On Capitalism

Capitalism. Few phenomena are more central to our lives. As MGTOW try to be intellectually reflective men, we should be interested in trying to get some critical perspective on capitalism. It can be said with little controversy that capitalism is a defining element of western culture. Mathew Arnold, a British poet and cultural critic, defined culture as: “A pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know on all matters which most concern us the best which has been thought and said in the world. And through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits.”

My intention with this video is to put forward a brief, but not complete, critique of capitalism. But even here I must elaborate as to the meaning of my goal. It would not be unnatural to immediately suspect that by critique I must mean criticism, and then further conclude that for me to put forward a criticism of capitalism is to simultaneously and synonymously put forward a defense of socialism.

Yet neither are the case. In the first sense, I am not putting forward a criticism of capitalism but an exploratory exegesis on the subject itself. Another way to view this critique is to consider it as a very long story of what capitalism entails; namely, I plan to offer a value judgment free exposition of capitalism which will neither enumerate benefits or shortcomings as to frame the conversation in terms of benefits or shortcomings is to immediately inject value judgements into what I say about capitalism.

In the second sense, namely, that my motivations for a critique of capitalism must entail some defense of socialism is also incorrect. This very thought is itself illogical. Though capitalism is often juxtaposed conventionally as being an opposite to socialism, this is a failure in thought. What is the opposite of an apple? Is it an orange? Or is it chocolate? No. Apples, Oranges, and Chocolate do not have opposites. In this same way, capitalism and socialism do not have opposites less so that they are opposites of each other. It is through consistently hearing defenders of socialism posing critiques of capitalism, and defenders of capitalism posing critiques of socialism, by which these two are conventionally seen as opposites.

The truth is that both socialism and capitalism are independent entities that have certain irreconcilable differences yet also many similarities. Yet often we forget that there are alternatives to the two. After all, what would you call the guiding cultural force during the medieval period of Europe? Surely it was neither capitalism nor socialism.

So, I hope that by clarifying these two points around the spirit and motivation of this video, we can move on without suspicion as to its content.

Now, since I first picked up Nietzsche I became fascinated with his concept of genealogies of ideas; namely, following an idea backwards in time to what I would hope would be its origin. That is to say, I am interested in the history of ideas, with the people who articulate ideas, people that we usually call intellectuals, often times philosophers, but also writers, social scientists, and poets; people who try to think how things are held together, and how institutions and traditions are related to one another.

Capitalism was one of those subjects I recently became very interested in tracing. So, let me share with you some of the things I have come to discover. When people come to think about capitalism their first inclination is to turn to the business journals or to turn to economists to explain it to them. In business journals, we can read about which companies are more profitable and which are less so. We can learn which products people are buying and what new products are being released. We can find trends relating to employment, inflation, and so on.

Economists tend to focus on how one element of one market activity is related to other elements. For example, how money supply is related to inflation or how interest rates affect investment and consumer spending. However, while we tend to almost exclusively think of economics and economists when we think about capitalism, I would like to argue for the idea that there is a lot more to capitalism than economic issues. Capitalism is too important and complex to be left to the economists.

Capitalism involves a great deal more than what we typically think of as economic. It is a system, or rather, a variety of systems by which people compete and cooperate with one another. It is a system through which people try to satisfy their goals, their needs, their wants, and through which new goals, new needs, and new wants are constantly being created.

Capitalism is a system that has political pre-requisites and it has political effects. It is a system that has cultural effects. In fact, almost every aspect of the way we think about ourselves as individuals and as groups is influenced by capitalism. Let us take something that seems to be completely unrelated to capitalism such as the size and shape of the family. The question is this. Why is it that when capitalism first develops, the family tend to get larger in size; namely, that people tend to have more children. But then, as capitalism develops further, people tend to have fewer children despite the fact that they are better off.

MGTOW would argue that perhaps it was not capitalism itself that has caused the decline of the family, but perhaps TFM’s thesis that it was giving women rights. But here too we must ask ourselves why were women given rights in the first place. Let us put a few theories into place and see how they stand up.

