What is capitalism?
I now realize that this question was imprecise. Marx was much more careful with his words. This is the first sentence of Das Kapital Volume 1 (1867):
The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as “an immense accumulation of commodities,” its unit being a single commodity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity.
Instead of capitalism, "the capitalist mode of production". Even critics of "capitalism" can fall into the annoying habit of assigning it blame for all the other problems in the world–– racism, sexism, queerphobia, war, slavery–– in purely ideal terms, ignoring the historical origins of these issues. But by transforming capitalism into its adjective form, the weight-bearing noun is now "mode of production". And it is clear that other modes of productions exist–– slaves and peasants and artisans have been the direct producers of "use-values" in many different societies across the world. Less clear immediately is that, even in a society where the capitalist mode of production prevails, there are pockets where it does not reach. If you're hanging out in the park with friends and you're still sad, that's not capitalism's fault, that's just your own suffering..
Every thing is a thing. "Use-values" are useful things, almost always produced/augmented by human labor (e.g. coats, tables, plastic containers), but Marx angrily reminds the German social democrats that "Nature is just as much the source of use values as labor". A "use-value" becomes a commodity only when it is attached to an "exchange-value", a market price. If you grow apples in your backyard and share them with friends and family they never become a commodity. In feudal times, the peasants would create use-values and the feudal lords would take a cut of those use-values; sometimes they could also compel peasant labor on building castles and whatnot. Not a commodity in sight. In antiquity, a slave might be a commodity themselves, but very rarely did they produce commodities for sale on a market. David Graeber details how, for most of human history, "human economies" trading things like women (marriage) and slaves were kept scrupulously separate from "commercial economies" of non-human use-values. "Trade" between social groups before modern capitalism–– which propertarians like to remind us happened for thousands of years–– was often conducted with ritual and whimsy. In North America, use-values traded hands between gambling women. In other cultures, exchanges of use-values was accompanied by exchanges of sexual partners. All this to say that the existence of commodities with dual attributes of use-value and exchange-value is by no means universal in human society.
Reading Marx helps people to be conscious about the "capitalist mode of production". I mean this etymologically–– con- means "with" (like contigo), -scious means "knowledge" (like science). Consciousness is not something we achieve independently, but rather by knowing together. We want a different world. We want people not to suffer and starve in the midst of the material abundance of the age of machinery. We walk into the grocery store or the pharmacy and are presented with "immense accumulations of commodities". How can we move from here to there without a shared understanding of what "here" is?
Marx said that we should transform the form of exchange-value from money (pleasure-tokens that are handed out for ownership of land or the means of production, not just for labor; does not expire) to labor-vouchers(distributed only for labor, retirement, and disability; expires). Marx says we should produce for use-value and not exchange-value; in the 1848 Manifesto he advocates for centralization and in 1872's brief On The Nationalization of the Land he advocates for a central economic plan.
We question Marx's demand for centralism, but we share his concerns with revisionism–– with allowing the interests of the petty bourgeois to infect and warp the party of the proletariat. We understand that there are many different forms of petty bourgeois, with different access to property and markets. Even among small business owners, important distinctions arise between those who employ proletarians and those who use only their own family's labor, between those who own their building and those who rent. Landlords are an especially reactionary strata of petty bourgeois. But most insiduous and hitherto unrecognized are the consumers. In The Housing Question, Engels is clear that those who get scraps of the surplus value extracted from the proletariat by extending working hours and improving machinery become petty bourgeois. Both the proletariat and the scrap-holders must procure housing in the dense cities, but the scrap-holders have more money–– because in Marx's time, all the political economists agreed that the wages of workers tend towards a subsistence minnimum. As such, the consumers become enchanted with the money-form and the "immense accumulation of commodities" that accompanies it. They grow attached to the fruit of proletarian labor; they have a class motivation to avoid peeking behind the curtain and discovering the labor theory of value. An entire nation of such consumers appears. This is Amerika.
Such ideas may bubble to the surface after you read Das Kapital, Volume 1, Chapter 1 of 33.
