Is Capitalism a Convenient Scapegoat?

There is something psychologically satisfying about discovering a single word that appears to explain nearly everything that is wrong with the world. For some, the word is capitalism. War, imperialism, fascism, exploitation, alienation, environmental destruction, cruelty, loneliness, even sadism and abuse can be placed beneath one enormous conceptual umbrella. Once this is done, history acquires an appealing simplicity: remove the economic system and perhaps the pathologies produced by it will disappear as well.

Capitalism deserves (or at least some of its manifestations deserve) serious criticism. Markets can reward predatory behavior; economic power can become political power; employers can exploit desperate workers; wealth can compound into oligarchy; corporations can externalize costs onto communities that possess little bargaining power. Socialist criticisms of exploitation, domination, inequality and alienation constitute an important intellectual tradition, not merely a collection of slogans. Nor can the role of private economic interests in historical atrocities simply be wished away: German corporations and business elites participated in dispossession, "Aryanization" and forced labor under Nazism.

But it is possible to acknowledge all of this and still ask a neglected question: When does capitalism cease to be an explanation and become a convenient scapegoat?

An abstraction cannot beat (or abuse) a child. "Capitalism" cannot humiliate a son, terrorize a daughter, crave revenge, obey a murderous leader, torture a prisoner, envy a neighbor or enjoy another person's helplessness. Human beings do these things. Institutions can encourage, reward, restrain or redirect such impulses, sometimes enormously. Economic arrangements matter. But they operate through human personalities, families, cultures, bureaucracies and political structures that already contain capacities for love and cruelty, cooperation and domination.

The danger begins when the economic explanation becomes so comprehensive that everything else disappears.

Before capitalism, there was cruelty

War is far older than industrial capitalism. So are conquest, slavery, empire, dynastic domination, religious persecution, torture, patriarchy, ethnic hatred and the exploitation of weaker populations. Ancient Assyria did not require a modern stock exchange to terrorize conquered peoples. Rome did not require neoliberalism to enslave populations or expand territorially. Feudal aristocracies did not require modern capitalism to extract wealth from peasants. Imperial ambition has appeared under monarchies, military dictatorships, communist states, tribal confederations and revolutionary governments.

This does not prove that economic systems are irrelevant to war. Particular forms of capitalism have plainly interacted with colonial expansion, resource extraction and military power. But "capitalism has sometimes facilitated imperialism" is a very different proposition from "imperialism is fundamentally caused by capitalism."

The latter claim has difficulty explaining imperialism outside capitalism.

The same problem arises with fascism. Nazi Germany retained substantial private property and private firms, and many firms benefited from or accommodated themselves to the regime. Economic historians describe Nazi Germany as a heavily state-directed capitalist economy, and private industry retained meaningful room for investment and production decisions. Yet the Nazi state also abolished independent unions, subordinated economic institutions to political objectives, dismantled civil rights, created a one-party dictatorship and organized authority according to the Führer principle.

Calling this simply "capitalism becoming fascism" therefore explains too little. Fascism also requires attention to authoritarianism, nationalism, racial ideology, mass psychology, political violence, resentment, obedience, charismatic leadership, institutional collapse and the willingness of ordinary people and elites to participate in persecution.

Capital interests can cooperate with those forces. They are not synonymous with them.

Perhaps the family deserves more attention

One alternative starting point is uncomfortable precisely because it moves the investigation from distant abstractions into intimate life.

What if some of the roots of domination are learned long before anyone receives a wage?

What if the first authoritarian institution a human being encounters is sometimes not the corporation or the state, but the family?

A child enters the world radically dependent upon adults. Those adults can provide affection, consistency, limits, protection and recognition. But they can also provide humiliation, unpredictability, neglect, terror and violence. A young child cannot resign from a family, establish an independent income, vote out a parent or formulate a sophisticated critique of power. The child adapts.

This was central to Alice Miller's notion of "poisonous pedagogy," a term she adopted from Katharina Rutschky. Miller described child-rearing systems based upon breaking the child's will, suppressing unwanted emotions, demanding obedience, humiliating the dependent child and teaching the child that these violations are undertaken "for your own good."

Miller's broader historical claims should not (necessarily) automatically be accepted as established science. But the underlying concern--that severe maltreatment can have long-term developmental consequences--is supported much more broadly today. The World Health Organization identifies abuse, neglect, poor parent-child bonding, family violence and poor parenting among important risk factors and notes that childhood maltreatment is associated with later mental-health difficulties and increased risks of both victimization and perpetration of violence. Statistics Canada likewise reports associations between childhood maltreatment and later violent victimization.