The first theory on why women were given rights is that beta cucks just wanted to get laid so it was a form of mating strategy. The second theory is that businesses just wanted more labor in the workforce which in turn would drive labor prices down. The third theory is that socialists wanted to bring about a bigger government which they hoped women would vote in, ultimately leading to a great socialist revolution. But why cannot all three of these theories be true simultaneously?

If beta cucks were using women’s rights as a sexual strategy, then the question comes to mind of where did this influx of beta cucks come from? To answer this, I can point to the debate between Voltaire and Jean-Jacque Rousseau in the 18th century. The debate stemmed around the idea of luxury. The debate was triggered by the influx of cheaply available goods in society at large as a consequence of capitalistic activities. Voltaire argued that luxury ultimately enriches a nation as a whole. Rousseau, on the other hand, sided with the Romans and wisdom of antiquity in stating that luxury made men soft and weak. He argued that what was once considered luxury, like salt and sugar, soon become in the eyes of the people a necessity. Ultimately, with a steady consumption of luxury, man’s appetites become insatiable while he himself becomes averse to all which is hard and therefore become soft himself.

If we are to take Rousseau’s argument as sound, then it would follow that the increase of beta cucks was a direct consequence of luxury consumption, which in turn was only made possible by the efficiencies and cost reductions of capitalistic activities. So, we must conclude that the first theory in relation to why families decline in size are ultimately grounded in capitalism in the causal chain.

But what about the second theory; namely, that businesses wanted more labor in the work force. Well, this clearly has a capitalistic motivation as increasing the supply of workers depresses wages. In fact, as we look at who constitute the majority of open-border advocates, we find business tycoons almost universally represented. Do we truly believe that Zuckerberg wishes to chime in a great socialist revolution in which he would relinquish ownership of the means of production to the people? Surely not. It is more likely that certain socialist ideas simply make convenient bed fellows with capitalism and align well with capitalistic interests. However, if Zuckerberg is ultimately driven by socialist ideas, in this case they surely do not interfere with his capitalist sensibilities.

But what about the third theory; namely, that socialists wanted women to vote so that the size of the state would grow and therefore lead to a socialist revolution. Let us suppose this is true and grant it without challenge. Yet here we see a clear alignment of socialist interests with the capitalistic interests of the other two theories as well.

Indeed, why can socialist and capitalist interests not align on many fronts? Perhaps our failing in spotting these alignments may stem from us comparing the finished products as oppose to their states in this moment in time.

Let us also not forget that feminism, when traced back to the French revolution and even before then, was still a phenomenon that has its roots in a capitalistic system. Though it could be argued that feminism may have other conditions under which it could have emerged, what we know for sure is that capitalism did not prevent it from emerging.

But now that we have explored our theories on why families shrink as capitalism settles in, let us look at some other cultural effect of capitalism.

Take how capitalism is related to larger groups with which we identify; such as classes and nations. Some scholars maintain that capitalism tends to break down national barriers. National borders create barriers for the free movement of labor and cause issues with trade as well. The United Nations, NAFTA, and the European Union are all exemplars that can be argued as being at minimum, very friendly to capitalistic interests and at maximum, almost exclusively motivated by capitalistic interests. Yet we also look at these institutions and can imagine they are motivated by some world government socialist utopia.

The United States is usually heralded as the best exemplar of what capitalism can do. Consider that the United States is constantly involved in wars in places with rich natural resources. Though the causes of wars are complex and cannot necessarily be boiled down to simply a pursuit of natural resources, it is clear that these wars are not against capitalistic interests. It has been often argued that war can be very good for business. However, this is only true if the war is not taking place where your means of productions exist. Namely, weapons dealers may like wars that happen overseas but would not want a war anywhere near their factories.

Let us quickly take a look as to capitalisms relationship to both conservativism and progressivism. I will use the United States as my point of reference here. Now, we are tempted to think that capitalism seems to better suite conservatives as oppose to progressives. After all, progressives seem to wish to advocate for an ever more socialist policy while conservatives tend towards conserving the status quo.

