The Soil and the Worker

Assessing Marx's Capital from the Right

Mar 11, 2026

Economics is a sorely untouched subject of discussion as regards history and geopolitics.

It seems that both the Left and the Right have preconditioned and presupposed arguments as to what they believe regarding policy of the economy. Above many other issues, these arguments (I reckon perhaps due to their complexity) are taken for granted and advanced without a second thought given to their validity.

Concerning my own journey of employment (or lack of it) and personal troubles with the idea of “being a wagie”, I started to take interest in what Marx had to say about Capitalist economies and how my recurrent thoughts regarding the modern nature of work could be explained. Not so as to justify them necessarily, but to offer a different perspective from what conservatives are willing to offer and seeing where I agreed.

Coming from the Right, Marx might as well be Satan. He’s Jewish, the father of Communism, was a “freeloader”, and retains many other negative superlatives to his name. From that perspective, why would you ever read Marx and take him seriously? We beat the USSR and markets obviously reign supreme—just look at all the things we have available to us in the West as a result of Capitalism!

Yet the 21st century has shown developments in Capitalism which have broken through that patriotic mental-block. Criticism now comes from both political aisles where the diagnoses are, disappointingly, standardized talking points regurgitated without thought. They don’t really get us anywhere productive in offering a new, revolutionary form of the economy, or at the very least, a fix for the one we currently have. Most people on the Left have never read Marx but parrot his ideas while those on the Right preach Capitalism without knowing a dam thing about it.

My goal with reading Marx, then, was to gain a new perspective that can be molded from my own non-Leftist point of view while also chastising the traditional Right for being mindless advocates of “le free market bro”. It is my perspective, but frankly I think it should be fairly obvious, that Capitalism has been the primary tool amongst many used in the destruction of Western nations and peoples, and downstream of that, our culture, politics, and more concerning, our future.

The book I picked to accomplish this without becoming an economics undergraduate was An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital by Micheal Heinrich. I highly recommend this book as it takes an ~1000+ page three volume slog and condenses it to ~200 pages of main-point overviews, which I will now proceed to even further compress for the sake of passing along important points and ideas that I found compelling enough to share. This is also basically the most important Marxian book, economically speaking, which is why I picked it. I have yet to read any of his other material, even the Communist Manifesto despite it being so short.

For a brief period, I also read Engels’ Socialism: Utopian and Scientific as a sort of ideological primer. It’s ~50 pages long and easy to read, you could grab an online pdf and finish it in an afternoon.

The following will be sections containing what I find to be the most pertinent takeaways from these books and their connection to present economic conditions and/or misconceptions, as well as serving as a general educational tool for those, like myself, who are not overtly trained or familiar with economic study.

Capital

Marx out of Hegel

It is fundamental to understand that Marx builds his understanding of the “political economy” and the ensuing critique on the Hegelian Dialectic. This follows a line of argumentation that postures a thesis, an antithesis (or contradiction), and finally a synthesis between the two. Argumentation is what he believed drove history, or rather the conflict between ideas and the resolutions that came to be accepted. As this relates to Capitalism, the pre-bourgeois, pre-capitalist societies progressed to a certain material point which enabled the birth of a new System.

Material then becomes another important aspect of Marx’s analysis. Hegel’s “spirit-based” outlook on things left much to be desired in terms of physical output, so Marx went the opposite direction in search of a more grounded philosophy. Interacting with earlier French materialists, older sources like Epicurus, Darwin’s ideas, and witnessing the physical working conditions of his own time, he adopted materialism as his basis for historical change.

What he births is a melding of the two ideas: Historical Materialism. Marx’s fundamental understanding of history is guided by the contemporary mode of production and where that would end up taking a society. According to this philosophy, if material conditions are what influence historical progress, then we can to a certain degree empirically study and analyze such conditions so as to gain clarity on not just the future, but what needs to be changed in the here and now. This analysis is what ends up becoming Capital.

By adopting this worldview, Marx is leaving a lot of metaphysical ideas on the table. Everything is reducible to points of data, but I think (I know) that a point of failure for him, in this regard, is the uniquely spiritual element of humanity that can influence the world just as much as any material ones can. Materialists can cast the idea of the spirit away as simple chemical reactions reinforced by social conditioning, but I personally think that what we have experienced from the 20th century til now has demonstrated the necessity for belief in at least something beyond the material so as to not succumb to nihilism as an obvious consequence.

That aside, just remember that all of Marx’s work is meant to find “baseness” in every ghostly, spiritual, or immaterial conception of society and historical progress. This also need not be something to look down upon, as there are benefits to seeing things this way. It helps us to have an attitude of empiricism instead of relying on presuppositional or superstitious beliefs as to why things operate or behave as they do. Unfortunately, partly due to the way Historical Materialism works, nuance is not much of a factor in Marx’s conception of this viewpoint, where empiricism can be used when needed but disregarded at other moments. Instead of allowing materialism to flexibly work alongside the immaterial human mind, the latter is disregarded wholesale. This makes him, if anything, logically consistent, but ironically it makes his future Communist ideals fall short of success in much the same manner as Capitalism does—by denying the human element when creating political economies.

This, of course, assumes that you are like me and place a high value on human flourishment (to a certain exclusive degree) and the systems which take that into consideration. But I digress.

Moral Impositions and Structural Analysis

Marx never asserts immorality on the Capitalist system, only that it operates according to certain necessary principles. This refutes the idea from people who only know Marx from pop-culture or high school history class that he considered capitalism “evil”.

