"They Enjoyed It": Capitalism and Stimulation

November is usually a month ripe for discussions of decolonization – after all, there’s a celebration of colonialism nested right at the end for us Americans. This year, I might recommend listening to indigenous and colonized voices, instead. Due to the ongoing colonial violence in Palestine, I might suggest, also, giving to Doctors without Borders and other, similar charities.

November, also, is one of two Hell Months. This is what I think of it as, and when I talk about the difficulties with my students, almost inevitably one of them happens upon the same phrasing. Deadlines loom, projects come due, and there is less and less time in which to get anything done. This phenomenon is known as “crunch” in the so-called “real world” outside of academia. We get it on a schedule, other professionals have it come randomly, out of the blue, like bad weather.

Crunch is, to an extent, demanded by fans. Death threats were sent to CD Projekt Red over the delays to Cyberpunk 2077 (a game previously discussed here.)

Most notable here is in logistics. Almost every trucker exists in a state of perpetual crunch, as do many creative professionals. There has been a fair amount of discourse on this in regard to AAA game production, but the employees of game studios are far from the only ones to suffer from this condition.

For the Marxist, the explanation of this is fairly simple: there is a tendency for the rate of profits to decline. The same amount of work gets you less return, until what was once a goldmine becomes a money sink. It’s the logic of the addict, when you get right down to it.

Historically, Capitalism has always relied on a free lunch of some kind. Either unclaimed frontier beyond which there is terra nullis or something we call a terra nullis and use violence to make free to grab. Since the end of the 19th century, that hasn’t really been an option. Capitalism keeps trying to invent a frontier beyond which that much-hungered-for free lunch exists. It does this by “going meta” so to speak – either through abstracting into finance (credit default swaps, derivatives, and so on) or using a computer (the dot com bubble comes to mind, as does social media, blockchain, the metaverse, and so-called AI.) This has failed more often than it’s succeeded. The plan is, usually, to find a way to turn the existing field of economic activity into a frontier – what I’ve called a “horizon of extraction” in the past – somehow without destroying it. So the captains of industry are, effectively, just finding a way to strip the copper wiring out of the walls while they wait for the door to Narnia to open up.

Two ways of “stripping the wiring” exist: raising prices and lowering the cost of doing business. Given that raising prices has historically been very unpopular, the tendency is usually toward lowering the cost of doing business. This means lowering the amount of money spent on raw materials, leading to a decline in quality, or the amount of money spent on paying employees, leading to a decline in worker happiness. Ergo, when labor is on the back foot, that’s the preferred option.

Part of labor being on the back foot comes down to atomization, and one of the most disingenuous, market-liberal means of maintaining this is to say, “we all have the same 24 hours in the day.” This, generally speaking, means that it’s your fault if you don’t get the same return on your effort as someone else. Of course, this falls apart if you think about it too long: if Person A has a 30 minute commute by car and Person B has a 2 hour commute by bus or on foot, then Person A essentially has three hours more usable time per day (“Person B could read on the bus and educate themselves!” my critics might cry, thinking that bootstraps are the sort of thing you can use to pull yourself up by.)

We don’t all have the same amount of time in the day, but we are often fed the line that we do. This is part of the dominant ideology. This leads to the most common response by the immiserated and precarious worker: to try to squeeze more day from their day.

I thought about calling this piece “Anti-Hypnos”, but I didn’t want to overplay that titling approach. I figure, if it’s sub-book length and not part of a series, you’ve got maybe two anti-[whatever]s in you a decade. Anything more than that is hubris.

Oftentimes, this takes the form of cutting in to sleep. You can sleep less for free, and might even make more money by doing so, after all. But two hours less sleep as a one-time thing is an unpleasant but survivable body blow. Two hours less sleep as an approach to daily problems, on the other hand, may as well be a chronic condition.

So some people attempt to find a loophole through that commonly-considered 24-hour barrier. If you can’t squeeze out more day, then perhaps you can fit more into your day? Perhaps there is some kind of intervention that will allow you to get more from your day?

Put a hold on that for a moment. Let’s talk about material culture.

