One of the most intensive defenses of capitalism I have recently heard comes from Miguel Anxo Bastos. In several conferences and interviews, he presents capitalism not merely as an economic system, but as a kind of “mental technology”: a way of seeing the world rationally, systematically, and productively. In his account, capitalism emerges from habits of saving, reinvestment, accounting, planning, and long-term coordination. It is not simply greed or commerce; it is a civilization built upon disciplined accumulation and increasingly sophisticated forms of organization.
There is something deeply compelling in this interpretation, and I do not want to dismiss it too quickly. Bastos’ argument captures something important about capitalism’s historical power: its ability to generate discipline, calculation, innovation and long-term coordination. However, I want to raise four critical problems with this view, which I outline briefly here and develop futher bellow. First, Bastos risks romanticizing capitalism by focusing on its origins rather than on its current stage of development. Second, he overlooks the lived experience of temporal discipline, acceleration and precariousness. Third, he implicitly compares an idealized capitalism with the historical failures of communism. Fourth, he reduces capitalism to capital, savings and work while neglecting externalities, social disruption and the erosion of social capital.
Bastos compares capitalism to science itself. Science, in his view, is not simply a collection of discoveries, but a method for looking at the natural world differently: through experimentation, proof, trial, error, and systematic observation. Capitalism would be something similar in the economic sphere. It teaches human beings to look at production, tools and resources through calculation, accumulation and rational improvement.
The transition from the stick to the hammer, from the hammer to the saw, from the saw to the electric saw, and eventually to industrial machinery and tractors, requires more than technical innovation. It requires saving, investment, accounting, planning and a social environment in which such accumulation can take place. Bastos links this process to the emergence of modern Europe, to commercial freedoms, to accounting practices, and to those historical spaces where capitalism could spread like small stains of oil, gradually undermining older feudal structures. In that sense, capitalism appears in his account as something deeply subversive: not a conservative force, but a disruptive one, especially against landed elites and traditional forms of power.
This perspective echoes classic analyses of capitalist development. Max Weber, in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, argued that capitalism depended upon a new moral orientation toward work, discipline, punctuality, and rational organization. Likewise, E. P. Thompson, in The Making of the English Working Class and especially in his essay Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism, explained how the working class itself had to be historically produced. Human beings were not naturally adapted to factory schedules, clocks, measured labor, and continuous productivity. Peasants and artisans often worked according to seasonal rhythms, task-oriented habits, and natural cycles of daylight. Capitalism required the creation of a new temporal consciousness.
This is a crucial point that many contemporary discussions overlook. The disciplined worker is not a natural human type. The capacity to live by the clock, to quantify time, to separate leisure from labor, and to internalize productivity as moral virtue was historically constructed. Thompson shows that this transformation often required coercion, institutional pressure, and cultural adaptation across generations.
My first critique is that Bastos’ vision risks becoming romantic because it speaks powerfully about capitalism’s origins: savings, tools, discipline, entrepreneurship, decentralized initiative, and the destruction of stagnant feudal structures. And historically, he is not entirely wrong. Capitalism was indeed profoundly subversive toward aristocratic and feudal orders.
But the capitalism of small workshops, local merchants, and dispersed “oil stains” of commerce is not the same thing as today’s globally integrated financial-technological capitalism. Once we move beyond the origins of capitalism, the question is no longer simply how capitalism emerged, but what it became.
Over time, those decentralized processes consolidated into massive institutional structures: multinational corporations, global supply chains, financial systems, algorithmic platforms, and planetary-scale industries. Economic activity now generates enormous externalities — not only local but global. Climate change is perhaps the clearest example.
The same question becomes even more uncomfortable if we look at ordinary work today. How can one sell a romantic idea of capitalism from the image of the baker who wakes up early in the morning, opens his shop and serves his community, while ignoring the fact that much of contemporary capitalism is organized through platforms, algorithms, corporate chains and global infrastructures owned by some of the greatest oligarchs of our time?
Second, even if capitalism historically generated discipline, coordination and productivity, we must ask what this discipline feels like from the standpoint of lived experience.
Did human beings really adapt to schedules, or did they simply become dependent on them? Is the ability to live by the clock a sign of civilization, or is the lack of freedom over one’s own time still one of the clearest signs of precariousness? Perhaps we never fully got used to it. Perhaps we merely normalized a form of discipline that continues to produce exhaustion, anxiety and alienation.
Here the perspectives of Michel Foucault become indispensable. Foucault’s work on discipline demonstrates how modern institutions — factories, schools, prisons, armies — reorganized human bodies and behavior through temporal regulation, surveillance, routines, and normalization. The clock was not merely an economic instrument; it became a technology of power. Even before capitalism, medieval artisans already followed forms of temporal discipline linked to seasons, guilds, and daylight. What capitalism did was radically intensify and universalize this process through increasingly sophisticated technologies of measurement, synchronization, and control.