Now he most certainly considered the effects of capitalism to be destructive and exploitative—symptoms that we DO give moral weight. But this is like the classic example of not judging the lion for eating the gazelle. Marx critiques capitalism not so that you may morally judge it, not even to reform it, but to transcend it out of a sense of your own interests. His belief was truly that a better life existed for most humans beyond capitalism, and his analysis of its structure points to that underlying goal.

Marx is also not coming up with anything new, necessarily, when he writes Capital. He is literally just describing the operating behavior of capitalism as a structure. Problems with his analysis can certainly be made, but asserting that he misinterpreted, redefined, or distorted capitalism is disingenuous, I feel. If you have a problem with Marx, then you have a problem with Adam Smith or any of the other prominent theorists that he was well-read and based a lot of his work on.

All that we will learn in Capital is how the means of production is represented in capitalism. That phrase “means of production”, is theoretically tied to every form of society which produces things. It is not a phrase unique to one political-economy or the other, but simply a way of describing the methods used to achieve the production of commodities which can then be exchanged—a behavior that all collective groups of human beings have partaken in. As we happen to live under a capitalist system, we thus refer to the means of production as the process by which products are created and exchanged according to capitalist-specific protocol.

Social Relations and Labor

Heinrich claims that individual acts of exchange occur in all forms of society, past and present, but the unique aspect of capitalism is that almost everything is exchangeable. If value can be produced in some capacity, then it can be exchanged, or sold, just as well. Contrast this mentality with the people of yore who, of their own means, would have produced a lot for their own use but not for exchange. It may very well be that a peasant’s wife would have owned a loom and knew how to make clothes. Bowls and utensils would have been hand-made, and generally Marx would have described the average person as being somewhat of an “artisan”, or a craftsman of their own personal devices. Of course exchanges still occurred for things like these, but as mentioned of the term “reproduction”, the general social practice was that people owned the means of production by which they could, by their own labor, reproduce what was necessary for their survival and livelihoods.

Critically, that social practice is what Marx keys in on to distinguish himself from more classical economists of his day. Heinrich says of Marx, “…it was not the thought processes of individuals that are fundamental, but rather the social relations in which the individuals are embedded at any given time.”1

Capitalism is not just a means of exchange for products created in a certain manner, but a set of social relations which enforce that manner of exchange. As a matter of fact, when people act according to exchange in this way they reinforce, or reproduce, the social relations which prop it up in the first place. To this extent, Marx says that people actually don’t even know that what they are doing is reinforcing capitalism by adhering to its rules.

Marx details this social aspect because it is helpful for him in accounting for his value theory, or more commonly known as the labor theory of value (LTV). This is a contentious theory that I’m unsure of it having been “disproven” or simply disliked by the predominantly conservative and capitalist critics I’ve come across. Yet Marx builds his entire economic philosophy off of it so it is fundamental to understanding him.

If we start with a baseline understanding that humans engage in exchange with one another, then Marx uses LTV as a framework for how that exchange operates within the overall social relations of a collective. Following that, labor has to then produce value by which exchange can occur.

Labor itself is not valuable. Labor creates a product (or service, these are interchangeable) which is exchanged, and then value is rendered.

There are lots of other more intricate terms for describing the different types of labor and values, but I would like to keep this as high-level as possible.

An average measurement of value then appears according to the socially-constituted labor times necessary for producing that value. Simply put, the average value of a product is that which all producers can render it under normal, non-extraneous conditions. Exchange gathers to it the measurable and objective standards by which it can occur, and thus value first exists within it. Value is not inherent, again, to labor itself or any individual commodity (something which can be exchanged) but is bestowed in the act of exchange, which is itself fundamentally social.

Taking our previous example at the beginning of the section: the peasant family would produce everything (or most) they needed for daily reproduction, but if they never exchanged those products, not only would they not be considered “commodities”, but they would also hold no value. In a capitalist system value is only, as we just explained, bestowed on items which are engaged in exchange. Foregoing that process consequently foregoes a product’s value as well; they lie outside the realm of social relations.

Money and Fetishism

Money is actually the solution to a problem. Commodity owners (we have yet to arrive at capital yet) want to exchange for another commodity that has a use-value2 to them. Yet, Marx says there is no general equivalent with which each of them can be traded for. The solution is to create a universal equivalent with which the two or more commodities can serve as an agent of the “social act”. Thus, real “money” is created.

This is a necessary step in Marx’s thought, as commodity owners “already acted before thinking”. Heinrich remarks that this stands in contrast to someone like John Locke with his “silent contract”, that money is not a deliberate determination but a compulsory one. What this ends up meaning is that Marx’s value theory, or his rendering of it, is actually a monetary theory of value, where the commodity-form makes no sense without the value-form which is found adequate only in money.

Heinrich delineates three functions of money:

Serving as the general measure of value, where “abstract labor” is the common substance. “So it is not money that makes commodities commensurable but the common reference to abstract labor.” A price is therefore the expression of value of a commodity, and it only serves really as an “ideal capacity”. If all commodities were to change price, then you have not a change in magnitudes of value, but in the value of money itself; this is what results in inflation and deflation.
A means of circulation. Commodities metamorphosize into new ones by means of this act, where the material substance of this is one use-value for another. The basic equation is Commodity—Money—Commodity (C-M-C). The precapitalist exchange of products is fundamentally different from this process, where a use-value would be traded for a use-value. I’ll give you 5 eggs for 2 loaves of bread. But the commodity becomes an integral part of this act of circulation, wherein also money is orbited by the commodities, being exchanged on both ends of the equation. Since commodity owners are only concerned with the other commodity they seek to acquire, symbolic money is sufficient; therefore, things like paper money which have no value can be substituted as “symbols of value”.
An independent embodiment of value. Real money becomes the “material being of abstract wealth” and the “material symbol of physical wealth”. Abstract wealth because use-values and their value can only be imagined, and physical wealth because money as a material object has value and can itself be exchanged for commodities and therefore transformed into a use-value.

