Sociocapitalism                                                                 

By Glen Wallace                                             December 12, 2022

                                                            updated February 16, 2022

Capitalism is a behavior, not a system. Socialism, on the other hand, is a system. Combining the two into sociocapitalism; a word I just recently coined, with socialism measuring, steering and directing capitalism, forming the dominant socioeconomic system running the modern first world societies of the world. While socialism is the government engaging in actions with the goal of benefiting the society that it governs, capitalism is the activity of members of that society where the goal is to derive more capital from the given activity than what was put into it.  But me let be clear, this is the system we are already living in, in any first world, fully developed modern society.  I haven't invented a new form of sociopolitical, socioeconomic system; I just invented a new word to describe what already exists in order clear up what I believe is a lot of confusion and misconception of how the socioeconomic world works.  

And make no mistake about it; this sociocapitalist system is a deliberately created system that is made by humans, for humans.  Sociocapitalism isn't something that grew out of the ground like a mountain that is largely immutable by humans where we, for the most part, have to work our lives around rather than imagine we can mold and design it according to our wants and needs.  A sociocapitalist system is not a mountain created by nature; it is something we humans have molded and designed according to our wants and needs.  But, unfortunately, some in positions of money and power, have tried to portray our socioeconomic system as though it were a product of nature, whose nature is comparable to a mountain that we have to live with and work around to the best of our ability.  They try to create this facade of immutability because the current system is already designed to the plutocrats advantage and they don't want plebs to get any notions that they can actually mold that economic mountain to their own advantage and to the plutocrats disadvantage. 

People engage in the activity, or behavior, of capitalism reliably enough that entire social systems, socialism, has been built around leveraging, controlling & steering capitalist activity for the benefit of the society in which capitalism is engaged. Many of the necessities of life, especially food, clothing and housing is almost entirely dependent upon capitalist providers to meet those needs. From the farms, to the trucking companies hauling the farm's harvests, to the food processors processing the harvests, and finally to the grocery store selling the processed food, they're all capitalists. 

There is no way for capitalism to even exist without socialism.  It is through socialism that the pathways for the conveyances of trade are built and the measure of a capitalist transaction are recognized and enforced.

But realizing there is potential dangers in, for instance, spoiled food that a capitalist in the food supply chain may ignore in order to increase their profits, the government steps in to monitor the foods sold to the consumer to protect the consumer from spoiled foods or contaminated foods or otherwise unsafe foods.

Meanwhile the government builds and maintains public roadways in order to ensure the farmer can, with the help of the truckers, deliver harvests to the commodity markets, and in turn to the food processors. The food processors, in turn, rely on those same road ways and truckers to deliver the foods to grocery stores. The consumer, of course, also relies on those publicly owned streets and roads to get to the grocery store and bring home their load of groceries. It is an entire supply chain reliant on a combination of people reliably engaging in the activity of capitalism along with the measurement and support of the government; sociocapitalism.

I claim that capitalism is not a system, but rather a behavior, because it is not something anyone needs to be ordered to do, it is done because people want to do it; capitalism is analogous to other behaviors that people reliably engage in such as the consumption of alcoholic beverages or sex. People are going to drink booze, have sex and engage in capitalism as a reliable behavioral trait, not as a system. No one refers to drinking booze or having sex as a system, so why do they refer to capitalism as a system? Another analogy would be that of comparing gambling with capitalism. Some could even make the case that gambling is a type of capitalism. With gambling, the goal is to get more capital out of the activity than what the participant puts in, so I think it is a form of capitalism. But who refers to gambling as a system? No one does. Gambling is referred to as an activity or behavior some people tend to engage in.  But it is a behavior that can lead to the destruction of those engaged in the activity along with others surrounding the gambler.  As a result, there are typically stringent rules and laws surrounding gambling designed to limit the damage gambling can cause to themselves and others. 