However, under closer examination capitalism is highly anti-conservative while being completely pro-progressive in practice. Think of it this way. Conservatives necessarily wish for things to pretty much stay the same but may allow for minor tweaks here or there. This is the necessary mindset of any conservative regardless of what particular values or institutions the conservative wishes to conserve. Progressives on the other hand, necessarily wish for there to be fairly rapid change. This is the necessary mindset of a progressive regardless of what particular values or institutions they wish to reform or destroy.

So, what does capitalism want? Does capitalism want things to stay the same or for things to change rapidly? Well, it is obvious it wants things to change rapidly. In fact, commercial activity is only possible through change and more profitable the faster change occurs. For example, if you buy a new phone every year, you are behaving in a capitalistically beneficial way as oppose to if you change your phone every 5 years.

Entrepreneurship, as another example, is the activity of finding problems and bringing into being something to resolve those problems, therefore entrepreneurship is about bringing about change. Edmund Burke who is hailed as one of the founding fathers of the conservative movement was actually advocating for conservatism against the rapid changes that he saw being made as a consequence of capitalism.

If this argument holds true, then it follows that SJWs, who are the current breed of progressives; namely, the people who want rapid change, are benefiting the most from that very same capitalism which they wish to destroy, while the conservatives, who seem to be defending free markets and all that jazz, seem to be undermined by that very thing they wish to conserve. Now, please do not read too deeply into my depictions of what does and does not constitute a conservative or progressive in the US. I am not at all concerned with the details of the values either of these groups hold but am concerned only with the fundamental underpinning of keeping things static vs rapid change.

So, what about religion? Well it seems like here too we have a bit of an ironic outcome. Capitalism does not seem to have a big problem with religion in theory and in practice we can see religion as a great boon to those capitalists that would exploit religious holidays like Christmas. However, capitalism ultimately destroys religion without desiring to do so while socialism desires to destroy religion but ultimately lays the foundation for religion to flourish.

Let us take a look at how this works. As capitalism can provide a wide diversity of goods and services at prices affordable to the masses, the capitalist consumer’s material standard of living is relatively increased by a large margin. The consumer lives in luxuries unimaginable to even kings of the past. However, as he indulges in his pleasures, he finds himself in conflict with religious teaching which teach asceticism. Due to the overwhelming abundance and virtually instantaneous accessibility of these pleasure fulfilling goods and services, his will makes concessions and he will fall into sin much more easily than during times when pleasurable things were rare and expensive.

In order not to live in bad conscience, the person will need to either give up the pleasures of the flesh or repudiate the religious teachings which create that tension between his actions and his beliefs. Given enough time, as most men are men of pleasure, they will abandon their religious beliefs as oppose to the pleasures made available by capitalism. In this way, religion will start to fade into oblivion in a practiced sense even if it remains intact by name.

This is the world of Christians who have premarital sex and don’t go to church on Sunday but still say they believe in Jesus. If you supply luxuries to the common man that bring his material wealth up to the level of opulence only accessible to the aristocrat in the 18th century, you too can expect from the common man a level of decadence and hedonism comparable to that held by said aristocrat. The aristocracy who succumbed to the pleasures supplied by money were almost always atheists in practice. This has another interesting consequence. The new atheists of today, for the most part are not intellectual luminaries who have shed iron age beliefs based on scientific discoveries, but are first and foremost decadents who need to resolve their life of pleasure against a judgmental God. Simply put, they first and foremost resent God for forbidding them what they like to do and cannot resist doing.

They then wrap that rejection up in mostly nonsensical arguments coming from atheists like Dawkins and Hitchens. When one takes this interpretation to heart it makes perfect sense why your typical overweight neckbeard is the poster boy for new atheism; they were raised decadent and lack the fortitude and temperance to even begin to meet the moral standards set by religion. No matter what you may believe about religion, one this is undeniable. Religion is hard. These men are soft. The same decadence that turned them atheist so too made them into the effeminate beta cucks that let their community get overrun by feminists and SJWs.