A particular failing of Marx, for which he can take no blame, is the assumption that money was to always be linked to a particular commodity. In his time, and up until recently, gold served this function. Heinrich actually provides a short synopsis of the post-WW2 ethos and the Bretton Woods agreement to make American dollars the global reserve currency. Even at that time, dollars would still be backed by gold, but it was the only currency backed by a commodity, while all the others had a fixed exchange rate to the dollar.

This was only applicable to state central banks though, and individuals could still redeem their currency for gold. Yet, by the 60s and 70s, too much money was then in circulation to maintain the coupling of dollar and gold, and thus the gold standard was abolished along with fixed exchange rates.

The assumption of the money-commodity is Marx’s failure, but not the idea of the general equivalent whereby commodities must relate to one another in some way in order to be exchanged. Only by taking a look at interest further along, says Heinrich, does the error make more sense, as it means money-commodities are simply a transitory state of affairs instead of a particular mode of capitalist production. We will continue to operate on Marx’s assumption about money for the rest of the article to stay consistent with his analysis, foreknowledge aside.

The fetishism of commodities and money presents a stark diagnosis then. Capitalism attributes innate value to these two where there are none. The real value lies in the social relations between humans where labor is concerned. If you look at a price tag, there is a sense that the product is worth that amount of money, instead of looking at it as worth the amount of labor expended in creating it.

Of course again, we know that labor by itself is worth nothing. The difference is that this labor is now tied to use-values which are being exchanged (commodities), which is worth something.

Money becomes the final form of this fetishistic behavior since it is the universal equivalent. It does nothing by itself, though we socially attribute this ability to it. Heinrich explains, “In the case of money, whether it is a money commodity or a piece of paper, a social relationship appears as an objective property of a thing.”3 A sort of “spectral objectivity” is granted to money on the basis of these properties.

Marx uses an analogy of lions, tigers, and hares mulling about the world along with the animal existing alongside them. If you know anything about software development (though perhaps not the best example due to its somewhat abstract nature), it would be like working with variables which hold integers and the Integer class itself, which those variables are instantiated from. The form walks alongside the incarnation, which makes no sense at all.

The illusion is that money possesses value intrinsic to itself, but in reality it is a token for future labor since it is used in the circulation of commodity exchange.

But all of this time that we have spoken about behavior and value, they have been treated as a theoretically ironclad way of doing things which are not always the case. Heinrich extrapolates that because value-objectivity is very specific human behavior, it is not predetermined to always operate in the same manner. In principle, this behavior can change, meaning a society without commodities or money is conceivable. Likely? Hopefully? Those are different questions.

Capital and Exploitation

The basis of capital’s exploitative nature is bound up within our previous understandings of value, labor, and money, yet capital itself has yet to enter the picture. Now we can touch on what “capital” exactly is and where it leads.

Because money has taken on this illusory quality of value-in-itself, then it too enters the sphere of circulation as an independent expression of value. This independence it seeks to maintain, and so the circulatory exchange changes, from C—M—C, to one where money consummates the flow: M—C—M. No advantage is found in doing this though; you’ve merely bought and sold a commodity for the exact same price.

The general formula for capital and the advantage of money then follows as M—C—M’ where M’ is greater than M. Heinrich says “In this movement, money not only retains its independent form, it also increases itself, so that it really does become the aim of the whole process.”

Another definition would be “the permanent existence of value”. The independence of money within circulation and as a value-in-itself finds itself expressed as capital—and the entire economy of modernity relies on this perception.

This movement that capital performs is referred to as self-valorizing value. The increase in value from M to M’ is, what Marx termed, surplus value.

The first critical point to make: “…the movement of capital is an end in itself, unlimited and ceaseless.” The previous bourgeois expression of C—M—C was concerned with the acquisition of use-values for the satisfaction of a measured need, to whatever limit. This is not so for capital—“The aim of capitalist production is surplus value and not the satisfaction of needs.”4

We are reminded that moral valuations like “greed” do not enter the picture as a result of this process. Competition among capitalists compels this behavior, or the risk of bankruptcy threatens to put them out of the game. Judgement can still very well be heaped on the structure as a whole, though, for what it renders—unlimited valorization may not be rooted in greed, but it can most certainly induce it.

Further along, we discover where capital can reap its excesses: in the form of labor-power.

“The owner of money must find a commodity on the market whose use values possesses the quality of being a source of value, so that the use of this commodity creates value, and more value than the commodity itself costs.”5

Labor-power is the commodity-form of the human labor you produce when, say, you go to work at your job. The labor that you do is a source of value, and that value is greater than the value of that which is being exchanged by the efforts of your labor. Stick with me here.

Two preconditions need to be met in this arrangement with labor-power (within Capitalism at least):

The sellers of labor-power must be legally free people. Slaves and serfs do not count since they cannot exchange their labor-power for anything, and thus the owner of money cannot encounter them on the market.
Sellers of labor-power must not possess any means of production, of any substantive property, otherwise they would not be driven to do so.

The capital-relation is then the class of property owners interacting with the large mass of propertyless, legally free people.

Because labor-power must be produced, Marx determines that a certain amount of labor-time is necessary for doing so. But labor-power must also reproduce itself i.e. the means of subsistence required of a human being (food, clothes, shelter, etc.) He concludes: “…the value of labour-power is the value of the means of subsistence necessary for the maintenance of its owner.” A certain amount of time must go into the production and reproduction of this power.