Thus, I argue that people, such as Marxists, who regularly bash capitalism are akin to members of the Temperance League prior to alcohol prohibition in the US back in the 1920's; they are engaging a sort of preaching combined with a desire to have the government ban an activity that most people will still engage in covertly even after it is banned.  As a result, it doesn't make a lot of sense to use the term 'end stage capitalism'.  Even if a case can be made that capitalism is generally counterproductive to society, as along as there is a desire for more wealth than what an individual already possesses, people predictably will continue to engage in the activity of capitalism. While a society or nation may be at its end stages and be ready to fall, unless the society or nation that replaces it is tyrannically restrictive, the individuals of that new replacement society will just keep going on capitalizing just as before, only now will do so under a new banner. 

While a case may also be made that the behavior of capitalism is not a virtuous activity and a society that relies so heavily on it for basic needs and encourages the activity for human wants is not a virtuous society, any decision to veer away from that behavior needs to be made by the members of society from within rather than forced from without by government dictates. Virtue is not something that can be forced upon a society by some bureaucratic megalomaniac, it must grow organically from within society.  And I think that was the case for some of the precolonial American Indians, who were largely not capitalists.  The American Indians didn't have their non capitalist ways forced upon them by the equivalent of a Marxist dictator.  Somehow their culture grew organically to be largely free of capitalism.  But a culture free of capitalism is not something that can be technocratically foisted on a people.  Culture is more spiritual than technological; that's something technocrats and Marxists just don't seem to get.  Maybe modern, first world societies around the world will one day largely abandon capitalism to the same extent that precolonial American Indians did.  But if that is to happen, it will happen through the spiritual milieu growing into a form that has abandoned capitalism. 

Marx, in his piece 'Capital' speaks of the capitalistic process in a very logical, mathematical sense; as though it were a form of calculus.  He uses the production of a coat as an example of the process involved in creating a good to be placed on the market.  He talks of the costs of the fabric to make the coat and the labor, including the skill of the labor involved in making the coat and the abundance or scarcity of materials such as cotton to produce it.  But Marx leaves out some very important ingredients in the production process that can't be so easily punched into a cold, boolean logic based formula.  There's no talk of fashion trends and the fickleness of the fashion conscious consumer who might buy the coat.  I suppose there's no way to easily enter anything such as fashion into Marx's Capital Calculus; so he conveniently left it out.  Then it comes as no surprise when, later, China's Chairman Mao embarks on something he called 'The Cultural Revolution' whereby citizens were forced to all wear drab uniforms and be satisfied.  Mao's citizen uniforms is just another example of how Marxism views individuals as mere cogs in the societal machine moving through history towards the Hegelian destination of Universal History.  

But the laws governing behavior should be reserved for the 'bad apples' who egregiously act counter to the unwritten social contract that we all more or less sign on to in order to live in a civil society. Most of our interactions with other members of society are not governed by written laws. We instead, as a society, develop moral rules we judge as fair and necessary in order to live in a civilization where we can interact in a more or less smooth, congenial and harmonious manner. We don't, for instance, need laws to tell us to wait in a line, or cue, where we conclude the first to arrive in the line should be the one ahead of the one who arrives later. We also don't need a written law to tell us to all face the door of an elevator in the same direction rather than face to face as that would make everyone uncomfortable. Those are just a couple of examples of a myriad of other examples that could be provided of rules we all follow that we aren't even fully conscious of, but follow obediently because we know they are necessary for society to run smoothly and are largely fair rules. We don't need some central government to order us around in order that we may behave as a society of individuals working together in a civil manner.

But those who want to ban alcohol consumption or capitalism are under the delusion that a technocratic central government can and should be the moral arbiters of a civil society; they think that when a square peg wont fit into a round hole, put the square peg onto a lathe and turn it until the peg becomes a cylinder and will fit into the round hole. That, unfortunately, is the ideology of Marxism; treat individuals not as the special spirit beings that they are, but rather as cogs in the machinery of society, and if those cogs aren't meshing properly, grind them down until they form a shape that will allow them to mesh onto the gears of the well oiled societal machine. The Marxists don't get it; humans aren't cogs. Everyone is a unique spirit being with dreams and goals, quirks and passions that don't fit neatly in with Marx's narrow view of society as merely being one giant blob morphing through Hegel's dialectical history.