The stolen sunshine project rejects historical materialism. Full stop. We reject the line that capitalism is historically progressive, let alone inevitable.
Cracker Marxists will call this "revisionism" because we are revising what Marx said. We recommend that they read "Marx at the Margins" by Kevin B Anderson to understand how Marx himself was moving towards this line as he got older.
Das Kapital Volume 1 is divided into 8 parts. The first 7 parts create and deepen philosophical concepts connected with class struggle within the capitalist mode of production. Part 8 breaks with this entirely; it is simply a history of how the capitalist mode of production first arose. Within Part 8, chapters 26, 27, 28, 29, and 30 describe the rise of the agricultural capitalists in Europe. Chapter 31 breaks from this and describes the origins of the industrial capitalists. The very first sentence highlights the rapidity of industrial development compared to the many centuries it took for the agricultural capitalists to break the resistance of the Western European peasantry: "The genesis of the industrial capitalist did not proceed in such a gradual way as that of the farmer." And the center is placed, not in Europe, but (correctly) in the Americas.
The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation. On their heels treads the commercial war of the European nations, with the globe for a theatre. It begins with the revolt of the Netherlands from Spain, assumes giant dimensions in England’s Anti-Jacobin War, and is still going on in the opium wars against China...
We wish to highlight that for Marx, this process of "primitive accumulation" was an ongoing process. The stolen sunshine project believes that this process has only intensified and expanded since–– stolen land, stolen labor, and stolen sunshine are the unholy trinity powering industrialism, and fossil fuel usage is still increasing. Even by the time Marx was writing, fossil fuels had taken a primary role. From Malm's Fossil Capital, itself referencing the work of EA Wrigley:
In 1750, all coal produced in England would have equalled 4.3 million acres of woodland, or 13% of the national territory. In 1800, substituting wood for coal would have demanded 11.2 million acres or 35% of the British land surface; by 1850, the figures had risen to 48.1 million and 150%, respectively.
Marx, goes on to rank genocides for whatever reason, claiming Mexico, India, and the West Indies had it worse than inhabitants of Northern Turtle Island. Worst take of the otherwise based chapter. But at least he's clear that genocide is bad:
The treatment of the aborigines was, naturally, most frightful in plantation-colonies destined for export trade only, such as the West Indies, and in rich and well-populated countries, such as Mexico and India, that were given over to plunder. But even in the colonies properly so called, the Christian character of primitive accumulation did not belie itself. Those sober virtuosi of Protestantism, the Puritans of New England, in 1703, by decrees of their assembly set a premium of £40 on every Indian scalp and every captured red-skin: in 1720 a premium of £100 on every scalp; in 1744, after Massachusetts-Bay had proclaimed a certain tribe as rebels, the following prices: for a male scalp of 12 years and upwards £100 (new currency), for a male prisoner £105, for women and children prisoners £50, for scalps of women and children £50. Some decades later, the colonial system took its revenge on the descendants of the pious pilgrim fathers, who had grown seditious in the meantime. At English instigation and for English pay they were tomahawked by red-skins. The British Parliament proclaimed bloodhounds and scalping as “means that God and Nature had given into its hand.”
In an earlier writing, a polemic against the mutualist anarchist Proudhon, Marx comes very close to saying that American chattel slavery was historically progressive (see our article "On Slavery"). But in this chapter he writes:
Whilst the cotton industry introduced child-slavery in England, it gave in the United States a stimulus to the transformation of the earlier, more or less patriarchal slavery, into a system of commercial exploitation. In fact, the veiled slavery of the wage workers in Europe needed, for its pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the new world.
This does not rule out that capitalism is in some sense historically progressive, but it does unobfuscate the relationship between chattel slavery and industrialism. For example, in Principles of Communism(1847), Engels attributes the Industrial Revolution primarily to technology instead–– a Euro-supremacist view.
Marx ends the chapter strong with a searing sentence:
If money, according to Augier, “comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek,” capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.