Hence the exploitative nature of capital begins to put itself on display. For what ends up being the basis for this system working, at all, is the unequal distribution of value that is attained through use of this labor-power. What ends up happening is that the daily value of labor-power (which is necessary for its own reproduction) is lower than that which is created in a day by the use of it. This gives capital its “occult” quality by which value seems to create “new value”. And we are not here talking about wages quite yet, so estrange the two ideas for now; we are focused on this abstract value which is later manifested by wages.

The daily amount of labor-power is only a portion of that value which is created in that same day. The consequence is that the worker exceeds the amount of labor-power necessary to reproduce his life in the creation of this new value, which is where surplus value derives from.

The example given is that over the course of an 8 hour workday, if 3/8 of that is the daily amount of labor-power necessary for reproduction, then 5 hours constitutes the surplus value. Only 3 hours of work was necessary for the worker, but 8 was required of him, where the extra 5 hours of value were still generated by him, but not rewarded. The worker receives a lesser value from the capitalist than that which he produced, which Marx defines as exploitation.

Crucially, this definition can be misunderstood. As stated before, Marx does not refer to exploitation in terms of wages, or with other issues like working conditions, but only in terms of this discussion surrounding “value”. The issue at hand is the fact that the producer, the worker, is receiving only a portion of the produced value. Exploitation is still occurring even if you are receiving a considerably good wage and the working conditions are fantastic.

The laws of commodity exchange find this behavior of exploitation to be in compliance, not infringement. Exploitation is quite literally built into the system; Marx’s view is, of course, the one that most people know but fail to understand why he holds based on all that we’ve discussed so far: if you want to abolish exploitation, you have to abolish capitalism, and all the things for which it stands.

Furthermore, valorization rests upon the appropriation of “unpaid labor-time”. You are paid for your labor-power and not the actual product produced by that labor-power. This is not well understood by everyday consciousness which confuses the existence of exploitation with the magnitude of a wage. As it goes, people don’t feel as if they are exploited if the wage is of a sufficient amount. Seemingly, the wage itself doesn’t express the value of labor-power, but of labor itself.

Marx says this value of labor is “imaginary” and “irrational”. Labor itself has no value (as mentioned previously) but only creates value. The example of an 8 hour workday possessing a value of 8 hours of labor makes no sense—what did that labor produce in 8 hours, that is precisely what we want to know.

But all of this being confusing is just part of the essential relations of capital. The appearances of the way value, labor, and money operate are nothing more than that—illusions. Only with scientific inquiry into these relations, as Marx demonstrates, can the underlying relations of things be properly discovered.

Surplus, Profit, and More

A capitalist reaps a profit simply by advancing capital, where “advancement” refers to the turnover time in production time plus circulation time (circulation is a topic I have elected to disinclude here). It is a necessary period before receiving a valorized sum from that process.

Just as with money, labor, and value, there are mystical qualities to the way surplus value and profit relate to one another. They are not in fact the same. Surplus value is that new value created above the value of labor-power, its source being labor’s expenditure. Profit is, on the other hand, “…the surplus of the commodity’s value above the portion of capital advanced that is used in the commodity’s production.”6

Not just exploitation, capital also finds itself being appropriated alongside land and labor. These become sources of income which “pay for themselves” i.e. the labor-power of others is exploited for the owners of these things which don’t have to input any labor-power of there own (something we’ll touch on later).

The “reification of the relations of production” becomes a part of the understanding of the capitalist production process, where every labor process you could possibly begin is already a capitalist one, and therefore exploitative from the beginning. The abstract understanding of these processes finds itself in concrete form; it only takes material study, again, to discover why it works as it does. From there, determinations can be made as to why these processes are allowed to happen.

The connection between profit/interest (capital), landed property (rent), and labor (wage) expresses what Marx calls the “Trinity Formula”. These three things are the “reified” social relations of capitalism.

Where primitive societies fetishized the magical abilities of certain items (think of items belonging to Catholic saints, or their very bones), capital and land find they possess these same qualities in modern times. Nothing has changed, only the historical process of production has developed to such a point where our determinations of what takes on “personification” has adjusted.

Interest and Credit

Money becomes potential capital when it is lent as a special type of commodity which “sells” the ability to yield a profit within a specific period of time. What you “pay” for this ability is interest, doing so with the profit that was made from the help of this special commodity.

This is nothing new, as lending at interest has been an old practice for some time now. What makes the process different under capitalism is that large numbers of loans specifically serve to enrich the debtors; money is borrowed to use as capital. Interest-bearing capital follows a circulation path that looks like the following:

M-M-C-M’-M’’

Capital is then advanced twice under this schema, which also means a double return is rendered as well. The industrial capitalist receives his cut first (which contains profit), then the lender (which contains interest from the profit).

Those who own interest-bearing capital are known as money-capitalists while those who borrow this capital are functional capitalists. The former operates by putting his property at the disposal of others, which gives interest the appearance of being fruit of the ownership of capital which seems to exist outside of the production process. Just by owning it can one bear fruit—it need not even produce anything.

Because of this, interest becomes an expression of the valorization of capital and the exploitation of labor-power. In our circulation expression, M-M’ appears to multiply all by itself. Marx says that interest-bearing capital becomes the most “superficial and fetishized form” of capital, where “…the social relation is consummated in the relation of a thing, money, to itself. […] Thus it becomes as completely the property of money to create value, to yield interest, as it is the property of pear-trees to bear pears.” (Capital 3:516)

All of this is encapsulated in the modern credit system regulated by banks and the government. Banks operate by offering a deposit interest rate for those who keep money in their system while charging higher rates for loans; the difference makes up their profit. As we should know by now though, banks are not just sitting on your money; they are in fact “creating” more money: credit money.

