Everytime I am introduced to an institution or concept, it seems to be self-undermining. Education bars the development of real knowledge; democracy has never strayed further from the will of the people; and science, most wide-reaching and essential of all, is occasionally bent on annhilation. It is fair to disagree somewhat with these sweeping criticisms, in so far as especially science is diverse: my opinion is that though technological innovation apparently works toward human flourishing, it mostly dreams up products that are at best a mixed bag, and sometimes wholesale destructive for society. One perspective on this phenomenon is that these institutions or systems of values have been polluted by destabilizing forces indicative of the modern period, i.e. capital. The problem with this perspective is that it does not capture the way in which systems of values are self-undermining on their own terms. The profit incentive does drive the development of violent technologies, but the profit incentive as a force is dependent on demand, itself reducable to desire. Of course, capitalism is a way of organizing human relations: it is because of the force of capital that technological development responds to some of society's desires and not others. The question is whether the desires manifested in demand are representative of the desires of society as a whole --- if so, capitalism is not to blame for the wayward direction of science --- or if capitalism points specifically to certain fringe desires of society that are not representative of the greater social project, in which case capitalism is to blame.
What capitalism seems to be is a given society's embrace of continued upheaval and reorganization for the sake of increased productivity. A land owner will have to endure economic pressure in the form of generous offers if his land could be more productively utilized by someone else. This is an absolute 180 from previous social organizations, where the structure and logic of human relations precedes productivity for the most part. Capital is an indicator of productive reorganization, productivity requiring a direct relationship with human desire. For capitalism to be working and effective, capital has to be accumulating and being created. If, in a healthy capitalist society, science is directed to pursue violent technologies, it is because this activity allows for the accumulation of capital; i.e., because it is productive. What capital is doing in this case is not hijacking the system of values that motivates and guides scientific activity, but exposing it to actually be something else. This really stings! A system of values should identify with moral and ethical directives like the promotion of human flourishing, etc. But capital tears down this narrative. Whether activity is productive is said to be dependent on desire; desire is dependent on a system of values or priorities; the system of values is undermined by productive activity, proven productive by capital. This is the crux of my argument for why capital is not to blame for the self-undermining of institutions and systems of values. That their self-undermining activity is demonstrated as productive is evidence that the desires of society are internally inconsistent in a meaningful and unavoidable way. The destabilizing force of modernity is the True as manifested in capital: we can no longer simply claim that what we want as a society is what is good, nor can institutions claim that their purpose is noble or moral. We can see from the activity of these institutions determined as productive by capital that in fact something totally different is desired of them then purely good things. The values and desires of society can no longer be simply said to be the same thing. To be clear, I will not concede the productive to be the good, but I admit that sometimes as a society, we pursue the evil --- and moreover, sometimes we are even satisfied with it, as evidenced by capital. It is not capitalism that is inherently evil, it is the real system of desires hiding behind purported values that contains the capacity for evil activity.
Of course, what has been elaborated so far is sure to annoy the readers familiar with the concept of class. I have done my best to treat society as one when, in the eyes of most, it is more accurately understood as many. My critique of a critique of capitalism would appear to disintegrate into dust if it were given that there are at least two groups of competing desires in society, the desires of owners and the desires of laborers. What is seen as productive by the owners may be understood to be destructive by the laborers and vice versa, painting a much simpler and comprehensible picture where capitalism is the system that allows the desires of the owners to violently dominate the desires of laborers. The problem with this picture is that, to be a good owner or capitalist, one has to make decisions that are productive according to exchange-value. More specifically, one has to produce things that are valuable according to a greater market in which all members of society participate economically. There seems to be a problem at first in that some people participate, most importantly on the demand side, to a far greater extent than others so that their desire is more important to the exchange-value of an object than other people's. But these over-participators will be punished proportionately in capital shrinkage, unless they can prove that their investment was actually productive according to the standards of the larger market. In this way there is clearly a logic of desire to capital that supersedes the particular desires of the owner-capitalists and laborers, and only in so far as the owner-capitalists fall in line with capital can they preserve and maintain their status long-term.
The profound obviousness of internally inconsistent latent desires throughout society as illustrated by the movements of capital can seriously undermine central beliefs. How can a society believe one thing is good and clearly signal a desire for another? When any group or individual's ideals are constantly subverted by their wants, it is impossible to take these ideals seriously. Morality in the simplest sense is supposed to be a system of preferences, but capital demonstrates that it does not occupy this role in society --- there is instead a different and more central system, difficult to pin down exactly but housed by the term productivity.