Capitalism as Zero Sum

Observations in trying to understand why people still want to play this rigged game.

I spend a lot of time wondering about people: what makes them feel inspired, what makes them follow rules, what makes them fight or follow along. I think about people specifically in the context of the systems in which we all exist and about how those systems impact our behaviour, our beliefs, our relationships, and our aspirations.

Obviously, I think about people in relation to capitalism. It’s a biggie. Capitalism has manifested itself in our lives as much more than just a system of economics. It permeates our culture, our beliefs, our hopes and dreams. It pressures us to behave in specific ways and tells us which direction or path to travel to be successful under its parameters. Which is odd because capitalism isn’t a person. It is centerless. There’s no one pulling the strings, but still, it feels as though capitalism is personified—as if there is an archetype or secret conglomerate of people that are perpetuating the system, ensuring its continuation.

The reality is that we are all perpetuating capitalism by continuing to partake in its domain. We continue to live by its rules. We teach our children how to play the game of capitalism. It is simultaneously centerless and everywhere all at once, not personified, but part of each of us, contained in our culture, in our psyche, in almost every action and moment of our day.

Okay, back to people under capitalism. Now that this picture of capitalist realism has been painted, a question that I bump up against regularly is: why do some people push back against capitalism and others do not? Why do some people play the game, especially those who aren’t really winning, and believe in it so wholeheartedly while others work to dismantle the system?

Obviously, I can empathize with those doing the dismantling, but I also try hard to understand why others still believe they can win this game, and I think it’s because they are missing a key concept of capitalism: it is zero sum.

A zero-sum game is one in which there are a fixed amount of resources and the only way to acquire the resource is to take it away from someone else. One person’s gain is another person’s loss. And before you come at me, yes, there are a million capitalists out there that will explain that capitalism is not, in fact, a zero-sum game because capital is not a fixed resource; it is being created and destroyed all the time. If we look specifically at money as capital, it’s easy to recognize that we’re not all trading the same money that existed 5000 years ago. The amount of money in circulation has increased exponentially.

So is capitalism a textbook definition of zero sum? No. But the reason that I refer to it that way is because accumulating surplus capital gives one player an advantage, limiting the opportunities for others. Likewise, as the size of the pie increases (to borrow a common economic metaphor), so does the size of each slice, and so the proportions really remain the same.

“When the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of economic growth over the long term, the consequence is that inherited wealth grows more rapidly than output and income. This means that those who are already wealthy accumulate capital more quickly than the rest of the population.”

Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century

In the book quoted above, Piketty examines how capitalism has led to growing economic inequality. He argues that capitalism, particularly in its current form, concentrates wealth among the rich and that this concentration has led to an economic inequality that resembles a zero-sum game. He highlights how wealth accumulation and capital returns can perpetuate and even worsen inequality, framing this effect as zero sum in the way that the benefits accrued by the wealthy are not matched by improvements for the rest of the population. While his focus is more on the big picture than a strict exploration of zero sum, his observations provide a critique of how capitalism can lead to significant economic imbalances.

In other words, it’s easier for the rich to get richer which, in turn, leads to more people falling out the bottom.

wvholler

A post shared by @wvholler

Hopefully I’ve made my point. I know it’s not a direct correlation. Capitalism is far too complex of a system to expect such a simple one-to-one measurement. But even anecdotally, we can look around, see the increase in the cost of living, witness the extreme material wealth of the 1%, and understand this phenomenon.

For some reason, though, capitalist fanboys still keep telling low income folks to get a better job, pull up their bootstraps, be smarter with their money, or just learn to play the game like they do.

As if the game isn’t completely rigged at this point.

The more we can all get on board with the understanding that capitalism is not serving us, and by us, I mean all of us because we all suffer from the delusions of a capitalist system, the more folks we can get on board with building a post-capitalist world, ideally one where we can start to get rampant inequality in check. I really loved

Devon

‘s recent post where they were dreaming about their own post-capitalist self, asking questions like: Who will I be outside of capitalism? What might I do if I was living outside of this economic system? What might be my motivations, my dreams?

And then, of course, coming to the realization that there really isn’t anything holding us all back from becoming those people right now.

<3 <3 <3