Credit money is a promise to pay that functions like money. Unless you go to the bank and request cash in hand, you are operating with credit money. Because in fact, banks are only required to keep a fraction of actual genuine money on hand. When that genuine money is requested, credit money is then, and only then, eliminated.

Most loans are not made in money, but in this form of credit money.

Just as well, banks are not dependent on deposits, but can also borrow from state central banks (hello Federal Reserve). These central banks can create “real” money as opposed to the promissory nature of credit money. The removal of commodity-backed moneys was both a prerequisite for this new credit money system, but also because of the crises inherent to capitalism. When a crisis would happen, a “run on the bank” would occur where people would try to withdraw not just money, but the gold that backed it as well. At the same time the need for credit grew, so more banknotes were necessary but impossible to provide without suspending regulation. “The money commodity proved to be an avoidable impediment to capitalist reproduction”7 i.e. capitalism could not survive unless it removed this barrier to circulation.

Speculation

To speak briefly on the “stock exchange”, Marx refers to circulating claims, securities, and stocks as fictitious capital. They are named as such because the owner’s capital is advanced only once, where it will be advanced a second time by the business which the original owner expects to make a profit. These things represent claims to payments based on the future value of the respective enterprise. The value of these payments are not based on contemporary developments, but rather expectations concerning future developments. In short, the entire market of speculation is basically a euphemism for “vibes-based trading” to use a modern term.

Opinions and Commentary

From here on, I’ll be including Heinrich’s and my own opinions concerning the capitalist system and Marx’s analysis and diagnosis of it. I believe that what I have presented in the first section of content is a sufficiently comprehensive understanding of what capital is to the point where the reader can feel safe making educated judgements upon it. At the end of the day this can all get incredibly complex, but the core messaging is fairly simple and that’s what I intend to hit on.

The “Free” Market

The sphere of circulation or commodity exchange, within whose boundaries the sale and purchase of labour-power goes on, is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of man. It is the exclusive realm of Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham. Freedom, because both buyer and seller of a commodity, let us say, of labour-power, are determined only by their own free will. They contract as free persons, who are equal before the law. Their contract is the final result in which their joint will finds a common legal expression. Equality, because each enters into relation with the other as with a simple owner of commodity, and they exchange equivalent for equivalent. Property, because each disposes only of what is his own. And Bentham, because each looks only to his own advantage. The only force bringing them together, and putting them into relation witch each other, is the selfishness, the gain and the private interest of each.8

The above quote sarcastically summarizes the fantasy of the “free” market. There is no such thing, as there has never, and will never, be a market that is entirely free, in a libertarian sense, to exist unregulated, unburdened, and independent of anything besides itself.

First of all, this is true because as we have noted, capitalism like most things operates off of a vast entanglement of social relations. That in itself is already a natural regulatory body which the market has to deal with. What if certain people don’t want to trade with others, or any number of petty issues concerning prices, logistics, or bad-blood gets in the way?

Second, the term “free” is a misnomer, as it does not mean what proponents of this idea think it means. “Free” in free market only means the freedom of capital to flow in exchange. People will look at the modern American economy with its subsidization of industry, regulations, and legal barriers and say that we lack a “free” market, that if only we were “free” of these roadblocks that everything would somehow be magically guided by the invisible hand to great economic success. But none of those elements keep capital from flowing.

It would be as if we said a river isn’t “free” to flow because of bends and turns in the river or even to the extent that man has engineered dams or bridges in its way. Whether it remains untouched or managed to some capacity, the river still flows on. The same is true of the market.

A truly “unfree” market is one in which the commodity-form is blocked from circulation. In today’s society, not a single soul is blocked from the buying or selling of commodities; if you have the money for it, you can have it. Prior political-economies did not act in this manner.

A peasant was legally obligated to sell their labor to their lord; even in the instances where peasants could move and live on another lord’s land, they were still placing themselves under an obligation to a new host. To the extent that a peasant went to the village and sold commodities at market, it would have been excess product that exceeded the necessary quota from their lord.

Likewise, guild monopolies were a real thing in early urban societies in Europe. Legally-speaking, if you weren’t a part of certain guilds, then you were not allowed to sell certain commodities that fell under the production of those guilds. Stuff like clothes, tools, even bread would fall under such laws.

Notice how most of the aspects of “unfree” markets involve the State preventing trade. Conservatives and libertarians think that the government regulating an industry is them “restricting” it, but in reality modern governments regulate out of a sense of protecting industry. That may not make sense to you, but to the capitalists who have made themselves into some of the most economically influential people in the world by way of their large, consolidated enterprises, it is all part of the plan.

The “plan” isn’t some shady backroom deal made in D.C. or Tel Aviv; it’s more of an unspoken practice among insiders to protect not just their own industries, but capitalism itself. To always operate in a manner that produces the most profit and keeps capital flowing. One industry gets restricted, another opens up. Why is American coal country so horribly broken and left behind? Because alternatives that offered greater profits came along which capitalists could rotate their business into, namely foreign oil and gas. Auto manufacturers in Detroit? Sent off to Japan, Mexico, and elsewhere.

Capitalism was never about supporting “American manufacturing” or creating a sustainable economy; it has always and will always be about where capital can flow the freest so that profits can be maximized. Why do you think AI is this huge bubble if not for the flow of capital into the tech industry over the past however many years?

