Today (2 May) is the two-year anniversary of the death of my father, Don Francisco Guerra. Although he did not live to see a free Cuba, my wife Sydjia and I will continue to honor his legacy by devoting our time and treasure to this Quixotic but noble and necessary cause as long as we remain alive. May my father’s lifelong dream of a free and prosperous Cuba come true soon!

Another moral dimension where Stoicism and capitalism overlap in part is that both systems embody a mixture of cooperation and competition. In the words of Marcus Aurelius, “We were born for cooperation …” (Meditations, ii.1) From a Stoic perspective, competition can also play a positive role in our moral development: competition is what allows us to hone our skills and develop our talents to the best of our abilities. Likewise, competition in economics is the lifeblood of capitalist system, for as Adam Smith showed long ago, competition is what lowers prices, keeps our selfish tendencies in check, and fuels innovation.

At the same time, cooperation is just as much a “capitalist virtue,” so to speak, as it is a Stoic one. Consider, for example, a simple pencil. In his classic essay “I, Pencil,” Leonard E. Read (1958) describes the complex global supply chain and the millions of people with specialized knowledge who cooperate to create a simple pencil.[1] This observation about capitalist cooperation goes back to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. In Book I, Chapter 1 of Smith’s magnum opus, the Scottish scholar shows how the production, distribution, and sale of an ordinary product—the “woollen coat” of an average day-labourer—results from myriad forms of cooperation involving a cast of thousands—nay, millions!—of different people from all over the world:

“Observe the accommodation of the most common artificer or day-labourer in a civilized and thriving country, and you will perceive that the number of people of whose industry a part, though but a small part, has been employed in procuring him this accommodation, exceeds all computation. The woollen coat, for example, which covers the day-labourer, as coarse and rough as it may appear, is the produce of the joint labour of a great multitude of workmen. The shepherd, the sorter of the wool, the wool-comber or carder, the dyer, the scribbler, the spinner, the weaver, the fuller, the dresser, with many others, must all join their different arts in order to complete even this homely production. How many merchants and carriers, besides, must have been employed in transporting the materials from some of those workmen to others who often live in a very distant part of the country! How much commerce and navigation in particular, how many ship-builders, sailors, sail-makers, rope-makers, must have been employed in order to bring together the different drugs made use of by the dyer, which often come from the remotest corners of the world! What a variety of labour too is necessary in order to produce the tools of the meanest of those workmen!” (Wealth of Nations, I.i.11)[2]

More amazingly, Adam Smith sees an infinite regress of cooperation in the capitalist system, for the woollen coat would not have been possible without “that very simple machine, the shears with which the shepherd clips the wool,” and the manufacture of those shears also requires “the assistance and co-operation of many thousands” of people: “the miner, the builder of the furnace for smelting the ore, the seller of the timber, the burner of the charcoal to be made use of in the smelting-house, the brick-maker, the brick-layer, the workmen who attend the furnace, the mill-wright, the forger, [and] the smith ….” (Ibid.) In short, whether we are describing the cooperation involved in the production, distribution, and sale of a pencil or a woolen coat, this Panglossian picture of diffuse human cooperation resembles one of Marcus Aurelius’ most memorable metaphors: the bees and the hive.[3] Like the limbs of one’s body, working together in perfect harmony, the individual bees in the hive are not only part of a greater and integral whole; they also cooperate with each other for the greater good of the whole colony.

But as soon as we dig a little deeper, we see how “capitalist cooperation” is qualitatively different from the type of Stoic cooperation that Marcus Aurelius champions on almost every single page of his Stoic Meditations. The great Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher conceives of cooperation as a conscious or deliberate act. He constantly has to remind himself to act for the benefit of the whole and the good of others.[4] Capitalist cooperation, on the other hand, is the unforeseen and unplanned result of millions of self-interested decisions made by untold numbers of people, i.e. Adam Smith’s famous (or infamous, depending on your point of view) invisible hand. Should it matter whether the level of cooperation in any given society results from deliberate, other-regarding Stoic acts of pro-social cooperation (e.g. charity) or from self-regarding, profit-seeking actions of capitalist money-making activities (e.g. markets), i.e. the unintended product of an invisible hand?            

On this note, let’s substitute the metaphor of the archer (see my previous post) with the metaphor of the football team. In a team sport, such as football, every player has an assigned position and a defined role to play during a game (e.g. linebacker, wide receiver, running back, etc.), and the outcome of any given game will depend on the individual contributions of each player as well as the collective performance of the team as a whole. A capitalist athlete, however, will focus on the outcome of the game; a stoic football player will focus on how the game was played, regardless of outcome. In other words, a Stoic values cooperation for its own sake; a capitalist, by contrast, values cooperation not for its own sake but for purely consequentialist reasons, i.e. for the mutual gains that such cooperation can engender. In other words, whether we conceptualize our lives as a team sport (football) or an individual endeavor (archery), the impasse or tension between pure Stoic motives (“The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts”) versus bottom-line capitalist results (“Show me the money!”) will not go away. (To be continued …)

[1] The legendary free market economist Milton Friedman popularized Leonard E. Read’s “I, Pencil” on an episode of his PBS television show “Free to Choose: The Power of the Market.” This iconic episode is available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67tHtpac5ws (Free to Choose Network 2012). As a personal and biographical aside, it was this particular episode, which I first saw when I was still a child, that lead me to my scholarly interest in the capitalist system.

[2] As an aside, Smith makes use of only eight exclamation points in his entire 900-plus page magnum opus—three of those exclamations appear in the woolen coat passage quoted here.

[3] See, e.g., Meditations, v.6.2 (comparing “a bee that has made honey” to “a man that done good”), vi.54 (“What does not benefit the hive does not benefit the bee either”), and xi.18.9 (describing bees as gregarious creatures).

[4] Cf. Meditations, iv.3.2: “Recall the conclusion that rational creatures are born for each other’s sake ….”