinct social personalities present, and the variety of mechanisms for organizing these into a coherent, functioning whole. Augmenting any of these dimensions increases the complexity of a society. Hunter-gatherer societies (by way of illustrating one contrast in complexity) contain no more than a few dozen distinct social personalities, while modern European censuses recognize 10,000 to 20,000 unique occupational roles, and industrial societies may contain overall more than 1,000,000 different kinds of social personalities.7
Societies increase their complexity to solve problems. However, increased complexity is subject to the law of declining marginal returns. As the complexity increases, it becomes more costly to sustain the activities the increased complexity entails. We see this phenomenon in diverse cases such as resource acquisition, information processing, and educating the members of society.
As mentioned above, human societies need energy, materials, and space to survive. They initially use those resources that are easier to acquire, extract, process, and distribute. As these more available and efficient sources deplete, societies have to use harder-to-reach and less efficient sources of energy and materials, or they need to supplement the current resources with alternative ones. That generally increases the cost (not only in financial terms but also in terms of energy necessary to acquire more energy) of resource acquisition and compels societies to develop newer technologies to reach and use the less efficient alternative resources. Another instance of declining marginal returns is information processing and educational costs. As complexity increases, society needs much more data to conduct its activities (such as records about taxation, price indices, technical information about some materials and processes, etc.) Ever-increasing amounts of data need to be collected, archived, and processed. That increases the information processing costs. Besides, modern specialized occupations need ever more specialized, highly trained personnel. It is costly to educate these people. Since these people need to pass every stage of the educational period from the most elementary to the most sophisticated, this inevitably brings declining marginal returns. On another front, ever more complex and expanded interventions to natural cycles create consequences that negatively affect the functioning of societies. The most popular of these phenomena is the climate change. The burning of fossil fuels by all sorts of engines and turbines disrupts the natural CO2 cycle and changes the atmosphere's chemistry. That causes climate change, and to remedy its detrimental effects, society needs to invest in newer technical “solutions” such as alternative sources of energy (solar and wind “farms,” research projects on fusion power, etc.), new transportation methods such as EV cars, new ways of smelting steel, heating homes, moving planes, and container ships, etc.
Subject to these laws, societies have a tendency to increase their complexity. They develop ever more sophisticated technological tools; they acquire and process ever greater amounts of energy and materials, and expand their activities in space. That increases their demography8, and increased demography brings more occupational specialization and stricter and more diverse hierarchies. In sum, the chain of alterations that start from the contact point of societies and Nature (i.e., infrastructural factors) percolate through their structure and superstructure. Looking into how these processes occur in real life would be more explanatory.
Hunter-gatherer societies had lower population densities, less occupational specialization, less strict hierarchies, simpler dwellings, a more restricted set of artifacts, etc. compared to the agricultural ones. That is because they depended on the wild species they found in their environments to feed themselves. In contrast, agriculturalists had the ability to produce their food. They cultivated the plants and/or fed the animals that they ate. As a result, agricultural societies acquired much more energy in the form of food from their environments than hunter-gatherer ones. That higher amount of food fed more people and created a population explosion. On the other hand, food production allowed agricultural societies to be sedentary. Sedentism and increased population resulted in higher population densities, more diverse occupational specialization, stricter hierarchies, etc. Nevertheless, we still observe different levels of complexity even among hunter-gatherer societies due to different infrastructural factors they have. Even among the hunter-gatherer societies, diverse infrastructural factors (differences in fauna and flora and different technological tools to exploit these natural features) created different levels of social complexities.
Foragers who had lived before the Upper Paleolithic must have relied on scavenging and chasing to exhaustion the herbivores so as to reach animal protein because they hadn’t had the necessary tools for big game hunting that we observe in Upper Paleolithic people. That must have reduced the energy flows of these pre-upper Paleolithic forager bands, and this might be the reason why we don’t observe the level of complexity during the pre-Upper Paleolithic times that we see in the Upper Paleolithic (antler and bone tools, needles, boats, oil lamps, cave paintings, etc.)
In the Upper Paleolithic, biomass-rich environments and more sophisticated hunting tools resulted in higher social complexity in certain regions. In the Moravian region of present-day Czechia, mammoth hunters built stone houses, produced a variety of stone tools, and could fire clay. Southwestern France during the Upper Paleolithic had the largest herbivorous herds in periglacial Europe. This was thanks to the climatic conditions of the place. The influence of the Atlantic Ocean in this region resulted in cool summers and exceptionally mild winters and rendered the steppelike vegetation extremely productive. These rich steppes fed large herds of herbivores. Higher energy flows provided by these herds sustained a high local density of human population and “allowed at least some degree of sedentism over a substantial part of the annual cycle.”9 As a result of sedentism and high population density, these groups experienced “the emergence of certain individuals with increasing status or authority to organize and coordinate the activities of other members of the group.”10
Comparing the Indians of the Pacific Northwest and the Mbuti Pygmies may show us how infrastructural factors influence social complexity in more recent hunter-gatherer societies. Modern foraging populations had very diverse population densities ranging in three orders of magnitude from the minimum of 1 person/100 km2 to several hundred people/100 km2. These differences in population densities were the result of different natural habitats and food acquisition techniques (i.e., differences in infrastructural factors).11 In the Ituri forest where Mbuti live, the population density –including both Mbuti and their sedentary agriculturalist neighbors– is less than 3 persons per km2.12 In contrast, “The Northwest Coast was densely populated when Europeans first made landfall in the 18th century. […] Early historic sources indicate that many winter villages had hundreds of inhabitants.”13 Higher population densities result in stricter hierarchies, more diverse occupational specialization, more varied artifacts, more complex dwellings, etc.
The Pacific Northwest, with abundant sea mammals on its shores, sustained one of the highest foraging densities. Without resorting to agriculture, foraging people of this area created coastal villages with large houses relying on near-shore hunting of sea mammals. With their abundant supply of easily worked cedar, they built “walled and roofed large, weatherproof, and ornate buildings with gabled roofs, as impressive as many European wooden buildings.”14 According to Coon, such a house was inhabited by several families. Indicating the existence of hierarchy and specialization in this foraging society, “the highest-ranking member, whether or not a chief, occupied the right rear corner, and the other positions followed protocol.”15 Coon remarks that what made possible this elaborate type of habitation was “ample supply of food and the availability in abundance of what is probably the world’s best timber.”16 Both infrastructural features.
Specialization and hierarchy (differences in access to material wealth and power in society) are two indicators of complexity. Specialization and hierarchy generally correlate with the abundance of energy and material resources. Coon says that “two conditions foster masculine specialization: a surplus of food adequate to free specialists from the daily food quest, and a need for their services or product among others able to pay for it.”17 The Nootka (a people from the Northwestern Pacific Coast in North America) men, for example, were specialists in canoe making, woodcarving, stone maul making, or trapping bears, deers, and elk. “[The Northwest Coast Indians] had a ruling elite that controlled use rights to corporately held or communal property.” Their social organization resembled the medieval societies of Europe, China, and Japan. Social stratification had three divisions: chiefly elites, commoners, and slaves or war captives. Elites derived their social rank according to the degree of relatedness to a founding ancestor. However, social stratification wasn’t limited to these three broad categories; each person had a particular hereditary status that placed him to a certain degree of status within these groups. The highest rank individuals were chiefs who specialized in political leadership; they administered the group’s properties and determined many of the patterns of daily life.
