Swinging my willy like it's made of money

Alt title:  the general malaise of having no bitches (bitches being capital) 

I remember, one year, my family and I, we went to Thailand.  Really, it was my mum, grandmum and I - my mum wanted to stay somewhere other than Sydney for a while - symptomatic of stress, overwork, and the general drudgery of modernity I guess.

I remember going somewhere - funny that, remembering taking public transport, but not remembering where to.  On the train - technically a monorail, but train sounds so much better - advertisements were blaring out in between each stop.  So, you'd be standing in a single level train car, watching ads flitter by on those LCD screens where they'd display the stations.

There was this temple.  You climbed up the temple, to the top, leaving your grandma at the bottom.  She had a fall, you see, fractured her hip before.  So you climb up.  And below you lies a sprawl of two storey buildings, each plonked together.  And in the distance, rivalling you even, rises skyscrapers.  The sort you'd find in any major city, all steel and glass and rectangles and more steel and more glass, oh and look, maybe even a circle or two, and more rectangles. 

On the way back from Thailand, my mum in all her adventurousness, took a tuk tuk.  Ok, I'm making it sound as if she took it on her own - we were with her.  So she was talking with the driver.  The typical:  where are you from; how has Thailand been; and eventually, through some benign process of association, how the Australian dollar compared to the Thai baht.

And of course, when the economy is brought up, peoples' insecurities and woes surface.  So he talked about the country's low taxes (compared to Australia's, a point of contention for my mother), the cost of living, the lack of access to social services...the good stuff.  She talked about her work, he talked about the hospital costs, he talked about how Australians went to Thailand because of the exchange rates, she talked about how the government takes so much money, he talked about...

***

I've been asked by one of my friends, in a roundabout fashion, to explain the free market.  Let's start with something tangentially related.

It is rather wild to think about how recent this whole modernity thing has been.  If we use the French revolution as the beginning of the modern era (a terribly Western view of things, but regardless, humour me here), then it hasn't even been 400 years.  American ascendancy has really only been 30 years old, given the Soviet Union's final collapse in 1991.  If my friends are reading this, then the modern era we live in is barely 10 years older than you.  

A hallmark of our modern age is the nation state.  The idea that the state is representative of, and acts in the interests of the nation, really came into ascendency in the mid 19th century.  So, in the grand scheme of things, terribly young. 

So despite being so young, the nation state has oddly implanted itself in our minds.  

Consider the time before nations existed.  It wasn't that long ago, when people didn't have loyalty to Australia, or Thailand, or America.  And it wasn't that long ago when the very concept of an Australia, a Thailand, or an America didn't exist.  But try to picture it.

Hard, right?

So the nation is a fixture of our modern times.  And what of the state?  

Now, arguably, the first states arose in Mesopotamia, an outgrowth of agriculture, of surpluses.  You know how the spiel goes:  for the first time in human history, we produced more than we needed; we needed to store it; labour was divided, specialised into different jobs; suddenly you had a priest class, an artisan class, a merchant class.  And depending on how you look at it, this was either the beginning of a brave new world, or a complete disaster for the human race.

States arose when we had surpluses.  But what is the purpose of a state? 

The state, ultimately, is the guarantee-er of capital.  Guaranteer?  Look, it doesn't matter.  The state essentially ensures that capital exists.

Now, what is capital?  The traditional line of thought is that capital is money - purchasing power.  A billionaire has capital because he's a billionaire - he literally has billions of dollars (I'm using "he" as opposed to the gender neutral "they", because let's be honest, they're mostly old men).  

But this doesn't capture the full essence of it.  Money, and especially the modern version of money, unbound to gold or silver, hasn't always existed.  I know.  Crazy, right?  But even before money existed, when we were still bartering like early city men, those peasants, the state still existed.  

No, rather, capital can be thought of as control over the means of production.  So, control over the farms, control over the factories, and so forth.

How does the state do this?  How does it guarantee capital?  Why, of course, violence.  State sanctioned violence.  

In early days, armies.  Remember when Rome suppressed Spartacus's slave rebellion?  Yup, violence.  Remember during the English civil war, when ol olly crommy (Oliver Cromwell) suppressed the Diggers, and the Levellers?  Yup, violence.  Remember the crushing of strikes in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries?  Violence, again.

Now, this is a very blugeony sort of violence.  Obvious violence.  The sort of violence you'd threaten someone with if you wanted to steal their wallet.  Other kinds of violence exist:  say resources are inadequately distributed, perpetuating vicious cycles, and then say we gaslighted people into thinking that it's the victims' fault for not being righteous enough; say we colonise some bugger off place, screw around with ethnic groups, left without batting an eye and then called it decolonisation; say we cut spending to public institutions under the guise of promoting a can-do attitude and the free market, whilst we bail out corporations that are too big to fail with public money.  Now this, this is not the sort of violence you'd use to mug someone.  But it is the sort of violence the modern state engages in.  This is not to say that states have moved away from wars - remember that for most of our lives, Australia has been at war with some country in the Middle East.  But it is the violence that the state applies in lieu of direct bloodshed.

