The Wrong Question bout Capitalism

Rev. KP Hong, Beloved Community Staff Team

A story is told about a monk, St. Ignatius of Sardinia, who walked the streets with a simple sack, begging alms to support his monastery and the poor. But he avoided soliciting a certain wealthy merchant, knowing the man had built his fortune by exploiting and defrauding the poor. The merchant, concerned that this reflected poorly on him in the eyes of neighbors, complained to the head of the monastery. Bound by a vow of obedience, St. Ignatius was ordered by his superior to solicit the merchant. Ignatius complied, and as expected, the merchant received him with fanfare, gave generously, and insisted that he come again. Yet as he left the merchant's house, a dark stain spread across his sack and heavy drops of blood began to fall onto the street, leaving a trail back to the friary. “What is this?” gasped the monastery’s superior, demanding an explanation. Ignatius replied, “This is the blood of the poor.” 

Versions of this story unfold every day in our globalized economy, with long supply chains that both reveal and conceal our complicity in late capitalism — a system of globalized extraction, racialized inequality, ecological devastation, commodified life, and finance dominated markets where hedge funds, derivatives, securities, private equity, and global banks concentrate wealth at staggering scales. From our morning coffee to fruits and vegetables in the grocery aisle, to shirts and garments that cover our bodies and silicon circuitry that powers our lives, the question remains the same: What is this stain, this path of grinding poverty and absurd inequality, left in the wake of capitalism? Are our hands clean?

Given our congregational focus on dismantling racial capitalism, rejection of capitalism may simply be assumed. Yet attitudes toward capitalism —outright affirmation or rejection — are often assumed long before they are examined. Protest movements from Seattle’s WTO demonstrations to Occupy Wall Street have cast capitalism as an obvious villain, but such moments do not constitute a moral or theological evaluation of capitalism’s deeper work: its anthropology, its formation of desire, its shaping of community, its spiritual consequences. 

All too often, debate about the morality of capitalism invariably revolves around a single question: Does capitalism work? Does it reduce poverty and elevate standards of living, or does it deepen and perpetuate suffering? The argument quickly pivots to empirical evidence — statistics, growth rates, welfare data, mortality charts, with a few anecdotes added for good measure. Such evidence matters, but it rarely persuades, because the deeper problem is the question itself. “Does capitalism work?” is the wrong question. On many fronts, capitalism clearly does work — its productive capacity remains unmatched. 

Instead of asking “Does capitalism work?”, the real question is “What work does capitalism do?” For capitalism’s moral problems do not lie merely in its failure to function, but in the kind of work it performs when it succeeds. This is what the theologian and moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre observed: “Although indictments of capitalism have justly focused attention upon the wrongs done to the poor and the exploited, [we must] view any social and economic order that treats being or becoming rich as highly desirable as doing wrong to those who must not only accept its goals, but succeed in achieving them... Capitalism is bad for those who succeed by its standards as well as for those who fail by them.”1 The problem is not merely whether capitalism works (which it demonstrably does not for the proverbial 99%), but what kind of people it forms and what kind of world it creates. In an economy where everything is commodified and subject to cost benefit logic, persons inevitably come to be valued by the same criteria as commodities — marketability, profitability, and consumability. The stingy god of scarcity warps desire into grasping after what is rationed just enough to feed the market’s relentless demand for expansion. Even when capitalism delivers the goods, it renders human sociality competitive and antagonistic, forcing autonomous, self-made individuals into rivalry for resources, wages, time, worth, safety, recognition, and belonging. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” — that first question hurled at God — may be capitalism’s first breath, the refusal of responsibility, the attempt to wash one’s hands of another’s blood in the rationalized pursuit of “self-interest,” the idolatrous faith that some invisible hand will accomplish what love of neighbor no longer commands.

Capitalism’s deepest work is not economic but anthropological and spiritual, structures of desire that shape how we perceive ourselves, the other, and the world. These are formations of the soul that reach deeper than markets or money, crafting a particular kind of human being trained in scarcity, competition, individualism, possession, exchange value, instrumental reason, and a racialized imagination trained to misrecognize the other’s distress as danger, the other’s need as threat, and the other’s vulnerability as volatility to be policed, incarcerated, deported, and disposed. 

The monastery’s superior looked at the spreading stain and asked, “What is this?” The question lingers, asking us to see and wrestle with its truth. What exactly is this stain that marks our streets, our communities, our world, our very lives?
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 1Alasdair MacIntyre, Marxism and Christianity. 2d ed. (London: Duckworth, 1995).

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