On Calling It Capitalism

Often, calling something (or some process, market, transaction, and so on) capitalism appears flippant, but the reality is that the problems of society today stem directly from the capitalistic logic developed and maintained at the Industrial Revolution. Referencing an 1800s analysis1 over and over again is exhausting—doing so, I think, is a large part of why calling something capitalism appears flippant—but largely the logic has not changed. The simplicity of naming it is useful because, since the 1800s, capital has been resisted. We don’t have to reinvent the resistance, we just have to do it. "Platform decay“ (or enshittification)2 is a useful analysis of contemporary commodities—like program code, marketing copy, or even attention, though Doctorow clearly means, reductively, (web) softwares—in the marketplace, but it is not capitalism in itself. Parsing out the distinction between platform-decayed commodities and a capitalistic economy is worth doing; after all, commodities exist…