35. Business does NOT equal capitalism: a guide for reclaiming commerce

Capitalism is so entrenched in our world, it's hard to think of business, money, and wealth outside of it. And yet, capitalism is extremely new to human history — even the history of human commerce.

Commerce that connected and enriched humanity, as opposed to exploit and extract, has existed for thousands of years before capitalism. And it's time for us to reclaim and re-create what commerce can look like.

Listen to hear more about:

• What sophisticated human commerce looked like for thousands of years before capitalism existed
• The shocking historical event that changed everything overnight (that they didn't teach me about in school)
• Why capitalism literally cannot stop — it's not a choice, it's built into the system
• Five key ideas that will point you toward participating in alternative liberatory forms of commerce

This conversation is deep and rigorous, and it matters. If you've ever felt conflicted about doing business in our current system, this episode will change how you see everything, and offer you a viable path forward.

Transcript

Welcome to Liberatory Business. I'm your host, Simone Seol, and thank you so much for listening.

So today I'm gonna try to tackle one of the questions that I get the most, or one of the questions that I see asked the most, which is: how can we do business when the world is falling the fuck apart?

And it is a really important question, and I think it's a question that's asked by people who have good hearts — caring, kind hearts. And what I want to expound upon today is that the problem isn't business itself. The problem is that business and commerce have gotten conflated with capitalism, and these are two very different things.

And I wanna take the time to really analyze this because I think knowing everything that I'm about to tell you is going to make it really clear how you can do business, how you can do commerce in a way where there's no ambiguity between whether you are contributing to harmful capitalism or not.

So it's gonna get a little bit deep, but I invite you to get excited because your questions are gonna be answered. If you've ever wrestled with, like, "I don't wanna be complicit in broken and extractive systems that harm other people," right? This is for you.

Let's imagine a world without capitalism

So let's go. Let's start with the foundation. I want you to imagine for a moment that capitalism didn't exist — just a world without capitalism. And it might be kind of hard, right? Because capitalism is just... if you're listening to this, you were most likely born into it. It's everywhere. It's like the air we breathe, the water we swim in if we were fish.

And capitalism just seems inevitable, like it's just a natural way humans have always done business. But it's really worth remembering how new capitalism is in human history. Like, in the perspective of the long, actual real span of human history, capitalism showed up yesterday. Whereas what's always been here, more or less, is commerce, right?

Commerce has always existed

Humans have been trading with each other for thousands of years, right? It's like, "Hey, we got some extra apples. You got some extra fish. Let's trade." "I made some pottery, and you are really good at making arrows. Let's trade some pots for arrows," right? That's commerce at its simplest — this kind of bartering.

But what commerce looked like pre-capitalism wasn't just simple bartering. People for thousands of years actually created remarkably sophisticated and vast trade networks.

You think about the Silk Road, right? It connected China all the way over to the Mediterranean, and that existed for 1,400 years. Indigenous Americans had extensive trade networks across the entire continent long before Europeans arrived. And I think I remember — I don't remember the details, but there were like jewels and just like things that were made, originally made in communities in like some northern part of the American continent that were found in the southern parts, like thousands of miles away. Or maybe it's vice versa, but there is — you can look this up 'cause I'm not an expert — but there's like a lot of archaeological evidence of really extensive trade networks covering vast distances, right?

Polynesian wayfinders were trading across the entire freaking Pacific Ocean, sailing huge distances maintaining these networks.

So trade is not new. Even sophisticated, complex trade, international trade is not new. Trade is normal.

How trade benefited humanity

Not only is trade normal, it has really benefited humankind in so many ways. Trade helped to build older civilizations by allowing each community to kind of like specialize in what they did best, right? So like the potters could get really good at making pottery so they could trade it for other things they needed. Fishermen and women got really good at fishing so they could trade their fish, right? So it allowed for specialization.

It allowed people who might not have interacted otherwise to share knowledge, culture. And in the olden days, from what I understand, merchants were considered to be like ambassadors of different cultures. 'Cause no one else really had an incentive to travel such large distances, like carrying "here's stuff from my land, how do we wanna do this exchange?" And a lot of exchange of like language, cultural knowledge, even like religion took place. Commerce connected the world before even the modern era.

What makes capitalism different?

But capitalism — it fundamentally changed not just how people trade, not just how commerce works, but it really deeply infiltrated into every aspect of human life, and not for the better.

And so I wanna talk about that. If you've ever wondered, "So what makes capitalism so different from all the other forms of commerce that preceded it?" — it comes down to a key thing, which is the complete commodification of land and labor. And this is, we're gonna get a little bit wonky over here, but you know, come with me.

