published
updated
A friend[#]_ mentioned that he believes it's a good idea to give Capital to those who can deploy it effectively. It's not a controversial idea, in fact, it's the samae idea as meritocracy, if you squint at it a bit. Sure the language is a bit VC, but we are speaking about capitalism generally.
I didn't have the words at the time, but something about that notion seemed wrong. It's only now that I'm realizing I oppose the notion of Capital altogether. Imbued in the word "effectively" is an implicit notion of what we're considering the successful deployment of capital: Accumulating more. This is, as far as I know, is the whole point of having capital in the first place. You want it to grow!
I could not reconcile this definitional description of Capital with my own feelings about that statement being "untrue". It's not like I philosophically opposed the idea of a Meritocracy (Though it certainly isn't my preference). I seemed to have implicitly understood that there could not be any other meaningful measure of effective use of Capital, other than through the tenants of Capitalism itself. I can't talk about human flourishing, or ecosystem preservation when the concept of Value has been made manifest through Money. That's the whole point. Capitalism provides us with a framework of value, we call it money, in which Capital is Money with the explicit goal of making more of it.
We may never get rid of Money. It's certainly much older than Capitalism. But Capital? Much more recent. We can certainly find alternative organization methods which explicitly avoid it's use.
So now I'm thinking about what a Post-Capital organization can look like.
- [#] Link Pending