In contrast to the Northwestern Indians, Mbuti pygmies represented the other edge in terms of complexity in hunter-gatherer societies. They had lower population densities, simpler dwellings and social organizations, and less strict hierarchies and specializations compared with the Northwestern Indians. They didn’t have specialized political leadership positions as we observed in Nootka; older men and women made the final decisions as to when and where the camp should be moved.18 Coon says that “[in Pygmy bands] there may be one man whom the Negroes call ‘chief’ because he seems to be the most facile mediator between themselves and the Pygmy band as a whole, but back in the forest his authority quickly evaporates.”19 According to Turnbull, “there was little apparent specialization [in Mbuti bands.] Everyone took part in everything […] There were no chiefs, no formal councils. […] There was no judge, no jury, no court.”20 Compared to the above-mentioned elaborate wooden dwellings of the Northwestern Indians, Pygmies built simpler domed huts for habitation. The domed hut is appropriate for a nomadic forager band that doesn’t have an abundant food source in a particular place because “it can be put up in no more than two hours whenever there is suitable wood, and can be abandoned whenever a band of hunters decides to move camp.”21
Leftists sometimes portray trade as something unique to “capitalism.” They go so far as to describe it as a vice that has been brought on people by “capitalism.” However, even people supposedly “untainted” by capitalism engaged in trade. Coon tells about an account of “a mortal battle between an inland band of Tasmanians having access to ochre, and a coastal band who had agreed to exchange seashells for the other’s product. The inland people brought their ochre, but the coastal people arrived empty-handed. Men were killed because of a breach of faith over the exchange of the two materials, neither of which was edible or of any other practical use.”22 Long before “capitalism” reached those lands, the Northwestern Coast Indians traded among each other; they exchanged various goods and resources such as woven robes, copper and many other materials, shark oil, Dentalium shells, and canoes. These trade networks even included slaves.23 Mbuti Pygmies, whose social structure had lesser complexity compared to the Northwestern Coast Indians, traded with their Negro villagers. They would trade meat and ivory for bananas, banana wine, pots, arrowheads, and knives.24
These examples show that infrastructural features of societies shape their structural features. On the other hand, they also show that private property and commodity exchanges existed in hunter-gatherer societies independent of “capitalism.” They are not unique to “capitalism” as leftists claim them to be. They only have become more intense and widespread as technology develops further and further.
The first agricultural society appeared in the Middle East about ten thousand years ago. The foraging economy had reached its carrying capacity at that time because the hunter-gatherer bands had already spread through all the continents except Antarctica. There was virtually no “empty” space to go for a hunter-gatherer group when resources were depleted at a certain locality. The ice-age megafauna had been greatly decimated by the combined effects of hunting and climate change (the last ice age was ending at that time). The agricultural societies started to pop up independently more or less at the same time in different parts of the world if we look from the perspective of our long hunter-gatherer existence (hundreds of thousands of years). The shift to agriculture occurred in those places where the climate was convenient for agriculture and where plant and animal species suitable for domestication existed.
Agricultural societies produce their own food. They turn suitable areas into fields to cultivate plants, and they raise domesticated animals. They use those plants and animals as food and material/energy resources. That vastly increases the energy flows of the agricultural societies compared to the hunter-gatherer ones. Higher energy flows allow higher population densities. Complex agricultural societies can feed their populations without making all of their members work directly in food production. As a result, stricter and more diverse hierarchies and occupational specializations emerge. Different classes that don’t work in food production appear, such as soldiers, clergy, kings and servants, and people who undertake bureaucratic functions. Those classes who don’t work directly in food production procure their food from the peasants who produce the food. They do this by instituting an organization: chiefdom at the initial stages of lesser complexity, states or empires at the higher levels of complexity. Bureaucracies, among other things, manage the finances (calculating the harvest, tracking and recording stock levels, levying taxes based on this information, etc.) Ruling strata (kings and their servants, soldiers, etc.) monopolize the violence. They subdue the support population (peasants producing the food), and ensure they pay their taxes, obey the laws, etc. They protect the realm from external attacks and attack neighboring societies to plunder or conquer their lands.
In summary, concentrated resources (especially food) create sedentism and higher population densities. When the food resources are plenty and consistent (like big and abundant schools of fish or herds of herbivores, or grains or domesticated animals), more people could feed on them. And if food resources are concentrated in a particular place, people could settle there. Sedentism allows people to accumulate wealth. Nomadic people can possess only those objects that they can carry with them, but sedentary people can generally accumulate more property than nomads because they don’t need to move their property to different places. More people in a settled place means higher population density. In an environment with an ample food supply, not everybody needs to work directly on food production because a part of the total population could produce enough food to feed the whole population. These factors (concentrated resources, sedentism, higher population density) allow status hierarchies and occupational specializations to arise.
People are not equal. They have different abilities and characters. Some are better communicators and have better social skills. Some are better at convincing and organizing people. Some are more intelligent and/or physically stronger. Some have more ambition to accumulate wealth and climb the status hierarchy. When the conditions of amassing wealth and climbing the status hierarchy exist, some people do those things better than others. So, the material factors create the conditions for the hierarchies (in wealth and status) to intensify, and the fact that people have different abilities causes those hierarchies. However, the existence of hierarchies is not only due to the inequalities among people. Sedentary societies with high population densities need hierarchical command structures to function. As mentioned above, not everybody works directly in food production in those societies. There are other tasks that need to be taken care of, such as calculating the harvest, tracking the stocks of food, collecting taxes, and using violence to establish order in the society or to protect it from the enemies. Societies with thousands or even millions of people could only function with a hierarchical command structure. Some should manage what other people do. People need to be convinced and forced to do things they are supposed to do and obey the rules, with force if necessary. As the complexity of society increases with technological advancement, this command structure becomes more complex. Every human society, from nomadic hunter-gatherers to the present techno-industrial society, has had hierarchies (in status and wealth) and occupational specializations. These hierarchies and specializations have become more conspicuous in today’s high-tech society. Advanced production, communication, transportation, and data manipulation technologies create societies with huge populations spanning massive areas. Myriad of different tasks needs to be fulfilled for such societies to function. People need to behave with great discipline, and their actions should be coordinated because what they do is related to what others do in a long chain reaction. People should obey the laws, get a proper education, go to their work on time and do their jobs, pay their taxes, etc. Only a hierarchical command structure could make them do those things.
Complex sedentary societies not only use force (or the threat of it) to ensure order; they also use ideological legitimization. They need this legitimacy because sedentary agricultural societies brought vast differences in accessing wealth and power among their members. While some lived in material abundance as chiefs, feudal lords, high clergy, or kings, others languished at subsistence levels under the back-bending hard labor. Besides, with their higher population densities, complex agricultural societies brought together many people who were strangers to each other. These societies needed to put these people in cooperative networks so as to function and survive. They used institutionalized religions to do that. These religions portrayed all the members of the society as brothers and sisters; they claimed that an omnipotent God watched people in their daily lives and punished those who cheated, stole, or murdered; they said that the king was the representative of this God on Earth and the king’s rule was the God’s rule on Earth. These developments show how infrastructural factors (agricultural techniques, a climate and land suitable for agriculture, species that are susceptible to domestication, etc.) influence the structure (organizational framework of the society, different classes, and specializations, hierarchies, etc.) and superstructure (beliefs, ideological legitimizations, etc.) We mention more recent instances of this phenomenon while discussing the birth of “capitalism” and the industrial society below.
Some leftists claim that the tendency to expand is unique to “capitalism.” They claim that due to its profit-seeking and capital-accumulating mechanisms, “capitalist” societies tend to expand themselves and they conquer and subjugate “non-capitalist” societies. They call this “imperialism,” and portray it as something unique to “capitalist” countries; something that occurred after the advent of “capitalism.” But this is not so. Thanks to their material advantages (greater demography; specialization in different fields such as bureaucracy, military, food production, etc.; greater logistics abilities thanks to domesticated animals; etc.) agricultural societies expanded to the detriment of the hunter-gatherer societies. The latter either emulated the former and switched to agriculture by themselves, or they were conquered and destroyed by the agricultural societies. The agricultural economy spread all over the world where this economy was feasible. One example of this process was the Bantu spread in Africa. According to Jared Diamond, Bantu people “engulfed” Pygmies and Khoisan peoples. Diamond says that he uses this word (engulf) “as a neutral all-embracing word, regardless of whether the process involved conquest, expulsion, interbreeding, killing, or epidemics.”25 Bantu “engulfed” Pygmies and Khoisan peoples because they were the ones who domesticated plants and animals. And “food production led to high population densities, germs, technology, political organization, and other ingredients of power.”26 This engulfing happened in Africa before this continent fell victim to “capitalist imperialism.” So, expansionism is not something unique to “capitalism.”