To reiterate: this was always going to happen. There was never a point where America was focused only on itself and making the economy work to the benefit and health of her people. Globalization since the second world war has simply made the process more open, obvious, and easy to operate.

So the modern state is literally built on the back of free trade. The modern state’s only goal, in fact, is to see the movement of capital and profits sustained. People see “regulation” and “free” as words contrary to one another but that only displays an ignorance of how markets actually work. We actually get on to Trump for this without even knowing it—we’ll say “Why doesn’t Trump go after businesses that hire illegals? Why doesn’t he outlaw companies that move overseas? Why doesn’t he forces businesses to stay and work in America?” And the answer is because capital must be allowed to flow! To restrict things in this manner would truly make us an “unfree” economy!

It’s not about America, it’s about THE GLOBAL ECONOMY. Politicians, capitalists, corporate CEOs, they couldn’t give two shits about any individual country or people group, only that capitalism continues to reign supreme on a global scale. Like the beginning quote says, the only thing guiding these entities is selfishness for what can be gained, and when the profits dry up, it’s off to the next industry which offers a better capacity for surplus value.

Despite regulations and conditioning for the market to prevent harm to the “organic” process, the market still managed to advance itself to the point of wide-spread destructive tendencies. The market is MEANT to do this, it is not the result of Capitalists exploiting governance, loopholes, or anything else, but Capitalism is predestined to consolidate and kill competition. It never was built to be “organic”.

Coercion

The mystified “freedom” that is typically argued for is this idea that everyone is a “free agent” in society, that you can determine who you do business with, what you trade for, where you do it, what particular job you can get, etc. Contrast this with the direct coercion of feudalism, capitalism appears to be “free”. Reality does not speak to this being the case.

Modern “freedom” hides a dark underbelly of coercion worse than feudalism. Feudalism at least openly states the obligations and duties of each party; capitalism characterizes false promises to the tune of “do whatever you want” while it railroads everyone into slavery.

Because unlike the serf or peasant, you have NO MEANS by which to provide for yourself. No land, no tools, no livestock, no plants, no family, the list goes on and all. Simply put, you lack the means of production, the means with which to reproduce your own life independent of anyone else. And short of inheriting it, there is no way to gain the means without playing the game—a game which has become so insanely fixed at this point that even a blind person could see it.

“The exploited consent to their own exploitation because in a society of private property they have no other possibility for securing their livelihood.”9 You MUST get a job, because how else are you going to survive? You MUST listen to your stupid fucking boss, because otherwise how are you going to get money to eat?

You can’t just wake up and milk the cow, grab an egg or two from the coop, and cook it for breakfast. You have to work 40+ hours a week at a job that exploits your ability to labor so you can make money backed by nothing, commute along shitty roads to the grocery store where you can buy fake food marked up to make a profit, and then sit alone in some residence that you don’t own, alone, with no hope of escape.

In a system that says you have unlimited agency, you in fact really have NONE. Your entire life is owed to the necessity for money and the only way to accrue it is by consenting to your own exploitation. “Oh well you signed the contract, you didn’t have to take this job!”—says the literal devil as he hunches over your shoulder. Tell me, detractors who say stupid shit like this: what else can you possibly do if you don’t wish to participate in society this way? Is it possible to live a simple life and yet also have all of the necessary human connections which make one happy and fulfilled? Or is it the case that everything is priced out of the hands of 99% of people?

The entirety of Capitalism is built upon coercion and being compelled to act against your own health, self-interest, and desires. The section “Capital and Exploitation” covers the way that happens well enough, having profit scraped off the back of workers who are forced to go above what is required of their own lives. Humanity does not require a lot in the material realm to warrant a good life, yet we are swamped by material goods and live lives of quiet desperation for things greater than ourselves and what we physically possess.

What is “Private Property”?

Here is another misconception that capitalism fools people into believing. “Private property” does not refer to the things you personally own, create, or use—it refers to things which are intended for capital i.e. things meant to be used as means of production.

You could argue that pretty much anything could be used as a “means of production”, and while this may be true, there’s a sort of intuitive difference in what the meaning is supposed to capture. Personal property are small looms, your own farm land, or power tools you have in your shed. Private property is commercial farm land, factories, corporate offices and proprietary software.

The former is used for the reproduction of the worker’s life, where the fruits are immediately owned and visible to them, while the latter is built entirely on exploitation of those same workers at a certain level of exclusion. When you build a society built around the means of survival being only available to the few who can actually produce it, then it logically follows that if you choose to not give up a portion of the value which you produce (surplus value) by engaging with the capital system, then you just can’t survive at all. That’s the definition of coercion.

Private property has the means of production excluded to the ownership of only those willing and able to play the game. They are, again, legally distinct objects which can only be used by agreeing with the capitalist to give up your surplus labor for a wage. Otherwise, the objects are not “free” to use, being kept behind fencing, buildings, warehouses, etc.

It’s not that property should necessarily be free to use, but if specific types of property’s success hinge on the exploitation of labor-power, then we should expect some type of reimbursement or compensation.

Because capitalism wants to exploit your labor through the use of these elements of private property, there’s no reason that they should be excluded from the community which is forced to make use of them in the first place. We wonder why the social element of society has died out, it’s because there are no longer shared elements between anyone. Everything that we engage with is a form of capital—the electrical company you pull energy from, the public utilities, the grocery store. We don’t depend on one another like genuine communities used to; all of our survival needs are met by the capitalist and his bevy of industries.