It's basically like this: Before capitalism, there were things that were just not for sale, and people knew they weren't for sale. There were things that people never attempted to commodify. But capitalism changed all of that. The most critical things that became thoroughly commodified with capitalism are land and labor.

And you might think, "Okay, but land and labor were tradable commodities before too. Like people owned them and sold them." Like, you know, kings had the land of their kingdoms and, you know... Yes, land in many cases was owned, but land ownership wasn't only a financial contract. Land ownership was tied to webs of relationships and social obligations.

Same with labor. People worked for money in many cases, absolutely. But like for example, under feudalism, peasants had to work — they had to put in labor they owed to their lords. But once again, these weren't only economic transactions. They were embedded in social relationships with mutual obligations.

Social bonds that limited pure profit-seeking

So think about it like this. If you were a lord in medieval Europe or something, you couldn't just like fire your peasants and hire cheaper peasants from the next town over, right? That's not how it worked. Peasants and lords both belonged to a certain land, and that wasn't something that could be changed with economic transactions. And they owed each other things. Peasants were owed protection, land use rights.

And guilds, for example, couldn't just outsource production abroad because it was cheaper or more efficient. You couldn't do that. You couldn't just like build a factory somewhere else 'cause it was cheaper. 'Cause guild workers were part of a brotherhood and they had obligations towards each other.

And if you were the chief of a tribe, you can't just like sell off your tribal hunting grounds 'cause you're low on financial resources — because land wasn't a commodity. Even if a chief had control over land, it was understood that the land is held collectively with the tribe and that you have to interact with the land in a spiritual way. The people and land are bound by a spiritual relationship, right.

And even in like tributary systems of ancient empires, while subjects — yes, they did provide labor and goods to rulers. Like if I am a village that's been ruled by the Roman emperor, right, you have to give something to the Roman emperor and the Roman emperor like controls your land. But at the same time, yes, economic transactions took place, but it wasn't just economic. Rulers were expected to provide defense. They were expected to settle disputes. They were expected to organize any large-scale projects that these villages needed in return.

So the key phrase here is that there were mutual obligations that transcended just the economic contract. There were social bonds, relationships, spiritual connections, community connections that put limits on pure profit-seeking. That's what capitalism changed — it takes something that yes, has economic value, and thoroughly reduces it to a commodity.

The violent birth of capitalism

Capitalism is what changed all of that. And I'm gonna tell you how this transformation actually happened because I actually learned this pretty recently, like in the past few years. And it actually kind of blew my mind. And I was like, "Wait, I went to really good schools. How come nobody taught me?" Maybe they taught me but I wasn't paying attention.

What was so striking about this is that the evolution towards capitalism — there was nothing natural about it and there was nothing gradual about it. And it required force and violence, and a lot of it.

So picture medieval England, right. And why England is because there were changes that happened in England that came to affect the entire world.

So, medieval England. Peasant families, they were living under lords and they lived within a system of customary rights — that's what they were known as. Everyone had access — like even if you're a peasant and you're poor, right, and you're forced to work for your lord 'cause that's how it's been for generations and generations — but even so, if you were a peasant, you had access to the common pastures, the rural land where you could hunt for animals. You could forage for firewood in the forest. You can forage for food, right?

So these were called the commons, and the peasants had access to them. Without access to these commons, rural life simply wasn't possible, and that is how it had always been. Everybody can go to the land, take what they want — doesn't belong to anybody, doesn't belong to any one person, right?

The enclosure movement

Then around the 16th century, something happened that would change all of that. And that is — the British (not just the British, you know, there's like Dutch and, you know, Portuguese and other people too) — but they certainly began developing better technology with which to build better ships, to be able to navigate better. And that resulted in the proliferation of international trade across vast distances that just simply had not been possible before.

And what happened was there was one commodity that suddenly became incredibly valuable now that England had access to these global markets. And that is English wool. And so it's like almost overnight the price of wool went up stratospherically — why can't I say that word? Stratospherically!

And wealthy landowners, the lords, had a realization: "Hey, we could just have these peasants living in commons, you know, working the land like they've always have, or... we could make way more money on the same land running large flocks of sheep. That is going to give me way, way, way more money than traditional farming with these peasant tenants is ever going to give me."

So what do they do? They kicked out entire communities of peasants that had lived on the land for generations, and they replaced them with sheep. They just kicked out entire families, villages overnight, and they put up fencing around what used to be the commons. They stationed armed guards around them, and no one was allowed in anymore.

Over 1,000 villages were simply erased from existence.

