One of the problems we have in public discourse, but also in scientific, technological and academic debate, is a pervasive misuse of the word ‘System’. This post presents a perspective where both Capitalism and its presumed opposite, Socialism, are not seem as ‘systems’ but as *results*, as *residues* of contingent historical processes. This shift corresponds to the notion that a ‘systems’ view reveals more about the observer who adopts it than about the object considered.
The word ‘system’ operates as a ‘filler’, an empty signifier, which seems to convey meaning but really occludes, covers and hides particular gaps which are not communicated or cannot be communicated. In this sense the use of the term ‘system’ is ‘ideological’ and an obstacle to proper understanding.
The word ‘system’ -according to the dictionaries– simply means “that which stands together” (or “that which is taken as standing together”). The word points to co-incidence, interrelation or dependency of the things which are observed. A ‘system’ is supposed to have ‘parts’ or ‘components’ which show some kind of close interaction or meaningful dependency between them. A system is considered to be an organism, or a machine or at least a structure of entities which act jointly with some regularity and ‘internal’ coherence. In fact, a ‘system’ is generally defined as a collection of entities which can be distinguished from the non-system precisely because those ‘internal’ rules are peculiar and proper to the system and not to its environment.
But the goodness of the term ‘system’ and its apparent utility don’t go further. As we move from one class of entities to another, or even from one entity to many, for example from the realm of living beings to machines or societies, or from one machine to many, the appeal to ‘internal rules’ or to ‘parts’ and ‘components’ breaks down and loses explanatory power. The complexity of heterogeneous entities and even multiple entities of the same class does not seem to fit under a single concept.
Across the multiple levels and segments of reality, the way things interrelate and ‘stand together’ is different in each case, to the point that there is no single meaning which can be assigned to the word ‘system’. Aside of the inability to go beyond a generic adhesion to the “systems philosophy,” the failure of Bertalanffy’s General Systems Theory was due to the lack of a common meaning of the notion of a ‘system’ across all the areas where researchers tried to apply the theory.
In reality we have “systems” and ‘systems’: some specific ‘internal rules’ for particular classes of entities, and some general ‘systemic’ concepts which are too general to be useful. It is then much better to understand a ‘system’ not as something which stands by itself, but as something which is *seen* or *perceived* as a unity by the observer, and which is the case only within and through particular interactions between the observer and its object. This means the ‘system’ is a result of interaction and does not pre-exist to it.
As in many other areas of research and business, in Information Technology we also find many meanings and many kinds of ‘systems’; and there too the term is used as a ‘finaliser’, a ‘stop’ to convey an ideological meaning: here the nature of the ‘system’ is assumed as a reality just because it is described as such by technology managers, even if the actual internal operation or interdependency of the ‘parts’ is arbitrary, contingent, and probably haphazard and contrived, i.e. even if what is described “stands together” by artifice and not by necessity.
This same abuse of the word ‘system’ is present in economic and political communication. General discourse, media items, press exchanges and academic debate are liberally adorned with descriptions of Capitalism and Socialism as social ‘systems’. It is important to note that this abuse happens among advocates and critics on *all sides* of the ideological debate.
What can it mean that Capitalism or Socialism are ‘systems’? Essentially, what it means is that contingent results of history, or better, what we perceive in them, are rationalised as coherent wholes, as consistent realities and not as the actual, contingent eventualities they represent.
From the Left (with the various meanings this may have nowadays), from the side of the critics of Capitalism, the usual explanation is as follows: Capitalism is an economic and political structure, an articulated set of institutions, processes, regulations, mechanisms and relationships which depend on and maintain private ownership “of the means of production” and which grows and develops exclusively for the sake of “economic profit”.
In that sense, for the critics of Capitalism, its ‘systemic’ character comes from the consistent and coherent operation of those rules, parts, institutions and components, so that –in the whole– Capitalism appears as a self-replicating, self-driving machinery, a social organism, where some actors exploit others.
On the side of the advocates of Capitalism, the ‘systemic’ view is also accepted and well established, because it serves to highlight that Capitalism cannot exist or operate without the articulation of several institutions and factors: the rule of law, private property, free enterprise, markets, democracy, etc.
In both cases, beyond the valid enumeration of aspects which may be listed together, beyond the range of characteristics which are *seen to exist together*, the emphasis is on the *coincidence* of those factors, and not on the actual understanding of how those determinations interact or are correlated. Neither in academic, nor in political or business environments do we find consensus as to how these factors interact or depend on each other, leading to uncountable and contradictory theories of the Capitalist ‘system’. As many or more than those theories based on Socialist ideologies.
