First an analysis of Capital in terms of its Libidinal nature.
History
Capitalism proper was invented by the Dutch to sustain the colonial effort. They brought to life the first stock exchange in order to finance the ventures across the seven seas. People could invest in promising risks. Most empires are to some degree based on such investments - Crassus represents this principle in Rome - but the formal structure came to be in Amsterdam to finance the VOC. With this structure, a new dynamic of capital flow was born. This dynamic we’ve come to know as Capitalism.
Meaning
What is the ultimate value in all this. What drives it all at the very foundation. What does wealth buy you? Freedom. And here is the deep crux, the contradiction, the Negative at play Wealth ties, makes the owner dependent on it.
The wealth provides the freedom of action but removes the freedom from the machinery of capital that a wage-worker has. As the capitalist accumulates wealth he is immersed deeper into the machinations and his consciousness becomes a function of it. So the prize of freedom of action is counterbalanced by the imprisonment in the machinations of capital, including the corruption. Which is a very strong bondage for reasons obvious to the philosopher.
This is capital wealth, in the sense of wealth acquired purely through the machinations of capital as such. Which means: value generated by the economic valuing of economic valuing. What stands free of this is capital generated simply by value. This means manufacturing, industry. If we take Amazon, it means the service the company provides. In this phase, which is ancient, values are produced and put on the market, whereby the market perpetually comes into existence.
The second phase, that of capitalism, which came into being in the Colonial axis between Amsterdam and Indonesia, with the VOC; United East-India Company, for the financing of which the first stock exchange was created. In this phase we have the capitalization of profit as such, profit manufactured as a product. Of course this only means prospects of profit; you can not buy the profit directly like you buy a shovel or a sack of potatoes.
In this phase, the market is created a priori to the product. The product cones into being as a function of the market. Of course there is no market without products, but where the primordial market is one of local coincidence of cross-interests generated from the earth, the capital market does not arise freely, it is built on the basis of a trust, an agreement bound and held over time by law.
It’s entirely secondary, as its goods are currency rather than directly appropriable values; its goods have to be translated into appropriable values; the actual freedoms, or freedom-givers, which are bought on the primary market.. For the power of secondary goods to be translated into greater secondary goods, the distance to primary goods is required, and this is the dimension of growth over time. The real value of the good has to be suspended for it to increase in speculative value. The real value is always Freedom, so it is this which is being suspended in capital as such.
Thereby capital becomes libidinal. Not as an aphrodisiac to the human libido like money is, but in that it acquires libido of its own.
As Capital, wealth no longer predominantly brings men freedoms from their pressures, but actively seeks freedom from its own pressures; it seeks to discharge itself. [from elsewhere]
Present
This logic had been on my mind for a while but this post was prompted as a response to a post by Pezer about the Vietnam war. What is omitted in these matters usually is a serious scrutiny of the reasons the US engaged that war how plausible the domino theory really is, or was. Did this war really rise from strategic considerations? I have my doubts. It makes more sense to me seen in the terms dictated by capital; expenditure for its own sake. “Self-lightening” in @zeroeth_nature’s/Lamperts terms.
Things as real as war always have many factors playing into them. Of course strategic interests are usually part of these. But what’s usually meaningful is to look for the cause that most accurately predicts the results. In the case of Vietnam, this expenditure for its own sake is more elegant than geo-strategy. Geostrategy was taken as an end serving as a means to legitimize the effort, which has the thoroughly a-moral (different from immoral) engine of libidinal capital.
So its not: bad people sit in a room contemplating how they can make more money off the backs of other poor folk. It’s: cogwheels in the machinations of capital are driven by mutual pressures to invent ways to meaningfully expend to release the pressures. Capitalists aren’t in control of capital thats the beauty of it as well as the danger.
Meaning is necessary as a means, but it is still secondary. Sometime the meaning fits and the endeavor is hugely successful, sometimes the meaning is ephemeral and the endeavor just results in experience and chaos, ands perhaps from that, some knowledge, some wisdom and some cowardice. All very human-like.
At this stage it is necessary to distinguish Capitalism from America or generally Western Liberty. These aren’t the same. Capitalism flows from this liberty, the Dutch protestant enterprising ethics, but is not equal to it. America was founded on the back of these original Capitalist ventures, but its foundation stone itself, the Bill of Rights and the philosophy espoused in the Declaration of Independence, does not relate to the machinery of capital. Nor even to that of Democracy, by the way. It is rather based on the French idea of the trias politica, the separation of powers, combined with then newly rising models of man as self-determining, God as rational, and history as progress. It is a philosophical construct which is a fertile host to Capital, but Capital is not at all sufficient to its essence. Capital is necessary to drive the effort of competition that allows such a state to continue functioning, but Capital serves that same function for different types of states and ideologies.
Which brings me to the next point; China. In the sense of Capital as libido, the Chinese model is a tantric. The pressure to expend is severely regulated, fed back into the system willfully and through subtle knowledge of the own organism. Note: the pressure is treated as the substance, rather than the wealth that fuels the pressure. It’s not that China is the only one to do it this way, the original VOC functioned in a similar way in fact, it was very much a blend of state and private venture, of venture and control. The early United States did not entirely lack this regulatory discipline, but the opportunities in that country so vastly outweighed the risks, that capital was basically set entirely free, which led to the greatest sense of liberty mankind has probably ever experienced. Which led to the abolition of slavery and several kinds of other new freedoms.
In the early 2000s, the concentration of capital and the lack of freedom, the pressure inherent in that for the capital ‘owners’ became so great that it led to another leven of expenditure, the result of which is the worlds current AI superstructure. I think that most of the current industrial trends are the result of Capitals blind will to expend, and no longer carry the excuse of meaning in them. The distortion of the phenomenon of meaning itself through AI is a fitting irony. Irony is a form of serendipity. And speaking of irony; Elon Musk, in a way, is addressing little bit of this problem when he diverts resources into what are now ironically more earthly endeavors such as space travel.
Future
What’s ahead for us on this trail? Now that we understand Capital as a living thing, rather than as a mere result of human properties, how do we approach it? What’s our preferred relation to this animal? What would we have it do for us, keeping in mind the ferocity of its nature?