There really is a symbiotic relationship between capitalism and socialism. It's not just the roadways and other modes of transportation, such as government building, maintaining and operating the locks and dams, along with dredging, along the Mississippi River; capitalists also rely upon the government in many other way to ensure the smooth operation of the competitive marketplace. Where, for instance, are the records of real estate ownership held in the US? The County Government. And when a property owner wants a tenant who isn't paying his rent evicted, the owner petitions the County government Court to order the eviction. And if the resident of the property still refuses to evacuate the premises the capitalist property owner calls on the County Sheriff to perform the eviction. Much of the actions businesses depend upon to continue their operations depend on the government to either build and maintain some infrastructure or enforce some law protecting the capitalist from an illegal action from a patron or competitor. The retail business owner might not give much thought to the pipelines underground installed and maintained by the city that bring in fresh water and drain out wastewater, for instance, but those businesses would certainly notice if the city were to stop maintaining the pipes or stop processing the wastewater at the other end.

Now, examples in relatively recent history can be found where socialism was not combined with capitalism, where sociocapitalism largely didn't exist. The most notable example of a more pure capitalism without socialism, was the case of company towns. With company towns, the capitalist company built and maintained the roads, schools, medical centers, law enforcement. While these towns didn't exist in a total vacuum, as the roads leading to them were public and the county recognizing their existence was public and the other infrastructure I've already mentioned that surrounded the company towns may have been publicly owned and operated, the operations within the towns were largely free of socialist intervention. But the residents of the company towns were not able to access a competitive marketplace when they shopped at the company store. That's why socialist intervention is needed to create a sociocapitalist system where a competitive marketplace can be ensured. It is only through government intervention that monopolies in the marketplace can be avoided and the consumer, the worker and the environment can be protected from exploitation.

The only way for capitalism to be effectively eradicated would be to create a company town out of the entire planet; which may very well be the agenda of the World Economic Forum, the WEF. The only way for capitalism to be effectively eradicated would be to create a company town out of the entire planet; which may very well be the agenda of the World Economic Forum, the WEF. As the WEF famously stated “you will own nothing and be happy” by the year 2030. A statement that aligns perfectly with Marx's “the theory of Communism may be summed up in a single sentence: Abolition of private property.” from his 'The Communist Manifesto.' And the Bolsheviks tried to argue that their bureaucratic form of government that allowed special privileges to the Politburo was only a temporary transitional stage that would end once the entire planet was a Marxist Communist utopia. Once that stage was reached, there would no longer be any need for bureaucratic class. But it seems that the Chinese Communists have altogether given up on the idea of treating the existence of a bureaucratic class as a merely temporary measure. Instead, it seems as though the bureaucratic class has replaced the bourgeois class as the master in the Hegelian master slave dynamic. I've watched some documentary videos demonstrating how it has become the dream and ambition of the majority of driven young Chinese citizens to become government employees as the positions bring material comforts and prestige to those fortunate enough to garner them. But there is no messages coming from the Beijing central government trying to assure the masses of China that the bureaucratic form of government is a merely temporary measure. Rather, that goal seems to have been largely forgotten by the Communist Party leadership of China as they don't want to give up all those comforts and luxuries that come with their positions.

