From 17 to 19 years old, I went to an international boarding school, where I made the best friends I could ever think of having. A few months into my second year, one of my friends (whom we will call Friend) was threatened with expulsion.
Friend said he also wanted to spend more time at school. Everyone in our group of friends, including myself, got that: We wanted him to say. Friend added that he was surprised that he felt that way, or that he wished he wouldn’t feel that way. That feeling, I couldn’t relate to. Why would it be surprising to want to spend more time with the people you love? Friend said he wished he had not felt that way. For some reason, it was wrong to feel this, because, he said, “More is for capitalists.”
The first thing this statement did was fuck me up, instilling in me intellectual confusion and emotional hurt. That was almost 3 years ago, and I’ve since then had time to think about it with a cooler head. I’ve gone from a
We want more of everything we enjoy. More good times, more friends, more good times with more friends. More good music, more money, more sunshine, more free time. We have a collective fetishism for everything bigger, shinier, quicker, newer, greater. Insofar as X has more of Y desirable quality than Z, X automatically assume higher status than Z.
What my friend meant is that there is no inherent, or natural reason, of why that is. We have good friends, why do we need more? The artists we like have given us so much good music already, why do we want more? We have vacations and weekends for free time, why do we always want more? Why do we think more is better than what we already have?
Friend’s insight was to point out the influence of capitalist rationality on even on our most intimate thoughts. The idea that more is actually inherently better than less does ring like the sort of thing a capitalist would say. Much of economic theory is predicated on the fact that people would rather have 2 thousand dollars than 1 thousand dollars in their bank account, or that their company makes 3 millions dollars worth of profit, rather than 1 million dollar worth of profit. The relentless pursuit of more, especially when one already has enough, makes the capitalist machine go round.
Some days, this makes a lot of sense. Friend meant what he said in a positive way: We’ve had the best time ever together already, why are we obsessively trying to secure more weeks, days, and minutes? I cannot help but agree with the general idea: More is in fact for capitalists. We should learn to question our automatic tendency to ask for more, or bigger, or longer, when what we have is already plenty. Satisfaction cannot come from what we can’t have. To put this tautologically, insatiable desire cannot make us truly satisfied.
Yet, I don’t think that this captures the essence of what is at stake in the affirmation that “More is for Capitalists.” Capitalism doesn’t have a monopoly on more. Capitalism doesn’t have a monopoly on wanting more nice things for ourselves and others. Indeed, sometimes we desire more things that serve to advantage capitalists. In fact, although growth and accumulation are central to the capitalist machine, I don’t think that’s what is fundamental to capitalism, neither as an economic system or as a mode of rationality. This article is not the appropriate platform to flesh out a full theory of the social effects of capitalism, but I can still highlight a few things that strike me as much more “typically capitalist” than wanting more good music, vacations or friends.
In the most basic terms, capitalism is an economic system, characterized by private property, where the benefits of that given property also belong to private individuals and groups. Capitalism is about many people working for unlivable (also called minimum) wages and a few checking in million dollar annual salaries. It is about violence and slavery and repression, all of which, are both historically and currently are central to capitalist development. It is about promoting meritocratic ideals, insisting that there are no gender, racial or class barriers to success, and all the while being fully aware of racial and gender disparities in quality of life. It is about a sort of collective gaslight, an ideology that insists that if one simply works hard enough, they will also have a chance to attain a comfortable life. As a man with a beard said in 1844, it is about the alienation of man from their creative powers and from their natural capacity to empathize with each other.
In light of this, I actually think there are good grounds to refuse to think that wanting to spend more time with your friends means you have succumbed to capitalist propaganda. To portray everything that has to do with “more” as an epiphenomenon of capitalist rationality is to obscure what capitalism is fundamentally about. Capitalism accepts the pursuit of more profit. That said, this is at the cost of more of a lot of other things, such as more social justice, more sustainability, and more healthy populations, for example. Capitalism is not inherently committed to the augmentation of all social goods.
It is crucially important to realize how capitalism shapes our thoughts. It is important because it is true that we live in a system that has taught us to see many things as natural and non-contingent, making the oppressive precepts of capitalism invisible. For change to be possible, we must criticize not only the material impacts of capitalism but also question our conceptual frameworks, to make sure that we are not accepting harmful premises. This is necessary to avoid reproducing them in our transformative project.
Nevertheless, we must refuse an over-totalizing critique of capitalism. It is one thing to say that economic philosophies have a pervasive impact on our modes of thought, which predispose us to prefer and value certain things. As elaborated on throughout this article, I think that’s certainly true. It is another thing to affirm that capitalist rationality has captured all our social relations and cognitive processes, to the result that every single thing we think is in fact just a consequence of capitalist indoctrination.
While the latter is a theoretical possibility, it is not self-evident. I think there are good substantive reasons to resist this: As explained above, it is a matter of empirical fact that not all our desires serve or re-iterate the capitalist project. For example, we may be committed a project of moresocial justice or more sustainability, which goes against the inherent commitments of capitalism. We may also want more leisure time or more art - things which are not directly related to what capitalism wants to increase. I also think it is instrumentally necessary to refuse that idea: Accepting that our thoughts can have no independence is to give up on the possibility of
Capitalism didn’t devour all of our humanity. Our capacity to feel intensely and act upon the world is a testimony to how we are not mere cogs in a destructive machine. Our human moments, when we demand more justice, more empathy and more compassion, must be seized and emphasized; they must not be undermined as by-products of the precise capitalist ideology they fights to oppose.
So, is More For Capitalists?
More profit, maybe.
More good times? Not so much
