This video is a video essay on the question "Is capitalism really natural?". It is based on the argument which goes "capitalism is the only economic system which is natural". I examine what this means, what human nature has to do with it and go on to examine if capitalism is really the most natural system there is. For this I compare it to another system which in the end turns out to fulfill more natural needs. Discord:
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Credit for the music at the end: They told me "not to worry about credits" and didn't give me anything I could shout out so I can't credit them
Transcript:
“Capitalism is just human nature. That’s why it’s the best system."
We’ve all heard it being said before. Mostly in the context of someone suggesting that capitalism isn’t perfect. Take any video talking about socialism, communism, anarchism or anything that isn’t neoliberal capitalism, and someone in the comments will tell you that that won’t work because Capitalism | is | natural.
But is it? I don’t think so. But let’s start off by asking ourselves “What is that even supposed to mean?” Let’s type the statement “Capitalism is natural” into google and see what it suggests since that’s obviously what people are thinking about.
There we have it “capitalism is natural selection” and that’s an actual argument used by many supporters of capitalism for why it’s a natural system. “Since capitalism includes natural selection it follows the laws of Darvin which makes it natural” On the surface this idea seems to hold water. Capitalism famously takes companies and individuals, ideally as many as possible, and makes them compete on the free market.
They compete for customers if they are companies and for jobs if they are individuals. So, everyone is constantly competing which is natural and the best way a society can be run ... right? Well I’d argue it’s definitely not the best system. Actually a lot of resources are wasted on the constant competition. Big cooperation have to invest huge sums into advertising in order to be able to compete.
“Ha” you may say “this is a big advantage of competition because it means that companies have to constantly innovate and create newer and better products for the people!”. This is a very common argument as well and as luck would have it, I already made an entire video on why the free market doesn’t cause innovation. In short it doesn’t because adverts are cheaper.
So competition is expensive and usually doesn’t even produce innovation. At this point you may already be questioning why we even bother with competition and the usual answer isn’t that we use it because it’s the best possible system but because it’s the best current system we have. That’s a big difference.
People rarely argue that capitalism is the best system to ever be able to exist. They prefer to argue that it’s the best system we have. This goes hand in hand with the fact that every 5-year-old already knows that socialism supposedly killed at least one petabyte of the people in the USSR. Of course, that’s not really true and I made a video on that one as well.
So the current argument usually goes: “Capitalism is the best system because socialism is bad because it killed people and at least capitalism doesn’t do that”. There are 2 problems with this statement. One is that the deaths caused by socialism are usually greatly exaggerated as I mentioned before. The other is that capitalism isn’t a perfect system either. Many people die each year because capitalism isn’t able to support them. And yes of course I’ve made a video on that.
And with the argument part of the statement refuted there isn’t anything left besides “capitalism is the best system”. Also this argument assumes that there are no other systems than socialism and capitalism which is a little odd considering capitalism as we know it today wasn’t invented until the late 1770s but I just noticed that I’ve gotten a little off topic.
Back to the point. Is capitalism natural because it features competition? Well. Not really. Of course competition is very common in nature but often times it doesn’t take place between members of the same species. For example, plants will intentionally avoid the leaves of other plants of the same genome, so they don’t need to waste energy competing for nutrients or sunlight.
This can be seen all over the animal kingdom as well. Fish move in swarms because that’s the safest for them. They don’t invest energy into changing their colour so that predators will eat the other fish first. Meerkats socially bring up the young and hell even humans cooperate like that. Think of the thanksgiving meal or your local equivalent. One person makes the food and everyone get’s to eat it. People don’t fight for it or compete. People cooperate and everyone profits. And of course in exchange the other people around the table will do the housework but what they won’t do is ask to be paid for any of that.
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