The political left and right seem to suffer from the same delusions of confusing how they think the world should and would work if only certain measures were implemented. Then both the left and right only rely on confirmation bias to find assurances that they are correct, even though refutations abound falsifying their assumptions of how the world actually works in the real world. The Marxist left doesn't acknowledge that the desire to possess material niceties and services doesn't just go away with any law limiting or abolishing those niceties. The human psyche just doesn't work that way. But this distortion and disbelief based on political ideology continues to this day, particularly in the case of leftists refusal to believe in the atrocities of the CCP. The same thing went on during the time of Stalin when Western leftists were told of the forced labor camps now known as the Gulags; they just either looked the other way or disbelieved in it. Even Henry Wallace let himself be led down the primrose path as the Soviets gave him a guided tour of a Potemkin Gulag so he could falsely announce to the world that the Siberian camps were just ordinary, humane prisons. Today, many independent leftist journalists who on Youtube alone have collectively over a million subscribers and otherwise uncover Western deep state corruption report the objective truth on those matters. But they seem to have succumbed to a fallacious reasoning that if the Deep State controlled mainstream media regularly reports falsehoods on other matters, then they must also be reporting falsehoods on Chinese CCP atrocities and human rights violations. Well, the same thing went on during the Soviet era, and while the Deep State back then did feed a load of false propaganda during that time, the truth has come out that they didn't need to do that during that time. The Gulags were real and they were horrific. The East German Stasi where the epitome of tyrannical police state thugs who got their intelligence to kick in doors and make political arrests from one third of the population who acted as spies on the other two thirds of the population, including close friends and family. I believe that is the case today with the CCP, there's no need for the Deep State to engage in hyperbole or doublespeak when speaking of the atrocities and human rights violations of the Chinese Marxist government; the truth is likely worse than what is reported by the Western mainstream media. The CCP is a Marxist government and Marxism doesn't recognize the existence of individual human rights. Marxism has left the door wide open for megalomaniacs to run wild and feed their lust for power. Give those in power an inch and they'll take a mile. And Marx gave the megalomaniacs a gaping hole of several feed for them to easily trample over the people for several miles. Nor do things work out as the political right tries to imagine they world in a fantastical free market where every retailer competes with each other on a fair playing field and the customer is able to choose the best product at the best price that poses no hazards unbeknownst to the consumer and the employees are all paid a fair wage under safe working conditions, and, if not, are able to easily walk to another employer that does provide those conditions. That, of course, is a fairytale world as well. What's needed is a pragmatic approach to socioeconomic forms of government that work to provide as fair as possible playing field to all parties; citizens, consumers, workers, the environment.

Even if there were complete universal basic income, or UBI, whereby nobody needs to work at all to meet their basic daily expenses, capitalism would still thrive as long as the government recognizes private property ownership, including the ownership of the currency used to trade private property from one party to another.  Human tendencies and habits have long demonstrated that people will engage in the behavior of capitalism to get ahead materially even if their basic needs are already met.  But if the government doesn't recognize private property, then the activity of capitalism will be very difficult to engage in outside of a black market bartering system involving the trading of items in the physical possession of two counterparties.  However, it is questionable if bartering can even be described as capitalism.  Also, public enforcement of bartering transactions would be effectively impossible since there would be no law to enforce if neither party in the transaction are legally allowed to own the items they are trading.  

I think there is a general recognition among the members of society that government regulation of capitalism is needed to ensure that capitalism is acting in the interests of society. Capitalism is like a team of horses, that, if properly steered, can work for the benefit of society due to their power and endurance. But if not steered in the right direction, the capitalist team of horses can do great damage as it tramples society, crushing everyone and everything under its hooves.

There is a lot of confusion and misconception of the nature of capitalism that does result in just this sort of trampling of society. First, people aren't clear that while the behavior of capitalism will continue to exists whether it's banned or not, what form it takes on and what direction it takes is entirely up to government socialism. Second, capitalism is not a being unto itself that has inalienable rights to roam freely and do whatever it wants and exploit who or whatever it wants, where whatever form it takes on, it has a right to be that way. Capitalism is not a being at all, sentient or otherwise. In modern, contemporary first world society, we can just rely on the behavior of capitalism and it is up to the governed to form a government that directs capitalism to behave in a way that benefits the governed. A third misconception is that whatever form capitalistic behavior takes on, that form is inevitable and there is no way to alter it without annihilating capitalism altogether. The reality is that the team of horses that is capitalistic behavior can be steered in a myriad of directions either for the benefit of humanity or its destruction by trampling.