We should emphasize that our classification of the features of societies is different than Marxim’s classification. Marxism classifies the components of human societies into two groups: infrastructure and superstructure. It moves some of the elements we put under the structure to infrastructure and superstructure. Most importantly, it moves “relations of productions” (i.e., the class structure of the society, the forms of property ownership) into infrastructure and attributes to these features more deterministic power than the material factors such as technology, demography, and the physical (natural and artificial) environment a society finds itself in. According to Marxism, class structure and the ensuing class struggles shape societies. The Communist Manifesto begins with this sentence: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” This is one of the reasons why Marxism is not really materialistic. According to Marxism, human history is progressive—morally and materially. Through class struggles, human societies are marching towards more “freedom,” “equality,” “abundance,” etc. Oppressors and oppressed are in an inexorable conflict with each other that lead us inevitably to a “free,” “equal,” and “abundant” classless society. Marx and his leftist followers don’t want to see this dream shattered by the objective factors27 (the availability of energy and material resources, climatic conditions, the consequences of human activities on Nature, etc.) So, they would rather push the material factors to the background and give primacy to class struggle. Thus it becomes possible to believe that despite the material constraints, humanity can still build an abundant, classless society with the technologies it has. Today’s environmentalist leftists still believe that we can unleash utopia on Earth with “green” technologies.
When leftists use the term “capitalism” to denote the current society that we live in, they refer to structural and superstructural components: its class structure, modes of property ownership, the market economy, financial institutions, corporations, economic theories, etc. The deterministic power of these characteristics, compared to that of infrastructural characteristics, is very low. These structural and superstructural characteristics have evolved during the evolutionary process of infrastructural change in some societies; they are adaptations of these societies to those infrastructural changes. We explain below in which environmental conditions these changes were triggered, and how they shaped structural and superstructural aspects of those societies.
According to leftists, commodity production and the trade of commodities are the essential features of a “capitalist” economy. The commodity is a product or service that is produced not for the immediate need and consumption of the producer; it is produced for the need and consumption of other people; it is produced to be sold on the market. However, again, commodity production and its trade are not unique to “capitalism.” They have existed throughout human history since the hunter-gatherer times28. They have only become more widespread and intense, and this has happened primarily because of technological development. Beyond a given threshold, technological development imposes the production of commodities and their trade as the dominant form of economic relations. Technological advancement makes the production and exchange of commodities the dominant economic relation because it enables people to produce more than their immediate needs. In addition, technological development creates specialization. As technology advances, new needs, products, services, sectors, and professions specializing in different tasks arise. These specialized domains, in turn, have to exchange their commodities to satisfy their own requirements; they require each other’s products to stay alive and perpetuate their operations. This network of exchanges creates the market (i.e., “capitalism”).
Different specializations and social classes based on these specializations greatly intensified in number and intensity shortly after human beings started to produce their food instead of collecting it directly from Nature as they had done during their hunter-gatherer existence. Food production increased the food resources of society. And cereals were especially suitable to store. That paved the way to civilization. It became possible to feed the population without making the whole population work on food production. As technology advanced and social complexity increased, the ratio of the people that worked directly in food production decreased further. This created different social classes with diverse functions in human societies such as kings, soldiers, bureaucrats, peasants, clergy, artisans, etc. The continuing development of technology created new needs, and new economic sectors; it increased the specialization further still. Increased specialization, in turn, caused more diffuse and intense commodity relations. Therefore, the production and exchange of commodities (trade networks and market economy) that are regarded as the hallmarks of “capitalism” began to take shape gradually with the development of technology. They already existed in the times that are regarded as pre-capitalism. As we said above, the exchange of goods has been a part of human history since the hunter-gatherer times. In Antiquity and the Middle Ages, there was trade among different nations as well as among people inside those nations.29 Since the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of modern times, commodity exchange and market relations have greatly intensified and their geographical extent enormously expanded. Some complex human societies expanded their operations to newly discovered continents and included those lands in the trade networks, and human labor itself became more and more a circulating commodity that could be traded in the market. These developments were triggered by ecological, geographical, and technological conditions that were unique to Western Europe in those times. Let’s examine what they were.
The Birth of “Capitalism”
Throughout history, Europe’s political structure was characterized by the absence of central authority and despotic states that could dominate the whole continent. Compared with the other parts of the world, such as Egypt, India, and China, no single central authority dominated a very large part of the agricultural zone in Europe. There was always30 a plurality of different groups and states that existed in competition. Even within the realms of particular rulers, there were alternative and rival bases of power (e.g., feudal lords, autonomous city administrations, etc.) that limited the authority of kings. Feudalism in Europe provides a good example of this European characteristic. After the collapse of the Roman Empire, old Roman provinces transformed themselves into feudal kingdoms in Western Europe. Under feudalism, manors were the center of the agricultural economic activity. Manors consisted of a fortified manor house in which the lord of the manor and his dependents lived and administered a rural estate. A population of laborers worked the surrounding land to support themselves and the lord through rainfed agriculture. This feudal aristocracy constituted a balance to the authority of central governments. On the other hand, there were independent merchants in the cities of medieval Europe who would gradually accumulate wealth and political power.
This European characteristic is due to its ecology and physical geography. These ecological and geographical characteristics set Europe apart from other zones of civilizations in Eurasia. Europe has a puzzle-like geography consisting of different parts separated by mountains and sea. The Italian Peninsula is separated from central Europe by the Alps, the Iberian Peninsula is separated from the rest of Europe by the Pyrenees, and the Scandinavian Peninsula is separated from the continent by the Baltic Sea. The British Isles are islands. The big rivers and dense forests of Europe constituted obstacles for mass troop movements. In contrast, Southwest Asia, East Asia, and the north of the Indian subcontinent have great open plains that facilitated rapid troop movements and made imperial power projection easier. These geographical characteristics of Europe are among the factors that made the concentration of autocratic power at the expense of other actors (e.g., aristocracy, city administrations, or populace in general) more difficult.
As a result of Europe's rainfall patterns, rainfed agriculture rather than intensive irrigation farming was the norm on the continent. In river valley civilizations (such as China, India, Egypt, or Babylonia), agriculture was dependent on the water provided by big rivers, and the population was concentrated in those river valleys. In contrast, the population was dispersed throughout Europe rather than concentrated in river valleys. Europe had a much lower population density compared to the river valley civilizations. This settlement pattern affected the political structure. In big river valleys, to use the water provided by rivers, it was necessary to accumulate and direct it by dams, pools, irrigation channels, etc. These constructions required massive organized worker armies to build and keep them in operation. Only big, centralized, hierarchical empires could organize these worker armies. It was possible to feed large and dense populations using such an agricultural system. At the same time, only large populations could provide the armies of workers that built and maintained these vast networks of irrigation systems. In rainfed agriculture, the melting of the snow and rains directly provided the water necessary for pastures and crops. This type of agriculture cannot feed as large and dense populations as agriculture based on the water of big rivers; the population was sparse and low in Europe during the Roman times and the beginning of the Middle Ages. Since rainfall provided water to fields, centrally organized big public projects, organized tax collection systems, and big channel, dam, or road construction projects were nonexistent in Europe. One centrally dominant bureaucracy wasn't the sole undisputed hegemon of the agricultural area as in river valley civilizations. Since rainfed agriculture didn't require the organization of big labor armies, feudal kings in Europe didn't become the despots that controlled the whole economic activity. They had limited authority and political power because they were forced to share them with feudal lords. The absence of central authority and despotic states in Europe would have substantial consequences by paving the way to the emergence of independent economic actors. We will return to this point below.
