Capitalist Interconnectedness
Mirrored image of laptop computer assembly line
Going forward, I will be publishing a new piece on this blog every Saturday. I wanted to start this trend by giving a bit of framing on my goals with this new project. I hope you all find it insightful, motivating, or at the very least, somewhat entertaining.
I’m writing in a coffee shop. My laptop is a 2021 HP EliteBook 850 G8 Notebook PC. Australian lithium, Russian aluminum, Thai plastic, Chinese assembly, Filipino cargo ship, American salesman. Sold new for more than $1,000 US Dollars. I’d be lucky to sell it for half that now.
I’m sipping coffee. Grown in Guatemala, shipped through Mexico. A splash of oatmilk, Estonian oats, Swedish produced, Norwegian shipped. It’s sold to me by a barista with purple hair (Canadian dye), a single earring (Ghanian gold) and a sparkly shirt (Indian cotton, Vietnamese sewing). My shorts were made in Bangladesh, my shirt in Pakistan, my shoes in Taiwan. I prefer not to consider the Congolese and Sudanese blood that suffuses my buzzing phone. I glance at the notification. I see images of death (Palestinian) by world-class tools of human mutilation (American), triggers pulled by merciless soldiers (Israeli).
If I went looking around this little coffee shop I could probably find something touched by just about everybody on the UN charter. But this is not an attempt to list all the countries of the world, the Animaniacs did that quite well.
Instead, let me point you towards a concept that also has its roots in many nations: “Interconnectedness,” a staple of Zen Buddhism. I read about it first from Thich Nhat Hanh (Vietnamese) writing from Plum Village (French) in the book “Interbeing” (Japanese paper, American printing).
All things arise in relation to other things, all things depend on other things. The chair I now sit upon does not exist without wood, without a carpenter, without that carpenter’s teacher, without that teacher’s mother, without that mother’s childhood doctor, without that doctor’s uncle who inspired him to go to medical school…and so on.
You know, it’s kind of a comforting thought in a, “peace and happiness, let’s all love and rely on each other" type of way. But then I think of the weary Cambodians fingers that labored on my backpack, the bleary eyed immigrant who ferried me via rideshare app, the oilman’s cough keeping the lights on. Interconnectedness. An economy, an order, a way of being, complex beyond all chance to follow.
I still try to follow.
Like Neo in a Marxist parody of, “The Matrix,” the world is transformed into lines of productive causality, names of workers, number of years given to labor, gallons of sweat spent on factory floors, wages stolen, profits made.
Profit. That bit drowns out the rest. An ever-increasing number blowing past utility and constraint. Would I see a pattern in its web of interconnectedness? I imagine it forming a face. The grinning, calculating glare of Capital, a leering synthesis of a whole lot of numbers. Numbers are all it is really. Humanity, production, value: a number.
No one number is cruel, but together they are a horror.
I imagine reaching out and grasping those strands of causality, sticking my fingers into the production charts and squeezing, twisting the value into something more humane. I point it where it’s supposed to go. Higher wages for the coffee farmer, long, paid rest breaks for the dockworker, maternity leave for the barista. But I fuck it up. The lines strain and snap loose. The chair vanishes from beneath me and I land in no coffee shop at all, just a patch of grass and litter on the side of a cracked highway. My clothes are gone. I yelp and try to bring it all back, but I can’t repiece it. “Error! Error!” the code screams. I try to reconnect it like bits of electric wire. Niger to Ukraine to Brazil to Jamaica to…no use. Does not compute. An economy, a social order, a way of being ripped off its hinges.
I am of course, not actually lying naked in the grass, but I’d prefer that to this feeling. My temples are raw from over-rubbing. I know this system needs to break. I know I need to break it. But even understanding the numbers makes me tremble, tracing the patterns leaves me broken down. To break, to change, to fix, to improve, to remake? The grinning face of capital absorbs and reacts to every blow. The smile never dims.
In fact, it gets wider.
There is an oft-cited saying online, “No ethical consumption under capitalism.” I have my criticism of the phrase (just so we’re clear, it’s not a Marx quote, it’s from Tumblr), but in moments like this it feels true. Perhaps I should say instead, “There’s no disconnected consumption under capitalism.” This doesn’t stop us from feeling disconnected, both lonely and sewn together by capitalist interbeing.
To eat fresh produce is to taste the melanoma of the Venezuelan migrant earning less than minimum wage in the California sun. To drive is to burn Saudi oil that will drown the island nations first (just ask Tuvalu), and all of us eventually. I type this very essay into Google docs, even as big tech reduces the human experience to raw data capital. Consumption, content, control.
What am I saying beyond “Capitalism has to end?”
I suppose if there’s anything I want to convey, it is capitalism’s bigness. The way it stretches and squirms, cables of cash connecting my coffee cup to Cornwall. It isn’t just the framework through which we understand the world, it is the world. To challenge it is to challenge everything…yet challenge it we do.
Yes, we can imagine a world beyond capitalism, but we imagine it born from flame. The Molotov cocktail, the commandeered tank, the repeating shotgun, the White House black with ash. Sure, we hope for this and that through elections. Healthcare expansion there, climate subsidy here. But the end of capitalism? In our fiction it only comes with drones turned on their masters, roving, righteous mobs, the breakdown of the social order. The lines of causality confetti beneath the masses’ feet.
Are we wrong to think this? How else could it be? Capitalism is the social order. You must engage with it to even write about its overthrow. People laughed at Posadas for saying socialism will need a nuclear war to start, but are our imaginations any kinder? What will it take to tear that grin of capital to nothing, and how much more to build something coherent, something that doesn’t leave us naked in the grass where a coffee shop once was?
We live suspended in potentiality. Look around you. Take a big sip of how big it all is.
How much human labor power. How much climate devastation. How much genius and creativity. How much deep thought and how many wasted years. Forgotten desired careers, mashed fingers, tweaked backs, workplace friendships, unionization whispers, and profit, profit, profit. Heights of genius, depths of stupidity.
We exist in a world that would border on incomprehensible for the majority of human history. I have the wealth of the world in my hands, yet it is distinctly likely that I will some day die from a preventable disease that I cannot afford to treat.
And so, I return to the lines of causal code. The interconnected toil of the global proletariat, grasping at purpose beyond profit.
The task of my writing on this blog going forward will be aimed at a single purpose: A. making sense of this wretched cacophony of code, B. imagining a world beyond it, and C. trying to find some way from A to B.
If you think you’ve solved this, then feel free to let me know. We’ll publish your answer here and then we can all go take a nap.
But unless that happens, I’ll see you next Saturday.
