What Is Capitalism? (And Why It Should Matter To You As An Entrepreneur)
Three days after Christmas, five-years ago, I was in a car accident on my way to work.
It was December 28th and I had just dropped off my youngest son, who was 3 years old at the time, at daycare. It was a busy winter weekday morning in Denver, which means it was cold, with snow on the road, lots of traffic and people trying to get to their work destinations.
I was used to this type of morning because it was part of my everyday routine.
Get up early. Shower and get myself ready. Then wake up my sons to get them ready. Drop my twins off to morning care at their elementary school and then drop my youngest off at daycare because he wasn’t yet in school. Then drive to the train station so that I could head to work. Three different stops every morning.
On this particular day, I had done the drop-offs and I was headed to the train station along my usual route. I got on the ramp to merge onto the highway. I was accelerating to reach the speed of traffic and as I was doing so I could see a car on my right lose control and begin swerving.
And as they say with things like car accidents, from there everything moved in slow motion. I knew that car was going to hit me and with the high speeds at which traffic was moving, I had very limited options and time to protect myself. I braced for impact.
That car hit me while I was on my way to work and sent me careening across three lanes of highway traffic. At that moment, which seemed like forever, all I kept waiting for was impact. My car hit the highway median, which spun me around to be facing oncoming traffic on the highway. My airbags deployed and before I could catch my breath, I was hit by another car.
Three impacts, at three different moments, inside of one accident.
It was intense. It was painful. It was scary af. I remember stepping out of my car so confused but so damn grateful to be alive and not experiencing any serious injuries.
After the accident, after speaking to the police, after having my mom and brother come pick me up and watching tears flow down my mom’s face because she was so overwhelmed by the sight of my crushed car, all I could think about was work.
I was late. I clearly wasn’t going to make it in. This was my singular thought.
I made it home. I cried. I sat down at my kitchen table and drank a glass of water and enjoyed the silence for a moment and then I closed my eyes and called my manager.
My manager was in shock and really concerned. She asked how I was feeling and wanted to make sure I called my car insurance people, etc.
After she did the required wellness-check and asked the right questions, she asked her most pressing question... would it be possible for me to still make it into work. She wanted to know if I was now good enough to commute into work after having three impacts, at three different moments, inside of one accident.
I remember feeling so justifiably pissed off. So utterly invisible. So acutely objectified.
Yes, my body seemed to be physically fine. I had no major injuries to the naked eye but I was still so shaken up after experiencing such a traumatic accident. Trauma is anything that is “deeply distressing or disturbing,” and my accident was certainly deeply distressing and disturbing. But not enough for my manager to give me space for the day. Not enough for the corporate machine, that only really saw my labor and not my life, to take a pause and allow me to have a moment to get my bearings. Even just a day.
That my friends, is capitalism.
Capitalism Defined
My favorite definition of capitalism comes courtesy of Silvia Federici: “Capitalism is the development of unequal power relations, hierarchies, and divisions, which in turn generate ideologies, interests, and subjectivities that constitute a destructive force.”
Capitalism is destructive.
A lot of times when I speak about capitalism, using the word capitalism, I don’t think it lands for many people. It’s an academic word. It’s an economic word. It really has no meaning unless you have been deeply entrenched in the language of the word.
But what I know to be true, is that everyone knows the feeling of capitalism.
Capitalism feels like having your head stuck in the mud and trying to breathe. It feels like having too many responsibilities and not enough time, too many bills and not enough money, too much stress and not enough rest, too much pain and not enough joy. Capitalism feels like not having autonomy over your own life.
I could share a number of stories about my experiences within our capitalist system, and you could too because it’s a socialized experience that we all share. We all know the feeling of being used. We know the experience of having a lack of power. Of feeling forced to choose subordination from above and below. Of divisiveness, despite how much we strive to avoid it.
I like to describe capitalism as first a feeling because we can tap into the feeling and therefore gain a more textured understanding of the word.
At the core capitalism takes the stance that “greed is good” and that profit for owners of capital (CEOs, landlords, landowners, stock owners, etc.) matters more than the humanity of people. Capitalism fosters manipulation, exploitation, and destruction. And because we’re so ingrained inside the capitalist system, it can be hard for us to see and acknowledge it. So, if we’re not careful, we can become perpetrators of said capitalism.
Capitalism As An Entrepreneur
Because capitalism is in the air that we breathe and infuses the ways we are taught to do and be in business, we must have an understanding of it in order to not adopt its insidious behaviors inside our very businesses. No matter how big or small.
Capitalism isn’t just about the profit that is produced but in how that profit is produced and who gets that profit. And capitalism doesn’t just show up in big business either.
As entrepreneurs, specifically solopreneurs or entrepreneurs running smaller scale businesses, it’s really easy for the ills of capitalism to show up inside the fabric of how we do and be in business because we may think it doesn’t affect us. We think we're not participating in the system of that or we think that we’re perpetrators of it (which is a form of self-harm and harm of others). But that notion couldn’t be further from the truth. Capitalism isn’t just a “big” business thing. Capitalism is a societal thing. Capitalism is how business, all forms of business, was crafted in our world...through exploitation and extraction.
I teach in my workshop “Business Beyond Profit” how the US slave trade and the enslavement of Africans created the business model in the New World. We are still carrying that legacy no matter how big or small our business may be.
As Cathlin Rosenthal writes in her book Accounting For Slavery: Masters and Management: “At a minimum, slaveholders (and those who bought their products) built an innovative, global, profit-hungry labor regime that contributed to the emergence of the modern economy.” So without a deep acknowledgment of this fact, tethered to a deep understanding of the mechanics of capitalism, coupled with a deep desire to explore different ways of doing business, we are bound to just treat ourselves the same ways capitalism has treated us.
So the goal is to unlearn and relearn new ways of thinking and being with business. Ways that don’t constitute a destructive force but foster more equity and joy than ever before. It’s possible, we just have to begin.
If you’re looking to begin to understand capitalism or to dig a little deeper, please check out these resources:
Hey there, I'm Toi!
I write about motherhood, life, and business through a womanist lens.
When I'm not writing I am mothering, learning, and loving.
If you're interested in doing business differently or a mother who desires to return to yourself you can learn about how I support folx with those desires here.