Throughout the Middle Ages, various technological advances increased the efficiency of the feudal agricultural system in Europe. Higher efficiencies made possible the production of surplus food, and surplus food increased the population. However, increased population levels would push the feudal agricultural system (agriculture based on fallowing and animal-drawn cultivation with plow) to its breaking point. The introduction of heavy iron plows and the invention of the harrow and rollers brought more efficient ways of manipulating (scarifying, breaking up, and loosening) the soil. Pitchforks and rakes facilitated the collection of the hay that animals feed on, and the construction of haylofts and stables to store hay and keep the animals warm in winter played key roles in increasing the efficiencies. These technological tools were the main instruments of the agrarian systems based on fallowing and animal-drawn cultivation with the plow in Europe. This agricultural system was dependent on the optimum balance between agriculture and animal husbandry. Lands were divided into four main sections according to their use: fields where cereals were planted, hay meadows where hay was collected for winter use, pastures where animals were fed in the open when they weren’t in the stables, and forests where wood was collected to be used in construction or for heating. People increased the size of their herds because they were able to collect and transport the grass more effectively using new technologies such as large scythes used with two hands and wheeled carts or wagons. They kept their animals in stables and thus produced more manure. More effective transportation technologies such as wheeled carts or wagons pulled by oxen, horses, mules, or donkeys made it possible to transport this manure to fields. More manure meant more organic matter for fields; yields increased. High agricultural yields caused the population to increase. However, as the population continued to increase, the fallow agriculture system passed beyond its optimum balance and entered into a crisis. The optimum point of the system depended on the ratio between the area that was allocated to cereal production and the area that was allocated to pasture and hay meadows. Whereas cereal was the main staple food of the human population, pasture and hay meadows were used to feed the animals. As the human population continuously increased, they allocated more and more area to the production of cereal. This, of course, decreased the area allocated for pasture and hay meadows. Smaller areas for pasture and hay meadows decreased the amount of grass that was available to feed the livestock. The decreased number and size of herds created a scarcity of manure. Lack of manure reduced crop yields. To remedy this, people further enlarged the fields of cereal; however, this only exacerbated the scarcity of manure and created a positive feedback loop causing the collapse of cereal production itself. Marcel Mazoyer and Maurice Roudart summarize this crisis below:
It is clear that the maximum capacity for a cultivated ecosystem is attained when certain proportions, the optimal proportions, among its constitutive parts are achieved. It is possible to assume that, at the end of the agricultural revolution of the Middle Ages, at the moment when cereal production and the population reached their maximum everywhere, the best proportions among cereal-growing areas, hay meadows, pastures, size of herds and forests were achieved nearly everywhere. But if the demographic growth in a particular cultivated ecosystem continues –the human population expands beyond the optimal proportions of the species that it eats (the cereals)– then it necessarily happens that there is a decline in fertility and production in that ecosystem.31
When a society reaches its ecosystem’s carrying capacity, it shows some symptoms of distress. Europe began to show these symptoms starting in the 14th century: peasant and millenarian uprisings, the appearance of Flagellants, pogroms and massacres against Jews, the schism in the Catholic Church, the Inquisition, the practice of infanticide as a “birth” control mechanism, and unending wars.32 There was another reaction of the European societies to this crisis that would have profound consequences. These were the geographical discoveries.
As we explained above, the societies of Western Europe, since the late Middle Ages, reached the carrying capacity of their land. Moreover, they were squeezed on the extreme Western fringe of the Eurasian land mass, and they were, among all the complex societies that had more or less the same level of social development at that time, the closest ones to the American continent. Before the geographical discoveries of the early modern era, parts of the Eurasian landmass suitable to settled preindustrial agriculture were filled with societies with more or less the same level of complexity and technological development. In those parts of Eurasia, there was an uninterrupted chain of civilizations from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. The central part of the Eurasian landmass was controlled by rival civilizations (Ottomans and Persians in the Middle East and the Mughal Empire in India). For the most part, the north of this civilized belt –the vast steppes of Eurasia, the taiga, and the tundra–, wasn’t suitable for preindustrial agriculture for climatic reasons. On the other hand, even when and where these lands were attempted to be settled by agrarian societies, they greatly were already home to nomadic pastoralists. These people, with their constant raids and harassment of settled communities, also made it impossible for civilization to expand into those lands. For these reasons, Western Europeans didn’t have the chance to expand eastward to ease the pressure of overpopulation, so they made an attempt to venture outside and started geographical discoveries. These discoveries added the newly discovered lands and oceans to the orbit of civilization. Europeans transported their economies to the new continents. They started to colonize the American continent by bringing their domesticated plants and animals; they brought slaves from Africa. By colonizing the Americas, they sent their excess population to newly discovered lands.33 At the Americas’ east coast of the Atlantic, a new economic center developed, and it was integrated into the economies of Western Europe and Africa. This was the transatlantic triangle. It was an intercontinental economy whose trade network consisted of diverse commodities such as fabrics, sugar, rum, slaves, and raw materials.
An independent and free merchant class seized on the full potential of this intercontinental economy. This class came into existence and found the conditions conducive to its development in Northwestern Europe because there weren’t centralized despotic empires in that part of the world. Until the 14th century, in China, the speed of scientific and technological development and the social complexity wasn’t behind that of Europe. However, in China, the existence of an all-encompassing central authority and its bureaucracy didn’t allow any independent economic actors to thrive. There were merchants in China, but they remained under the control of the central bureaucracy organizing the economic activity; they couldn’t become independent economic actors. The central bureaucracy swallowed the successful initiatives and prevented the appearance of an economic “ecosystem” in which fierce competition among different economic actors fostered scientific and technological development. In Western Europe, on the other hand, the absence of an all-encompassing central authority and the limited power of the kings allowed such an “ecosystem” to flourish. The existence of many independent economic actors created a “free market” in which these economic actors were in constant competition. These economic actors (companies, corporations, etc.) had to increase the extent of their operations; they had to absorb more energy and materials in order to perpetuate their existence. The “free market” and the ensuing competition created an atmosphere where the organizations which constantly developed and used more effective technologies survived, and others that weren’t as effective were eliminated. This atmosphere enormously accelerated the rate of social and technological development. However, this competition isn’t unique to “capitalism” or a special way of doing things unique to Europeans. This competition is a universal phenomenon. It is a result of the Darwinian selection operating on human groups. What is unique to Europe is that the appearance of the “free market” greatly intensified and accelerated this competition. And this, in turn, greatly accelerated the development of social complexity.
Parallel to the geographical discoveries, the crisis of the Middle Ages triggered some changes in Europe itself. As the crisis in agriculture decreased the efficiencies, profitability was reduced both for peasants and lords. As a result, feudal lords sought different sources of income. Especially in England, they started to enclose agricultural lands to provide wool to the textile industry. They turned their own lands and fallow lands that were under common use into pastures for sheep, or they applied new rotation techniques to fallow land. The enclosure movement reduced the area of land that belonged to peasants and forced them to migrate to wool fabric production sites in towns and cities.34 These migrants constituted the labor force for the new manufacturing sector. The enclosure movement transformed the common land left on fallow into private property and paved the way for a new agricultural system that didn’t utilize fallow. As some of the old fallow lands were transformed into pasture, the population of herds increased. That brought more manure, more animal power, and more of other benefits provided by animals such as meat, milk, wool, leather, etc. The remaining fallow lands were put into rotation with leguminous seeds. These plants increased the nitrogen content of the fields and made it possible to sustain and increase yields without fallow. Europe, beginning in early modern times, switched to a new agricultural system. This new system relied on the more intensive use of animal manure and leguminous seeds as a nitrogen source. It doubled the agricultural yields.35 The increase in yields fed the increasing population and made possible the emergence of a new manufacturing/industrial sector. Industrialization depends on a vast labor power that works outside food production. Increasing yields made it possible to feed ever-expanding non-agricultural population. In the end, the agricultural population ended up constituting a tiny part of the whole population. At the same time, the production of industrial goods is only meaningful if there is a population that would consume it. Therefore, the early modern agricultural systems and the new manufacturing sector developed together and fed each other. This newly developed manufacturing sector was something different from the old artisanal economy. The artisanal economy was closely related to agriculture. It was organized to satisfy the needs of agriculture. However, starting from the early modern times, the manufacturing sector, by integrating into the “free market” and intercontinental Atlantic economy, became a second sector, beside and on top of agriculture.
To sum up, four parallel and mutually reinforcing factors unique to Western Europe gave rise to the “free market” where the trade of commodities became the main economic activity, and where different economic actors competed with each other by expanding their functions. First, the agricultural system in Europe went into a crisis during the late Middle Ages. The continent reached its carrying capacity, and European societies were unable to sustain their population levels with the old way of doing things. This situation selected and favored some social features and innovations that helped them solve their predicament. Second, Western European societies were on the Western fringes of the Eurasian land mass and, among the Eurasian complex societies, the ones that were geographically closest to the American continent. From the Pacific to the Atlantic, Eurasia was full of rival societies with the same level of complexity as the European ones. So, it wasn’t possible for Western Europe to send its excess population eastward to ease the pressure. That forced them to geographical discoveries. They colonized the American continent, created an economic center there, and sent some of their excess population to these new lands. The discovery of the American continent eased the population pressure and created an intercontinental economy in which the trade of numerous commodities flourished. Third, thanks to the geographical and ecological conditions of Europe, there weren’t centralized states with extensive bureaucracies. Because of this, economic actors independent of states appeared in Western Europe. Fourth, after the crises of the agricultural system that relied on fallow, a new agricultural system appeared in Europe. Under this system, common lands that were previously put on fallow turned into private lands; a more intense application of manure and the rotation with leguminous seeds increased the yields. Peasants who became landless emigrated to cities and towns, and they constituted the labor power of the incipient manufacturing sector. The combined effects of these four factors created the “free market.”
