So Capital is useful, in that it enables trade, but in doing so it alienates all sides of an exchange from the products being exchanged and from one another. While this is a problem, it is not insurmountable, or, rather, it may be insurmountable, but it could be alleviated somewhat, perhaps though an campaign of education or through direct intervention by individuals and groups. The biggest problem, and the one that can only be overcome if all humans everywhere decide to cooperate, is Capital itself, its desire, what it wants.

It may sound strange to claim that Capital—an inanimate, immaterial, and human-created object—can have desires, but I think it does. After all, many other objects have desires: chairs want to be sat upon, books want to be read, paintings want to be looked at. Ever driven past a vacant, garbage-strewn plot of land and seen a forlorn-looking chair sagging amongst the weeds? There is more going on here than mere anthropomorphism. The chair may not actually be depressed, sitting alone in the vacant lot, but insofar as its purpose is to provide support for humans as they eat or work or rest, the chair, sitting amongst the weeds and garbage in the vacant lot is most definitely not fulfilling its purpose. Even more so is the gilded throne in the museum: no longer the support for a ruler of state, it now only supports a bit of dust and must spend the remainder of its life behind a rope, or, worse, itself sitting on a plinth or in storage somewhere. At least the chair in the vacant lot might be sat upon by weary passers by, or by feral cats or opossums, or picked up by a someone in need of a chair or by someone who reclaims chairs from vacant lots and puts them to use. No such luck for the museum-embalmed throne.

But to say that chairs want to be sat upon may be overstating things: it is certainly their purpose, but just because an object has a purpose, it doesn’t necessarily follow that the object wants to fulfill that purpose. Do guns want to shoot? Does Chili Mac want to be eaten? Do televisions want to be watched? Of course they do. After all, guns rust without regular attention; chili mac will grow mold and rot if not eaten or preserved in a timely fashion; unless we watch them, or at least turn them on while we go about other activities, televisions become mere hunks of plastic and minerals taking up space in our lives.

But what does Capital want? Well, it was made to be exchanged: that is its purpose, that’s why we created Capital. However, and unlike other object, Capital wants something else. It really doesn’t care whether it is spent or hoarded. It doesn’t care whether it is used or merely looked at. We can bury it, put it on a shelf, stuff it in a pocket, even burn representations of it: Capital is not discouraged by any of this. What Capital wants, more than anything, is to be stacked up with others of its own kind.

Throughout the history of Capital, it has repeatedly agglomerated and been forced to disperse (usually through violence). Kings and Popes once owned everything, even the people in distant lands. But they were largely overthrown centuries ago.# After the Kings came the bankers and business owners, and then came the Corporations, which pretty much rule the world in the early twenty-first century.

All of these entities—Kings, Popes, Bankers, Business Owners, Corporations, and many others—are master aggregators of Capital, and its from this aggregation that they derive their power. There are commonly two theories of how this aggregation comes about: on one side, the Corporations are simply providing a service that appeals to lots of people, they make a great product and deserve to be compensated for it; on the other side, people are greedy and want more and more, and so the Bankers cheat their depositors and the Business owners cheat their employees. Both of these arguments are true, in a sense, but neither capture the whole story.

Sure, Apple makes great computers, and it should be able to charge a premium for its wares. It should also be able to pursue the cheapest source of materials and labor. But is there any reason that it should sit on twenty-five billion dollars year after year? Should it make 60 or 70% profit on iPads? All of that seems a bit unnecessary to me, and Apple is not the wealthiest entity around, or the worst actor when it comes to unnecessary capital accumulation or resource exploitation, and it doesn’t even bring in the greatest amount or percentage of profits off of its products. It’s not as if we can claim that Apple, as a Corporate entity, is greedy. After all, and despite legal claims to the contrary, Apple—and all other corporations—is an inanimate object, and is therefore incapable of greed and other human vices.#

What Corporations are capable of, however, is acting according to their purpose, and their sole purpose is “increasing value for its shareholders,” in other words, aggregating Capital. This wouldn’t be so bad if it didn’t have such far-reaching consequences.

Because Capital wants to be around its own kind, and because Corporations exist only to appease Capital, we humans enact free trade agreements, build factories in China and Bangladesh, where labor laws (and their enforcement) are nonexistent, and where the people are so desperate for basic needs that they will send their children to work sewing cheap t-Shirts and willingly move into dormitories attached to factories, where they give back half their pittance for a bed and eat from factory-owned kitchens and wear factory-owned clothing so that when their paycheck comes it contains a bunch of 0’s, much like Steve Jobs’ paycheck, which also contains a bunch of 0’s, but with one important difference: Steve’s paycheck features other numbers in front of the 0’s. This exploitation of workers serves exactly one purpose: aggregating Capital.

In addition, Corporations find all sorts of ways to extract capital from one place and add it to a big pile somewhere. They search out locations where pollution is permitted, because manufacturing processes that pollute are slightly faster and slightly cheaper than cleaner alternatives. They source materials from countries that are controlled by Kings, or Caliphs, or military juntas, where all resources (including human labor) are owned by the state, and where the raw materials are subject only to bribes, and not in addition to the tariffs and regulations found in North America and Western Europe. Like worker exploitation, the only reason for environmental exploitation is to decrease production costs and thereby increase profit, also known as aggregating Capital.

But it wasn’t enough for Corporations to exploit workers and the environment in one corner of the world, they also needed to go global with it, and so they bought the governing and judging classes and instituted a 30-year plan to destroy worker protections and social aid, a plan that is presently in full swing, and is only increasing in speed and power.

