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.

Capitalism is the organization of labor into an economic system. It is distinct from other economic systems through the delineation of owner and worker, tied up with the concept of "capital" itself. Workers are capital, though initially of, for, and in themselves; we make things to use.² Anything that makes value, especially profits, is capital. The Luddites protested the introduction of mechanical looms because it was a different kind of capital that edged out the person themselves. Luddites were being forced to compete with machines, which require no compensation for their labor.³

"Platform decay“ (or enshittification)⁴ 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 within economies. 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 developer?

The total estrangement of ourselves from products of our work is brought to a head in the information-as-commodity economy of the modern day. Often we are making things in order to make other things.⁵ With agentic generative pretrained transformers (GPTs), a commodity itself begins producing commodities for us. (Are they for us, though?) No one is connected to anything, neither the labor nor the product. Platform decay, then, isn't against anything; the product is by and for no one...what is the use value⁶ of Facebook when it is predominantly automated accounts?⁷ Questions like that seep into other aspects of life, highlighting the emptying out of social-ness or the relations of production and consumption.⁸ An email is a commodity with a use value and no exchange value;⁹ the email becomes valueless if no human hand touches it (or reads it in the case of a GPT-generated summary).

There is also a cultural issue with capitalism. The modes of being, living, and relating are dictated together, which define labor, and which additionally defines culture. This reciprocal relationship changes production as culture changes and the opposite is true; as production is structured by the means of, for example, legislated work hours, culture in turn changes. Platform decay seems to sit in the middle ground between culture and production as what it affects are commodities, which in turn are used by people in particular ways. So capitalism and platform decay are also inter-related and reinforcing. However, the loss of human-ness in the production of the commodity disrupts the cycles of change that production and culture go through.

This in-between-ness of platform decay, I think insidiously, could be so disruptive as to flatten culture and production or at worst, destroy culture. Perhaps platform decay is deleterious in this way; not just a bad product, but destructive to the social fabric that is already so tenuous having been framed by and within capitalism for so long now. The flattening of culture into production by commodities as themselves finally edges out humanity totally, a perfected isolation of everyone in their own production-culture bubbles. Influencers influence no one but the artificial "influencer" itself generated from a pattern-making algorithm to simply sell more commodities that have replaced human connection. The despair of doomscrolling may not be because of bad news, but because there is no one behind it. Often, those who are in it and whom the bad news is about, might as well not be real anyway...not that we could tell given the rampant, artificial content spread everywhere on the internet.

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Footnotes

1. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, ed. Frederick Engel, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (Progress Publishers, 1887), marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1. ↩

2. This is, to Marx, the inherent nature of humanity: A natural inclination to labor (Marx, 1959). ↩

3. At the most basic, workers have to be fed and sheltered, which is expensive and so leads to lower profits. The loom needs none of that. ↩

4. Cory Doctorow, "Social Quitting," Medium, published November, 2022, doctorow.medium.com/social-quitting-1ce85b67b456. ↩

5. While division of labor is neutral—though nominally good for commerce—it takes the worker away from the thing as a whole, only producing things for other things that are sold as a whole commodity. There is no longer an interpersonal relationship between buyer and seller; this worsens as buyers and sellers become corporations (Smith, 2002). ↩

6. "Use-value is the qualitative aspect of value, e.g., the concrete way in which a thing meets human needs:..." (Marxist Internet Archive) ↩

7. John Herrman, "Why Meta Is Filling Your Facebook and Instagram Feeds With Bots," Intelligencer, New York Magazine, October 22, 2024, nymag.com/intelligencer/article/how-meta-is-using-bots-to-automate-facebook-and-instagram.html. ↩

8. Justin Gregg, "Why Using AI to Write to Friends and Family Is Dehumanizing," Psychology Today, June 5, 2025, psychologytoday.com/us/blog/elegant-arguments/202506/why-using-ai-to-write-to-friends-and-family-is-dehumanizing. ↩

9. "Exchange-value is the quantitative aspect of value, as opposed to 'use-value' which is the qualitative aspect of value, and constitutes the substratum of the price of a commodity....Exchange-value differs from 'price...'" (Marxist Internet Archive). ↩