The criticism I have put forward of the new atheist is very similar to the criticism Nietzsche put forward of the French aristocracy. In this way, capitalism overthrew aristocrats worldwide as they too became effeminate after having abandoned honor as the highest value and substituted it with the pleasures that money could afford them.
But capitalism also destroys religion in another manner. Voltaire argued that when men of faith meet together in the marketplace, they put their religious differences aside as it is money that rules in commerce. In this way, money for many becomes the object of focus where previously that focus was reserved for God. Capitalism has a way of making various differences in diverse people disappear when there is money to be made. In fact, this was an argument Voltaire put forward in defending capitalism as a mechanism for peace. If people put their differences aside when they are unified in a common pursuit of money, then there will overall be less conflict under capitalism.

But what does socialism do? Socialism tends to very quickly degenerate into a life of scarcity and hardship as corruption and bureaucracy make even food scare less so luxury goods and services. So even though the socialist utopian ideal desires to destroy religion, it creates an environment where people are left with virtually nothing but religion and an environment where adhering to religious beliefs is fairly simple as there is little to no temptation.

Capitalism also influences the ways in which we define ourselves as individuals; namely, by our chosen interests. The fact that we might think of ourselves as a jazz aficionado for example, is linked to our shared appreciation and consumption of concerts, and recorded music. Those connections link us to others around the country and perhaps around the world. That is only possible by the commodification of music; namely, that musical performances can be bought and sold in the capitalist marketplace and therefore, some people can specialize in making the sort of music that we want to listen to.

Think about it. There are certain genres of music that have a relatively non-mainstream appeal and therefore an artist producing that music needs a global reach in order to make the production of that music worthwhile.
As such, there exist genres of music today that could have only been possible under capitalist conditions. But this too means that certain identities are also only possible under capitalist conditions. From this it follows that hipsters, at least of the music kind, are a purely capitalistic creation.

As I traced capitalism back over the centuries I found that key thinkers in the United States and Europe going back to at least the 18th century were interested in the development of capitalism. They understood that it was central to understanding the modern world. This was true not only of thinkers who we usually associate with capitalism like Adam Smith or Karl Marx, but also writers like Voltaire in the 18th century or Mathew Arnold in the 19th century. Or philosophers like Hegel, who was actually known as somewhat of a figurehead of the left. As I came to study these thinkers more carefully I found that thinkers like Adam Smith and Joseph Schumpeter who were usually thought of as economists actually had a much wider range of concerns than is characteristic of economics proper. What I found is that the thinkers who transcend disciplinary boundaries and those who transcended political boundaries were most interesting. What I came to discover is that there are varieties of capitalism; that indeed, capitalism was not really a monolith but sometimes more like a plant that took different forms at different stages in time.

It is sometimes said that the decline of communism in the Soviet Union, eastern Europe, and in China has brought about the victory of capitalism. This, I discovered, was a half-truth. There are actually a variety of forms of contemporary capitalism. Some are more entrepreneurial and dynamic, some are less so but with quirks of their own. Some of them are in democratic capitalist societies, some are in non-democratic capitalist societies.
Now, there must be some common set of characteristics to talk about capitalism as the nature of capitalism has seemed to have changed over time. The capitalism of the 17th and 18th century was focused, on the one hand, on the importation into Europe of new goods from overseas; goods that began as luxuries but soon came to be perceived as necessities like sugar, coffee, and tea. On the other hand, in the 17th and 18 century we have the development of new means of production such as cottage industry in which people manufactured various parts of larger processes in their homes.

A sort of production based on a division of labor which was novel at the time. There was a financial revolution in the 18th century as well that was connected to the rise of international trading companies, as well as to the rise of a market for government bonds. There was also a consumer revolution in the 18th century. Well, at least in England and North-Western Europe. That consumer revolution formed the background of Adam Smith’s book entitled “The Wealth of Nations”.