This does not mean that an abused child becomes an abusive adult. Most causal relationships in human development are probabilistic, not mechanical. Temperament, later relationships, therapy, communities, opportunity, social norms and countless other factors intervene.

But it raises an important possibility:

A society concerned about authoritarianism might profit from studying how human beings first learn authority.

The absent father and the terrifying father

The role of fathers deserves similar nuance.

There is no simple formula in which father absence produces fascism or paternal severity produces sadism. Families are too diverse for that. A household with one loving parent can be healthier than a household with two frightening ones.

Yet fathers can matter developmentally through their presence, absence, affection, unpredictability or violence. A father who is physically present but emotionally unavailable can teach one lesson; a protective father another; a terrifying father still another.

A child confronted by an overwhelmingly powerful adult may discover several survival strategies. He may submit. He may idealize power. He may learn that weakness invites humiliation. He may identify with the aggressor. He may conclude that safety consists in becoming the person who gives orders rather than the person who receives punishment.

Years later such dispositions may be rationalized through politics.

The ideology may be new.

The emotional grammar may be very old.

And mothers cannot be reduced to saints or villains:

The same principle applies to mothers. An anxious, intrusive or smothering caregiver may undermine a child's development differently from an indifferent or neglectful one. An unpredictable caregiver may produce yet another adaptation. But it would be an error merely to replace economic reductionism with parental reductionism--or to turn mothers into another convenient scapegoat.

Parents themselves have histories.

The abusive parent may have been abused (and/or neglected and ignored). The emotionally unavailable father may have learned emotional absence from his father. The anxious mother may have grown up amid instability. Poverty, addiction, war, social isolation, marital violence, single motherhood and economic insecurity, etc. can make adequate parenting harder.

Here economics returns--but now as one causal level among several, rather than the universal answer.

Indeed, WHO's model of violence against children explicitly treats causation as multi-level: individual, relational, community and societal factors must interact.

This may be a much better model for society in general.

The child who must love the source of fear:

Miller's insight becomes particularly provocative when applied to authoritarian psychology.

A small child normally depends emotionally upon the very adults who possess power over him. If those adults are cruel, the child confronts a terrifying contradiction:

I need the person who frightens me.

It may be psychologically easier to conclude:

Father is good; therefore I must deserve the punishment.

than:

The person on whom my survival depends is dangerous.

Once this adaptation is established, domination can acquire a strange moral glamour. Authority is right because it is authority. Submission becomes virtue. Anger cannot safely travel upward, so it travels downward toward someone weaker.

Alice Miller believed that repressed childhood rage could later be displaced onto convenient targets (e.g. the unvaccinated, dissidents, etc.). Her claims linking particular childhoods to later political atrocities remain controversial, but her concept of "poisonous pedagogy" explicitly focused on the suppression of a child's feelings through humiliation, coercion and compulsory obedience.

This suggests another interpretation of political sadism.

Perhaps ideology sometimes supplies permission for impulses whose psychological roots precede the ideology.

The authoritarian movement says:

Here is the enemy you are permitted to hate.

The damaged personality replies:

Finally.

Sadism, masochism and the desire to dominate:

"Sadism" and "masochism" should be used carefully here. Consensual adult BDSM practices are not (necessarily) equivalent to political brutality or abusive personality structures.

In the broader psychological sense, however, societies repeatedly display both the desire to dominate and the desire to surrender responsibility to dominating authority.

Why?

Economic dependency may certainly contribute. A frightened or precarious population can become susceptible to political promises of security. But childhood experience offers another possible layer. Someone raised to equate love with domination may later find hierarchical domination strangely familiar. Someone taught that obedience confers moral worth may experience submission as safety. Someone systematically humiliated may derive compensatory satisfaction from belonging to a powerful group that humiliates others.

That psychological process could attach itself to many economic systems.

A capitalist can be authoritarian.

A communist can be authoritarian.

A monarchist can be authoritarian.

A revolutionary can become authoritarian while sincerely believing that he is abolishing authoritarianism.

The personality does not disappear when the economic vocabulary changes.

The controversial case of birth trauma:

Some psychohistorical writers go considerably further. Lloyd deMause, for example, argued that childhood abuse and even fetal and birth experiences help generate collective political fantasies, wars and historical cycles. He explicitly treated severe childhood maltreatment as a major cause of war and genocide and proposed a much more speculative theory in which fetal experience becomes a foundation for later political imagery.

