This tweet perfectly sums up how many left-wing Americans feel about capitalism:
Loved this response:
It really seems to me that many people say "capitalism" when they mean "life." What kind of system wouldn't involve most people going to school and getting jobs and going on vacations and dying? Anarchists die, too, and if they want to eat and have roofs over their heads, they have to work. Without even getting into smart phones and the Internet and streaming and lattes and avocado toast.
I remember during the weird riots in Portland some people tried to take over a city park to plant a food forest, saying that once we had free food we wouldn't have to work any more. Sigh.
12 comments:
Let's cut through the nonsense and get to the heart of the problem.
People aren't against Capitalism per se. They're against our specific brand of Capitalism, which places profits and the pursuit of infinite growth above human happiness and stability.
Likewise, people aren't advocating for Socialism per se. They're advocating for a system that doesn't treat them as cogs in a machine that is designed to make their lives worse in order to benefit the ultra rich.
And I understand why you, John, struggle with that. People are using vague umbrella terms and symbols to talk about a huge and deeply varied number of issues. Their complaints lack specificity. Worse, even when you understand what they're trying to get at, there's no single easy fix for the problems. You're someone who always wants people to offer up specific, workable solutions, or you dismiss their complaints as nonsense.
But you regularly and routinely fail to realize how exceptional your own position is. You're someone who has the education and the intelligence to be able to come up with specific, workable solutions.
In contrast, most people lack that capacity. They're not as educated or intelligent as you. And yet, their inability to devise or articulate such solutions doesn't mean they don't NEED a solution.
Similarly, most people aren't anywhere near as comfortable and well off as you are. The average person is an overworked, underpaid, chronically exhausted, unhealthy, neurotic mess, with no savings, no job security, and no future prospects. They experience a very different kind of life than you do.
Where you're going to be able to retire, for most Americans that's an utterly laughable prospect. Where you own your own home, most Americans can only dream of that kind of luxury. Where you are lucky enough to be respected and treated with dignity by your employers, most Americans are reviled and taken advantage of by their corporate masters.
When people complain about working until they die, they literally mean it. The average American doesn't get to retire - they're going to be employed for life, and likely suffer an early death.
They don't get to go on the regular comfortable vacations you love to post pictures - even if they are lucky enough to be given the chance to take two weeks off from work (and even luckier if it's actual -paid- vacation), most Americans can't afford to actually... ya know... vacate. Plane tickets aren't cheap. Hotels aren't cheap. Food that you can't prepare in your own kitchen isn't cheap.
Of the small minority of my peers who even RECEIVE a vacation, only one of them can afford to actually travel, rather than just rest at home. And that's only because A) they work a specialty job that pays well enough for them not live hand to mouth and B) they don't have children.
The only people I know who take vacations regularly are comfortably retired Baby Boomers, for whom the idea of NOT being able to take at least one vacation every year is so foreign and absurd as to be unthinkable. They've been doing it all their lives, after all.
Outstanding response, as ever.
In many ways, John, you epitomise the 'problem' with academics. On the one hand, I absolutely love your blog and visit daily. Your posts are intelligent, often insightful, and frequently alert me to fascinating developments in your fields of interest. But on the other hand, you don't seem to grasp just how exceptional your situation is. Yours is the view from the ivory tower.
As G said above, you're incredibly fortunate. Doing well is related to intelligence and hard work, but there are lots of hard working and intelligent people around the world who barely scrape together enough to live on.
Capitalism has been good to you, and that's great. I don't disagree that the modern world is immeasurably better than pretty much any point in history. You're absolutely right that, say, an ancient Egyptian farm worker or an Aztec stone mason would probably describe their life in much the same terms as that Tweet at the top of your post -- except they'd not just be working almost every day, but they'd also be dealing with terrible health, a monotonous diet, and a scarily high risk of death from even the most minor injury or infection.
But empathy isn't about comparing my life or yours with that of someone living thousands of years ago. It's about looking around and asking if this world, this political and economic system, is the best it can be. I'm not ask for a revolution -- I think capitalism works great as the engine of the economy -- but more about thinking about where the money goes and who gets to set the financial regulations that determine that.
As you correctly observe, there are definitely things Americans can learn from Europe, such as how to make a fairer, more efficient healthcare system that ensures people aren't bankrupted if they get sick. There are doubtless things Europeans can learn from the US as well.