The economic activity conducted in the “free market” demonstrates itself through certain manifestations. Independent economic actors (companies, corporations) compete to perpetuate themselves, so only those most efficient in accessing and using resources survive and thrive in the market. Making profits is their means to perpetuate and expand. The efficiency in making profits reflects the efficiency in using the inputs (materials, energy, labor power, technology, etc.) they put through their metabolisms and turning these inputs into “useful” outputs (products and services) that they sell. Because these economic actors are in constant competition, those who survive in this competition should extend their operations (absorb ever more energy and material from the outside world and turn them into useful outputs) and their magnitude (capital). Otherwise, they would be absorbed, displaced, or destroyed by other actors that are more successful in that regard. However, this competition isn’t always a conscious competition; most of the time it operates unconsciously: imagine the “competition” among plants. Those plants that are more effective in propagating themselves spread to the detriment of other plants. They reach more sunlight, and mineral and water resources compared to their “rivals.” In the end, they displace their “competitors.” But they do all this unconsciously; the competition among plants just happens. The competition among economic actors has often also the same characteristics. It often just happens regardless of the intentions of the humans that belong to these organizations. Another important aspect of this competition is that most of the time, it doesn’t involve direct physical antagonism. Economic actors that are more effective in absorbing and processing energy and material resources in their metabolism and turning those into sellable products could spread their operations in a manner that they may end up absorbing or displacing other less effective rivals without using physical coercion.
This competition isn’t something unique to capitalism. It is the result of the universal Darwinian selection process that operates also in human organizations. Profits, capital, credit, debt, etc. don’t motivate this process; these are only outward manifestations of a deeper phenomenon. This competition existed among humans since they began to form groups. It existed among hunter-gatherer bands, the first agricultural groups, the first states, and the agricultural empires. What is unique for early modern Western Europe is that the appearance of the “free market,” the existence of independent economic actors, and their integration into an intercontinental economy greatly intensified and accelerated this competition. Because of that, the development of social complexity also accelerated in Western Europe and opened the way that led to the Industrial Revolution.
Industrial Revolution and the Industrial System
Intensification characterizes human activity. According to Marvin Harris, “any increase in the quantity of soil, water, minerals, or plants put into a particular production process per unit of time constitutes intensification.”36 Human societies, as self-perpetuating systems, need to absorb energy and materials and transform those into output. As we said above, they have a tendency to get bigger and more complex whenever they can. This inevitably means more land, minerals, plants, and energy are put into the production process. As they use more resources, their activities begin to clash with material limits. This process creates economic damage: consumption of more resources creates scarcity in those resources, and Nature’s ability to absorb the waste products of the economy and provide “ecosystemic services” to it diminishes. As a result, efficiencies decrease, and decreased efficiencies reduce profits. To escape this cycle, technological innovations that reduce costs and improve efficiency are tried to be introduced. But these technological developments result only in more expensive constant investments, ever more intensification by the rivals (they introduce their own technological innovations), enlargement of the production and consumption cycle, the re-institution of the material limits at a higher level, and basically the repeat of the above-described cycle.
The Industrial Revolution was ushered when human societies started to use the energies of fossil fuels at large scale (first coal, and later oil and natural gas). They were forced to resort to these energy resources as a result of the above-mentioned intensification cycle. The manufacturing sector in Britain became extremely dynamic due to the emergence of the “free market.” Steel and glass production, ship construction, and some other manufacturing activities exhausted the wood sources of the island. Britain resorted to mass mining of coal in the 16th century to substitute wood as an energy resource. However, coal became an option only after the wood resources of the island had been exhausted because coal mining requires much more energy, labor, and investment than logging. Coal replaced traditional biomass energy (wood, dung, etc.) first in domestic heating; brick, ceramic, glass, and metal production followed afterward. Initially, coal mining was conducted only by human and animal muscle power. Human and animal muscle power dug the mines, transported coal in the tunnels, and lifted it to the surface. As mines got deeper, tunnels began to reach beneath the water table, and it became impossible to do all these things only by muscle power. Steam engines were the answer to this predicament. They were utilized to pump the water out from the mines and lift the coal to the surface. Steam engines and coal mining reinforced each other: Steam engines, by giving more power to miners, intensified coal mining. However, to power steam engines, more coal was necessary. So, steam engines intensified coal mining, and more intense coal mining made steam engines more widespread. Steam engines spread to other sectors as well with a similar intensification cycle. Steam engines increased the production capacity in factories. Increased production capacity enlarged the volume of trade and created more demand for transportation. After a certain limit, muscle power or wind power became insufficient to transport the goods. People began to use steam engines to move ships on waterways and locomotives in railroads.
This initial spark of industrialization (the integration of coal and steam engines) was followed by the use of other energy resources and the technological means that utilized them: the mass production of iron and steel with coal; internal combustion engines and oil; the mass utilization of electricity via an extended energy network; the use of fossil fuels, nuclear, solar, and wind-power to produce electricity; the creation of new raw materials from coal and oil by organic chemistry; the industrialization of agriculture by agricultural machines, artificial fertilizers, and pesticides; the globalization of the logistics networks by big container ships, railroads, and jet-engines; the birth of mass communications and computer technology thanks to electronics; and the further integration of the global techno-industrial system via the Internet.
As we have said above, technological development imposed the production of commodities (products and services intended to be sold in the market and not for the immediate consumption of the producer) and their trade as the dominant form of economic relations. (What is commonly called “capitalism.”) We see this most spectacularly in the developments ushered by the Industrial Revolution. The industrial mode of production, powered by the energy of fossil fuels, can only be done in high volumes as mass production. Industrial agriculture cultivates huge areas with minimum human labor; it decreases the ratio of the population that works in food production. As a result, food production becomes a commodity production. Industrial production requires huge constant costs: Think about building a large factory, the necessary buildings and equipment, and the associated energy needs. Therefore, in order to be efficient, feasible, and profitable, this type of production can only be done on large scales. These factories cannot produce only for the immediate needs of their workers. They should constantly produce on massive scales for a vast market that consumes their products. Technological development increases specialization as well. As production methods and economic networks become more complex, people’s role in the economy becomes absurdly narrower. They deal with the minutest parts of the production process (this is not only relevant in the manufacturing sector but also in the service sector). As people become more and more specialized, they become commodity and service consumers. All of their needs are satisfied indirectly by other specialized commodity and service producers/consumers. As technological advancement diminishes the ratio of people that work in the agricultural and manufacturing sectors, more and more aspects of people’s lives become commodified. Not only do they buy their food as a commodity, but they also have to buy virtually everything else they need and pay other people to look after their kids, tidy out their houses, cook their meals, exercise them, soothe their anxieties, entertain them, and bring all these commodities and services to their homes.
In sum, “capitalism” is an economic system characterized by the existence of a “free market,” the existence of economic actors greatly independent of the state, and the production and trade of commodities (not only manufacturing and selling of material commodities but also supplying services sold as commodities). All these characteristics intensify as technological development increases production capacity and specialization. In fact, “capitalism” is the “natural” economic system of the techno-industrial society. Because, under the techno-industrial system, economic activity becomes so complex that a single actor cannot manage it following a centralized plan. “Free market” proved itself to be the most efficient economic system where modern technological conditions are prevalent. Some countries attempted to manage the economic systems of their technological societies under the command of a single actor, but these attempts resulted in failures. We will return to this below.
As we tried to show, capitalism (or, to put it more correctly, those phenomena that are usually classified under the word “capitalism”) wasn’t produced by a certain segment of society. It is not a result of an intentional process. It is the result of the blind, mechanistic, and impersonal interactions between Western Europe’s natural, geographical, and demographic conditions and its technological infrastructure. It is not, unlike the socialist projects of the 20th century, an economic system that was planned and attempted to be realized by a clique to reach an ideal type of society. It is the spontaneous product of Western Europe’s history. The existence of different classes and inequalities in property ownership in human societies, and the fact that some people work in back-bending conditions in poverty while others lead a luxurious life in abundance are not unique to “capitalism.” These have been characteristic qualities of at least all sedentary human societies—the socialist attempts of the 20th century included.