There is legitimate contemporary research on psychological trauma associated with childbirth, especially the experiences of mothers, and researchers are studying its consequences for maternal mental health and bonding. But even recent reviews emphasize that psychological birth trauma remains an evolving field with definitional and evidentiary uncertainties.

That is very different from claiming that an individual's experience of being born explains later fascism, warfare or civilization.

DeMause's theory is intellectually provocative; it (probably) should not be presented as established developmental science.

Still, his broader provocation is worth retaining:

Why do political theories devote enormous attention to ownership structures while sometimes giving remarkably little attention to how human personalities capable of cruelty are formed?

Socialism does not abolish human nature

If capitalism alone creates exploitation, abolishing capitalism should abolish exploitation.

History has not been so obliging.

Socialism itself covers an enormous range of theories, from democratic market socialism to centralized state planning; it cannot fairly be treated as synonymous with Soviet communism. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explicitly emphasizes this diversity and notes that some socialists reject statism and preserve markets.

But experiments in highly centralized planning demonstrate a different danger: when economic and political power become concentrated in the same institutions, exploitation can occur through bureaucracy and state coercion rather than private ownership.

The Soviet model concentrated political and economic power in a nondemocratic one-party state, curtailed civil and political liberties, and faced serious informational, incentive and innovation problems. Even socialist political philosophy acknowledges these historical defects while discussing decentralized and market-socialist alternatives.

This matters because exploitation is not necessarily created by markets.

It can also be created by power without accountability.

A factory owner can exploit and oppress a worker.

A party official can exploit and oppress a worker.

A military commander can exploit and oppress a conscript.

A revolutionary committee can exploit and oppress a dissident.

Changing the title of the person issuing orders does not guarantee that domination disappears.

Communism and the danger of salvation through abstraction:

Revolutionary communism illustrates another danger of abstract thinking: once history itself is believed to have a morally necessary destination, actual individuals can become obstacles to the future.

A person ceases to be Ivan, Maria or Alexei.

He becomes:

bourgeois, kulak, counterrevolutionary, reactionary, class enemy.

Once a human being has become an abstract category, cruelty can be redescribed as historical necessity.

Capitalist societies possess their own dehumanizing abstractions:

labor cost, consumer segment, human capital, collateral damage.

The lesson should therefore not be:

communist abstractions bad, capitalist abstractions good.

It should be:

Beware whenever an abstraction becomes more morally real than the human being standing in front of you.

Anarchism solves one problem and inherits another

Anarchism offers one of the most radical critiques of domination because it asks why anyone should possess coercive authority over anyone else. Its better traditions emphasize voluntary cooperation, mutual aid, equality and freedom from domination. Anarchism is diverse, and many anarchist traditions are explicitly pacifist.

Yet anarchism encounters the opposite problem from centralized socialism:

How is legitimate coordination maintained when coercive authority is minimized?

Large societies confront crime, violence, infrastructure, collective goods and conflicts between people who will not voluntarily reach consensus. Political philosophers therefore ask whether some enforceable authority may be necessary to coordinate responses to such problems.

The danger of excessive authority is tyranny.

The danger of insufficient legitimate authority can be domination by whoever happens to possess local strength.

Abolishing the policeman does not necessarily abolish the bully or the bandit.

Sometimes it merely removes the person capable of restraining him.

Anarcho-tyranny: coercion in the wrong places

This leads to the provocative concept of "anarcho-tyranny," coined by Samuel Francis. Francis used the term for a situation in which the state appears simultaneously incapable of performing basic protective functions while remaining intrusive or punitive toward comparatively compliant citizens: anarchy in one domain, bureaucratic coercion in another.

One need not accept Francis's politics to recognize the conceptual possibility.

A state can be both:

• ineffective where legitimate authority is needed, and

• overbearing where restraint is warranted.

The alternative to authoritarian government is therefore not simply less government.

It is better-bounded government:

strong enough to protect people from violence and fraud, constrained enough not to become itself a machinery of domination.

That distinction cuts across conventional left-right categories.

Capitalism's real sins should not be minimized:

None of this requires rehabilitating capitalism into innocence.

Markets can commodify necessities. Employers can exploit asymmetric bargaining power. Wealth can buy political influence. Competitive pressure can reward behavior that no individual participant particularly admires. Environmental costs can be imposed upon people who never agreed to bear them. Desperate workers may "freely" accept arrangements only in a thin formal sense.

These are substantive criticisms.