Hartmut Rosa pushes this argument further through his theory of social acceleration. Modern capitalism no longer merely organizes labor; it continuously accelerates social life itself. Technological innovation, communication systems, labor expectations, consumption cycles, and institutional competition generate a permanent pressure toward speed, adaptation, and optimization. Rosa’s work is valuable precisely because it shifts the debate away from simplistic celebrations or condemnations of capitalism toward the question of how modernity transforms human experience itself. I discuss this more directly in my article on Rosa’s lecture on emotions and human agency: Hartmut Rosa’s Lecture: Emotions and Human Agency
Think of the person who spends the entire day filling in forms, following procedures, clicking “yes, no, yes” through bureaucratic systems. Or the supermarket worker reduced to the rhythm of the scanner: beep, beep, beep. A nostalgic defense of capitalism may still speak of effort, savings and productive discipline. But the lived reality of many workers today is not entrepreneurial freedom. It is procedural obedience, temporal pressure and dependence on institutions too large to understand, let alone control.
This is not only an abstract argument for me. I remember my own experience working for Reuters in Poland during the 2010s, in a peripheral location within the European capitalist system (see my personal notes from 2016). I used to work extremely hard, often eight, nine or even ten hours a day, producing systematic translations of financial news and stock exchange developments (I still remember how they were named “sigdevs (significant developments)”: mergers, acquisitions, IPOs, profit warnings, dividend announcements, quarterly results, regulatory filings, management changes, market updates. The work was hyper-systematized. I was not using technology as a tool for freedom; I felt like an extension of the computer, processing standardized information under constant temporal pressure. The end product was simply a headline summarizing a report of sometimes dozens of pages, and it was published almost instantly after being uploaded to the system. If after clicking the bottom of publishing there some typo or error (visible to everyone outthere), then a manager had 15 minutes to amend it, so they used to come running toward us (just as a ambulance with a siren) to “fix the problem”, making clear who’s being the error from.
This is precisely where Rosa’s argument becomes crucial. The problem is not only exploitation in the old sense, but acceleration, loss of resonance and the colonization of human agency by systems that demand constant adaptation.
David Graeber’s idea of bullshit jobs fits naturally into this critique. In Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, Graeber argued that many contemporary workers experience their labor as socially pointless, bureaucratically inflated, or disconnected from any meaningful contribution. This complicates the romantic image of capitalism as pure productivity. If capitalism is supposedly a technology for efficiency, why does it also generate armies of consultants, middle managers, compliance officers, corporate communicators, brand strategists, internal auditors, and administrative coordinators whose daily work often consists of producing reports, attending meetings, measuring performance, managing appearances, or maintaining procedures that few people experience as genuinely necessary?
And this is not only a problem of doing too much under the pressure of acceleration. It is also, paradoxically, a problem of doing nothing — or of doing things that even workers themselves experience as socially empty. Interestingly, contemporary capitalism produces the same kind of pointless, performative inactivity that has often been used to caricature communism: people sitting in offices, waiting for instructions, attending meetings, completing procedures, generating reports, maintaining appearances, and sustaining institutions whose purpose becomes increasingly unclear. Graeber’s point is precisely that capitalism did not abolish this problem. It reproduced it through corporate bureaucracy, managerialism and the institutional need to justify hierarchies.
My experience also showed the opposite side of the same system. In other departments, I saw people doing practically nothing for days or even weeks, not because they were lazy, but because of organizational inefficiency, poor coordination or bureaucratic inertia. This is what makes Graeber’s argument so powerful. The same corporate system can produce both hyper-accelerated work and empty work, both exhaustion and inactivity, both the scanner-like rhythm of productivity and the absurdity of waiting for tasks that never arrive. And it is particularly revealing that this happened in Poland in the 2010s: a semi-peripheral European space integrated into global capitalism through outsourcing, financial services and corporate back-office work.
Third, there is a methodological problem here. If we are going to judge capitalism as an original “mental technology”, then we should do the same with communism. We should compare both as theoretical technologies of thought: capitalism as a logic of saving, investment, calculation and decentralized initiative; communism as a logic of collective ownership, equality, planning and emancipation from exploitation. One may still find capitalism more convincing. But the comparison has to be symmetrical.
What cannot be done is to compare an idealized, romantic and original version of capitalism — the baker, the artisan, the saver, the small entrepreneur — with the Soviet Union in its final years. That is not a fair comparison between ideas. It is a comparison between one system’s origin myth and another system’s historical degeneration. A serious discussion should either compare ideals with ideals, or historical outcomes with historical outcomes.
Fourth, there is a theoretical problem. Bastos not only seems to define capitalism through what looks like an original, almost romantic image of capitalism; he also tends to reduce it to its core productive elements: capital, savings, investment and work. But capitalism cannot be properly understood only through the factors that make accumulation possible. It must also be understood through the consequences that accumulation generates.