Imagine Rome, with all of its public bathhouses and amenities, in modern America. It’s unthinkable, because everything is subject to private equity and ownership. There can be no communal spring or well, no road upkeep by citizens, no offering free food to those in need or simply just to give it away (health violations goy!) Everything must be done for the sake of profit, which is the entire point of private property.

Private property is a collective relationship between people and things, not one person and a thing. This is, at least, Marx’s argument. The State legally enforces not just the exclusion of society from tooling, but also the profit which the owners of said tooling receive by the exploitation of workers which are otherwise excluded from their usage. The possession of a tool by an individual is not what we are talking about; we are talking about industries which relate to the greater mass of society and practically impact us all.

Humans do not naturally operate on the basis of private property either, as history and anthropology has demonstrated that most of human existence did not have this exclusive element of production like we do under capitalism. This exclusive nature had to be invented, enforced, and maintained over time. In fact, capitalism was only able to be established by direct State intervention. Heinrich brings up the early modern English history where to enable capitalist production, peasants were forcibly expelled from their land (or rather, the Lord’s land) so as to work in factories and centers of manufacturing.

This direct line of intervention by the State acts as the “ideal personification of the total national capital.”(MECW, 25:266) meaning the State embodies the general interest of capital to ensure the most profitable accumulation possible. Therefore, the State is actively in the business of ensuring not only the existence of private property, but also its effectiveness.

To deny private property isn’t tantamount to people showing up at your door demanding all of your belongings. First and foremost it is simply the recognition that property being “private” is a historical invention that once did not exist and therefore does not precondition the future into being obligated to behave that way. Second, it is the recognition that an entire community is involved in the production process and should have ownership over their own fruits of labor. Gatekeeping surplus value behind “ownership” of capital is one that we should ethically detest, as it is the surest way to create slaves of a people.

Risk

A common capitalist trope is to say that the owner of capital should incur the “reward” of profit because they were the ones who “risked” the enterprise in the first place. This is, like so many other platitudes, a mystification of what is actually occurring.

Acknowledge first of all that value does not come from risk—it comes from labor (which I am compelled to remind you for the third time in this article has no inherit value until being used to produce something). There are a ton of things in life which are risky but carry no value to them. To the extent that humans do risky things for the thrill of it, that analogy doesn’t quite apply to economic situations. “Oh no I accidentally stumbled into a 1 million dollar business investment, what a thrill!”—stuff like that doesn’t happen quite like someone going cliffjumping or skydiving, where potential risk is the agent of value.

The value of capital comes with ownership, not risk. Simply having the legal rights to pieces of private property is enough to guarantee reward since surplus value can be appropriated from the workers that labor for that property.

So what do capitalists actually “risk” when they play this game? They risk losing capital. If they lose capital, if they fail to scrape enough excess off the top, the worst they may have to endure is bankruptcy and a return to wage-labor. The capitalist’s worst fear is becoming like us: propertyless, without agency, dependent.

Contrast this with the worker, who has to deal with actual risk concerning the labor which produces the capitalist’s surplus value. The worker is constantly fighting a battle of subsistence; if a business goes under, they are more than likely immediately subject to material harm by loss of wages in the form of hunger, loss of shelter, or lack of healthcare. Working conditions must also be mentioned, since the capitalist need not work in his own environment since he pays laborers to do it for him. Rampant cost-cutting is always a feature of capitalism, so these environments are typically ok at best and dangerous at worst; the early days of capitalism were wrought with detestable conditions for the workers in factories and manufacturing centers, and only by hard fought union and worker’s movements were advancements forced on to the capitalists.

Think also on the fact that when it comes to genuinely BIG business, they have become “too big to fail”. Our most pertinent example is of course the 2008 housing crisis where the government stepped in to bail out these massive corporations because if they were allowed to go under they would “destroy the economy” aka “destroy a lot of capital”. So where is the risk in that? They just get to survive indefinitely off of not just the exploitation of labor, but on the taxpayer dime as well? In situations like these, 2008 being just the most recent example, the government is quick to socialize the consequences, and yet the rewards are privatized to the owners. Everyone must bear the brunt of what these corporations do to us but somehow it’s impossible, inconceivable to adopt a system which socializes the fruits of labor instead of privatizing it.

At the end of the day, “risk” is never a problem for the capitalist. Even small capitalists who run businesses with small margins and statistically fail the most can get out of the debt incurred by way of government reprieves. Only the worker has to deal with genuine risk to his life and health since he has no means to provide for himself beyond what the capitalist can offer in the form of a wage and the conditions under which that wage is “earned”.

Besides, where does your “right” to the rewards of our labor extend to my “right” to it? All the time you hear this argument of “rights” being used to justify why the owner of capital gets to treat workers a certain way. Of course we know that it’s because legally speaking, the idea of everyone being a “free agent” means that you are voluntarily giving up the surplus value of your labor to the job that you undertake, but as we noted in the section “Coercion”, we know that to not be how things actually work. The “right” to the rewards of capital ownership are therefore not justified by any sort of “risk” taken in gathering it, but only by legal enforcement.

“Why don’t you set up your own business then?”

This is a question to ask someone in a younger America where opportunity abounded and the market wasn’t yet saturated. Modern American exchange is ruthless and most businesses fail right out of the gate. Is that an excuse to not try? No, but it is being realistic.

Anyway, most markets have consolidated to a point where competition is pretty much futile without a massive upfront investment in capital, which means you more than likely already had the capital from another endeavor to pursue this path.

If you aren’t an already preexisting fast food chain, how can you hope to compete with the old guard? Same goes with any industry; a principle of capitalism is that whoever gets to market first typically stays on top indefinitely unless some major shock, upset, or issue runs up against them.

