Capital Killed the Tribe

Anti-capitalism has always been and will always be a popular human opinion. The relations that wealth cultivates between humans is predicated on an inhuman vector of the cosmos, one which brutally and mercilessly optimizes material organization for the consumption of energy. While capital at first must take a form that appeals to the primitive social organization of humans, it insinuates itself into that social organization so it can effect changes beyond any individual or collective's ability to stop. Anti-capitalist rhetoric and activism is nearly universally a waste of time and energy, but their deluded response is all-too-human and does not exculpate capital's effect on mankind. The foundational unit of social organization in contemporary society - the family - is a product of capitalism, cohering with a notion of individual, private property that can be abstracted from their pre-existing relations.

One of the stranger elements of anti-capitalist rhetoric is how little it seizes the millennia long history of civilization and capitalism in making its critique. Then again, of course, it makes sense it doesn't, since the typical anti-capitalist doesn't possess a robust understanding of human history, and so is unfamiliar with how it could be leveraged to buttress their arguments. But it seems one should be able to point to the millennia preceding written history to document the incredible ability of capital to reorganize human social relations. That anti-capitalists do not, I believe, is because, on the one hand, the history of humanity's transition away from tribal to mass civilizations is more an argument that we must go through capitalism, rather than trying to stop or go around it. On the other hand, 99% of people's understanding of history basically goes no further back than Rome, at best, with an overwhelming majority seeming to believe that only the last couple hundred years of human history have been significant or meaningful.

The fact that capitalism has always and everywhere gradually dissolved and reformulated human social relations for all of recorded human history is hard to surmount with limp-wristed suggestions that one can simply appoint committees to solve all problems of economic justice. Further, if such a form of social organization were so successful, why has it yet failed to arise? Even assuming communism is just, if your social organization is insufficient to sustain itself against encroaching imperial powers, it doesn't matter. The only meaningfully just social system must be one that operates with some reliability. If anything, again, here history skewers the anti-capitalist's position - we started out non-capitalist - but capitalism as a form of social organization is always stronger. Societies that aren't organized along concepts of individual private property always get steamrolled by those that do. Even if one grants capitalism is at least partially unjust, it still outperforms communism historically for the simple reason that every non-capitalist system was either conquered by or assimilated into capitalist systems, and therefore actual justice effected is nullified by not existing.

Tribes as a form of social organization are required to take a particular form. Capitalism has an advantage over any particular form of human social organization for the simple reason that it isn't wedded to form. Capitalism can take any form. Since it can take any form, it can exist under a much wider variety of conditions than the tribe. Any attempt to "get away from capitalism" short of returning to conditions of primitive tribalism is futile, because either capitalism will re-emerge or what elements of capitalism remaining will destroy the attempt. Not to mention, we're already ~10,000 years into evolutionary selection by mass civilization, so there's no going back even just genetically or morphologically. Unless you're literally part of a remote tribe or only one or two generations away from such a lifestyle, then the majority of your genes were selected for specifically by civilization, genes that would not likely have been equally selected by more primitive circumstances. Not just human social relations but the human form itself has been impacted deeply by capital.

This might latch into another reason deep human history is rarely incorporated into critiques of capitalism: if one understands human history, it is easy to identify civilization with capitalism.