The Myth of Capitalism’s Alternative
Socialist leftists claim that they want to supersede “capitalism” because it is a system that is not under rational control: In “capitalism,” numerous economic actors compete to maximize their profits and none of them, states included, are in a position to guide economy according to a rational plan. According to these leftists, since the economic activity in “capitalism” is organized with the sole purpose of maximizing profits without any concern for “real human needs,”37 this system produces enormous amounts of waste. They claim that corporations don’t mind inequality, poverty, hunger, environmental problems, or wars because they only seek profits.38 If we could replace capitalism with an economic system that would be rationally planned according to the “real human needs,” we would solve all these problems, they say. This new economic system, according to them, would enable us to plan rationally the whole economic system, we would match perfectly the demand and production, and distribute the products of this economy equitably according to the “real needs of people.” But they forget one “little” detail: This is a pipe dream impossible to realize. To realize this dream, we need to have an actor who would suppress all the other economic actors and take in its own hands the whole global economy, determine what the “real needs of humanity” are, and rationally plan and manage the whole global economic system according to this “real needs.” Moreover, it would have to do this not for one year, or five years, or not even for 50 years, but for eternity.
After the Industrial Revolution, during the second half of the 19th century, Marxism became the dominant branch of leftist ideology. According to Marxism, human societies would switch to socialism and then to communism after “capitalism.” “Capitalism” was only a stage in the development of human societies. Marxism claimed that there was a better way to organize the economic systems of the incipient industrial societies. “Capitalism” was unable to use the full potential of the new technologies the Industrial Revolution had brought because it was an economic system that had not been planned rationally. In “capitalism” different actors who were in constant competition with each other conducted economic activities. Their sole aim was to increase their profits. For this reason, Marxists said, it was impossible to plan the economy rationally under “capitalism.” Since the economic activity was under the blind direction of the “invisible hand,”39 it was impossible to achieve a balance between production and consumption, between supply and demand. This was inevitably leading to overproduction crises and recessions. In contrast, under socialism, a single economic actor would concentrate the direction of the economy in its hands. It would, according to Marxists, supersede the “free market,” eliminate the “invisible hand,” and direct the economy following a rational plan. This rational plan would manage the production according to the “real needs and demands of the people.” It would eliminate the discrepancy between the demand and supply and the crises that were supposedly emanating from this discrepancy. In the new egalitarian socialist society, people would shed their “bad” characteristics such as egoism, greed, etc.; they would become unselfish and would place themselves voluntarily at the service of the “common good.” Thus, the full potential of the productive forces (the technologies such as the steam engine) would be unleashed, and a bountiful, egalitarian new society would be created.
During the 20th century, these theories were tested in real life in several countries. The Soviet Union and China were the most salient examples. All these examples unanimously proved Marxism’s predictions wrong. Socialist attempts to manage the economies with a central plan produced worse results than the “capitalist” economies of Western Europe and North America did. These “capitalist” economies (economies where economic activity was carried out by different actors with not much interference of the state) proved themselves to be more adapted to fostering technological development and using their resources (energy, materials, labor, etc.) more efficiently, and in the end, more capable at increasing the amount of energy and materials they use and at using it more efficiently. Contrary to socialist expectations, people didn’t devote themselves to the “common good” of society. In the socialist systems of the 20th century, they continued to have those “bad” qualities that are so hated by socialists because, contrary to what leftist ideology claims, humans have a nature, and its expression cannot be changed enough by collectivistic conditioning.
When we say that socialist attempts produced worse results than Western “capitalist” economies, we are using only the criteria that would make human societies more competitive in the Darwinian struggle among each other. We don’t use any of the ordinary humanistic criteria, such as material equality, happiness, etc., to evaluate these two systems. Because as we said above, what matters in the competition among human organizations is their material power: their ability to absorb and use energy and material resources for perpetuating and expanding themselves. Those organizations that are more successful at doing these will enlarge their operations and displace, absorb, or destroy other organizations that are not as successful. Or, these unsuccessful organizations, seeing their predicament, will try to emulate the more successful ones.
There are fundamental reasons why socialist attempts proved themselves to be less successful. First of all, the myths about an alternative to “capitalism” assume that we can control the development of human societies. According to these myths, we can steer society to a definite goal by following a rational plan. We can manage the minutest details of an industrialized economy according to a rational plan. However, human societies are complex systems. Our technologically advanced global modern society is the most complex human society that has ever existed. It is impossible to manage complex systems according to detailed theoretical plans and attain the desired results. Complex systems consist of numerous components that are connected with each other in a way that it is impossible to sketch out their precise nature. These inter-dependencies create feedback mechanisms so that one little change in one component might cause unintended consequences throughout the system. That is why we cannot calculate and know the precise consequences of our actions vis-a-vis complex systems. Therefore, we cannot plan on paper an ideal society, an ideal way of running the economy, and then implement this plan in real life. It is impossible, in the long term, to direct human societies to a desired model of society. Human history is full of examples that demonstrate the futility of long-term social planning. But the clearest and the most spectacular examples of this phenomenon are the socialist projects of the 20th century that tried to replace “capitalism” with centrally planned state economies.
The economies of human societies consist of a myriad of parameters and factors. A single actor cannot successfully manage them following a central plan. Trying to manage hugely complex economic systems according to a detailed plan produces even worse results than the absence of such a plan. Socialist systems, in order to abolish the “free market” and supersede “capitalism,” have to suppress independent economic actors. Ideally, they should reduce the number of independent economic actors to a single actor that would manage the whole economy. Otherwise, “capitalism” will reinstate itself. This inevitably reduces the intensity of the competition in the economy. Competition among the independent economic actors forces them to ameliorate their processes, find more effective ways of doing things, discover new consumers, and invent new products to offer to these consumers, etc. In a competitive environment, those actors that are less dynamic, have inefficient processes, and are not creative enough to discover new products and niches are replaced by other actors that are more successful in those regards. Therefore, the efficiency of an economic system, up to a certain point, increases with the intensity of the competition that it harbors. In socialist systems, this competition is at a minimum level or even non-existent since the state tries, more or less successfully, to be the only economic actor. All the different sectors of the economy tend to be under its supervision. Those institutions that undertake different functions in the economy tend to follow its lead. In the absence of any competition, these institutions have no incentive to increase their efficiencies, create new products to increase their market share, foster technological development to beat their rivals, etc. No matter how inefficient they are, the state continues to subsidize and keep them alive.
Socialist regimes, if they want to eliminate “capitalism” and reinstate a socialist economic system, should keep the state power in their own hands; they should create a one-party rule. They have to use this power to prevent independent economic actors from emerging. Otherwise, the “free market” (“capitalism”) will gradually reinstate itself again. When a one-party regime consolidates in its own hands all the state power, it suppresses all the other independent supervisory and regulatory mechanisms that exist in a society. This situation inevitably corrupts the bureaucracy of the state and the cadres of the one party. They involve in nepotism, bribery, embezzlement, and all sorts of other corrupt practices. These practices decrease the overall efficiency of the system.
We said that “capitalist” economies are more efficient than “socialist” ones. By efficiency, we don’t necessarily mean a strict dictionary definition of that word, such as thermodynamic efficiency. With regards to thermodynamic efficiency, “capitalism” has many flaws such as huge expenditures in logistics in a globalized economy or the production of ever more ludicrous commodities to entice consumers and all the associated material and energy expenditures. “Capitalism” might be squandering resources, inventing and producing some unnecessary products and services that humans don't need (this is one of the most repeated criticisms about the inefficiency of “capitalism”) but precisely these characteristics make it more dynamic in fostering economic growth. Since the economic actors are in more heated competition in a “capitalist” economy, they want to reach every resource, they want to exploit every nook and cranny, they want to fill every possible niche of the economy, and even create new niches for themselves.