But, unfortunately, it often is to the benefit of capitalists that the third misconception is perpetuated as that ensures price gouging profiteering at the expense of the consumer, the environment or the worker. No more better example of such profiteering can be found than in the field of medicine where price gouging is rampant due to inherent or deliberate monopolization of products. Inherent monopolies exist in medicine in the case of hospital inpatients, where, due to the patient's incapacity, are unable to shop around for better deals than what the hospital offers. Deliberate monopolies exist in medicine where the government enforces patent monopolies or refuses to grant approval of medicines or medical devices to potential competitors trying to manufacture a product no longer under patent protection. But none of these monopolies, whether deliberate or inherent, are to the benefit of society; rather, they are to the detriment of society.  That is were the government needs to intervene to redirect the capitalist team of horses towards a direction beneficial to the governed.  This failure of the government to reign in medical monopolies has gone under the radar for far too long as it is and I don't think it is accidental.  The ignorance by government officials, elected and unelected, of government monopolies and their dire consequences should be obvious, and I'm sure they are.  But there is a lot of crony capitalism, that is, corruption between government officials and capitalists resulting in a breakdown of the needed capitalist steering mechanism that would otherwise prevent the public from being trampled by medical price gouging.  While some might argue that patent monopolies are necessary as an incentive to engage in extremely costly research that could result in cures of horrible diseases.  I would counter that, while that's possible, the reality indicates the opposite of what is intended with patent monopolies is occurring.  A system has been set up in the medical governmental establishment whereby only the most profitable potential medicines are explored to the point of actual production due to the extreme costs of achieving government approval of a medicine.  Correspondingly, there is an incentive for capitalist drug and medical device manufacturers to cease investigating or outright suppress and potential medicine that would not only be unprofitable but would replace a very profitable existing medicine if the unprofitable, affordable replacement were ever to reach the consumer market.  This problem is especially notable in the case of herbal and other alternative medicines that are already widely available and are generally not patentable.  This is the case with ordinary baking soda, also known as sodium bicarbonate, that I believe has great potential in the treatment of cancer. But given that a full course of cancer treatment with baking soda is over a hundred thousand times cheaper than a typical mainstream, conventional government approved cancer treatment in the form of chemotherapy drugs provided by a capitalist drug company, there is tremendous incentive for Big Pharma to suppress baking soda as a cancer treatment. 

