Capitalism is not a “makes sense to me” economy

May 28 2025

INTRO

The following excerpt was written in January or earlier of 2024. I'm uploading it because I find it interesting that before I really dove into the concept of dialectical materialism and the relative worth of objects tied to a tangible representation of reality (Like gold, which when the gold standard was destroyed it fucked a lot of things up), I made this and almost explained a similar thing.

Included in this, in the bottom, is an unfinished would-be explanation of positive and negative freedoms: freedoms to and freedoms from things, which I learned about in a law studies class back in high school, but I don't know if I made the connection at the time.

Anyway, I hope you find it interesting enough to discuss. I don't write like this anymore, so sorry if it sounds a little pretentious? I dunno.

I need to upload old things more often.

LE ESSAY

A question directed at socialists commonly is on the value of labor and the exchange of goods and services. The shorthand of this question as would be asked by an uninformed individual is “why are you pulling the value of things out of your ass? Isn't that bad for the economy?” To that, I ask of the very existence of capitalism: the exchange of capital for goods and services. Even before this concept, bartering “pulls value out of its ass” by making use of the traders’ senses of value, which is an individualistic “6th sense.” What is the individual’s attachment to this object? The attachment is most often what gives an item its value. By this nature, adding a barrier in the form of tender turns “this chicken is worth five shovels” into “what could buy this chicken is conveniently what could buy shovels instead” Capital is based on the relationship between buyer and seller, so the “makes sense” philosophy is easy to follow on a small scale, and is encouraged to improve the well-being of people. In the big picture, the average person has no perception of the real value of an object, and is perpetually prone to exploitative marketing practices. At this point, pulling value out of the ass becomes much easier and much more difficult to challenge. Intuition will not be felt universally once monopolization takes place, and it is built to do so under capitalism.

Furthermore, as artificial inflation further distorts a person’s image of what should be worth what, even independent sellers are unable to properly price their goods and services, and are forced to make their mom and pop store sell at less than competitive prices just to sustainably continue operations. The operations in question although are anything but sustainable, and drop at a dime the minute the economy at large heads to a recession, either suspending said operations indefinitely, or ending it, never again to return to the market.

The value of everything is set by members at the very top of the economic food chain; it is an economic dictatorship despite the potential separate body of the government (which under a capitalist society exists only as a tool of the bourgeoisie anyway). The values they are set at may be based in part on the legitimate relative value of the objects (a computer will always be worth more than a toothbrush), but they do not need to accurately align values simply out of the inability of the consumer to change it. This misalignment is what causes the working class to remark that one meal is worth 2 hours of their work. To put it in perspective, working six hours a day just to be able to to have the average three meals a day would mean in order to sustain other forms of sustenance- housing, sanitation, utilities- one must extend the day far past the 24 hours, which is impossible.

This dynamic could just as easily manifest in a socialist society which uses a currency. Although sustenance is much cheaper, work could be viewed under the same light. The laborer knows still that their treatment is conditional: based around the way they work. Money, in all instances, lessens the connection a person has with the interactions they make with work, with society, and with the economy. A functioning economy should be built with the foundations of basic regular sustenance (food, utilities, housing) and regular trade should be without the inclusion of a tender, official or not. This comes with the added benefit of theft protection. In the modern day, the value of something stolen in money is much more important than if the item was stolen in the beginning. This means that pricey and arbitrary items are investigated with more care than something that might genuinely affect someone’s wellbeing. The abolition of money prolongs the security of personal objects, and makes the bourgeoisie much easier to defeat. The perception of a “rich” man now becomes one of obesity and hoarding. The people intuitively understand that stealing a car is more damaging than someone’s bucket, simply out of the value it brings by its very function. Anyway, theft would be much less common given the standard of living the people are guaranteed. Removing cash value further nips theft crimes in the bud.

In conclusion, if one is to pull value out of their ass, it should be done on the surface where it is easy to negotiate and not deep in the recesses of society at large, where one may not be able to negotiate its value. Cash money is a detriment to the idea of a communal society. The question on how authority is able to enforce this is a valid concern. Government could either help secure these rights as a socialist government should, or hinder it by setting casual trade values itself. If it were to perform the latter, then said governance should happen at the most accessible level, where a personal connection to the economy can still be viable.

Which types of freedoms should people have? How many freedoms? Institutionalizing rights is a balancing act of which rights the people will be guaranteed to in code, which rights people will be given non-enumerated, and which rights people will have from certain things. In currency, removing the freedom TO exchange tender for goods and services is a freedom FROM economic exploitation. In many ways, restriction leads to more freedom- not arbitrary restrictions, but ones that keep man from the freedom to bring another man down through their own abusive means. Freedom from money is synonymous to freedom from slavery. If there is a freedom to or freedom from slavery, then the same basis can be made for money. If one is free to be a slave, then they are not free from being a slave. If one is free to have money, then they are not free from needing money. A right is inescapable, thus it is an object to protect in law people from freedoms that pose a detriment to society at large, and guarantee to people rights that will improve their life.