This Substack blog is dedicated to posing and answering the most fundamental and critical question on earth: Does global capitalism deserve the right to exist? It is beyond dispute that capitalism runs the world, and has predominantly run it for about the last 250 years and, further, that it has shaped the world in its image. While we know elements of capitalism have been traced back almost to the Middle Ages, we place its effective beginning as the system we roughly recognize today at 1775, when the first Industrial Revolution was underway. The steam engine had been invented and improved and, along with the cotton gin, the power loom, new iron production processes, etc., was, by the early 1800’s, having a trampoline effect on capitalism. This jump started manufacturing and the factory system which was a catalyst for the banking and credit industry. And so on.
Of course, emergent capitalism had already accumulated a great deal of capital from slavery and the slave trade, and would continue to do so, both in Europe and in the U.S. This in itself stands as stunning testimony that it has no more of a conscience than does rain.
It’s impossible to reasonably contend that the shocking conditions in the world are not the result of those 250 years of the economic rule of capitalism. Capitalism’s track record is the record of those shocking conditions. The powers that be shudder to use or even acknowledge the word “capitalism” because they know that, among broad strata of the people, it has come to be the dirtiest word in our language. (The word came into wide use in the late 1800s.) It calls to mind too much of the ugly truth of what this deceitful and rapacious economic system has meant for the condition of the world and the vast majority of its people. The political leaders and commentators are fond of using the terms “free market,” “free trade,” “free enterprise,” and even “democracy” to label the ruling economic system, thereby hoping to lend it a sound of dignity and render it seemingly benign, and thereby hope to obscure its reality.
Of course, capitalism didn’t invent suffering and exploitation, although it probably has set the world record for it. If, or because, there was poverty, oppression, lack of medical care, and war, etc., during the 1600’s, does that mean we hold those ruling structures of those times responsible for the horrors that are clearly prevalent today? Or are we supposed to insist that it’s just the result of “human nature”? If we answer “yes” to either of those questions, we will get broad and enthusiastic applause from the powers that be, along with their great relief that our finger of guilt is not pointed at them and their political and economic system.
The argument by some, usually by those in the richer countries, that capitalism has primarily been good for the world, is patently false by even a casual survey of the destruction and deprivation left in its wake for at least two-thirds of humanity, and some say it’s more like three-fourths. But the fact that a slice of humanity has benefited from capitalism is not just important but essential to its staying power for, without that slice, the system would have long ago been swept into the dustbin of history. The continued support by the satisfied majority of the populations in the top capitalist countries is the main factor in its social, political, and economic endurance.
As for the reasoning that, if capitalism spread spontaneously across the globe in the first place, doesn’t that mean it must have been the “natural” instinct of humanity? No, it doesn’t , because, for the most part, it didn’t spread spontaneously. It was imposed. What spread spontaneously was ferocious opposition to it everywhere throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Today, still, that imposition survives, due to overwhelming economic and military power.
Behind the foregoing is a veritable ocean of evidence. Capitalism indicts itself. We hope to give voice and context to much of that evidence as we continue with our next post later this week.