Are You Even A Capitalist, Bro?
Photo by Fidel Fernando on Unsplash
Bro, if you have ever been in a heated conversation online, you’ve probably had a cringe-worthy debate defining political terms like socialism or capitalism. “[Socialism] Who’s Behind It, Why It’s Evil, and How To Stop It” reads the subheader for Dinesh D’Souza’s 2020 book United States of Socialism. “Socialism is when the government does stuff,” academic Richard D. Wolff infamously said at a talk. People have a lot of opinions on how we should structure our government, and as we can see, they can get very rough.
However, it quickly becomes apparent that most people simply do not know what these words mean. They are relying on a rhetorical boogeyman to blame all the world's problems on the hated ideological framework of their choice. As not chill politician Margaret Thatcher once said, “Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people’s money.” Note she said this three years before she became British prime minister and used the powers of her office to implement policies that worsened wealth inequality overall. She was not interested in talking about economic systems as much as she was defining an enemy.
Nowhere does this ignorance become more obvious than with self-described “capitalists” who claim to be so, despite not actually being capitalists at all. Many people seem to be starting fights on the Internet (and in real life) to support a class of people they falsely believe themselves to be a part of, and we need to examine what that says about us as a people.
Now bro, before you scroll down to the bottom of this article to write an epic response, let’s define what capitalist and capitalism even mean. A lot of false definitions of capitalism will define it as trade (i.e., two people or entities engaged in the buying and selling of goods and services). “Capitalism has always existed in one form or another,” one Reddit user posted. “…the concept of ownership and economic markets has always existed even without modern currencies.”
While it’s true that humans have been engaged in trade for thousands (possibly even hundreds of thousands) of years, capitalism is a little more complex than a person hawking their wares at a marketplace. It is an economic system where private individuals, rather than governments or kings, control most of a society’s trade and profits. These private individuals are what we mean when we talk about “capitalists.” These are people who own capital (e.g., machinery, tools, equipment, buildings, railways, and all means of transport and communication, raw materials, people, etc., ), or what based leftists may refer to as “the means of production,” which then are used in the creation of goods and services purchased by consumers.
That’s a lot of jargon that basically means capitalists own the stuff, and people used to make the things that we will buy.
This way of thinking seems like second nature to us now, but capitalism is a very young economic system that has already had several iterations. Some bros will refer to mercantilism (roughly from 1400 CE to the late 1700s), or a country using protectionism and imperialism to maximize their exports and minimize their imports, as the origin of capitalism. Other chill dudes might point to the Dutch Republic (1588 to 1795 CE), more specifically joint-stock companies like the Dutch East India Company, as a proper origin. Many more begin the story in the industrialization of the United Kingdom and the United States (and then the world) starting in the 1800s. Even if we are going by the most conservative estimate here, we are still talking about less than seven hundred years. Not that long when compared to the roughly twelve thousand years of human civilization. Do the math, dude or dudette.
In western Europe, the previous era of economic development was known as feudalism. It was where land was divided up among the nobility and church and given to vassals in exchange for political and military support. Some merchants existed — selling and trading goods in whatever market would fetch the highest price— but most people in these polities were peasants who worked said land in exchange for protection. The virtues of business and financing that we today consider the bedrock of capitalist society were not well-accepted back then. Money-lending, in particular, was viewed quite negatively by some elements of European society. In England, for example, a Church prohibition on “usury” in the 1300s caused many lenders to conceal the interest charged in local loans. It would take centuries for the attitudes of the public to change into what we recognize today.
Now, mate, it also bears noting that we are, of course, speaking in broad strokes here. No place around the world has ever had one unified economic system. There have always been those that live outside the maps drawn by emperors, presidents, generals, monarchs, and High School Football Coaches. We have seen a lot of subsistence farming (i.e., people raising crops for personal consumption rather than trade) throughout history, including within the United States. In fact, subsistence farming continues to the present in all sorts of places around the world.
Even today, there is no purely capitalist economy. The United States is a “Mixed Economy” where the government fully or partially controls many industries such as defense, education, and infrastructure. The line between the private and the public sector is not always very clear-cut either, with many successful capitalists relying on the government for their wealth. According to reporting from the Los Angeles Times, Elon Musk’s various companies have drawn upon billions of dollars in government subsidies. He may be a Twitter savant, but he didn’t earn his billions without some help from Uncle Sam. The same can be said for Amazon, Google, and Facebook. In fact, most major US companies have enjoyed government subsidies at one point or another and continue to do so.
You may very well support this system — I don’t judge my bros — but something to make clear is that you are most likely not a capitalist within it. If you do not make the majority of wealth through capital (again, the things and people used to make the stuff we buy), then you are not a capitalist. Truthfully, only a tiny minority of humans in our system will ever be full-fledged capitalists. Class mobility has shrunk dramatically in recent years, and the situation does not seem to be improving.
What are you then, my man or manette?
Well, if you make your money by performing labor for someone else (we non-capitalists know this as a job) or you rely on someone who does (a spouse, child, student, etc.), then you would fall within the working class. Members of the working class are people who must rent out their labor — either to capitalists, other workers, and sometimes both — to subsist. If you or your loved one cannot ever stop renting your labor to others, then you are not a capitalist — you are a worker.
Some workers have to work all their lives. Others live in chill countries that provide a more robust safety net that subsidies their wages (and consequently the wages capitalists have to pay them). Whether you earn a small income or a large one, however, most of us were born into the working-class and, at the risk of sounding like a total bummer, we will most likely die as members of the working-class, especially in America where so many of us work into old age (totally not chill).
