Roberto da Silva Rocha, university professor and political scientist
Capitalism
It's not a text about capitalism but it's a text about what people say is capitalism and what they don't say is capitalism.
Capitalism was not born somewhere or at some point in history, it was not invented or discovered, it was never properly theorized, but it suffered a great cultural impact after writers and thinkers like the socialists and pre-socialists like Rousseau started referring to capitalism. as a social system, which it is not, and never was, so capitalism was criminalized and stigmatized by Heinrich Karl Marx as the social-political-economic system and responsible for the unhappiness of people and the evil of humanity, although it is a system Even capitalism is not or was not an economic system or a social system, much less an ideology.
Heinrich built a sophistical cast on capitalism to be able to deconstruct it and thus justify a series of anathemas and pseudo theorems that together formed a theory and an ideology about socialism and about communism as the paradox of capitalism, for that he had to make inventions. theoretical concepts and make a structural-functional scheme about his reading and narrative about the system he called capitalism.
Why is capitalism not a social, political or economic system?
Without doing a heavy bibliographic review as it is in the book I wrote about capitalism, I will summarize this statement just citing the bases of historical capitalism.
To replace the complex system of exchanging goods and services, since prehistory many hypotheses need to be considered a priori, since the invention of writing and the invention of a counting system that is described in the theory of numbers that belongs to one of the subjects taught to Mathematics students.
As long as we agree that without numbers, without writing and without mathematics, capitalism could not exist, it is easier to go further in our speculations about where capitalism came from.
So, imagine on an island, or in an archipelago far from European civilization, or in an indigenous tribe immersed in the Amazon jungles, people fishing, harvesting fruits and food in their small garden, or organizing to get household items and tools or weapons. for hunting, the question is: how does this small community organize its market system for products and services?
Well, the Potlach and the Kulla were two systems found by an anthropologist on the Trobliand Islands that intrigued them for many years, those obligatory ceremonies for all citizens each lunation where everyone from the villages had to attend the huge fair to make obligatory exchanges of objects, and of women, so someone made canoes, another made pots, another made clothes and shoes, and another made axes, and everyone was obliged to exchange their goods at the ceremony.
In the unknown tribe of the Amazon the Indians counted to two, they knew in their numerical system only two digits: the digit 1 and the digit 2. Anything above that was infinite!
The zero digit was unknown to Europeans when Amerigo Vespucci arrived in America and when Vasco da Gama arrived in the Indies, so the Indians knew the zero digit as well as the Mayans when the Europeans first arrived in Mexico!
This means that the path to the discovery of the number system went a long way to be established in human civilization, it was not always organized in a practical way as it is today in a positional way on a power of ten scale, there were rules for counting six in six, multiples of sixty, and of twelve, these days, with the exception of the USA and Great Britain, with their complicated systems of inches, gallons, feet, miles, we, everyone loves the decimal system of measurements and numbers. .
So capitalism needed to accompany the discovery of numbers, the invention of algebraic operations, addition, subtraction, division, power, root, algebraic equations to support the greatest discovery of economics which was the double game of accounting science, in the Renaissance. , then we can add to that the creation of the bureaucratic administration already known in China and that arrived in the West to say that we finally have a well-developed capitalist system.
Since the systems of social and political organization were being replaced from the tribes, to the empires, for the first time to experience slave labor, and servile labor, and then wage labor paid with salt, or with gold coins that were worth its weight, a system of counting things and exchanges needed a standardized reference.
Hence for the choice of something that could be exchanged between the people other than an exchange of a canoe for an axe, the gold and silver coin and bronze were generally sufficient.
I couldn't To counterfeit a coin because it was not the value engraved on it but its weight, so coins were nothing more than an exchange of products and merchandise.
How much effort and how long did it take for people to accept a stained paper written that that piece of paper could replace a silver coin? Do you have any idea why a person should accept a piece of paper in exchange for a canoe, or an axe, or a house, or a herd of cattle, that paper called money?
I have no idea how people got used to accepting a piece of paper written with a number that was a replacement for the gold coin exchange system.
So capitalism, described by Karl Marx as the organizing system of social forces and ideology and the State is as responsible for the poverty of people in capitalism as the sea is responsible for the wars fought on the seas by warships!
Capital is just a financial convention to facilitate the exchange of values, capital is not a value in itself, it is just a contract that can be broken by accident and when this happens inflation or stagflation occurs, because we trust in paper money, but many people and institutions can and do make their reserves not only in money, but in other capitals such as: gold, silver, property titles, patents, weapons, knowledge, and blaming capitalism for social inequalities is nothing more than historical ignorance and ignorance. of financial market mechanisms.
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