In economics, these consequences are often discussed as externalities. Arthur Pigou’s classic work on welfare economics already showed that market activity may impose costs on third parties that are not reflected in prices. Later, Ronald Coase reformulated the problem by asking how institutional arrangements and property rights shape the management of social costs. More recently, debates on climate change, inequality and environmental degradation have made it clear that externalities are not peripheral details of capitalism. Nicholas Stern, The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review, Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life, Ulrich Beck, Risk SocietyThey are central to understanding how capitalism actually operates once it expands beyond the small-scale world of the artisan, the saver and the entrepreneur.
Sociology has its own vocabulary for this problem. Karl Polanyi described the disruptive consequences of turning land, labor and money into “fictitious commodities.” Émile Durkheim worried about anomie: the weakening of moral regulation in rapidly changing societies. Joseph Schumpeter celebrated capitalism’s “creative destruction”, but even that expression recognizes that innovation does not merely create; it also destroys social worlds. More recently, Ulrich Beck’s notion of the “risk society” and David Harvey’s work on capitalist urbanization and accumulation show that capitalist development continuously produces dislocations, dependencies, inequalities and risks that cannot be dismissed as secondary effects.
This is where Bastos’ argument becomes theoretically insufficient. He appears to speak fluently about capital, savings and work, but much less about externalities, social disruption and long-term institutional consequences. At times, he seems to dismiss this type of reasoning as if it were a minor objection, or merely a moral complaint against productivity. But this is a mistake. There is an enormous body of economic and sociological scholarship precisely devoted to studying the unintended, displaced or hidden costs of capitalist development. To ignore it is not to defend capitalism more rigorously; it is to defend a simplified version of it.
It is interesting to observe how Professor Bastos often refers to Daniel Bell and The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism to explain why, for instance, younger generations appear less hardworking than previous ones. Bell argued that capitalism generates the very cultural conditions that eventually undermine its own moral foundations. The system requires discipline, delayed gratification, hard work and self-control in production. Yet, in consumption, it promotes desire, novelty, hedonism and permanent dissatisfaction. But this is not an accidental or unintended consequence of capitalism, nor simply the result of insufficient ethical education, as if the problem could be solved by selling capitalism more effectively as a moral ideal. It is, rather, one of capitalism’s deepest externalities.
Bastos sometimes seems to treat cultural decline as something external to capitalism, as if the moral vices of consumer society could be separated from the economic system that produces them. But perhaps this is precisely the point. Capitalism may generate prosperity for a first generation of workers after a lifetime of sacrifice, but without guaranteeing a stable improvement in the social conditions of the next generation. This helps explain part of the crisis of youth today: precarious work, unaffordable housing, weak community ties, emotional exhaustion and a growing sense that the promise of progress has been broken.
Perhaps the father who worked so hard, who saved, who accumulated, who embodied the ethic of sacrifice, did not spend enough time with his children. Perhaps he accumulated financial capital, but depleted another kind of capital. This is where the language of social capital becomes indispensable. Authors such as Pierre Bourdieu, James Coleman and Robert Putnam have shown that societies do not function only through money, labor and investment. They also depend on trust, networks, family life, civic participation, community ties, habits of cooperation and shared meanings.
In this sense, investing time in one’s family, neighborhood, friendships, education, leisure, creativity or inner life is not merely a private luxury. It is also socially productive. A society where everyone is permanently working under the pressure of the clock may accumulate capital while eroding the very social conditions that make life meaningful and institutions sustainable.
This, from my point of view, is Bastos’ great theoretical deficit. He seems to defend capitalism as if two hundred years of social theory had not happened. He speaks as if the essential problem were still to free the artisan, the saver and the entrepreneur from feudal restraints, while paying far less attention to the institutional, ecological, psychological and social consequences of capitalism’s later development.
And this deficit is not merely academic. It becomes politically significant when figures such as Javier Milei try to translate this nineteenth-century vision of capitalism into government. The risk is that an elegant defense of savings, effort and entrepreneurial freedom becomes a political program blind to social capital, externalities, care, community, ecology and the lived experience of people whose lives are shaped not by heroic entrepreneurship, but by precarity, acceleration and institutional dependence.
At this point, it becomes unclear what exactly defenders like Bastos are advocating for. Are they defending capitalism as an original civilizational impulse? Are they defending globalized financial capitalism in its current form? Are they defending technological modernity itself? Or perhaps a nostalgic image of pre-bureaucratic entrepreneurial society?
Because these are not identical things.
The irony is that the very temporal discipline celebrated as productive and emancipatory may also have evolved into forms of social acceleration that undermine human autonomy, emotional stability, democratic control, and ecological sustainability.
Capitalism may indeed have begun as a “mental technology.” But every technology eventually transforms the environment in which human beings live. The question today is not whether capitalism once enabled development. The real question is whether its current form remains socially and ecologically governable. My final question, is Bastos overlooking two centuries of social theory that critically examined, revised and ultimately moved beyond nineteenth-century conceptions of capitalism?