In the 19th century and well into the 20th, it was industrial factory production that became of primary importance to capitalism. Also, there was the rise in the 19th century of several new institutions with tremendous ramifications for the development of capitalism. For example, the limited liability corporation which allowed far more people to participate in the ownership of companies. Also, in the later 19th century there was the development of trade unions which eventually led to labor parties. These labor parties, in turn, were there as a mechanism to increase the economic and political power of the working classes.

In the 20th century, capitalism was transformed again. Advanced capitalist societies moved from an industrial economy to an economy focused on what we now call services which involves everything from education, healthcare, to the means of entertainment.

But what is capitalism? How shall we define it? Before we try and come up with a working definition, let us turn our attention for a moment to the history of the word. The term capitalism is relatively new. Though as it often happens in the history of ideas, the phenomenon existed long before the term. It existed under a variety of other labels. Originally, capitalism, as a term, was a political slogan. It was a term coined by socialists who looked to stigmatize the phenomenon. Karl Marx never used capitalism as a noun but he did write about the capitalism system of production. Though other thinkers have used the term before Marx, it was Marx who popularized the word. For Marx, the term capitalist, namely, the capitalist system had a polemical meaning. The term was made to indicate that the system worked on behalf of those who had money and invested that money at the expense of everyone else.

The word capitalism became defused of its polemical quality and gained a neutral tone at the beginning of the 20th century when the German sociologist Werner Sombart entitled his book “Modern Capitalism” in 1902. Two years later, another German sociologist, Max Weber published the first part of his famous essay “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism”. After that, people started to use the term in a value neutral sense.
However, well before the word capitalism was in use people were using a variety of other words more or less to describe the same phenomenon. For example, Adam Smith, writing in 1776, described it as commercial society. Like most concepts in the social sciences, capitalism is an ideal type. It is an abstraction from experience that helps us grasp key elements and their relationship to one another.

So what are the key elements of capitalism? The first is private property. Now, private property is by no means as straight forward a concept as it seems. It actually implies a lot. You might think, for example, is it not the case that all property is private, or at least isn’t that the default position for property? The answer is no. In reality, things belong to whoever has the power to take them, unless, there is a power that guarantees that other people will not take them. So usually, private property depends on the existence of government power. Namely, a power that is able to protect property from those who would like to steal it.

The second element of capitalism is that capitalism involves exchange between legally free individuals. This means that in a capitalist society, when one person works for another, it is for wages. When this person exchanges something of value with someone else, it is for money.

You might be asking yourself at this point, what is the alternative? Well, the historical alternative, before the rise of modern capitalism was often a situation in which you worked for someone else because he was your political superior or because he owned you. Much of Europe in the early modern period was still dominated by serfdom. Under serfdom, lords owned land and exercised a good deal of direct control over the people on the land. The lord was entitled to a certain amount of unpaid work from his serfs. The lord also had control over where his serfs could live. In some cases, the lord also controlled who his serfs could marry.

In Eastern Europe and Russia, serfdom persisted into the 19th century. In Poland, for example, much of the language still carries with it overtones of this system. The word “Chlop” means adult male but it also carries the connotation of his station. The word today has barely overcome its connotations and is even sometimes used as an insult. In Polish culture, it is not uncommon for people to look up their genealogies to see if their families were part of the aristocracy or not.

Mind you, the lesser aristocracy was fairly large as compared to the higher aristocracy, but nonetheless, there is still an element of pride in the voice of Poles who bring up the fact their families were not serfs.
In Western Europe, nobles were still entitled to various types of economic extractions from the peasants on their land up to the time of the French Revolution. In other parts of the world, including north and south America, there was slavery in the 17th and 18th century. That is to say, a situation in which some people owned others as property.

The 3rd element of capitalism is that it is a system in which production and distribution of goods operates primarily through the market mechanism. Now, when we say that production and distribution operates through the market mechanism we mean that prices are not set by custom, government decision, prices are not set by those who produce the goods, but they are set by the rules of supply and demand. Or more generally, prices are not determined by anyone in particular.

