I posit business, meaning good business, as an undertheorized third thing between capitalism (the King) and refusal (the Priest or Hierophant). Like the Deleuzoguattarian war machine, business—true business—finds itself a contested power alternately appropriated by capitalism and enemies of the state. Traditional communisms are refusal-oriented, and do not constructively provide a vision of how to live or succeed politically within the current capitalist-statist regime; they provide merely an apocalyptic eschatology, without bridging the gap with a theory of praxis or progress.

Business, true business, is negentropic, because human economy is ultimately an act of cooperation that results in huge surpluses. What both capitalism and Marxism fail to theorize is the conjunction of the capitalist subject—which is pure metabolism of organism, or, “What I eat must exceed what I excrete”—with the Marxist insight: that labor-power, not capital, is the origin of all value and all political-economic power.

Capital is, in reality, nothing but an enabling quantity and an amplifier for labor-power. Well-known rags-to-riches stories, as well as contemporary successes like Kyle MacDonald, who traded up from a red paperclip to a house in a series of fourteen trades, demonstrate this truth. By initiating inventive action, anyone can produce value in the (economic) situation they are presently in; capital merely gates access to others’ labor-power, as a mass resource, the use of which is decidedly unethical and to be minimized (because the basic condition of capitalism is coercive social pressure to work under an illusion of scarcity created in/from the Outside—in other words, paid labor is coerced labor).

What Marxists don’t have is a theory of cooperation, of productive cooperation, or of progress towards the Marxist apocalypse. Marxists don’t even have a theory of how to build a solvent organization within capitalism, an organization that doesn’t simply reenact the tropes of capitalism! Marxist organizations end up following the rules of organism, and end up cleaving to default organization structures.

We can begin to fill out such a theory by acknowledging business as this third thing being oppressed by its reduction to both productive value/capitalism and labor-power/Marxism. That thing is practical negentropy itself, which here we are calling business or good business.

The core theoretical misstep that the capitalist makes is to equate money and value. Capitalists will tell you all day long that they don’t conflate these two, but they do, and they conflate them deeply . The reason that equating money and value is such a gross theoretical error is that it elides the conversion of human economy—a positive-sum game of cooperation—into summary bookkeeping—a zero-sum game of tracking relative percentages of ownership over society (or labor).

This is a fundamental oversight, because rags-to-riches capitalists don’t create value through financial manipulation or re-slicing the pie. Rags-to-riches capitalists create new value through their initiative: through the strategic instigation of actions that lead to the organizing of further value-production in society. Rags-to-riches capitalists, the true movers and shakers of history, tend to produce far more surplus value than they capture and extract. These hyperproductive capitalists become wealthy not by virtue of vicious extraction, but through the sheer proliferation of productive enterprises which they instigate. These pillars of society and history are renowned because they produced so much value for others that, even if they took a substantial amount for themselves, it didn’t make much of a dent in the value they helped bring to everyone else.

Marxists usually take the opposite approach: Demonizing private value and money, they throw out the basic technology of capitalism (the balance line—everything adding up to 0) along with them. This makes it impossible to theorize the solvency of any given organization or movement, and it also alienates Marxism theoretically from what it theoretically hopes to attain and consummate: A theory of value that makes sense to ordinary people, from an ordinary perspective. This is also something that capitalists, in their abandonment of true, unalienated social life and ethics, have given up on. Capitalism does not make sense, because it provides me no basis on which to decide how much exactly to donate to environmental causes or the local union; Marxism does not make sense because it provides me no theoretical basis on which to organize myself and my community in any way other than capitalism.

Business is usually conflated with and reduced to capitalism, but what if business is actually this third thing, like an alien growing in the belly of capital? Capitalism works through territorializing and then reformatting (deterritorializing and reterritorializing) economies in cycles of extraction which are always based around centralized and ultimately violent control. So, capitalist systems work via negative feedback loops, loops which suppress change.

To a capitalist who implicitly reduces economy to money, the capitalist can only gain when others lose. But to the businessperson who sees the power of their own initiative and the value of their own action, anything is possible, and a business can produce value out of thin air. A business doesn’t create value when it completes a transaction for cash—it creates value when the members of that business initiative strategic actions that benefit themselves and the community. A business is good (and ethical) when it innovates a lot of value and only extracts a minority of this value. A business is capitalist when it doesn’t try to innovate value and focuses on extraction within a zero-sum (usually monetary) perspective. There is a world of difference between the two.

Most people look askance at the idea of producing value outside the authority of a boss and a corporation, because authority of the boss and the corporation and the myth of value they provide makes it easy to count and thus believe in the value created. So, most people sneer at the idea of starting one’s own business, or of forming a new political party, or of starting a movement not driven by money, because they literally can’t imagine value on their own—they need someone else to tell them what value is. They won’t take this step to imagine value on their own; they are willing inhabitants of the capitalist mindworld.

What’s needed for good business is reflexive labor, that is, labor that knows its own labor-power. Unions are supposed to be precisely this—reflexive labor talking to itself, strategizing within itself, and acting (collectively) upon its own best interests. However, in practice, unions suffer from the same ossifying forces as other capitalist-and-anti-capitalist organizations, and end up systematically producing alienated subjects which ossify the forms of labor in the community into tired forms, which then become the subject of territorial disputes and thus zero-sum games.

What is needed for good business is continual innovation, continual turning-outward, continual moving-on from old businesses to new.