The conversation from here usually devolves into whether this divide between workers and capitalists is based or cringe. Capitalists would say that they provide innovation and greater inefficiency. Marxists would claim that capitalists are extracting the full value from the labor of the workers they hire. There is a lot of nuance between these two poles of thought, and they have been discussed in-depth elsewhere. If you want content that doesn’t require too much work to absorb, check out the based Philosophy Tube video Work (or, the 5 jobs I had before YouTube).
I am more concerned, however, with why so many people do not understand what capitalists even are and what that says about us as a society.
Americans have a weird disconnect when it comes to wealth and poverty. America has a deep mythos about meritocracy (e.g., the American Dream, and all that). We basically think hard work makes people successful, and so we tie our ability to earn wealth into our own value as human beings—the exact opposite of taking a chill pill. The divide between capitalists and members of the working class is often obscured by our own shame of not living up to that standard.
Most Americans don’t consider themselves workers, capitalists, lower-class, or upper-class, but middle-class — a mythical, everchanging center that falls between the wealthy and the working-class. A 2015 Pew Research poll found that 9 out of 10 Americans consider themselves middle-class. Another poll in 2018 had that number up at 70%. This perception is weird given how frickin’ unequal everything is in America. Most Americans don’t make a whole lot of money. Nearly half of working Americans work in low-wage jobs that are not enough to pay for their living expenses.
Capitalists also have this problem but in reverse. They don’t think they're in the upper-class and instead will cling to the middle-class label. A 2019 Ameriprise Financial Study, for example, found that a majority of people with one million dollars in assets or more did not consider themselves to be wealthy. As Barry Davret writes in Medium:
“Today, I’m what you’d call a middle-class millionaire. When I add up assets and subtract liabilities, the net balance exceeds the mythical threshold, but you’d never know it from my lifestyle. My house looks like a generic old home you’d find in Anytown, USA…The rest of my life mirrors common middle-class challenges: paying a mortgage, worrying about college for my kids, and nervously peeking at my credit card and bank account balances once a week.”
Barry Davret is calling himself middle-class based on an aesthetic, and not so much on comparing himself to the material conditions of the rest of America. He is an influencer with tens of thousands of followers who also invests in stock and other financial assets. Most “middle-class” people cannot generate that type of capital at the scale he is talking about. In fact, one comparison from Pew Research places anyone who makes $145,500 or higher (plus or minus regional differences in cost of living) in the upper class. Barry, middle class, you are not, bro.
As we can see, Americans are weird with the concept of class and wealth. In fact, as a general rule, Americans are uncomfortable with disclosing how much they make, and this bites many of us in the keister when it comes to things like salary negotiations. One contributing factor for why salary discrepancies exist in this country, particularly racial and gendered ones, is because people are not actively aware of how much their peers make. We don’t talk about it because money makes many Americans uncomfortable, and then we don’t know what to ask for (and capitalists don’t tell us) when selling our labor.
This taboo, however, is by no means universal everywhere. The writer Joe Pinsker gave one entertaining example in The Atlantic about how some cultures can be refreshingly direct, writing:
“Kimberly Chong, an anthropology lecturer at University College London, told me that when she studied the office of an American consulting firm in China, the mostly Chinese consultants “freely shared information about how much they earned with each other and also felt emboldened to ask senior executives how much they earned.” To the frustration of management, this made it difficult to sustain the pay differentials that are common at American companies.”
Pinsker, bro, “pay differentials” is a funny way of saying that these businesses are “willfully riping their workers off.”
We are generally in the dark when it comes to how much our peers make, leading to these perceptual bubbles. Working-class Americans are ashamed to admit that many of them are not part of that mythical middle-class and are being failed by society at large. Rich Americans, meanwhile, are comparing themselves to other rich people and don’t realize (or simply don't care) how little everyone else is making. There is a lot of shame over class in the United States. We are so deadset on internalizing all of society’s failings that we effectively try to pretend like class doesn’t exist, and if there is something a bro shouldn’t be, it’s in denial. This confusion leads to situations where a lot of people are fighting against their own class interests.
As an example, it’s not simply the rich who oppose unions. Despite high support from the public, as well as ample evidence that unions increase benefits and salaries, there is often a hesitancy from some workers to engage with new unions. “Everything they say they want from a union, we’ve already got by working directly with Amazon,” one worker remarked recently of their decision not to support a new union at an Amazon warehouse. Not every union is perfect, by any stretch of the bro-tastic imagination, but to think that you will have better bargaining power alone than alongside your other workers' ties into that belief of meritocracy we were talking about earlier. A lot of people still think that work is all they need. “I work hard here, and I think I’ll be rewarded for that,” said another worker of her decision also to vote no.
As we can see, this refusal to acknowledge what class we even are leads to tangible harm. It muddies the waters so that we don’t recognize where our interests lie. Most Americans lack what some based bros might describe as “class consciousness” or an understanding of where they are on the economic hierarchy.
Instead, we have a system where everyone thinks they are valued, and very few are.
There is no universal agreement on how to deal with this problem of class in America. Solutions run the gamut from education and awareness to passing reforms so capitalists cannot extract and hoard as much wealth to getting rid of capitalists entirely. The point of this article is not to convince you of a solution but rather to have you understand your position in this hierarchy.
You may believe in the ideology of capitalism (again, this article is not seeking to judge you for believing in the dominant ideology on the planet), but unless the majority of your wealth is earned from capital (i.e., stocks, bonds, commodities, capital goods, a business you own, cryptocurrency, etc.), not your labor, then you are not a capitalist. Just as peasants who support the monarchy are not kings, very few people who support capitalism are capitalists. You are a worker. You have always been a member of the working class, and you will most likely die a worker.
What you do with that information is up to you, bro.