A more pragmatic approach to the socioeconomic order needs to be taken.  Previously, there has been an entrenched ideology of a false choice between either a form of socialism where the government owns all of the means of production or none of it.  A more pragmatic approach would be for the government owns the means of production where the capitalists have failed to reliably meet a need or want of society at a reasonable cost and at a reliable supply level; but the government could meet those cost and supply goals.  No better example can be found of just such a scenario than the current situation with medical drugs and medical devices.  In both cases, regular exploitation of the consumer through price gouging has occurred with drugs and medical devices.  The exploitation has become so regular that the situation seems intractable if left in the hands of the capitalists.  It is a situation where government regulation seems incapable of adequately handling.  While government regulation has been able to, through public utilities commissions, measure to a significant degree the privately owned capitalist utilities operating as a monopoly.  A public utilities commission, or PUC, is a government regulator that is commissioned to order private capitalist providers of utilities, such as natural gas, to set their prices at some maximum level while maintaining a minimum level of supply to the customers of the utility.  There has been an understanding among society and politicians that utilities operating as a monopoly without strict special regulation would be less than ideal and potentially catastrophic for society.  Actually, just such a scenario did unfold for a time in California when such regulation of price and supply was abandoned and a more free market approach was adopted there during the Enron era.  The result was extreme price hikes for the electricity customers along with regular power outages.  It should be clear by now that monopolies owing the utilities providing necessities for maintaining a reasonable standard of living if not life itself, need strict regulation of price and supply.  But somehow that need for regulation is lost on the policymakers when it comes to the field of medicine even though it is just as much of a need, if not more so, than electric or gas utilities and often operating just as much as a monopoly.  And yet, no consideration seems to be given by policymakers to implement anything remotely close to either of the only two possible solutions to a monopoly utility; either a PUC or public ownership of the means of production.  While a PUC governing drug and medical device manufacture might be a possibility, the complexity of the medical field might make it impractical.  Which leaves us with the other option: letting the government manufacture drugs and medical devices, especially where the capitalist makers of those products have either engaged in egregious price gouging or have failed to maintain adequate, reliable supply of the needed products.  The counter argument to turning over production of drugs and medical devices to the government would be that it would discourage innovation in those fields.  That counter argument can be easily refuted a number of ways.  For one, many of the drugs and medical devices being price gouged or not being supplied adequately are already out of patent but are still, for whatever reason, not being provided at a reasonable price or supplied at an adequate level. The only reason patent protection is granted for any product is that it, the argument goes, provides incentive to invest in innovation because the fruit of that innovation could lead to the patent holder to reap monopoly profits from the product; in other words, engage in legal price gouging.  But once patent protection lapses, that legal right to price gouge no longer exists.  And if the free market system operated as the free market capitalists promised us it would, then no patients would still be facing price gouging or shortages of the products they desperately need; but they do and that shows the free market system is broken when it comes to medicine and cannot be relied upon.  But even in the case where patent protection does still exist, the question needs to be asked as to whether there is a better way to provide the product without squelching innovation.  A couple of points need to be kept in mind; one is that patent protection is a government program that capitalists rely upon but is only a service provided under the assumption that, in the long run, is beneficial to all members of society, whether or not they are capitalists.  Thus, patent protection and all other forms of intellectual property are forms of socialism designed to prop up capitalism, that is, part of the sociocapitalist system.  But if patent protection is ultimately there not to protect and support capitalists as an end in itself, but rather as a means to the end of helping society, then that patent protection needs to be abandoned where it ultimately harms, rather than helps, society.  Therefore, we need to examine whether patent protection of medical drugs and medical devices are helping or harming society.  Let's then look at the argument that patent protection incentivizes innovation and the removal of patent protection would remove the incentive to innovate.  Well, who is doing the actual innovating at drug and medical device makers?  Is it the executives occupying the c suites of those corporations developing and manufacturing the drugs and medical devices?  Of course not.  It is the engineers and scientists who may very well first conceived of the idea for a drug or medical device at some university or other university.  And only later the idea later found its way to some corporate R&D department.  Regardless, it is the scientists and engineers making the innovations, not the cigar chomping executives and bean counting accountants.  And where is the monopoly profits incentive for the scientists and engineers to patent their new discoveries?  There is none.  Typically, all engineers employed by a corporation give up any patent rights for their inventions in exchange for a regular and reliable paycheck and benefits package.  Therefore, the incentive for the scientist and engineer to innovate remains the same whether they are working for a capitalist drug company or say, a governmental R&D department.  But with the government doing the innovative research, there is actually an advantage to society insofar as there is no incentive there to squash any research that doesn't have the prospect of being sufficiently profitable to justify the research as there might be at a capitalist drug or device development firm.  Also, with the capitalist, some innovation might have the potential to replace, at a lower price tag, an existing higher price tagged drug or medical device.  In such a case the incentive would be to squash that innovation, regardless of how beneficial it might be for society.  Imagine, for instance, that the innovative drug had lower side effects, was more effective but would be less profitable because it provided a cure with just one dose, replacing the existing drug that had to be taken by the patient for years, thus providing the drug company with years of reliable income.  If the goal is then to help society, then the only viable solution would be to both nationalize the research and development, and the production of drugs and medical devices with the mandate of providing those products to patients at the lowest possible price, the lowest side effects and the highest degree of efficacy.