It’s not only Corporations who serve as the Agents of Capital, but also the owners of the corporations. People like Steve Jobs, to be sure, but especially people like Rupert Murdoch, who manufactures much of the news and entertainment that we workers consume, not only through ownership of newspapers, radio and television stations, and movie studios, but also through the creation of celebrities and sports idols who serve as unattainable models for the masses, and as fodder for news stories when they inevitably fail to live up to the hype that surrounds them.

The worst of this class of master aggregators might very well be the bankers and financiers, who profit from all of this, like Jamie Diamond of JPMorgan fame, who must have had an idea of what Bernard Madoff was up to with his Ponzie Scheme, but did nothing to stop it, and who absolutely knew that giving mortgages to people, then hacking up, repackaging, and selling off the debts, would wreck the financial world (and the rest of the world along with it), but who skated away from the resulting crises wealthier than ever before and with narry a mark on him.

There are finance people in this world, hedge fund managers mostly, who take home hundreds of millions of dollars every year, and make the most money when the rest of the people loose their shirts. What does one individual need with even one million dollars per year, let alone one hundred million dollars? I made roughly $30,000 last year, and I managed to feed, clothe, and shelter myself, get to and from work, pay off my credit cards, take on the care of two cats, and still save a bit of money for a rainy day. Sure, I could imagine maybe making enough to buy a small home (though I plan to be a renter as there are fewer headaches), replace my aging and gas-guzzling automobile, maybe buy a new computer every couple of years, maybe even find a partner and help to raise and provide for some children. I could do all of that fairly easily with $50 or $60K per year, and there are people out there who make two thousand times as much and still want more? Why? What do they need that much money for? They can’t possibly spend it all, or maybe they can, but on what? Cars so fancy that they never drive them? Houses so big that they never see large swaths of them? Multiple homes in multiple countries throughout the world? Cocaine and high-class prostitutes perhaps? And with all that, some of these ultra-rich people would still have more money left over than I will make in a lifetime, so much money that they worry about how they’ll manage to get more!

There must be more going on here than simple greed, and we all know that hard work and determination has nothing to do with it. I don’t begrudge Mr. HedgeFund his riches: more power to him and may his god bless him and all that. I’m sure he worked hard to get where he is. But did he work harder (or smarter) than my neighbor who holds a PhD in English and teaches at a nearby community college for half of a pittance? Did he work harder than my other neighbor who traps cats and volunteers for a local animal shelter? Did he work harder than my father, a one-time bricklayer and current associate at a Home Depot? Did he work harder than the thousands of migrant workers who pick fruit for starvation wages? Did he work harder than the soccer ball-sewing children in the sweatshops in Guatemala? I find it unlikely, in fact, I find it likely that the vast majority of us work as hard as we need to and no more. A few people are slackers, and a few others are extra-hard workers, and some of that should be compensated, but it is impossible that one person works 2000 times harder and adds 2000 times more value to the society than any other human on the planet, and that’s roughly how much more Mr. HedgeFund makes than I do.

What he did do was aggregate capital better than the rest of us. And not just money, but also the Social, Cultural, and Symbolic Capitals that he traded on to become Mr. HedgeFund. He is far more of a slave to Capital than the sharecropper and the bricklayer-cum-Home Depot Associate.

And what is Mr. HedgeFund and Mr. Murdoch and Misters Koch and Mr. Jobs and all the others doing with their vast wealth? Well, Bill Gates, for example, goes around encouraging other billionaires to give half of their fortunes to charity. Sounds good, yes? But what is Mr. Gates going to do with half a billion dollars? What are his great-great-great grandchildren’s grandchildren going to do with half a billion dollars? Buy Maybachs and Mansions? But at least he’s willing to give up some of it, which is more that we can say for Mr. Murdoch and most of the other ultra-rich.

Other billionaires buy politicians, but mere millionaires can do that. The really big dogs buy whole political parties, and then have laws enacted to make their businesses more profitable. This is rather smart, sure, but it’s also somewhat disheartening to those of us who care about protecting the environment and avoiding worker exploitation.

The thing is, billionaires are people too. They probably love their families, like babies and puppies and apple pie and Momma and all just as much as the rest of us. They’ve just allowed themselves to become slaves to the whims of capital.

And the only thing capital (and its slaves) cares about is agglomerating, piling on more and more of itself, creating ever more ingenious schemes to take capital from wherever it is and add it to the massive piles already in existence, and always already growing larger and larger.

Maybe I’m just making excuses for the darker sides of human nature, but I sincerely believe that Capital itself is at fault for most of the evil that plagues the world. Just like sex addicts who marry prudes and end up cheating only because they can’t help themselves, Capital—with its sole desire to find more of itself and have ever larger masturbatory orgies—will destroy human society and the entire world if left to its own devices, and we, us, all of us, will help it right along, as long as there are new versions of the same shiny toys for us to play with and strive for, as long as there is just enough bread and just enough of a circus to keep us occupied, and as long as people like me sit and write instead of banding together with other living, breathing humans, going out into the world and forcing the entire socioeconomic system to change.

So what can be done about this? Can Capital be stopped? Can we transform Capitalism into a system that refuses to exploit humans and the environment?

This where I’ll turn next time, though I may pause to say a few things about the class war that’s underway in the United States and elsewhere first. We’ll see how it goes.