And the human cost was staggering. These families who had been, you know, yeah, maybe poor, but largely self-sufficient and had always knew — always had a place to go, always had a place to get food and to get firewood, et cetera — they suddenly found themselves out in the streets, destitute. Without access to the commons, there was no way for them to survive in the countryside. They had nowhere to go, nothing in their possession, and nothing to sell except their labor.

The birth of industrial capitalism

So these countless displaced families flooded into the industrial cities that were now becoming a thing in England at the time. And these factories that were now creating everything that was to be exported back out for enormous profit margins — and these people were being crammed into factories under horrific conditions. Men, women, children as young as five years old, working 14, 16 hour days in dangerous, toxic conditions.

And this pattern — what started as, they called it "enclosure," that's what this whole phenomenon is called, the enclosure in England — became essentially a colonial template worldwide. That's what happened in the Americas. The colonists displaced indigenous peoples, massacred them. They stole fucking human beings from Africa and established plantations. In Africa, they were also extracting tons of natural resources with forced labor. In Asia, they were forcing subsistence farmers into cash crop production. Different methods, same core pattern: turning land, labor and resources that yes had been traded, but also had been deeply embedded in non-transactional, non-commodifiable social relationships, and turn them thoroughly into commodities that can be sold for profit.

Why capitalism can't stop

And this is not something that just happened in a period of history and then stopped. It is still happening today. So why? Why is this? Why can't it stop, right? Why can't capitalism just chill out after all the damage that — I mean, you don't need me to go into the damages that it has done. Why can't we say, "Okay, you know what? We have, we've achieved enough, quote unquote, 'development.' We have enough wealth in the world. We have enough food to like feed the whole world. We have enough clothes to clothe the next like eight generations or whatever, right?"

We have so much shit. Why can't we just chill out? Why can't we all just stop?

Well, it all comes down to a simple fact: that capitalism runs on borrowed money. And the borrowed money changes everything and it turns capitalism into a machine that can't stop.

Wait, hold on. I actually wanna go down another historical rabbit hole just for just for a minute, because understanding this really puts into perspective what has created the kind of like endless growth, like "hustle until you die," like "extract from the entire earth and all of the people" kind of mentality that has become like the religion of our time. Whether you like it or not, that is what capitalism is pumping out every single day, and I really need you to understand this.

The debt machine

Why did capitalism come to be characterized by borrowing, right? And the answer lies in a massive shift in how things got made — the Industrial Revolution, which cannot be thought apart from capitalism, the development of it, right?

'Cause think about it. For thousands of years, like we said, most production happened on a small scale. A blacksmith needed a forge, some tools, maybe an apprentice, right? A weaver needed a loom. A farmer needed some land and some basic tools. Like, these were the kind of investments that a family or a community could handle.

But remember, in the 17 and 1800s, everything changed with the explosion of international trade and the scale that that brought. In order to compete, you needed things at what had never been seen in humanity before, which is industrial scale, right? You needed — in order to be able to compete — you needed massive textile mills with hundreds of mechanical looms. You needed steam engines, railway systems, enormous factories filled with complicated machinery.

We're talking about totally different orders of magnitude. Instead of needing a few hundred dollars worth of — pounds, whatever the currency was, right, let's just talk in dollars 'cause that's what we know. Oh, that's — I'm sorry, that's what I know. Instead of needing a few hundred dollars worth of equipment, or even a few thousand, which is like on a human scale, like family scale, individual scale could be a lot, but it's like fathomable, right?

But instead of that, entrepreneurs suddenly needed tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars. This is — we're talking about the kind of money that no individual or even a small community could easily accumulate on their own.

So where do you get the kind of capital that you need to build a giant factory if you don't have the cash lying around? Because no one has the cash lying around for that. You borrow it.

How debt changes everything

And here's where it gets interesting. Once you are borrowing these massive amounts, the entire logic of business changes. You can't just make enough to live comfortably and support your community anymore. You have enormous debt payments to service. And those debt payments don't give a fuck about your relationships to the community or your like, or the environment or anything.

This is where business shifted from "How can we create what our community needs? How do we trade to meet each other's needs?" to "How can we generate maximum returns for our investors?"

Because here's what you gotta remember about investors that make them different from just like a neighbor that you can borrow, you know, a hundred dollars from. These early industrial ventures didn't just borrow money. They sold ownership stakes to investors who expected growing returns, not just fixed payments.

And since investors have multiple opportunities available to invest, they're gonna naturally gravitate towards businesses offering the highest returns, right? So a business generating only a 5% return loses out to one that's generating 15%.

