There is a problem in understanding capitalism as a political system, rather than as an inherent feature of the economy, which reproduces in its own artificial function—as technology—the violence inherent in reality, now with human meaning. The human aspect here is not moral or political, but rather the reflective and artificial nature with which it is determined and carried out, and through which it is simply resolved in conventional forms, but in pursuit of the same efficiency and purpose: the maintenance and development of the structure itself, not as a given system but in its structural functionality.
From this perspective, the assumption that capitalism is in a better or worse state may be fundamentally erroneous, since as a system it would never have its own consistency, being reduced to the formal projection of the economy. This economy will always be industrial as long as it is modern, referring to the technology it uses and not to its objective; and it will be its critical (ideological) reflection that will attribute to it its own object, be it capital itself or society as an end.
Here, it would be wrong to reduce modern capitalism by referring to Italian mercantilism in the 15th and 16th centuries, when in fact it is the very nature of Western culture, ever since its transition from the archaic to the classical period. At that time, the determination of the social structure in its political expression ceased to be religious tradition, which was dismantled by the Minoan cataclysm, which exposed the relative weakness of Mycenae to the expansion of Phoenician trade.
As a result, that determination would have shifted from religious to economic, depending on that mercantilism, affecting the central structures, transcendentally legitimized, with the emergence of the commercial bourgeoisie. This development would have been natural, as can be seen, for example, in the Phoenician expansion into this area; but in this case, due to the lack of centrality of this culture, which is exceptional due to its own historical circumstances; and now accelerated by the decline of these central powers, with the relative weakness of Mycenaean militarism.
In principle, this would moderate the growth of these central structures in their imperial projections, contrary to the exemplary cases of the Far East, where trade never achieved this level of emergence. This is the process that stagnated in Rome, leading to the crisis of the republic, due to the contradictions of the oligarchy; and ended up stagnating with the absolutist solution of the empire, until the economic contraction of the high Middle Ages; which returned to its apotheosis under the new projection of the Carolingian usurpation, in the transition to the late Middle Ages.
This would result not only in a recovery of the classical mercantilism of the archaic period, but also in its renewal, since it now had the inflationary power of excessive luxury production, coming from European expansion, and was sustained by a culture of consumption that would reach its apotheosis with the crisis of the French aristocracy. The centrality of Italian and Flemish mercantilism is instrumental here, but also circumstantial, not fundamental, because what was important was the general redefinition of culture, now centered on consumption rather than production.
The very definition of capitalism, like that of socialism, is specific to an intellectually specialized segment, which therefore has its own class object, regardless of whether it legitimizes it in its social projection as transcendent. This is ultimately the function fulfilled by modern intellectual elitism, displacing traditional religion with the French Revolution as the apotheosis of the middle class since its emergence in the Carolingian usurpation.
In fact, socialism would be only the ultimate and apotheotic contradiction of capitalism, given that formal nature, by which it is mutually determined in the corporate function of the economy, to the detriment of the development of the structure. This is in itself an onto-anthropological phenomenon, as well as a structural one, and not only political as its dialectical expression; insofar as this structural determination is trialectical, resolving cultural trichotomies rather than political dichotomies.
Image: Sketch of Le Serment du Jeu de paume, by Jacques-Louis David (circa 1791-92).
