Ravenwood

Best Resources for Understanding The Capitalist System

Karl Marx wrote in 1848:

Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange, and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.

Alluding to Goethe’s famous poem “The Sorcerer’s apprentice”, this is a very powerful image about the boundless/irrational madness of capitalist modernity, or as Marx himself described it, the “magic and necromancy” of commodity production.

On top of the constant horrendous violence, exploitation, dispossession of bourgeois/capitalist modernity, there’s this deep, overwhelming monster or machine that is beyond anyone’s ability to truly control. It can’t ever stopped or slowed down, it brings everything down with it even as it never moves out of a state of crisis… It leads to atrocities that couldn’t have been created in any other mode of production/epoch…

Ross Wolfe cited a very eloquent comment by Marshall Berman:

This image evokes the spirits of that dark medieval past that our modern bourgeoisie is supposed to have buried. Its members present themselves as matter-of-fact and rational, not magical; as children of the Enlightenment, not of darkness. When Marx depicts the bourgeois as sorcerers — remember, too, their enterprise has “conjured whole populations out of the ground,” not to mention “the specter of communism” — he is pointing to depths they deny. Marx’s imagery projects, here as ever, a sense of wonder over the modern world: its vital powers are dazzling, overwhelming, beyond anything the bourgeoisie could have imagined, let alone calculated or planned. But Marx’s images also express what must accompany any genuine sense of wonder: a sense of dread. For this miraculous and magical world is also demonic and terrifying, swinging wildly out of control, menacing and destroying blindly as it moves. The members of the bourgeoisie repress both wonder and dread at what they have made: these possessors don’t want to know how deeply they are possessed.

Another quote from Marx that is still harrowingly relevant today:

In our days, everything seems pregnant with its contrary: Machinery, gifted with the wonderful power of shortening and fructifying human labor, we behold starving and overworking it. The newfangled sources of wealth, as if by some weird spell, are turned into sources of want. The victories of art seem bought by the loss of character.

Here are recommended readings/resources to understand and make sense of capitalism as both a social totality and historical epoch, in a word, a mode of production and sociopolitical organization/reproduction. It’s taken years for me to gradually start actually believing I’m more or less able to grasp what it is and how it works, and of course this is an ongoing process of studying this horrible system that must be abolished for our sake and for our planet/environment. I still am convinced that Marx’s dismissive critics (including sympathetic ones) rarely realize how groundbreaking his contribution was, even though it was significantly incomplete both according to Marx’s own overall plan and insofar as a lot of stuff has happened and changed since then (in addition to the shortcomings of his viewpoint, i.e. the aspects he didn’t address properly/sufficiently and that were already relevant for his time/period). We don’t do ourselves any help by either relying solely on his (contested) theoretical contribution, or by rejecting what is still the most fundamental starting point for a critical theory of capitalist social relations. Nothing comes close, even though alternative critical frameworks like Capital as Power may have things to offer (while still deficient). What Marx left us was nowhere near sufficient or infallible, but nonetheless the foundations for a critical theoretical project rooted in the will to abolish and revolutionize the existing state of things (or social order).

And it turns out that we’re lucky to live in a period during which there have been many meaningful advances in theorizing capitalism, after many decades of largely sterile and flawed discussions by radicals/socialists and some leftwing economists or intellectuals. My own writings are only partly original, insofar as I heavily rely on and share the works of various authors that I’ve found useful or relevant. Obviously, both scientific inquiry and critical theory are a collective process by essence.

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