So, our working definition of capitalism involves private property, and exchange between legally free individuals where production and distribution of goods occurs primarily through the market. However, this is a sort of model from which in historical fact there have been many variations and divergences. For example, slave owners and slaves were very much a part of the international capitalism economy of their time. Most of the slaves in places like the Caribbean, Brazil, or the colonies that later became the United States were purchased by their owners to grow crops that would be sold to others. Crops like sugar or tobacco. Slavery, of course, is the opposite of legally free individuals so slavery diverges from our model of capitalism. Though the slave owners were legally free, the slaves were not.

Some, however, might consider slavery to be non-capitalistic. The problem with this is that we would then fail to capture the close link between new world slavery and the large Atlantic capitalist economy. Alternatively, you might say that we should drop the element of legally free labor from our model of capitalism. Doing so, however, would leave out a key element of capitalism in most times and places.

So, we are best served to keep our 3-point model but recognize that it is just a model from which reality has sometimes diverged. But when did capitalism begin? This is a difficult question. This is not the kind of question to which one can give an absolute answer to but only a rough estimate. Trade has been around for a very long time but it is only relatively recently that a society primarily based on trade has come into existence. There has been bartering since the stone age. There was a good deal of trade in the ancient world and in the middle ages. Indeed, there was a commercial revolution in Europe from around the 12th century to the 14th century. However, during all those periods in time, most households continued to consume most of the things that they themselves produced. And most households produced most of what they needed to consume.

It is probably that only in and around the 18th century that in the most advanced parts of Europe the majority of people came to buy most of the things they needed. To buy the things they needed, people took to selling most of what they produced rather than using it themselves.

This is a key observation in our critique of capitalism. A pre-capitalistic man was fundamentally skilled in a great deal of areas. Though his expertise was not perhaps to the level of a master craftsman, he was competent enough to make goods to a high enough level for his purposes. For example, when I look at the farmstead of my grandparents, I could see that pretty much everything needed for a self-sustained life was present.
For example, my grandfather would breed rabbits for their meat but more importantly for their skins. In turn, he had all the tools he needed to skin the rabbits, and toughen those skins into workable leather. The leather in turn, he would use to make shoes, or certain articles of clothing. In this way, the complete production cycle existed for many common household items; butter, bread, wool clothes, leather clothes, farm equipment such as rakes, shovels, and other tools as well.

My grandparents kept chickens, pigs, rabbits, pigeons, ducks, geese, a cow and a horse. They grew wheat, potatoes, cabbage, carrots, pickles, beets and several other vegetables. They grew all the typical herbs and spices used in Polish cooking. They had apple trees, pear trees, both types of cherry trees, a walnut tree, and plumb trees. They had strawberry bushes, raspberry bushes, gooseberry bushes, red and black currant bushes. They also kept bee hives.

The point is that pre-capitalistic men were usually self-sufficient men who did not particularly need money for anything other than more complex specialty items like perhaps metal works that would come from a blacksmith. But what does this mean? Well, Ted Kaczynski, otherwise known as the UNABOMBER, in his manifesto, explored how technology supplied an ever more powerful mechanism for making people miserable. He argued that man can only get true satisfaction from continually facing challenged which were non-trivial, but still within the man’s power to overcome. Well, Kaczynski argues that technology progressively reduces the set of non-trivial challenges by making things much easier while many of the challenges that were previously outside the scope of a man to overcome, mostly remained at that level of difficulty. A man, in a world of technology, is then left in a place where all that exists before him are trivial challenges which give him no satisfaction in overcoming, or challenges that are completely outside his power to overcome. By robbing a man of the satisfaction of overcoming non-trivial challenges, a man may have material comforts and luxuries, but himself be an entirely miserable creature.

A similar phenomenon, I believe, became the case also when man switched from the pre-capitalistic life to the role of a merchant life under capitalism. Like my grandfather, the pre-capitalistic man had a lot of different non-trivial challenges like making his own shoes, breeding his own animals, and so on, which, when executed, gave him life satisfaction both in their accomplishment but also in the diversity of activities he was engaged in. Not only did he produce his own goods, he also consumed them, which also gave satisfaction.