Setting up a business, legally, is actually fairly easy since the State is invested in the flow of capital. But depending on your local competition, the breadth of customers you are trying to reach, and the product you are offering, the juice may not be worth the squeeze. You’re probably going to work MORE hours as a capitalist than as a wage-laborer.

Then there is the ethical question of “Do I want to exploit people in my own community, of my own blood, for the sake of profit?” Yall know I’m not a moralist, yet at the same time I have a sense of empathy towards my own race—I want the best for everyone, even if most people are retards. I’d rather find a way to cooperate with people that leaves the natural-born, or hard-fought, leaders at the top while everyone else works towards a certain level of self-sufficiency and mutual exchange built on community, not excess.

Historical Examples

Henry Ford is said to have had a $60 million surplus in 1919 due to the success of his motor company. Famously, he wanted to decrease the price of his vehicles and raise the wages of his workers while disregarding increases to the dividends paid out to shareholders. The Dodge brothers (owning 10% stake in the company) sued him over this, where the Michigan Supreme Court ruled in favor of the flow of capital i.e. profitability was the ONLY concern with which a company could concern itself with, not the workers. The court ruled that "A business corporation is organized and carried on primarily for the profit of the stockholders. The powers of the directors are to be employed for that end." (emphasis added).

Ford was legally disallowed to interfere with the profitably of the company for whatever reason, whether it was shrewdly used to shrink the influence of the Dodge Brothers (who wanted to use dividends to start their own competing business) or more “nobly”, to pay his workers more.

Gemini gave me synopses on plenty of 19th century strikes that were important precedents of State influence on capital as well. The Great Railroad Strike (1877) & The Pullman Strike (1894) saw the State literally use Federal troops to enforce labor for the sake of railroad profits.

Modern history is filled with these examples of the State enforcing the flow of capital against the people’s ability to reject work out of fear of failure to find proper subsistence.

The Logical End State

A phrase you have probably seen online reads “The System is not broken, it’s working exactly as intended.” Cliche as it may have become, it’s true—the underlying political-economy adopted by modernity, Capitalism, has an end-state that totally disregards humanity and what causes us to tick.

That’s why you see modern labor as tedious, boring, mentally draining, physically tiring, and unrewarding. It’s not meant to enrich your life or sustain you, but to USE you as a tool. You, as a human, are a tool of exploitation to the capitalist, nothing more and nothing less.

We have reached an end-state, especially with the advent of AI, where even jobs themselves are becoming obsolete. It is quite literally becoming the case that exploiting us is not even worth it anymore. You can only drain a person so much before they become a husk of what they once were.

So where does that leave us? If by 2030 everything they told us about “humans won’t own anything and be happy?” becomes true, what excuse do they have to keep us around? Nobody will be able to even afford to consume anymore, much less create.

Technofeudalism is I believe where we are headed. Capitalism will have reduced labor-power to such an extent that those with money and power will have no need of most of humanity save a small portion—and that portion will become permanent renters at the behest of their Capitalist lords. You will get none of the natural benefits that came with organic, traditional feudalism, but all of the associated negatives with both systems.

You will own nothing, but the system has crafted itself into such a fine tightrope which we are forced to walk across. We all make just enough money to get by, but not enough to be secure. Certainly not enough to escape the system wholesale or be fulfilled in any capacity. And if you kill yourself, well, there’s billions of others to take your place. It’s no sweat off the back of our governments that suicides are the highest they’ve ever been, male or female; there’s still enough willing slaves to take up their labor.

Communism and Alternatives

I’ve spoken my own peace at length concerning how I feel on this. Back to Marx, we obviously know how he diagnosed the effects of Capitalism. Communism was, to him, the historically necessary end-result of Capitalism, where by his analysis, a communist state was bound to happen once certain material conditions were met.

Right out of the gate I must say that I disagree with Marx’s diagnosis though his assessment of the situation is spot on. It is unfortunate that Capital and his analyses are hidden behind what he thought to be the solution to it all. In fact, Capital itself really doesn’t even talk about communism since it’s not the focus of the book.

A classless, racially egalitarian, Utopian society will never exist as long as biology continues to operate as we understand it to. Hierarchies cannot be broken—changed, perhaps—but not gotten rid of as a fundamental human structure. A Communist society is not one we should wish for, as it denies every vitalist impulse and understanding of individual human desire and free will which we value as Europeans.

Fascism and National Socialism are pertinent possibilities, though we did not get to see how they would play out as political-economies contra Capitalism due to international finance killing the baby in the crib during the world wars.

My proposal is Techno-Agrarianism. To avoid the overarching authoritarianism of the previous ideas, efforts towards eugenic depopulation must be made and then the remaining populace must somehow be given the opportunity to freely work and live on their own land and be self-sustainable. Citizens will no longer be dependent on laboring for a wage, but will feed, cloth, and shelter themselves as the fruits of their own work.

This need not be done without the use of technology. Markets must still exist, but innovation is not locked to Capitalism as people think. Innovation is dependent on the human drive and spirit, not the exploitation of labor. We need not go back to candles and butter churns, but we must find a way to produce commodities without relying on self-valorization and exploitation. This, I must admit, is where I have no clue how to proceed. I am interested to hear your theories on potential replacements for our current system.

For a replacement IS necessary, make no mistake about it. Capitalism has slowly but surely reduced us to a husk of a people. It is the Jew’s ultimate weapon, the structure where usury finds its home. If we want to be a truly free, healthy, and proud people once more, the shackles of modern capitalist economics must be taken off for us to try something different. I hope that in my efforts here I have at least educated you on the way this all works and the problems inherent to it.

The Decadent Axis

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