On Calling It Capitalism

I think a lot times calling something capitalism comes off flip, but the sorry reality is that the problems of society today stem directly from capitalistic logic and there is no mystery about it. Referencing a 1800s analysis over and over again is exhausting, but largely the logic has not changed. The simplicity of naming it, though, is useful because, since the 1800s, capital has been resisted. We don’t have to reinvent the resistance, we just have to do it. "Enshittification“ is a useful analysis of contemporary commodities in the marketplace, but it is not capitalism, with which people seem to be conflating it. Parsing out the distinction between enshittified commodities and a capitalistic economy is worth doing: Doctorow surely would have just said "capitalism" if that is what he meant, so we should not conflate the terms. What use is Marx here, now, when he was making arguments for the factory floor and we are facing a disappearing class of programmers, the entry level…