Someone once gave me directions I hadn't asked for. I was standing on a street looking, presumably, like a man who didn't know where he was going, and a stranger stopped and said: do you need help? I did. They helped. They didn't charge me.
This happens constantly, and we barely notice it. You go into a shop and ask where something is and a person takes you there. You look confused at a bus stop and someone tells you the number you want. You drop something and the person behind you picks it up. None of this is transacted. Nobody invoices anybody. It just happens, because most people, most of the time, are basically decent and will extend small kindnesses to strangers without calculating the return.
Economists have a word for things you can't easily charge for: externalities. It's a word that makes the freely-given texture of ordinary human life sound like an accounting inconvenience. What they're describing, when they get round to describing it at all, is the vast commons of sociality that the market economy depends on and doesn't pay for. The workforce has to get to work somehow. It navigates, cooperates, asks and answers, helps and is helped, and none of that shows up in anyone's quarterly results. It's just the air the economy breathes.
David Graeber, the anthropologist, called this baseline communism — the observation that most actual human interaction runs not on exchange but on gift and need. You help because someone needs it and you can. The market likes to present itself as the natural form of human organisation. It isn't. It's a relatively recent and quite specific set of arrangements that floats on top of something much older and much larger: people just being human with each other.
The same logic applies at scale, though the stakes are higher and the theft is better organised.
Universities are, in the main, publicly funded institutions. The research they produce is paid for by grants drawn from public money, carried out by academics whose salaries come from public money, and then published in journals that charge the public to read it. The knowledge belongs, in any reasonable moral sense, to everyone. It was bought with everyone's taxes.
The technology industry understands this perfectly, which is why it has spent decades helping itself to the results. The internet was not invented by entrepreneurs. It was built on publicly funded infrastructure, developed through academic collaboration, and released as an open protocol precisely so that no one could own it. What the platforms did was wait for that commons to exist and then fence it off. Google didn't invent the web. It indexed what other people had made and sold advertising against it. Facebook didn't invent friendship. It digitised the social fabric that people had been building for free for their entire lives and charged companies to reach it.
The tech billionaire is, in this sense, a very particular kind of parasite: one that arrives after the host is already thriving, extracts enormous value from what it finds, and tells a story about its own genius loudly enough that most people believe it. We hear a great deal about the education Elon Musk paid for. We hear rather less about the publicly funded research his companies depend on, the roads his vehicles drive on, or the GPS satellites his software navigates by — all of which he got, in the relevant sense, for free.
The workers who actually produce the value are paying twice. They paid, or borrowed, to get themselves educated. Then they hand the returns on that education to someone else for the rest of their working lives. The investment was theirs. The yield is someone else's.
None of this begins to account for the most fundamental free lunch of all.
Every worker who has ever turned up to make somebody else rich arrived already made. Gestated for nine months. Born. Fed, clothed, kept warm. Taught to speak, to read, to cross the road, to manage disappointment, to get up in the morning. Kept alive through every illness and accident of childhood. Introduced, gradually and at enormous effort, to the idea that they were a person capable of participating in the world. All of that — years of it, decades of it — was performed almost entirely by women, almost entirely without pay, and almost entirely without acknowledgment by the economic system that would eventually hand that finished human being a contract and take the results.
Silvia Federici has written about this more carefully than I can here. The point is simply that capitalism did not produce the workforce it depends on. It inherited it. The factory was built by someone else and the inputs keep arriving as if from nowhere, which is to say: from mothers. The market has externalised the entire cost of its own reproduction onto the people it also underpays for everything else.
You will notice that none of the people who talk most loudly about hard work and self-reliance have anything very much to say about this.
There is a simpler way to put all of this. This morning, walking past a garden near where I live, I noticed that someone's roses were in flower. They were beautiful. They made my day, in a small but genuine way, better. I didn't plant them. I didn't pay for them. The person who did plant them got nothing from me in return.
Most of what makes a life worth living is like that. The directions from a stranger. The hello from someone you know. The smile from a person you'll never see again. The flowers in someone else's garden. An enormous amount of human flourishing is freely given, freely received, and nothing to do with what anyone charged for it.
Capitalism did not create this. It found it. And it has been monetising it, enclosing it, and pretending it doesn't exist ever since.