Sabine, Markets =/= Capitalism

 

Quantum physicist Sabine Hossenfelder wades out of her depth in a video titled "Capitalism Is Good." I posted the following comment:

There are two fundamental errors here. One is assuming the consequent: she argues for the benefits of a market in the context of private ownership of the means of production, but that's precisely the condition for the capitalist system's operation, which she doesn't question.

The second error is confusing a free market with capitalism. As Sabine acknowledges, capitalism is a recent historical development, yet markets have existed since ancient times. What distinguishes capitalism as a system is the commodification of labor-power. The existence of labor markets and capital markets, which is unique to the current capitalist era, results in an increasingly uneven distribution of personal income, so that there's growing expenditure on luxuries for a few while the basic needs of many others go unmet. This in turn causes capital to be increasingly invested in producing luxuries and comparatively disinvested from the production of necessities. Obviously this is sub-optimal for the species biologically.

It also misses the point to dismiss the problem of anticipating externalities like the social cost of carbon emissions as "another problem." The problem is precisely that the capitalist setup, in which the means of production are privately owned by wealthy people who can afford to insulate themselves from the social costs of their investment decisions, guarantees that such considerations will by default be an afterthought, and by the time even a robustly democratic government has begun to catch up with them, much damage has been and there's a vested interest with the resources to obstruct any attempt at regulation. Capitalist democracies are constantly closing the barn doors after the horse is gone.

None of this is to deny that a great deal of material progress has been made possible by capitalism, but further progress is increasingly obstructed by the imbalances it creates, and it's been absolutely destructive in the way it forces most people into a much more alienated relation to their work than was typical in premodern times. Instead of one-sidedly pronouncing it "good" as if it represented the end of history, it's necessary to see it as a phase of social evolution that it's time to move beyond. Capitalism has created machine industry and in the process it's also created a working class for whom cooperative labor is second nature. It's time for this class to recognize that it can lead society in replacing the allocation of productive resources by unconscious market mechanisms with the conscious democratic self-direction of society, and to act on this understanding by substituting its own political rule for the present de facto dictatorship of capital.

To deepen your understanding of capitalism not as synonymous with liberalism but as a contradiction immanent within bourgeois society and pointing beyond it through proletarian revolution, I suggest you enroll in The Platypus Affiliated Society's primary Marxist reading group.