Divide People, Multiply Capital
Divide people and multiply capital, that's capitalism. Capital multiplies itself when it divides labor, elevates itself when it divides politicians, and goes international when it divides nations. If people can't control their labor, capital can control it all. If parties can't control politics, capital has them in its thrall. And if nations can't control themselves, international capital has a ball. As long as people are divided, capital can multiply without a care in the world. And if the world burns who cares? Getting the AI called capital to care about other animals is asking a computer to divide by zero. It doesn't compute at all.
None of this is coincidental—the division of workers, of political parties, and of nations. It is the capitalist system working as intended above it all. Spoiling things for humans so capital can take the spoils. As long as people are alienated from the fruits of their labor, the alien species capital can feed to its heartless content. As long as politics is a reality TV show that doesn't mess with business, business can carry on unrepentant. And as long as nations are fighting amongst themselves, capital can sell them weapons, take the resources, and charge rents.
This division of people, this fracturing of feeling, is a fractal phenomenon. You can see capitalism working in microcosm on the human soul, or and in the macrochaos of the whole world. Leo Tolstoy zoomed in on the human soul in 1900, quoting John Ruskin who told,
We have much studied and much perfected of late the great civilized invention of the division of labour, only we give it a false name. It is not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided, but the men – divided into mere segments of men – broken into small fragments and crumbs of life; so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the point of a pin or the head of a nail. Now, it is a good and desirable thing, truly, to make many pins a day; but if we could only see with what crystal sand their points were polished – sand of human souls – we should think there might be some loss in it also.
The sand of human souls, is there a more poetic way to describe the plunder of capital? But since time immemorial, it has been known that man cannot survive alone, as Ibn Khaldun said in 1377, “the power of the individual human being is not sufficient for him to obtain (the food) he needs.” Humans have always been social animals, but once we encoded human society as nations and then into abomination called corporations, we created our own predators and unleashed them upon the world. Thus the world has been ruled by malevolent AI since at least the 1600s, but no one gave a shit cause it was devouring the darker continents and poorer people. We should have truly feared the aggregates of men we ensouled, but it's too late for that now.
Aliens
Before it was too late, people like Karl Marx saw the state of things to come. His book Capital is not a cry to stop the beast but rather to ride it, to seize the means of production, not smash them. This is really the vital difference between capitalism and communism. Not what but who is in control. Marx et al saw the rising forces of capital and didn't stand athwart history yelling stop. Instead he (via The German Ideology) first identified the alien species made of steam, metal, and men, saying,
In history up to the present it is certainly an empirical fact that separate individuals have, with the broadening of their activity into world-historical activity, become more and more enslaved under a power alien to them (a pressure which they have conceived of as a dirty trick on the part of the so-called universal spirit, etc.), a power which has become more and more enormous and, in the last instance, turns out to be the world market.
I take Marx literally and consider this power literally alien. I consider capital a species of artificial life and what we call the economy just its ecosystem. However you choose to imagine it, it's real enough. There is little point of debating whether a creature is crocodile or alligator when you're already in its mouth.
The vital question in the 1800s to 1900s was whether we would ride this beast or if the beast would ride us, roughshod. And communism is merely the proposal that people rather than inchoate profit should be in control of the economy. As Marx continued, secondly saying that humans should have conscious mastery of these powers,
All-round dependence, this natural form of the world-historical co-operation of individuals, will be transformed by this communist revolution into the control and conscious mastery of these powers, which, born of the action of men on one another, have till now overawed and governed men as powers completely alien to them.
Centuries later, you can see the theory in practice, as we have tried capitalism in most of the world and communism in places like China. And you can really see the difference in productive forces. The Communist Party of China controls capital and the whatever parties of the West are controlled by capital. Thus China can not only produce more, they also have the concept of enough. China has concepts they call ‘moderate prosperity’ and ‘ecological redlines’ and their economy has gas as well as brake pedals. Capitalism, of course, has only gas, and regularly breaks itself by crashing.
This is because capitalism is not under human control at all, and this is the vital difference between communism and capitalism. The capitalists do not care about the human or natural world at all because why would they? They can't even perceive them. Talking to a capitalist is like talking to the bacteria in your guts. They're just there for the tasty byproducts, and if they grow a conscience they'll be replaced and shat out. Remember that most of us are governed by an artificial species called capital that perceives us about as much as we perceive cattle. Centuries ago there was a question as to whether to be ruled by aliens or ruled by humans and, sadly, the dominant White Empire chose to sell the whole world out. And now we're getting the bill for this affront.
Climate collapse also isn't coincidental either. This isn't the first time the emissions of a new species have extincted those who came before (see the Great Oxygen Holocaust). The alien species capital was only programmed to grow at any cost, as the apex predator above humans with no predators upon it, it has reached the end of the Petri dish we call a planet.