I am not a technological determinist, but technology plays a role in material culture. It’s a dialectical action, caused by the interaction of multiple factors and agents in response to one another. The way we live is shaped by the infrastructure around us. Technology, I want to stress, is not neutral. It is, perhaps, the furthest thing from neutral, because every technology both responds to and calls to a political project.

The first electric vehicle capable of carrying a person, the Flocken Electrowagen, first built in 1888. I keep this on deck in case a student claims that Elon Musk invented the electric car. Image uploaded to wikimedia commons by Franz Haag and used under a CC BY-SA 3.0.

The automobile replaces the horse as a mode of transportation, able to go further and faster: perfect for the dispersed environment of America. Early on, it was easy for a skilled professional to make one, and it quickly became an item comparable to the personal computer a hundred years later: it offered freedom of movement to otherwise slow-moving populations. But the invention of the automobile made the car accident and the traffic jam inevitable, and led to it being necessary to invent the traffic light.

Let’s stay with vehicles for a moment. The material base of the industrial revolution was shaped by transportation. Early factories were placed where water wheels could feed them power and canals could deliver materials – industrialization concentrated in these areas. The invention of steam power allowed it to disperse, and railways moved materials around. This led to factories being concentrated in urban areas, centered around rail yards. This centralization created the neighborhoods of the industrial proletariat, which sprouted the institutions of solidarity – trade and industrial unions – as a response. Truck-centered shipping dispersed factories again: now, it was more profitable to have production take place near the highways, at the periphery of cities, dispersing the working class into a more atomized state. Containerization, just-in-time shipping, and other inventions have had effects just as drastic.

Technology is about the skillful use of what we find in the natural world, not about separation from it.

And canny participants in this labor market might try to use a technology to squeeze more time out of their day.

John Frederick Lewis’s The Coffee Bearer. Coffee has long been associated, in Europe, with Turkey and the broader Muslim world, though it originated in Ethiopia.

The premier technology for this is the stimulant.

I would go beyond just saying it’s correlated, though. I would like to suggest that there is good reason to believe that capitalism is the political project that inheres in the technology of the stimulant. The use of stimulants coincided with or slightly preceded the emergence of what is commonly recognized as capitalism, and many of us still dutifully get up every morning and need to drink several cups of black coffee to make it all work.

Coffee is endemic to Ethiopia, and spread into the Muslim world through Yemen, arriving in Europe alongside the Turkish armies at the gates of Vienna in 1529, though the first coffee shop in Europe was supposedly in Belgrade, and opened in 1522, so the 1529 figure is just popular legend depending on how much you care about continents as being indicative of dominant culture (Serbia, at the time, had been conquered by the Ottomans). While it is purported to have existed as early as the 9th century, discovered by the goatherd Kaldi in the highlands of Ethiopia, the exact origin is unknown.

Fairly quickly after its introduction to Europe, it spread and provided the necessary commodity for the coffee house. Tea followed quickly thereafter, but in either case, the beginning of caffeine consumption in Europe corresponded to the time known as the Enlightenment, which supposedly began in coffee shops. Jürgen Habermas has characterized this period as the “emergence of a bourgeois public sphere” – and the coffee shop is an arguable ground zero for that: here was a place where people could socialize while consuming a drug that accelerated, rather than decelerated, thought (as alcohol does).

Other stimulants entered broader European markets around the same time. Consider:

Sugarcane cultivation began in Papua New Guinea some five thousand years ago, and spread fairly slowly through South East Asia, the Vedic and Islamic worlds, and reached Europe around the tenth century. It was known before then – as were other sweeteners, like honey or lead – but none of them provided the same pure sweetness as cane sugar. Unfortunately, its cultivation was extremely difficult and labor intensive until the colonization of Madeira, the Canary Islands, and Cape Verde began, as well as the first stirrings of the slave trade (where it became no easier, but violence enabled a great deal of labor-intensive processes to proceed despite that). Once the cost of production had thus been driven down and the volume of production driven up, it became a cash crop.

An Aztec woman making xocoatl, from whence the English word “chocolate” originally comes. Image taken from the Codex Tudela.

