"Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!" --Karl Marx

In this pithy quote Marx, whose 199th birthday was yesterday, encapsulates the insane logic of the capitalist system. Its precise lettering is mentioned in the same paragraph, below:

If to classical economy, the proletarian is but a machine for the production of surplus-value; on the other hand, the capitalist is in its eyes only a machine for the conversion of this surplus-value into additional capital.

Capitalism is like a machine, then, for the appropriation and capitalization of the world. Its general logic is one of universal greed, for one can never have enough in a dog-eat-dog world. There is, however, one essential difference between capitalism and a machine. A machine is made of metal, at least in its essential parts, whereas capitalism is ultimately a construct of human beings, human beings who are being compelled by the logic of the system to behave like machines. This is the insanity of which I speak.

In the 1844 manuscripts Marx writes of "alienation." Later in his writings Marx stops using this term, but "alienation" carries the moral weight that "abstract labor," Marx's later term, doesn't quite have. "Alienation," in the sense used by the 26-year-old Marx, means that your power over your labor isn't yours -- it belongs to your boss or your customers or "the market" in general. Any sanity you might exercise in the use of your labor-power, in your ability to reshape the world as a worker, belongs to a higher power, and that power is the power of money. Money is the grease that keeps the capitalist system whirring.

In the chapter of these manuscripts titled The Power of Money Marx says:

If money is the bond binding me to human life, binding society to me, connecting me with nature and man, is not money the bond of all bonds? Can it not dissolve and bind all ties? Is it not, therefore, also the universal agent of separation? It is the coin that really separates as well as the real binding agent – the [...] [One word in the manuscript cannot be deciphered. – Ed.] chemical power of society.

Shakespeare stresses especially two properties of money:

1. It is the visible divinity – the transformation of all human and natural properties into their contraries, the universal confounding and distorting of things: impossibilities are soldered together by it.

2. It is the common whore, the common procurer of people and nations.

The distorting and confounding of all human and natural qualities, the fraternisation of impossibilities – the divine power of money – lies in its character as men’s estranged, alienating and self-disposing species-nature. Money is the alienated ability of mankind.

In this early version of his philosophy Marx stumbled upon the insanity of the capitalist system. Under capitalism people are driven by this "visible divinity" to confound and distort their own abilities to do things, and thus if carried far enough the pursuit of money will overcome the pursuit of survival, the fundamental human end. As we die, we will compare who died with the most toys, and that will be the end of it. This is the insane logic of capitalism.

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The big political discussion now impending on Facebook and elsewhere is about the Republican rewriting of the ACA. Obamacare will probably be replaced in some form or another with Trumpcare, and it will be another failure except insofar as it will channel more money into the accounts of the already-rich, which Obamacare does just fine. The nice advocates of more Obamacare tell us that "Trumpcare will kill people." The actual calculation of how many people will die, however, is unclear, and the nice advocates for Obamacare aren't making it any clearer.

The bigger problem standing in the way of those nice advocates is that Obamacare is merely a streamlining of a system designed to extract money from people first, and to treat their illnesses second. Perhaps "people will die" because Medicaid will disappear -- yet the logic of the system will replace Medicaid with some form of hospital-based charity, unless the medical profession decides at some point to repudiate the Hippocratic Oath and refuses to admit people to emergency rooms without prior proof of ability to pay. If that happens, it, too, will be a consequence of the general insanity spread by capitalism.

*****

Once upon a time there was a discussion within the halls of government about climate change. Climate change continues to transform the Earth in unpleasant ways as a consequence of capitalist industry, and its adding 2.3 parts per million per year of carbon dioxide to Earth's atmospheric carbon dioxide endowment. Eventually all of this abrupt increase in Earth's atmospheric carbon dioxide endowment will spell disaster for the world, and thus for us. Much of the conversation about climate change was begun by Al Gore when he was Vice President. However, Al Gore is also a profound advocate of capitalism, and so we can see how this plays out in his writings. From his (2013) book The Future, Gore tells us:

The inherent advantages of capitalism over any other system for organizing economic activity are well understood. It is far more efficient in allocating resources and matching supply to demand; it is far more effective at creating wealth; and it is far more congruent with higher levels of freedom. Most fundamentally, capitalism unlocks a larger fraction of the human potential with ubiquitous organic incentives that reward effort and innovation. The world’s experimentation with other systems – including the disastrous experiences with communism and fascism in the twentieth century – lead to a nearly unanimous consensus at the beginning of the twenty-first century that democratic capitalism was the ideology of choice throughout the world. (from page 33)

Let's for a moment put aside the irrelevance of this propagandistic statement to Gore's goal of mitigating climate change. There are a number of distortions in this statement, and let's go over them one by one:

1) Capitalism "allocates resources" upward -- toward the wealthy, and away from the working class. Some other force has in all periods of capitalist history been needed as a corrective to capital accumulation -- government welfare, loans, grants, or charity perhaps. Something must always be done about the masses of people who work their butts off and yet don't have much of anything to show for it. What is done about these masses will depend, in any particular era, upon capital's need for well-educated, nutritionally-satisfied workers, which capital still does not want to pay for.

2) Capitalism only matches supply to effective demand -- demand backed by money. For instance, if I demand the ownership of a nice house, that doesn't mean in any sense that I'm going to get one unless I can afford the payments, and on a $26K/ year income that's not really likely, is it? The progress of society is continually hindered by people's inability to pay for things, all the way down to, for instance, the problem of world hunger, which has been solved with tedious slowness marked by periodic setbacks.

3) The capitalist system might be regarded as effective at creating wealth, if you disregard the endless struggle of the majority of people to obtain a tiny share of that wealth.

4) The capitalist system does not offer "organic incentives." Rather, capitalist innovation is largely motivated by money, and therefore follows a path directed by money. Climate change will only be mitigated under capitalism if someone can be paid to do it. It also might be important to add that nearly all of the important innovations comprising today's technological society occurred in the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries. We no longer live in that era of capitalism, so perhaps we ought to have a philosophy of "organic incentives" to fit our era, and not that one. And we are not going to come up with a robot that will be able to separate out molecules of CO2 from the atmosphere and dump them into a trashcan capable of holding gases indefinitely.

5) Only in Gore's playbook are "communism and fascism" other systems than capitalism. State capitalism of the Soviet or Nazi variety does not count as innovation in political economy, and this fact points to a greater truth, that the world really hasn't experimented with other systems of political economy.

6) Capitalism is really only "democratic" insofar as the capitalists who make all of the real policy decisions allow the people to "choose" a cast of figureheads now and then. The elites are perfectly happy pitting a money-hungry candidate with half the owning class at her disposal (Clinton) against one who wants to make government into a billionaire's club (Trump). Rather, capitalist dictatorship is the real ideology of choice for the oligarchy at the top, and "democracy" is the compromise formation.

In sum, Gore is wrong about capitalism, and in the end this greatly limits the measures he's willing to propose in order to mitigate climate change. Gore suggests a few ineffective economic incentives which will barely disturb our current society's elite-made choice, which is to go with fossil fuels all the way up to the point when civilization itself disintegrates and what is left is a few disillusioned stragglers on a planet that will look like an overheated desert. Climate change mitigation would benefit from a renunciation of Gore's pledge of allegiance to more capitalism.

*****

We really do need to get off of the capitalist path, away from the society of money and toward some other social form. It is a consequence of our profound alienation that we are at present not capable of thinking of a transition away from capitalism and toward a better, non-capitalist society.