There might be some inefficiencies (in the strict thermodynamic sense) in capitalism, but overall, in this strict thermodynamic sense too, “capitalism” is more efficient than a centrally-planned economy. Socialist systems relied on central plans. However, in a complex industrial economy, the central plan doesn't work. It inevitably brings gross inefficiencies. In the socialist systems, virtually the whole economy was under the state’s supervision: mining, energy production, manufacturing, transport, domestic and foreign wholesale trading, banking and insurance, agriculture, etc. were conducted by the state-owned firms or cooperatives under the state’s control. The state managed the economic activity through bureaucratic coordination.
For example, bureaucracy determined all the prices (costs of the firms through inputs such as raw materials, labor, and machinery) and sales (incomes of the firms) of the state-owned firms. These firms didn’t produce revenues; bureaucracy determined their cash flows via central planning. This created an incentive problem; the absence of real-life targets; the absence of an anchor. Not only in the sense of individual motivations but also regarding the “motivations” of the firms. Even if the firms didn’t produce revenue (i.e. when they lost money), the state compensated them, and these firms continued to exist. The establishment and dissolution of firms and the appearance or disappearance of new products and new technologies were decided by direct bureaucratic control. This prevented the Darwinian selection of the market processes; precisely those selection processes that weed out unsuccessful firms.
Direct bureaucratic control is inefficient in many respects; it is extremely rigid. It could only work if the most detailed information about the past was available, the predictions about the future were precise, and every command was faultless and carried out with impeccable accuracy. However, as anybody who has a modicum amount of common sense knows, everything in real life is the opposite of these. As Janos Kornai remarks, direct bureaucratic control caused long delays and serious losses before it adapted to changes in the needs of the population, technology, the domestic political situation, or the outside world. It provided no incentive for initiative, entrepreneurial spirit, or innovation.40
In the absence of a market mechanism, the managers of the socialist systems relied on quantitative targets such as production quotas to incentivize firms. The profit motive wasn’t a target that was strongly encouraged by the central planners.41 This created a peculiar bargain between the managers of the firms and central planners. Since managers didn’t care about the revenues of their firms and their careers were mostly dependent on the production quotas of the central plan, they tried to obtain as much input as possible and tried to promise as low output as possible. Basically, they tried to produce as little as possible while receiving as much as possible. This caused low efficiency in the management of resources and created a shortage economy. Kornai gives a comparison of the ratio of input and output stocks in capitalist and socialist countries.42 These figures indicate the inefficient management of resources in socialist countries compared to capitalist ones.
As we have tried to explain above, the components of the society that are classified under the term “capitalism” (“free market,” corporations, financial instruments, types of property ownership, the class structure of the society, commodity production, etc.) have appeared spontaneously during the evolutionary process of some human societies. They are not the products of a conscious long-term plan. They are the products of the relations that these human societies had with Nature via their technological infrastructure. The socialist attempts of the 20th century, however, tried to “supersede” these spontaneously created elements by fiat to create their imagined “perfect” society. Their attempts were unsuccessful. Eventually, many socialist countries saw this reality by themselves and opened their economies to the global economy, ended the economic monopoly of the state, and let “capitalism” reinstate itself. Old Soviet countries and China are examples of this return and re-institution of “market economies.” They saw that they were lagging behind the “capitalist” economies of the developed world, and tried to emulate their economic systems. So, through Darwinian competition, the “capitalist” economy has become the dominant economic form of techno-industrial societies. In the future, different countries may have different “capitalisms,” some states may assume bigger roles in the economy than others, and the role of social welfare programs may increase or decrease. However, these real-life examples have demonstrated that, as long as modern technology exists and humans continue to be one of the main factors of the economy, “capitalism” (an economic system that to a great extent is not under a central command) will continue to be the economic system of technological societies.
What we have said just now may sound like a bold statement, but we cannot figure out an alternative economic system to “capitalism” as we define it here. As long as modern technology exists and humans continue to be the cogs in the social machine, what kind of an economic system could replace “capitalism?” We cannot imagine any alternative, and this could be our failure. Perhaps in a case where machines completely replace humans in the economy, an alternative economic system might emerge. We define “capitalism” as an economic system that has more than one independent and competing economic actor; an economic system in which the production and selling of the commodities in the market are the dominant economic activities instead of subsistence production and consumption. In a world where humans are completely eliminated from all economic activities, perhaps, the production and selling of commodities could cease to be the main economic activity. This could result in a more collectivistic, eusocial-like machine society in which machines cooperate seamlessly and meet the “colony’s” needs collectively without resorting to market mechanisms. There could be more than one machine “colonies” that are in competition with each other, etc. However, we cannot exactly imagine the economic system of this machine society apart from making some speculations.
Moreover, even if capitalism were to be eliminated while humans are still the dominant economic actors (i.e. the replacement of “capitalism” by another economic system that would leave the techno-industrial system intact and humans will continue to be the dominant actors in this system), this wouldn’t solve the fundamental problems that we face today: the destruction and subjugation of Nature, and the subjugation of the human race to an unnatural existence. As we tried to demonstrate above, “capitalism” has become the dominant economic system of modern techno-industrial societies through a Darwinian process. As long as modern technology exists, an alternative economic system could supersede “capitalism” globally only if it used this technology more efficiently and fostered its development better than “capitalism.” As we have said, human organizations (nations in this particular context) are in a Darwinian competition with each other. Those organizations that extract more energy and materials from Nature and increase the scope of their operations displace, absorb, or destroy other organizations that are less successful in doing so. Those organizations that had this hypothetical alternative economic system should prove themselves better at achieving this so that this alternative system might spread. Only then, they and their economic system could spread globally by displacing or absorbing current “capitalist” human organizations. Or “capitalist” organizations, seeing that they would be losing ground, would emulate this alternative economic system. Just like those phenomena regarded as “capitalism” have spread all over the world. If this were to happen, it would mean even more intense and rapid destruction or subjugation of Nature and a more accelerated digression from those habitats and behaviors to which we are evolutionarily adapted. Because this alternative system would use technological means even more efficiently to extract resources from Nature and transform it into artificial environments. It would better develop the technological means and would further increase the damage these inflict on Nature. It would accelerate further the social complexity and move us further away from our natural habitats and behaviors.
Conclusion
This myth about “capitalism,” this boogeyman, plays a significant role in the system’s neatest trick.45 It deflects attention from the real threats wild Nature (wild human nature included) faces. It channels to irrelevant issues the potential reactions that could be directed to the techno-industrial system. It portrays the technology as a benign or at least a neutral force that could be used to build a “sustainable,” “equitable,” and “happy” technological society if it could be saved from the hands of “capitalism.” Leftists who portray “capitalism” as the main problem come to us with tragically comic diagnoses and proposals given the severity and deepness of the problems we face. They generally propose such naive schemes as switching to wind and solar power, consuming less, giving up meat, using public transport instead of automobiles, etc. These “so radical” schemes have already become the main propaganda points of the system itself. Anti-capitalist leftists only go so far as to declare that we could only achieve these by abolishing “capitalism,” “free market,” “private property,” etc. They always talk about alternatives to “capitalism,” but apart from the tried and failed socialist systems of the 20th century, they cannot show any alternative to the current dominant economic system, and they cannot explain how we are going to end “capitalism,” “free market,” or “private property.” They only muddy the water, create confusion, and deflect attention from the real problem. Leftists internalize the values and propaganda points of the techno-industrial system and help to promote those values and propaganda. While doing this, they believe and claim to be “revolutionary,” “anti-system,” “contrarian,” etc. As a result, leftist values that are, in fact, the fundamental values of the techno-industrial system end up regarded as values against the techno-industrial system. People who have values and inclinations that are really against the technological system begin to see leftist talking points as the only ones that are against the system. This process absorbs the potential reactions that could crystallize into a genuine movement against the techno-industrial system. Moreover, since leftists develop their so-called criticism from the perspective of the system’s values, they only point to its problems and malfunctioning, and the solutions they propose end up as mere remedies that would solve the system’s problems and make it more efficient. So, they reinforce the techno-industrial system instead of really combating and weakening it.
Therefore, we call on those who value wild Nature above anything else to stop reproducing this myth about “capitalism.” We call on them not to use this term or refer to this concept in their communications, messages, writings, speeches, etc. We call them to focus attention on the real problem, on the most significant threat wild Nature faces: the techno-industrial system. We call them to declare that, whatever its economic system, as long as the technological system continues to exist, it will wipe out from the face of the world the remaining wilderness and will render real freedom impossible. If it doesn’t exterminate us altogether, it will turn us into pets of the machines. And we call them to declare, despite the psychological and social burdens this entails, that through nothing short of the complete destruction of the technological system we could save wild Nature.