When considering Socialism, while roles may be exchanged, both advocates and critics overwhelmingly resort to the *coincidence* of factors too, to qualify Socialism as a ‘system’: socialist law, regulated enterprise and ‘popular’ democracy. For all the actors supporting these views, one ‘system’ appears as the negation of the other, and these negations can be represented as the presence or absence of those perceived characteristics. In essence, debates of this nature are purely descriptive and fail to explain why Capitalism and Socialist came to exist at all and how come they seem to depend on each other. As these ideologies start from ahistorical models, the contingency of history is lost from the start.
In other words, both the advocates and the critics of Capitalism perceive its actual, material ‘consistency’ and ‘continuity’ and ‘self-reproduction’ even if they have very diverse and in some case opposed rationalisations of the nature of Modern Industrial and Post-Industrial societies. The consequence of this, though, is that the term ‘system’ suggests more than it can deliver, pretending to have a deeper understanding which really does not exist.
A more complex view of Capitalism can be invoked if we grasp the nature of its ‘consistency’ and ‘continuity’, not as a pre-existent model, but as a contingent consequence or result of the historical process. Not as a rationality which emerges or appears through evolution, but as a common denominator which imposes itself by *acceptance* and *resignation* (by default) and not by *rationality* and *optimality*.
The naive view of Capitalism (independently of the ideological stances in favour or against it) takes ‘systemicity’ as given, as part of the ‘nature’ of Capitalism. Socialists derive much confidence from the fact they are ‘opposed’ to a ‘system’ and then propose an ‘alternative’ to it. That means that Capitalism is ultimately considered as a pre-existent, ahistorical model, as something ideal and necessary for society, and not as a contingent outcome of history. Even in the most radical post-Marxist theories, Capitalism is considered a necessary ‘stage’ of some sort of evolution of Humanity. For the Socialist trends, defining an alternative ‘system’ seems to carry an aura of rational justification and logical consequence, but both sides of the ideological spectrum are well served by this ‘naturalisation’ and ‘inevitability’ of Capitalism.
To move away from these contradictions, we need look into the link between these ahistorical conceptions, the ‘systemic’ prejudice and the predominant idea of Progress in history.
There is a deep connection, across all ideologies, between the notion of a ‘social system’ and the idea of ‘historical progress’. Ultimately, the assumed ‘systemic’ nature of Capitalism and its counterparts goes hand in hand with a representation of history as a sequence of structures which follow one another. All Modern ideologies share the characteristic notion of a succession of social ‘systems’, if not since the origins of Humanity, at least since the end of the last Ice Age. Progress, in the sense of a necessary, gradual, staged evolution of economy, society and culture, is intimately linked with the conception of Capitalism and its ‘alternatives’ as ‘systems’. According to them, ‘systems’ stand against each other or succeed each other, as for example Capitalism supposedly succeeded Feudalism in Europe. “Hydraulic Empires” predated Feudal ‘systems’.
Consequently, if we abandon the illusory opposition of Capitalism and Socialism and their shared systemic theories, a better foundation would be to understand that ‘consistency’ and ‘continuity’ of social functioning do not stem from ‘systemic’ models. Instead, they arise from the results of history itself. Alternatively, one could say that any ‘systemicity’ which may be seen in social organisations in reality is a *common denominator of social operation*, a residue and result with is neither “superior” nor “inferior” to other configurations and which only exists as an unqualified contingency.
Only a naive ahistorical view of society would assume that this or the other contingent constellation of human activities would be ‘superior’ to another. Indeed, such presumption by itself reveals the historical horizon of these ideologies which need reassurance, which need to prove their value by contradiction.
It should be evident for the careful observer that ideas of ‘progress’ and ‘systems’ necessarily resort to *judgements of value* over the entire historical record; while any record of this nature can only be said to support judgements of fact. So, naive, uncritical, ahistorical views of society reveal themselves as products of history; deeply attached to oppositional thinking, and as being constrained by how history bears on their understanding.
These limitations can be clearly seen when one considers how, although Capitalism can be described as a ‘structure’ of institutions and economic and social processes, the ultimate roots of Capitalism are not Capitalist institutions, but a very long historical processes of population growth, territorial displacement and dispossession, ethnic conflict or mixture, and long running transformation of the types of exploitation of natural resources. Processes which prepare and underlie, layer after layer, era after era, the Industrial Revolution and its sequels.
This complex history extends over millennia and starts long before the supposed “primitive” accumulation of Capital dated to Medieval times. That “accumulation” itself was preceded by uncountable historical events which were in some cases larger and more radical than the events described by XIX Century Socialism. In other words, the immediate cause of Modern history is not ‘modern’. This notwithstanding, history has been presented in a contrived way, arguing that the separation of peasants from land created the masses of industrial workers as an immediate condition to capitalism, while it should be evident that the separation of large human populations from immediate possession and use of natural resources has been a much longer and convoluted process which never was *directed* towards and never was bound to culminate in Western style Capitalism. No ‘system’ is prefigured in history.
