The Business of Being Human in a Capitalist World

It is quite puzzling how capitalism has not commodified every aspect of life, from water to oxygen. Now, the wage dictates everything happening under the sun: even smiles sell for thousands of dollars. War is equally about money, as is dating…“He isn’t my type!” becomes shorthand for market compatibility. This pyramid scheme (capitalist system) is about using humans and nature to stay alive. It not only subordinates life but pretends to be above it: it exploits humans and nature to keep alive.

Value is abstracted from care, time, land and labour, then returned as price, debt or scarcity. What cannot be priced is rendered invisible; what resists extraction is disciplined or destroyed. In this logic, exploitation is reframed as efficiency, and survival is mistaken for success. Capital thus feeds on life to remain alive, presenting its dependence as inevitability and its violence as rational order.

Now, let us look at a human between birth and death, where these seemingly neutral natural processes become a gruesome spectacle of how capitalism weaponises life.

From the moment of birth, survival is mediated by markets: healthcare is priced, nutrition is stratified, and care is unevenly distributed along lines of class and geography. Under the famous Shona mantra of kura uone (grow up and you will see), a human walks into the brutality of markets rather than life itself. Life is not about living; it is about riding the waves of market volatility.

After all, this young human is born from a heavily commodified human, whose life, comfort and destiny are shaped by the relentless wage. A wage, whether in the form of a salary or a dividend, determines a person’s fortunes, whether they can access what they need (or are made to need), and their lifespan. Capitalism prefers the able-bodied and fully-grown people, hence the term ‘economically active population’ (EAPs).

EAPs are potent sites of direct and indirect exploitation from dawn to dusk, with no break to breathe. As soon as young ones reach the age of ‘maturity’, like investments, they are deemed ready for exploitation. They become anchors of production (they join the labour market, the earning classes and the consumption classes) and of sustainability (they must produce children to keep the capitalist system going).

Capitalism uses its ‘soft’ power (ideology, aspiration, discipline and the promise of upward mobility) and ‘hard’ power (wages, debt, precarity and the threat of exclusion) to keep everyone engaged, compliant, and willing to be exploited in the unending pursuit of limitless growth.

Consent is manufactured through hope, while coercion operates through necessity. Freedom is reduced to a choice between commodities, and dignity is conditional upon productivity. Those who cannot work, will not work, or are no longer profitable are rendered surplus and treated as burdens rather than lives.

In this system, rest becomes laziness, care becomes inefficiency and solidarity becomes an obstacle to competition. The human is fragmented into predetermined roles, including worker, consumer, debtor, parent and retiree, never whole, never sufficient outside market recognition. Capitalism does not simply organise life but colonises imagination, narrowing the horizon of what is thinkable, desirable or possible.

When people date or “fall in love” under rituals such as Valentine’s Day, the system quietly scripts the expected outcome in advance. Desire is filtered through affordability, romance through consumption, and commitment through projections of future income. It becomes normal to ask whether a partner is ‘financially stable’ or capable of ‘building together,’ phrases that translate intimacy into balance sheets and long-term returns.

One’s education and profession (both determinants of a wage level) eventually resolve uncertainty in the dating market, functioning as risk-management tools rather than expressions of affinity. Education has become an investment portfolio, not a public good. Youth is disciplined into ‘employability,’ and creativity is narrowed into productivity.

Marriage, in turn, is seen as a unit of economic optimisation, pooling resources to withstand market fluctuations.

Under capitalism, families function as crucial tools by providing free labour (domestic/ childcare), reproducing the workforce, serving as primary consumers and maintaining class structures through inheritance. They, therefore, mask exploitation behind emotional support and create ‘false needs’ for goods, ultimately benefiting the capitalist system by socialising individuals into its norms and perpetuating inequality.

Children are planned around affordability, careers are negotiated based on household income, and affection is subordinated to financial survival. Even heartbreak reflects market failure: one ‘invested’ wrongly, chose poorly or misread signals. Umjolo discussions are not different from bond yields or investments that went bad. In this way, the wallet replaces a human touch.

Girls become ‘slay-queens,’ and boys become underperformers in this highly demanding economic venture dominated by financially stable older men. Older women disquietly lament this bourse-like interaction that seemingly disregards their presence, after delivering the key components (babies) that make the whole capitalist system tick.

Adulthood is defined by waged dependence, debt and perpetual insecurity, while exhaustion is normalised as ambition. Even illness and ageing are converted into revenue streams, managed through ‘sick leave,’ insurance rationale and end-of-life industries. Pension or retirement is an eventual destiny for humans that the system no longer needs: they bear no children, or can no longer work.

Now, uncertainty in developed countries in Europe and Asia stems from the actual state of nature threatening to break the human cycle that is necessary for the upkeep of capitalism. In short, an ageing population means fertility rates fall, and life expectancy rises, impacting economies, healthcare and social structures founded on rampant capitalism. Some of the interventions include the retirement age and growing a ‘silver economy.’ In the words of anthropologist Samson Williams, suddenly “a long life is a punishment” under capitalism.

If it can, the capitalist system would make the dead work for its profits. Death is monetised, re-packaged and administered, almost completing the cycle.

Mind you, religion and animist faiths glorify the dead with their ‘life after death’ and ‘ancestral’ myths, and these have also crucial components of capitalist practice. Amadlozi economics, for example, plays out through ritual expenditure, ceremonial accumulation and inherited obligation, where the living must continuously invest resources to maintain symbolic relations with the dead.

Ancestors are incorporated into cycles of consumption, authority, and discipline, shaping behaviour, reinforcing hierarchy, and legitimising extraction beyond the grave. The dead become moral creditors, demanding labour, obedience and spending from the living. Capital thus secures its most perverse victory: extending accumulation into metaphysical time, ensuring that even death does not halt productivity. What appears as reverence is quietly built on obligation, and what is presented as tradition becomes another space where life, memory, and belief are rendered economically practical.

At no point is life allowed to exist on its terms: the class is dismissed!

Siya yi banga le economy!

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