Young children are obsessed with the question ‘why?’ ‘Why do I need to brush my teeth?’ ‘Why do birds fly and dogs don’t?’ ‘Why does mommy have to go to work?’ The quest is universal, but it doesn’t last for long. Children quickly learn that grownups dislike the question and often don’t know how to answer it, and they realize that one ‘why?’ inevitably leads to another, followed by further hassle and endless aggravation. So they grow up. By the age of five or six, they abandon the ‘why?’ in favour of the more practical ‘how?’ They stop questioning the world and try to fit into it. They become adults, and they usually remain so for the rest of their lives.

But not everyone grows up. As Mark Twain (1881) reminds us, some people stay young no matter how old they become. And the youngest of all are those who never stop asking ‘why?’ This book is written for these young people of all ages. We write it for those who feel their future is at stake and wish to do something about it; for those who sense that there is something deeply wrong with the conventional creed but don’t know exactly what it is; and, above all, for those who simply dislike dogma and want to think for themselves.

The lack of theoretical alternatives

Perhaps the key problem facing young people today is a lack of theoretical alternatives. A new social reality presupposes and implies a new social cosmology. To change the capitalist world, one first needs to re-conceive it; and that re-conception means new ways of thinking, new categories and new measurements. And yet, many contemporary critics of capitalism seem to believe that they can challenge this social order without ever asking how it operates, let alone why.

With some obvious exceptions, present-day leftists prefer to avoid ‘the economy’, and many are rather proud about it. To prioritize profit and [p. 4] accumulation, to theorize corporations and the stock market, to empirically research the gyrations of money and prices are all acts of narrow ‘economism’. To do these things is to fetishize the world, to conceal the cultural nuances of human consciousness, to prevent the critic from seeing the true political underpinnings of social affairs. Best to leave them to the dismal scientists.

And, so, most self-respecting critics of capitalism remain happily ignorant of its ‘economics’, neoclassical as well as Marxist. They know little about the respective histories, questions and challenges of these theories, and they are oblivious to their triumphs, contradictions and failures. This innocence is certainly liberating. It allows critics to produce ‘critical discourse’ littered with cut-and-paste platitudes, ambiguities and often plain nonsense. Seldom do their ‘critiques’ tell us something important about the forces of contemporary capitalism, let alone about how these forces should be researched, understood and challenged.

Most importantly, though, this stale context conditions students to stop asking ‘why?’ The big questions about capital are pushed under the rug, and as the young generation gets older and becomes established, the questions are forgotten altogether. Occasionally, an untamed spirit, having discovered an old debate in an outdated book, raises a naïve ‘why?’ But these spontaneous fires are quickly isolated and extinguished. Ridiculed by know-all professors and hushed by acolyte students, the outlier is forced to relinquish or perish. There is no alternative, and the safest thing for an academic is to never wonder why.[2]

A new conceptual framework for capital

Our book defies this dogma. We provide a new conceptual framework for capital – along with the context that this framework negates and the means by which it is articulated.

‘There is no empirical method without speculative concepts and systems’, writes Einstein in the forward to Galileo’s Dialogue [p.5] Concerning the Chief Two World Systems (Galilei 1632).

But, also, ‘there is no speculative thinking whose concepts do not reveal, on closer investigation, the empirical methods from which they stem’ (p. xvii). The two processes are dialectically intertwined.

And, so, together with our theoretical schemes, we introduce new research methods; new categories; new ways of thinking about, relating and presenting data; new estimates and measurements; and, finally, the beginnings of a new, disaggregate accounting that reveals the conflictual dynamics of society. We show that there can be many alternatives, provided we never stop asking why [3].

Clearly, we would be happy to convince our readers with our specific arguments, but that goal is secondary. The more important goal is to encourage readers to develop their own research. As the book will amply show, social facts are indispensable but never ‘self-evident’, and since the emperor is so often naked, we shouldn’t be afraid to ask why. There is a lot to suspect in the world of the ‘obvious’, so try to distrust the ‘experts’ and ‘authorities’ – be they mainstream or critical.

In the final analysis, the only way to develop your own opinion – instead of adopting the opinions of others – is to always ask why and constantly re-search your own answers.