Now, everyone pretty much has one expertise they specialize in and whose product they most likely do not even consume themselves; especially where the service industry is concerned. People today define themselves by this singular expertise. When you ask someone “what are you?” or “what do you want to be when you grow up”, you expect to hear the name of a job. But this means that man’s self-image of himself is of nothing more than a means of production; a human doing as Warren Farrell would say. In pre-capitalistic societies, the question of “what are you” would probably be answered by referring to one’s station in the social hierarchy. A man would answer; a peasant, a nobleman, a duke, a knight and so on. A man might be a cobbler in addition to being a peasant, but his identity would not be rooted in his role as a cobbler.

The entirety of our lives today is structured around optimizing ourselves to be an even more efficient means of production. We no longer go to school to grow as human beings but to develop marketable skills.
Our humanity is but a secondary consideration and not usually a focal point of our waking efforts. In virtually all career choices, we eventually lose meaning in our work as decades of repetition of the same tasks have a tendency to breed boredom and a sense of futility. The things we usually produce we neither use nor can we usually recognize even as our own achievements. Think about the construction of an apartment building.

A very large team of specialists will work on such a building. What about you as an electrician? You cannot point to the building and say “I built this!” No, you can say that there are some, hidden from view wires you put into it and little more. How much more rewarding would it be if you and maybe 2 of your friends could construct a humbler structure which you could honestly be able to point to and say with pride that indeed, you built that! Sure, the building you built might be no more elaborate than a log cabin, but it would have been all you! Our labor today, seems to have the emotional impact on us that I would imagine the slaves who built the pyramids must have had. Decades of their life expended alongside countless others, doing the bidding of a taskmaster, only to be able to point to something and say that they made some trivial knick-knack that happened to be used in something greater.

With the division of labor and the immense complexities of modern supply chains, man is left to performing repetitive trivialities day in and day out. Though the wonders that modern capitalism has produced are undeniable, and have indeed led to many luxuries in life, we must ask ourselves; have we become better human beings as a consequence? Are we happier as a consequence of these luxuries and ease of living? Perhaps the price we pay for sensual comfort is mental anguish. This, coupled with the effeminizing effect that luxury seems to have on people, is potentially the price we must pay.

If indeed what I have discussed so far is true, or at least true to a great degree, we can explain a few other phenomena in our culture. It is argued within MGTOW that women see themselves as human beings whereas they see men as human doings. Indeed, men see women as human being and other men as human doing as well. This might have no explanation deeper than biology. However, capitalism sees everyone as human doings. A statistic was brought up in MGTOW that said that around a quarter of all women in the United States are on some form of anti-depressant or some form of medication of a similar nature.

Perhaps a meaningful contributing cause to this is that women, under capitalism, too must in many respects look upon themselves as human doings as oppose to human beings. Perhaps this imposed expectation is too much for women. Perhaps they are simply cracking underneath the pressure as a consequence of having never been forced into this position before. Or more specifically, having been forced to think of themselves in this light as an expectation carried throughout their entire lives.

In MGTOW we have long ago gave a specific answer to a certain question. The question is: why did feminism come into being in the time frame that it did? As in, why did feminism not come into being in say the middle ages? The answer that was given in MGTOW was that women started to demand a prominent role in public life as soon as men made the public sphere safe enough and public life easy enough that it could be comparable to the safety and ease of the private sphere. Let us assume this is true. So, for feminism to emerge, it was necessary that women felt safe enough and work became easy enough for women to be neither in danger or have to exert themselves too much. But it is also argued by members of the MGTOW community that it was the beta cucks who ultimately gave women various rights within the public sphere.

