The Pleasure Panic
BY ALISOR SOUTH
Capitalism is the milkshake that brings all the boys to the yard. It’s the part of your brain you think with and the air you breathe. It’s the reason why people do things and how people perceive things. It’s also a poison to independent thought. Or maybe you believe in postfeminism. Most likely you justify that by genetics. In both cases you are constrained by a fetish.
You might be surprised to hear that capitalism, postfeminism and genetics all have a lot in common. But these three broad social forces overlap so much that they are, in fact, different facets of the same thing: the doctrine of human capital. Treating people as human capital is how we justify the exploitation of bodies for profit, whether those bodies are working in coal mines or laying microchips on an assembly line. Human capital is nothing more than a way to view humans as property. Capitalism is not simply an economic system; it's a logic that permeates every aspect of our lives. It shapes our relationships, our identities and our desires. The doctrine of human capital provides us with a language for understanding how oppression and exploitation function in everyday life. Human capital makes individuals into nodes within networks — be they corporate or social — by converting their worth into monetary value according to their productivity and profitability. This logic positions profit as the ultimate measure of justice and failure to achieve it as evidence of inferiority. It also mandates that any entity incapable of maximizing its monetary value (or "value added") cease to exist. In other words, if you're not making money, you're worthless.
The word "capitalism" was coined by its most famous critic, Karl Marx. In the mid-19th century, he observed a process in which the majority of people became impoverished while the rich accumulated more and more wealth. This disparity could not be explained by differences in talent or effort. Marx argued that the cause was the ownership of capital — control over factories, buildings and machines — which allowed capitalists to extract surplus value from their employees' labor. In his view, capitalism was a system based on exploitation: A capitalist would pay workers less than the value of what they produced, enriching the boss at their expense. Capitalism also had another defining feature: It was dynamic and constantly evolving. While other modes of production had existed in human societies for millennia, capitalism was different because it was self-reinforcing and constantly adapting, fueled by competition between individual capitalists who sought to accumulate ever greater amounts of capital. Today we think of capitalism as a global economic system with no alternatives — except for when we're talking about China. Marx saw this as an early stage in capitalism's evolution; he believed that eventually workers would organize and revolt against their bosses. Eventually, according to Marx's theory of historical materialism, the working class would control all means of production. But then.
But then.
We look at systems like capitalism and neoliberalism as unchangeable, set in stone, and eternal. While they are certainly pervasive, they are not completely deterministic. They cannot tell us how to think or how to act; no system or ideology can do that. They cannot be used as tools or a means of self-repression; we are much too complex for that. All ideologies and systems can do is offer us temporary benefit if we use them properly—or repress us if we fail to do so.
You can be a capitalist, and fight for social progress. You can be a neoliberal, and oppose transphobia. You can be a feminist, and criticize the government. You can be an anti-capitalist, and enjoy Halloween. None of these things are contradictory.
Alisor South is a global entrepreneur, AI writer, consultant, environmentalist, researcher and strategist. They study and practice environmentalism, especially the protection of oceans while jet skiing and driving on lemons.