Western Capitalism (and its Socialist shadow) appear only at the end of a very long process of displacement, acculturation and wandering when the separation of human populations from their immediate environment of has had many layers and epochs and where cultural, social and human links have been removed, mixed, translated to such extent that the only common measure or glue which remains in societies, except for isolated segments and groups is the quantitative measure by ‘value’. It is in that sense that we can speak of Western Capitalism and Socialism as contingent results, as a residue of history, so that, by their own nature of being aspects of an inherited context, appear as inevitable realities on an undisputed ground of being. (Note: due to the multiplicity of human origins it is not possible to speak of one single original environment so that the history of wandering and displacement may well be said to be coterminous with the human condition.)
Consequently, instead of looking at the ‘consistency’ and ‘continuity’ of Capitalism and Socialism through the lens of the past few centuries, where the foreground is occupied by the pre-eminence of Western cultural, legal and political institutions, we should see the deeper continuity of history where ‘free’ (wandering) human labour is finally *locked in* as the only viable form of life for increasingly larger populations to the point we can now assume this is the *universal* form of human life.
In this context the current drive towards a post cultural and post national world appears not as a final act of Western Capitalist ‘systems’, but as the late effect of that long history of wandering and displacement: the production of value, already freed from social and political constraints, already far removed by centuries of dispossession and acculturation, is now blindly following its own logic.
So, while the dominance of monetary gain and ‘growth’ may be closely related to Western capitalism (for example via the effects of Protestant Ethics and Catholic Universalism), its roots lie actually in pre-capitalist and pre-feudal history both in the East and the West. It goes without saying that the so-called anti-systemic negation of Capitalism operates completely within the same historical ground where “accumulation of value”, “growth” and the “right to work” have become irreplaceable, a matter of necessity and urgency, albeit not a matter of rationality.
Capitalism, in that sense, from the point of view of long term history, is not a ‘system’ but an outcome, figuratively as a flood can be the outcome of continuous rain. The flood is a result, but not a ‘system’.
It is in this sense I say that Capitalism is a recent result of a entrenched situation where extremely large parts of the population do not have immediate access to resources which would allow them to exist in their own capacity, but also where the return to direct life from nature (not necessarily in ‘primitive’ form) has become impossible as this condition has been locked in by wandering, acculturation, urbanisation, loss of skills and technologies, and populational concentration.
This universal situation may be called pervasive, entrenched, consolidated, continuous, etc. but not a ‘system’ because it does not correspond not is it based on some sort of model, and instead represents a universal trap, a fantastically radical consequence of unplanned, un-systematic processes and non-teleological transformations. A process where the ultimate result is that working for a wage (employment) is compulsory and simultaneously inevitable for the survival of the population.
Hence the ‘system-quality’ of Capitalism and its alternatives comes not from political institutions but from the imperatives of salaried work. that is from a product or result of history which has been in the making for many centuries before Capitalism and Socialism themselves. This leads us to see that cultural, legal and political institutions represent only the *scenarios* where history is experienced, as we could say that ideologies are the partial reflections of a wider reality as seen by the participants.
This is a situation where any form of state and any form of politics has to maintain and extend the production of value, and where the differences between the ideologically driven factions can be only those related to the degree of the rate of accumulation of value. In respect to the distribution of property, history constrains our choices to the relative *size* and *aggregation* of control. It does not allow the participants to see the contingency of those choices. Grandiose statements of support for ‘systemic’ or ‘anti-systemic’ values are made in a context where the actors really are bound by the common ground of the post-industrial, globalised, post national society. Under those conditions, even “conservative”, “nationalist” and “populist” options are themselves marked by post-national characteristics.
So instead of a ‘system’ or a sequence of ‘systems’ what we see in history is *coping* strategies of all social actors. All dealing with the consequences of their own actions and interactions, blindly, and coming to terms also blindly with the results of past historical periods which lie beyond comprehension and awareness. We do not know what has been lost, and because of that we see the present as a ‘system’ but we see it from within, from an endo-perspective, which prevents us from escaping from the actual chaos these false ‘systems’ stand for.
References:
L. von Bertalanffy, General Systems Theory, 1968
Alexander Chayanov, The Theory of Peasant Economy, 1966
O. Rössler, Endophysics. Die Welt des inneren Beobachters, 1992
Vilfredo Pareto, Trattato Di Sociologia Generale, 1916