So, from this it follows that for feminism to emerge it is necessary to have a safe environment and an apply supply of beta cucks to serve as women’s proxy agents. Based on what we have explored so far in this video, it looks like capitalism was fully capable of supplying both. Through capitalism constantly rewarding change in the form of entrepreneurship, many luxuries and efficiencies were produced. These efficiencies, in turn, made the public sphere generally danger free, and created jobs that did not demand hard physical labor. The luxuries in turn, effeminized men through their consumption. These luxuries created the small army of beta cucks that would later give women rights in the public sphere as their mating strategy. Slowly, as the supply of cucks grew, gynocentrism became ever more present in public institutions as a consequence of female suffrage and the willingness of ever larger numbers of effeminized men to defer to women in hopes of getting laid.

Further evidence suggesting that the veracity of this conclusion is true can be observed in the spread of feminism itself. Those countries with the longest history of capitalist development seem to have a much stronger feminist influence.

In my video discussing the history of feminist thought, I trace back proto-feminist thought to in and around the French revolution circa 1789. In and around that period you also had American independence. Both events were in a sense an overthrowing of the aristocracy by the bourgeoisie. And who were the bourgeoisie? They were the wealthy merchant classes of society who wished to annex political power. Up to that point, political power was vested in a social hierarchy that was not ultimately a consequence of wealth. Nobility, for the most part, was based on hereditary inheritance. There were many poor nobles but even though they were poor, they were still higher on the social ladder than the rich commoner. In this way, these revolutions can be seen as a form of victory for capitalism.

Now, one of the ways it can be said that a society has become a capitalist society has to do with the distribution of time in the household. In the past, households had contact with the market. That is to say, households sold some goods that were produced in the household but these were excess goods that were sold to supplement the household’s income.

Today, with the rise of capitalism we have seen the predominance of market oriented households. Households became market oriented in a variety of ways. First of all, there was agricultural specialization. When people produce with an eye towards self-sufficiency, they tend to grow small amounts of a wide range of crops and animals; exactly like my grandparents did. However, when a household produces with an eye towards the market, households tend to specialize. That is to say that the household will grow one or two goods that they are particularly good at growing, with the intention to sell them.

Another form of market orientation of the household is through cottage industry. Namely, through devoting more family time to producing goods at home for sale in the marketplace. Another example is, of course, wage labor. Spending less time in the household and more time working for others in order to gain money. In turn, as people increasingly oriented themselves towards the market, and spent more of their time towards producing goods and labor in market activity, the other side of this was that people increasingly purchased items in the market that in the past would have been made at home. Goods like beer, furniture, clothes, or needles, or pots and pans, soap, butter, and vinegar. People began to purchase common items from the market as oppose to making them because it was more efficient for them to do so.

That is to say, people could own a wider variety of desirable things than if they had to produce those things themselves. Of course, like I mentioned earlier, this also resulted in forgoing the satisfaction one would experience in creation itself.

In order to buy these things from others, they worked harder than in the past, and devoted more of their labor to making things that they did not need themselves but could sell to others. Slowly, people began to live in an increasing commercial society, in which, as Adam Smith put it, everyone becomes a merchant to some degree or another. Yet as a consequence of this move, the psychology of people came to be uniformly molded to think as a merchant.

In the past, the male dominance hierarchy was informed by martial prowess. The strongest and most skilled warriors would hold the highest positions. This codified itself into an honor based hierarchy that carried through to the 19th century but soon enough fell away and was superseded by an economic ranking. Today, a man is higher in the hierarchy based on the amount of money he has.

Our language has also undergone a transformation. Just look at MGTOW and the concepts we have within this community. Virtually all MGTOW concepts are analogous to merchant language. From the sexual market place, to sexual market place value, to hypergamy, the wall, and even neoteny. Each of these concepts operates squarely within a merchant point of view. In fact, it is hard to imagine how we could describe the dynamic between men and women today without reaching for this paradigm.

Capitalism does not end at merely being an economic model but seems to force all of life into economic terms; from how male dominance hierarchies form, to how we organize our educational goals, how we pick friends, and how we commoditize virtually all human activities. Capitalism does not care for your humanity, it rewards you if you have money, it rewards you if you produce and throw you in the gutter as soon as you are no longer able to produce. Capitalism is a woman.

Thanks for listening.

Go Team!


Share this Videos