So while your immediate pressure might be, "Okay, I gotta pay back the debt to the investors," the systemic pressure overall becomes: maximize returns at all costs. Because that's what determines survival. Even if you personally just wanna cover your obligations, you're competing against other businesses that are optimizing for maximum investor returns.

And then they can reinvest those higher profits into another factory, better equipment, better marketing, lower prices. And so the businesses that survived and scaled became the ones that could attract the most capital by promising the highest returns — creating a system where maximizing investor returns became the organizing principle rather than just meeting debt obligations.

The horrific consequences

And the change that this represented, right, where the organizing principle of the economy becomes maximizing investor returns — it had profound consequences.

In the past, it looked like brutal factory conditions of the Industrial Revolution that killed men, women, and children. The Atlantic slave trade that turned human beings into capital investments. And it's actually so, like, beyond horrific how methodical they were about this.

What I learned is that they used to literally calculate whether it was more profitable to work enslaved people to death in seven or 10 years with maximum extraction of labor, or try to maintain them for 20, 30 years with quote unquote "lighter" workloads. And they would factor in the cost of food, shelter, any kind of required medical care against the expected output. They would calculate breeding potential for enslaved women, literally treating human reproduction as livestock breeding, et cetera.

This is just such a horrific, horrific example of what it looks like to commodify everything that's sacred about life, about humans, to the last detail, to extract maximum profit.

Same thing with various forms of colonial extraction that stripped entire continents of resources while leaving local populations in poverty.

The extraction continues today

And today, it has not stopped, even though the forms have somewhat changed. And we can see this plainly all around us in different forms.

The gig economy where drivers work 80 hours a week and still can't fucking afford rent. Social media platforms that intentionally profit off of the deterioration of the mental health of children, not to mention political polarization and using their platforms to prop up fascistic regimes. Pharmaceutical companies that would rather let people die than lower drug prices. An economy where teachers and nurses need multiple jobs to survive while billionaires compete to see who can colonize space faster.

The same extractive logic has created a world where the richest 1% own more wealth than the bottom 50% of humanity. The machine that started with wool and sheep enclosures is still running. It just keeps finding new things to extract from.

The most important thing to remember

Okay. I know that was a lot, but if you remember one thing from this episode, let it be this:

Capitalism hasn't always been here, which means it doesn't always have to be here. Capitalism was created artificially by force, and we can uncreate capitalism and create better systems by using the energy and force that's going towards maintaining capitalism and then doing something else with it.

And look, I am under no illusions that we're going to like violently overthrow capitalism overnight. That's not realistic, nor maybe even desirable, right? There are definitely policy changes and shifts in larger culture and organizing and strategy work that needs to happen at different levels of society.

What needs to change at the policy level

For example, we need tax policies that reward people who contribute genuine value to society instead of people who just move money around. We need better regulation of big banks so they can't gamble with people's savings or charge outrageous fees that just extract more money from the poor. We need financial systems that support long-term thinking instead of demanding growth every quarter. We need to break up platform monopolies that take huge cuts from creators. We need policies that ensure people can actually live on the wages that they earn. We need social safety nets that let people take risks and get an education and get healthcare without risking going bankrupt if you get sick. We need environmental policies that recognize that nature is not an infinitely extractable resource.

So these are policy things that people need to work on in a sustained way for the long haul, as well as we need to have different cultural conversations. We need to change how we think about success, what we think about wealth, what we owe to each other and to future generations.

How your business is part of the change

These are big things, but guess what? How you do your own business is also a super important part of the change.

Every time you choose, for example, to nurture relationships fairly as opposed to just extract from people, every time you set a fair price instead of exploiting people's insecurities and fears, every time you let some things be sacred instead of having to commodify everything — you are proving that other ways of doing commerce are possible. You're creating pockets of new possibility. You are not just building your business, you're demonstrating what commerce can look like when it's embedded in the values that sustained humanity for eons before capitalism took over.

Five fundamental distinctions

So I wanna offer you some helpful and specific pointers because I want you to know — I don't want there to be guesswork about whether you're actually building alternative commerce or just doing same old capitalism with like some kind of ethical branding, right?

So allow me to offer you what I think of as five fundamental distinctions that get to the heart of the difference. So think of these each as like a compass for navigating towards the kind of commerce that heals rather than extracts, that contributes to society rather than taking away from it.

First: rethinking wealth and success

So here's the first one. We've got to rethink the purpose of wealth and success.

In capitalism, because of the built-in profit motive that comes from capitalism's reliance on debt, wealth is an end in itself, and more is always better. And success always means individual accumulation, hoarding — you know, how much can you expand your own net worth and just keep it to yourself and your family, right? Climbing to the top of the ladder, being the best, the most famous, the biggest, whatever, right?