Alongside sugar, the Americas provided a number of possibilities, such as chocolate. First cultivated about three thousand years before contact with the Europeans, cacao is associated with Mesoamerica but most likely originated in the Amazon basin. It was viewed as a sort of elixir of power and vitality by the cultures that used it, largely because it contains caffeine and associated alkaloids. The first Spanish colonists found it foul, but quickly acquired the taste, sending it back to Europe around 1600. Chocolate bars were known and associated with sugary desserts as early as the French Revolution – as much is noted in a letter by the Marquis de Sade.

Another notable stimulant cultivated by indigenous Americans includes tobacco, which was brought to Europe in 1529, and became a valuable commodity in three nations by 1533, when the Frenchman Jean Nicot, for whom the compound “nicotine” is named, sent leaves and seeds to Paris for consideration as a potential cure for the headaches that the King’s mother suffered from. This drug is perhaps less acceptable today than in previous years, but consider the relationship that it has to work. The server at the restaurant is most likely not sneaking off to have a mid-shift drink (or, if they do, it’s frowned upon), nor is the dishwasher microdosing on mushrooms to keep up with their work flow, but any one of them, regardless of other concerns, can step out the back door and have a cigarette. A desire for nicotine is considered a fine enough reason to stop working.

Of course, no discussion of stimulants can stop here: if we’re already in Mesoamerica, we might as well drop a letter and rearrange “cacao” to “coca”. The Spanish invaders thought of the plant as a tool of the devil, but found that their colonial subjects could not keep up with the workload in an unmedicated fashion. So they permitted the drug and taxed it at a rate of 10%.

We could continue this discussion, associating stimulants of greater and greater power with higher and higher expressions of modernity – all the way to the amphetamine usage of both Allied and Axis war machines in the Second World War. We could discuss how, in the pursuit of any number of commodities, the British flooded Chinese markets with opium to put a hole in the Qing dynasty’s trade surplus.

The logic of capitalism is the logic of the stimulant enacted as a social, political, and economic system.

But stimulants never create more energy. On the near edge of acceptability, they engender deficits – robbing the future so that the present becomes more intense – while on the far end they wear out bodies consuming them, accelerating them to the point where the smooth muscle of the circulatory system lacks the tensile strength to contain the force of the heartbeat and the mind becomes deranged.

If Americans didn’t have such a hunger for Benzedrine, would we have been able to avoid Jack Kerouac and his imitators? (I kid, though I find him tiresome.) Image uploaded to Wikimedia commons by Tom Palumbo and used under a CC BY-SA 2.0.

Now consider the fact that, according to JSTOR, American workers have always relied on substances like cocaine and benzedrine. What exactly it means that amphetamines were made illegal in 1971, around the same time that ADHD appeared in the DSM-II under the name “Hyperkinetic Reaction” is unclear to me, but the correlation seems pointed.

The problem with this sort of thing, though, is that the case I’m presenting is largely circumstantial. I understand that I cannot prove anything more than a correlation here: perhaps capitalism wasn’t caused by the introduction of stimulants to Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, perhaps the emergence of capitalism made them more likely to make use of the newly discovered substances.

To an extent, I think this has happened – why position this particular type of potentially-useful toxin as being all of the same variety of thing? Only having the right mental framework would lead to that – but I find it interesting that capitalism emerged from the one place in the world that human civilization did not have access to a natural stimulant, and it only happened after stimulants became available.

I am, also, not exactly sure where to take this idea from here, because like hell am I giving up my morning coffee.

But there is a suspicion that I can’t shake: the Accelerationist problem — the mismatch between democratic modernity and industrial capitalism — has been inherent since the beginning, but it’s been salved over by the use of stimulants, and Lyotard’s question — why the working class of England (and other nations) gloried in the annihilation of their traditional life — is answered by the narcotic, self-destructive mania of experiencing chemical stimulation for the first time. The end result could be that the war on drugs is perhaps the greatest contradiction that capitalism has engendered in itself: attacking the very thing that allowed it to flourish in the first place.

Because, while the coffee and cocoa bean, the sap of the sugar cane and the tobacco leaf allowed it to start, there is a tendency towards diminishing returns, and it’s just not possible for them to bring themselves to push further. At least, not officially.

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