The apologists for capitalism from the sixteenth century to today have been enthused by capitalism's promise to fulfill needs, but they underemphasize the fact that, carried through to its logically later stages, it creates other, possibly more painful needs in its wake. In other words, the needs fulfilled by capitalism are the needs of precapitalist people: abundance and quality of product.

Though they certainly suffered (often long) periods of hunger and bad product, such precapitalist people* in general already had other needs fulfilled--especially the need for meaning infused into their experiences. What provides such meaning usually goes under the (dubious) name of culture.

But the requirements that 1) you fill your day with labor that is appropriated by another and 2) that you labor apart from your family and community** leave much less time and energy for the enactment of the binding ties of culture.

Thus the "destruction of cultures under the advancing steamroller of capitalist development" (or however it gets worded) is not bad because the "cultures" being destroyed are good per se--rather because they are deeply successful systems of meaning. They fulfill a fundamental need that the apologists of capitalism presume to be fulfilled a priori--but in fact are blocked from being fulfilled by precisely the advancing development of a capitalist way of life.




*In some ways I prefer the prefix non- because it avoids the teleological connotations of pre-, but it also seems to connote something about essence that's even worse than teleology. Take pre- in the best spirit of non-romanticized chronological anteriority.

**If not physically than at least in spirit, due to the demands of the employer.