In alternative commerce, you articulate how much is enough. And you measure success as collective flourishing rather than one individual getting to the top, an individual accumulating, hoarding as much as possible, right?

You think about things and you're like, "You know what? I did the math and I need $200,000 a year to live on comfortably and to save for retirement and contribute meaningfully" — if that's your... it's just an example, right? Then you restructure your business to be able to reliably generate that. That becomes your goal, rather than endlessly feeling like you have to pursue more and more and more. Success becomes about your role in community and your contribution and sustainability rather than climbing as high as possible.

Second: what remains non-commodifiable

Second, we gotta think about what has to remain non-commodifiable.

Capitalism says everything can and should be turned into a commodity, a product, a service that generates revenue. You end up feeling like you have to monetize every piece of knowledge, every moment of your day, every relationship, every personal story, turning your morning routine, your failures, your family, everything into content and products.

Alternative commerce means that you decide — you get to decide what's sacred, what's private, or what just gets to be shared generously outside of commerce. Rather than having to turn everything into a revenue stream, you can keep certain knowledge to share freely. You can maintain genuine relationships and nurture them, and they don't have to become professional connections or networking opportunities. You can preserve family time that never becomes content. You can preserve your creativity that never becomes content. It's about drawing a clear line between what gets to be commodified and what doesn't, and appointing yourself with the authority to make that decision.

Third: the context of economic exchanges

Now, third. It comes down to the context of economic exchanges. And by that I mean, in capitalism, transactions are isolated market exchanges between strangers seeking maximum individual benefit, right? This is what I mean when I call something transactional. You get tit for tat. I give you this, you give me that, and that's it, right? And you treat every interaction as a potential sale and you're optimizing for conversion, without ever really needing to consider who the human being is on the other side or what it's doing to the health of relationships in the community that you're in.

In alternative commerce, you recognize that every transaction happens within relationships and it creates ongoing responsibilities to each other. When someone, for example, buys your course, they're not just purchasing information — they're entering a relationship with you where you have ongoing responsibility towards their success, and they become part of the community that you're dedicated to serving.

And when you collaborate with someone else, you're not just looking for what you can get out of the partnership. You are invested in their success too. They become part of the network that you are responsible for.

And when you hire a freelancer or a contractor or employee, you are not just buying their time and giving them money, and that's it. Again, you're entering a relationship where their professional growth, their financial wellbeing, their personal wellbeing becomes something that you are invested in. Why? 'Cause you are in a relationship — human relationship with each other — that goes beyond the transaction.

And when you share your knowledge, when you share your resources with other people in your community, you're not just being strategic in terms of networking for future gains. You're contributing to a world where everyone's wisdom, everyone's success strengthens the entire ecosystem. That's what I mean by considering the context of exchanges and making decisions that do justice to the web of human relationships where exchanges occur.

Fourth: our relationship to the sacred

And the fourth thing is about our relationship to the sacred. 'Cause once again, capitalism reduces everything to market value. Nothing sacred, nothing gets to remain out of economic calculation.

And when the sacred is removed, it turns into, you know, those sort of like parody memes going around on social media of people's LinkedIn posts, right? Where they're posting shit like, "Oh, my wife just died and here are three things I learned about leadership from planning her funeral." You know, which is like obviously an outrageous parody of an example. But sometimes people be like that in real life.

Some things can remain sacred. Alternative commerce recognizes that business exists within something larger than just material exchange in this material world. Whether that's your spiritual beliefs, your connection to nature, or your felt sense of responsibility towards future generations. And you intentionally maintain spaces and practices that are never for sale. You understand your own ideas and your work, your body of work as something that you steward rather than own, and you make decisions based on what honors the sacred in yourself and others, rather than what produces the most profit.

Fifth: time spans and horizons

Lastly, I want you to think about time spans and time horizons. Because capitalism is always in a fricking rush, right? Capitalism optimizes for immediate short-term revenue, next quarterly growth, and you are launching products quickly to hit the next monthly revenue target without considering the long-term impact.

Alternative commerce means not thinking in terms of next month's revenue goals or this year, next year revenue goals. We're thinking about the way we're gonna work across many decades if we are lucky enough to live long, healthy lives. And not just the entire lifetime and all the decades of my work, but the next generation and the generation after that, and the generation after that — our descendants who are gonna inherit the systems and the culture and the practices that you're investing in.

Your business can be part of the rebuilding

I do really believe that the business world can be rebuilt, and that it is being rebuilt one entrepreneur at a time. And your business can be part of that rebuilding.

So thank you for being a listener and I hope you'll continue to join me. I'll talk to you next time. Bye.