For example, Bob’s Red Mill is one of the few examples I can find of a non-extractive, more ethical business. In an inspiring move, Bob gave the company to his employees when he retired. If only he had done this earlier, soon after opening the mill, we could practically call it a socialist company. One can imagine a socialist serial entrepreneur, starting one company after another, and selling or giving each company to the employees soon after founding it (retaining only a small dividend or minority ownership stake, if that—not a large dividend or controlling stake)—a sort of Johnny Appleseed of socialism. This mode of business is true business: the act of business itself is this market-innovation; the act of zero-sum territorializing of value (privatization) is the act of capitalism. Liberty flourishes when business (innovative production) outpaces capitalism (extractive capture).

What converts good business into capitalism is when business owners hold on to their business beyond its launch, attempting to control the actions of the many people who now compose the economic community they helped initiate. Attempting to have their cake and eat it, too, these business-owners try to boss others around and reap the benefits of others’ obedience. However, everyone can see through this, and it is only the installation of a pervasive global regime of violence and life-ruining that allows these business-owners to maintain control despite their obvious vestigial worth. If they were ethical, these business-owners would move on and start some new business, happy to retain even a small inflow of free money from the business they already started and no longer have to even manage. (But most capitalists are power-mad control-freaks and simply won’t give up any power or money without a fight, no matter what.)

Good business could emerge from betwixt capitalism and communism as a vast and unstoppable productivity too radically productive and too rapidly-mutating to stop or control, and too ubiquitously profitable to extract from universally or to the point of capture. What stops true business from emerging from a people is their collective belief in their unreflexivity, the collective unreflexivity of their labor. In other words, merely the belief that money comes from jobs and value comes from companies (with a minimum threshold of retail locations, of course) is a deeply damaging belief that fundamentally cuts-off the ability of individuals and people to imagine and instigate strategic action. This is not even to mention the self-incriminating moralizing of Marxists, that prevent many from succeeding in life and lead many to condemn virtually all political and individual action and imagination!

Those who routinely doubt the efficacy of others and themselves to start businesses or succeed in life without becoming an employee or other “member” of some “corporation” (i.e., corpulent, collective social body) have been hoodwinked into a belief in monetary value as the primary or only form of value, and this has turned off their imagination for initiating strategic action. Meanwhile, the rags-to-riches businesspersons (not capitalists) who believe in the value of their own labor-power can initiate many actions and businesses, becoming radically more influential as one individual than a whole corporation of obedient employees. Such individuals can be such a catalyzing, disruptive, value-producing force for themselves and those around them that they are like a walking, talking, one-person socialist revolution! That good businesspersons are like centers of socialism is why the Shadow of Chad is the Capitalist-Hegemon-Despot—the free overproduction of wealth is lovely and jovial, but it’s easily-imitated by centralizing piles of private wealth.

We need many of these good businesspersons, because good business demands every individual involved attain to the perspective of reflexive labor, i.e., of personal agency. To attain to the perspective of personal agency in economy is not to believe in money nor to believe in exploitation as a necessity to attaining personal success and wealth; that is just what the capitalists want us to believe, because that belief turns off our initiative, making winning zero-sum games easier for capitalists. (Even that old capitalist saw of “increasing the size of the pie” is a misleading intuition-pump, because it still conceives of that pie as adding up to one whole—maintaining the capitalist zero-sum framing. Why not bake two pies, so you have one to spare?)

Two units of reflexive labor—two individuals who believe in their own economic agency and efficacy—is a good business; three is a powerful movement. It isn’t acts of repetition such as joining existing industries or creating products that already exist that originate economic value—it’s original acts such as inventing new industries, new procedures, new products, or new services that always originates huge new swaths of value. That this value is then always counted and assigned to one or few individuals, and the mechanism of extraction ossified into a repeatable new form of society, is the route by which we the public are then asked to forget about this new innovation. So, instead of every new business or product innovation becoming an ever-exciting new part of the human condition that we can all share in (a new standard-of-living increase to roll out to all humans)—each innovation becomes territorialized as a class privilege available only where it is most profitable to the fewest, and then quickly locked-away. If the public remembered, on a continual basis, all the value that was locked-away and tamed as mere profit-machines for the very few, they would rebel on the spot.

So, if one were to want to create good business as an ongoing movement and escalating activity, it seems it would be theoretically required to explicitly talk about labor reflexivity, negentropic or true economy (human cooperation), and initiating strategic action. In this approach, it also becomes natural to speak of each human as an independent adult, each of us with our own real-life concerns and thus claim to a fair share of accumulation (we are all “too big to fail”—we all want and deserve a house!). If each individual who arrives at the negotiating-and-planning table is an agent with the ability to initiative strategic action, then we are all bringing something incredibly valuable to the table—and that thing is our labor-power, now more fully theorized and fleshed-out on an individual basis while remaining within the context of capitalism, countability, and organizational solvency.

We can expect more from each other—and that doesn’t mean expecting greater obedience or more perfect productive behavior to-spec. It means expecting intelligent agency, strategic initiative, and constructive, ethical conduct from each other. This is not a hard baseline to attain if one is even trying to act in good faith; but if one has an unacknowledged commitment to personal profit via extraction (of value) or exploitation (of labor), one will miss these opportunities to invent personal acts of labor which would make the difference. This reveals that the imaginarium of invention is a very distant realm from the realm of meanness, scarcity, and dominance-moves—moves which quietly dominate or constrain others are really a failure of imagination and a failure of personal agency.

Thus, we can see that our personal agency is really already collectively implicated—because when we all agree a change in law has taken place, it has—or when we agree something is possible together, suddenly it is. If we all believe in our personal agency, that also implies believing in our collective agency, and vice versa. An unruly and hard-to-govern populace is thus an actively agentive and democratic people, a people that knows it can coordinate itself through many acts of initiative and strategic imagination, a people which knows its acts and decisions matter and can shake the world.