Ok, so states uphold capital and apply violence to do so.  And nowadays they claim to protect the interests of the nation - they cannot be separated from the nation under the modern schema, even.  So how does a nation state juggle protecting the ownership of capital, and acting as the representative of the nation?

Let's go back to the free market.  

Let's take it at face value.  A free market is a market existing without state intervention.  Wow, that's great, let's deregulate, let's cut taxes, let's shrink the state.  In fact, let's get rid of the state.

But hang on, there's a contradiction, isn't there?  Because if a market is basically the way we trade goods and services, derived from capital, or rather, enmeshed with capital, then how does it exist without a state to enforce it.

You want the state to do as little as possible - maybe not even exist - but at the same time, the state is absolutely crucial in guaranteeing that your 'local' billionaire actually owns the factories and businesses he says he owns.  The state, therefore, is the only thing really stopping, say, Amazon workers from breaking Bezos's kneecaps.  So you can't actually minimise the state in this regard, which is why you need to spend more on law enforcement, and on the military.  But you still want to make the government smaller, or appear smaller.

So what do you do?  Healthcare, education, public transport, electricity, telecommunications, the bloody mail service.  Cut, cut, cut and when they barely function, privatise 'em.  

Ah, but we've hit a contradiction.  Doing so hurts the people.  But wait, isn't the point of the state to represent or to protect the people?

And here we come to a divergence between the people, and the nation.  You can measure health outcomes, incomes, savings, hell, even happiness.  But these measures describe the people's, the population's conditions.  It does not describe the conditions of the nation.

So what is the nation?  A nation, simply, is an idea.  It is an idea, a social construct, in the same way that race, religion, and money are social constructs.  Do races actually exist, biologically?  No.  Is there an all powerful being dictating everything?  Who cares?  And so a nation is a collection of stories and shared identities which influences the world, ourselves, and the relationships between the two.  And of course, we can influence, change and alter our nation - our national identity.

What I just said isn't completely true.  Yes, we all have a certain power in dictating what our nation really is, but we are still beholden to very real imbalances in power and resources.  For the longest time, Australia was White Australia - a narrative of the working man's paradise, assuming that you were a white male, of course.  Then, we became a truly multicultural country, provided that your parents came from the right ones, and via the right methods.  And all of these narratives are very much largely influenced by those in power - those with capital.

So the state aims to represent the nation, but the nation itself is built upon existing power structures.  And from this, a state needs little justification to dismantle social support, or entrench existing prejudices - it is, after all, acting in the best interests of the nation.

With this, wealth and capital gets funnelled into the hands of the few.  This isn't to say there's some grand conspiracy, and this is absolutely not meant to be anti-semitic.  In reality, it's a mess of people acting in their own self interest.  They want to protect their wealth, and because our economy demands perpetual growth, to perpetually increase their wealth.  But the end result is that the state's interests align with the nation's interests which align with the interests of the rich and powerful.

Thus the state cuts taxes for the wealthy, thus the state reduces spending for social services, thus the state must not meaningfully punish or prevent any crimes committed by big businesses - if anything they must protect big businesses.

This, of course, makes people pissed.  Hell, they might even get funny ideas about actually being in control in their workplaces.  Maybe the workers want to own the means of production.  And so you need to invest in the police, the military, the police, the military, and so on. 

But you see, in the end, the state isn't smaller or less pervasive.  The entanglement of the state and capital means that the institution of the state, and its powers, must grow in scale.  

That's the free market.  It's where state interference in the market is minimised by paradoxically increasing the ability of the state to protect those with capital.

And what has the free market lead to?  Well, we've had stagnant wages, our public services have tanked, and we've had 3 financial crashes in the span of 20 years.  But other than that the economy is looking strong. 

Addendum:

One might say that the government's role is to represent the people.  And, of course, every so often we vote for a political party - usually Labor or the Libs - and if in power, they seek to implement policies and take action based on the wishes of their voters.

This is all very good in theory.

However, all power, whether it is state power or capital, tends to form monopolies.  This is why it is necessary for modern democracies to have checks and balances.  This is why anti-trust laws exist.

But think about what this means.

Democracy, or rather, our form of representative democracy, is at odds with itself.  It simultaneously aims to represent the voices of as many people as possible, yet its very structure limits the voices that can be heard.  And because democracy aims to maintain rule by the people, democracy is at odds with the economic system that engulfs it  - an economic system where capital tends to concentrate in the hands of the few.  

So we reach a crossroads.  

If we are to abide by the ideals of rational actors, choosing to participate in a system where the people who are affected by the decisions make those very decisions then we cannot have structures that funnel power into the few.  

We cannot have capitalism.