Notes
1In this text, we refer to the second and third-wave leftists when we use the term leftists: Those leftists that are descendants of the socialist left. First-wave leftists (current liberals) don’t see “capitalism” as bad. For them, “capitalism” is the ideal economic system that functions best and brings happiness, prosperity, freedom, technological advancement, etc. For the historical development of leftism, see: Karaçam, Leftism, Techno-Industrial System, and Wild Nature.
2 Despite the fact that all the “vile” things are being attributed to it, it is rare to encounter a clear definition of capitalism. Essentially, capitalism means an economic system that isn’t managed by a single actor according to a central plan. When we mention capitalism in this text to refer to an economic system, we mean this meaning of the word.
3 Though these economic systems have never appeared in their pure theoretical forms (total absence of state intervention in the case of “capitalism” and total control of the economy by the state in the case of “socialism”) in real life, there were rival social systems in the 20th century that approached to these theoretical alternatives.
4For the psychology of leftism, see: Theodore John Kaczynski, “Industrial Society and Its Future”, ¶¶ 6 – 32, in Technological Slavery: Volume One, Fitch & Madison Publishers, 2019, pp. 24–31.
5When we say that technological development is gradual and takes time, we don’t mean the number or diversity of technological tools that are invented in a given period. Measured in this way, the speed of technological development in the last 200 years has been much more rapid than it was before this period. What we mean here is that the natural constraints that hang over human societies cannot be lifted suddenly by technological development. Even if it could be possible to move forward some of the present natural limits through advancements in technology, we would encounter other limits that would even be harder to surpass.
6 Marvin Harris, Cultural Materialism: The Struggle for a Science of Culture, Vintage Books, 1980, p. 67.
7 Joseph A. Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies, Cambridge University Press, 1988, p. 23.
8This seems to hold true until a certain level of social complexity. Most of the developed countries have decreasing demographic growth and for some of them, their populations are expected to decrease in the coming decades. This demographic trend seems to be caused by modern living conditions and the availability of efficient birth control techniques.
9See, Paul A. Mellars, The Ecological Basis of Social Complexity in the Upper Paleolithic of Southwestern France, Department of Archaeology Cambridge University, 1985.
10Ibid.
11Vaclav Smil, Energy and Civilization: A History, MIT Press, 2018, p. 28.
12“The Mbuti of Zaire”, Cultural Survival (https://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-quarterly/mbuti-zaire).
13Elizabeth Prine Pauls, “Northwest Coast Indian”, Encyclopaedia Britannica (https://www.britannica.com/topic/Northwest-Coast-Indian).
14Carleton S.Coon, The Hunting Peoples, Book Club Associates, 1974, p. 33.
15Ibid, p. 36.
16Ibid, p. 37.
17Ibid, p. 269.
18Ibid, p. 240.
19Ibid.
20Colin M. Turnbull, The Forest People, Simon & Schuster, 1968 p. 110.
21Coon, Op. Cit., p. 29.
22Ibid., p. 172.
23Ibid., p. 182; “Northwest Coast indian”, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Subsistence, settlement patterns and housing (https://www.britannica.com/topic/Northwest-Coast-Indian/Subsistence-settlement-patterns-and-housing).
24Coon, Op. Cit., p. 240.
25Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: A Short History of Everbody for the last 13,000 Years,Vintage Books, 2005, pp. 385 – 386.
26Ibid., p. 386.
27Marx’s attitude towards Malthus’s work is well known. He didn’t want to acknowledge that population growth would inevitably lead to resource scarcity and poverty. According to Marx, resource scarcity wasn’t inevitable and humanity, if it could supersede capitalism, would unleash bounty on Earth with the technologies at its disposal. It is true that by tapping on the enormous amounts of energy provided by fossil fuels, humanity vastly increased its food production (and, as a result, its population as well), and in some parts of the world reached levels of material abundance that haven’t been seen before. But this doesn’t mean that we freed ourselves from material factors, solved the problem of overpopulation, and that today’s levels of consumption could go on indefinitely. Most important, the massive increases in human population and consumption damaged enormously wild Nature.
28See footnotes 23 and 24 for examples and references.
29See the article on Roman trade in Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_commerce For the medieval times, see the Wikipedia article on Hanseatic League: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanseatic_League
30 Even the Romans were not an exception. Roman Empire was a Mediterranean empire incorporating only southern Europe and lasted for only a fraction of European history.
31 For the crisis of agricultural systems based on fallowing and animal-drawn cultivation using the plow, see Marcel Mazoyer and Laurence Roudart, A History of World Agriculture: From the Neolithic Age to the Current Crisis, Earthscan, 2006, p. 304.
32 Harris, Cultural Materialism: The Struggle for a Science of Culture, page 259.
33 This eased the population pressure they felt at home and prevented an all-out collapse. They earned precious time and their level of complexity continued to increase until the Industrial Revolution.
34 Marvin Harris, Cannibals and Kings, Vintage Books, 1978, page 257.
35 For the first agricultural revolution of modern times, see: Marcel Mazoyer & Laurence Roudart, Op. Cit., Section 8, p. 313.
36 Harris, Cannibals and Kings, p. 266.
37Anti-capitalist leftists often say that “capitalism” doesn’t care about human needs. Some even go as far as to claim that “capitalism” is the enemy of “people.” None of this is true. The techno-industrial system, and its economic subsystems, satisfy the needs of people because, at least so far, people are necessary for the system’s functioning. People are cogs in the machine of the techno-industrial system, and one should lubricate and maintain the cogs of a machine to run it. Anti-capitalists say that instead of providing everybody with his basic “real” needs, “capitalism” produces commodities that are not essential for the “real human needs.” But the issue of “real human needs” is more complicated than as anti-capitalist leftists present it. The development of technology constantly changes what some of these “real needs” are. Technological development alters society so deeply that new technologies like smartphones, the Internet, electricity, or automobiles become necessary for a “normal” life in modern society, diminishing our individual autonomy and forcing us to use those technologies. Leftists don’t see this problematic and embrace those technologies as “rights” people should have. But for most of the human history, all these recent inventions were non-existent, much less necessary.
38Anti-capitalist leftists prefer to ignore the fact that companies are increasingly turning into “woke” social justice warriors promoting equity. Besides, it is a well-known fact that corporations are involved in philanthropic causes such as poverty reduction, and promoting global health and education because these activities boost their public image and foster the more efficient functioning of the techno-industrial system.
39The concept of the "invisible hand" is a metaphor used in economic theory to describe the self-regulating nature of the market. It refers to the idea that in a free market, the actions of self-interested individuals will ultimately lead to a more efficient allocation of resources and the greater good of society, even though these individuals are not necessarily acting to benefit society, but themselves. The liberal economic theorists of the 18th century first coined this concept. Marx countered their arguments by saying that the “invisible hand” was a myth and that the market system does not allocate resources efficiently. He claimed that a central plan would manage the economy more efficiently and prevent the problems of overproduction and underproduction that stemmed from the unregulated nature of the “free market.”
40Janos Kornai, The Socialist System: The Political Economy of Communism, Oxford University Press, 1992, p. 118.
41However, not even promoting profits as the chief target would solve the problem of incentives in the socialist system. Because the system would still lack decentralization, free entry, and free competition. In the absence of these, profit motive wouldn’t play the role it plays in “capitalism” in forcing companies to reduce their operational costs, decrease input costs, utilize more efficient technologies, develop new products or markets, etc.
42Janos Kornai, Op. Cit., p. 250.
43The concept of design space indicates all the possibilities of designs that a Darwinian process can explore. In our context, it would indicate the all possible designs of the economic actors: their organizational features, how they organize their processes, how they choose and motivate their employees, how effectively they create and market their new products, how they manage their supply chains, etc. In a competitive environment, Darwinian selection would “find” more efficient designs more rapidly than in an uncompetitive environment.
44Ibid., p. 293. Kornai gives some tables that demonstrate this fact. We reproduce here two of these tables (see ibid., pp. 293 – 294):