Indeed, serious socialist philosophy does not merely say "capitalists are greedy." It develops arguments about exploitation, domination, alienation, inequality and the distribution of productive power.

And fascism demonstrates that private firms can accommodate themselves appallingly well to dictatorship when doing so protects profits or institutional survival. Nazi business elites participated in persecution and forced labor, even though the regime simultaneously subordinated the economy to authoritarian political purposes.

The correct response is not:

Capitalism didn't cause everything, therefore capitalism caused nothing.

That would merely invert the same intellectual mistake.

The deeper problem is monocausal thinking:

Imagine a war.

One theorist says:

capitalism caused it.

Another says:

childhood trauma caused it.

Another:

nationalism caused it.

Another:

religion caused it.

Another:

male aggression caused it.

Another:

resource scarcity caused it.

Another:

political elites caused it.

Perhaps all of them are partially right.

A realistic explanation might look more like:

traumatized or ordinarily status-seeking human beings

• cultural narratives

• group identity

• fear and humiliation

• economic interests

• institutional incentives

• technological capacity

• political leadership

• historical accident

--> war.

Remove one variable and perhaps the outcome changes. But that does not make any single variable the metaphysical cause.

Human societies are ecological systems of causation.

WHO uses precisely such a multi-level framework for understanding violence against children: individual, relational, intergenerational, community and societal conditions interact rather than one universal cause explaining everything. Our political thinking could benefit from the same humility.

Abstractions make excellent scapegoats:

There is a final irony.

To say "capitalism is responsible" can sometimes reproduce the very psychological mechanism that critics of capitalism rightly recognize elsewhere: displacement of responsibility onto something remote and impersonal.

Abstractions cannot apologize.

They cannot remember.

They cannot be ashamed.

They cannot change or improve their parenting or behavior.

They cannot decide not to strike someone.

They cannot refuse an illegal order.

They cannot protect a frightened child.

Humans can.

Institutions matter because humans build them and then become shaped by them. Economic systems matter because incentives matter. Laws matter because power matters. Childhood matters because personality develops before political ideology. Culture matters because it provides the stories through which fear, resentment and desire become meaningful.

The important question is therefore not:

Capitalism or childhood trauma?

Nor:

markets or parenting?

It is:

At what level is the causal mechanism operating, and what evidence shows that it is operating there?

That question is less emotionally satisfying than discovering one villain.

It is also harder to put on a protest sign.

But it is probably closer to reality.

Beyond the scapegoat:

Capitalism is neither the source of all human evil nor an institution beyond criticism. Socialism is neither the inevitable path to tyranny nor a guaranteed road to justice. Anarchism contains both a profound warning about domination and difficult questions about durable coordination. The state can protect people from private power and can itself become the greatest concentration of power they face.

And families can nurture citizens capable of freedom--or teach children that love means obedience, domination, humiliation and fear.

Perhaps this is the most important contribution of Miller's "poisonous pedagogy," even if one does not accept all of her historical psychoanalysis. It directs attention toward the microphysics of authority: the first commands we hear, the first punishments we suffer, the first powerful people we must trust, the first occasions on which we learn whether weakness deserves compassion or contempt.

A society composed of people comfortable with cruelty will find institutions through which to express cruelty.

If private property is available, it may exploit and oppress through private property.

If bureaucracy is available, it may exploit and oppress through bureaucracy.

If revolutionary ideology is available, it may exploit and oppress through revolutionary ideology.

If nationalism is available, it may exploit and oppress through nationalism.

If religion is available, it may exploit and oppress through religion.

And if anti-capitalism is available, even anti-capitalism itself can become a language through which power seeks moral permission.

The challenge, therefore, is larger than abolishing or defending one economic system. It is to create families, institutions, markets, governments and cultures that make domination difficult and humane cooperation easier.

Capitalism should be criticized wherever its actual mechanisms produce exploitation. Socialism should be criticized wherever collective ownership becomes bureaucratic domination. Anarchism should be questioned wherever distrust of legitimate authority leaves weaker people exposed to private coercion. Families should be scrutinized wherever "discipline" becomes humiliation and "for your own good" becomes permission to injure a dependent child.

The point is not to replace one scapegoat with another.

It is to give up scapegoating.

"Capitalism" is an abstraction. So are "socialism," "the state," "the family," "the patriarchy," "the market," and "society." They become explanatory only when we identify the concrete human relationships, incentives, traumas, institutions and acts of power hidden inside the words.

And once we do that, the world becomes harder to explain in a sentence--but much easier to see.