65% of American households own their own homes. I know people below the poverty line who go on vacation every year. 87% of Americans have air conditioning. These are not rare luxuries. Poor people in the contemporary west are materially richer than almost everyone was 100 years ago. These accomplishments cannot be waved away. We are, in world historical terms, fantastically wealthy. Because of our political and economic system.
"Without even getting into smart phones and the Internet and streaming and lattes and avocado toast."
Whoa, that's *exactly* the kind of hostile remark that, mutatis mutandis, I would make about some sort of Trumpish, e/acc, or tough-guy manosphere complaint.
In either case, are such remarks helpful? Do they just reveal our own "hating ons"?
For my own case, I'll answer respectively "no" and "yes."
@John
Take a look at how that statistic is measured. Citing from a pdf file from census.gov:
"The homeownership rate is the proportion of households that is owner-occupied. It is computed by dividing the number of households that are occupied by owners by the total number of occupied households".
That does not mean that 65% of Americans own their own homes.
It means that of the homes that are occupied, 65% of those households have the person who owns them living inside them.
That doesn't account for the 10.5% of all housing (15.1 million units worth ) that sits unoccupied - so that 65% gets multiplied by 89.5%, reducing the overall value to 58.175%, for starters.
We also have to take into account the fact that 35% of the population lives in apartments rather than houses - and apartments are traditionally rarely owned by their occupants, and are almost always rented.
So that means we're only talking about 65% of the total population to begin with. We multiply that by the rate of 58.175% , and we get a maximum theoretical value of 37.81375% of the population being persons who both own and occupy a home of their own. We're already well below majority.
But wait, there's more! That percentage doesn't account for the fact that most homes are owned by a single person (sometimes two if a married couple puts it in both names, etc), yet household dynamics are often not that simple. There are other factors that must also be considered.
You have to factor in things like multi-generational housing, which makes up 3.8% of all homes. You have to factor in things like rental arrangements where the owner lives in the same house or on the same property as the renters (be they family, friends, strangers, whatever). You have to factor in individuals who own vacation homes, which still count as "occupied" by the owner, even if they are only occupied part of the time.
Then there's the matter of "nominal" homeowners versus "outright" homeowners. Most people who "own" their own homes don't actually fully own it - they have mortgages / home loans / etc, and they can lose their property to the banks / lenders if they suffer from unexpected losses.
Only 23% of American homeowners actually own their homes "free and clear". The remaining 77% are technically mortgage-owners, not home-owners. Their homes may technically be in their names, but they don't actually own them any more than someone financing a car owns the car.
And then there's the generational gap in homeownership, which masively compounds all of the above.
The "homeownership rate" for all Americans aged 65 or over is a whopping 78.4%, which is doing a lot to drag that overall "65%" average higher.
Meanwhile, the "homeownership rate" for young Americans is abysmal. For Americans between 25 and 29 years of age, it's 35.2%. For those between 30 and 34, it's 49.4%. For those between 35 and 39, it's 59.2%.
And remember, we need to adjust those numbers downward by compensating for A) unoccupied units and B) apartments which are almost never owned rather than rented, so the real numbers end up as 20.477%, 28.73%, and 34.43% respectively.
And in the interest of fairness, we also need to make the same adjustments to that 78.4% rate for Americans over the age of 65 - which drops it down to a mere 45.6%!
Not even the portion of Americans with far-and-away the highest "homeownership rate" actually enjoys a majority of said Americans owning their own homes!
1/?
We are, in world historical terms, fantastically wealthy. Because of our political and economic system.
We are -collectively- fantastically wealthy.
But the problem is that most of the wealth goes to a handful of absurdly rich individuals, while the poorest among us don't get to anything like their fair share of that wealth. They get thrown the barest scraps, and because we've come so far compared to a century ago, that still means people are living better overall. And yet it does NOT mean they aren't being robbed blind in the process.
Yes - certain aspects of how we choose to operate our political and economic systems are very large contributors to the great increase in collective wealth that we all enjoy. (Some far, far, far, far, far, FAR less than others...)
But the issue is that OTHER aspects of our systems cause much of that fantastic wealth to be squandered and wasted - it goes into the bank accounts of disgustingly wealthy men, men who have more money than any sane person could ever realistically need, and yet who only want to amass more, at the expense of literally everyone else.
And then they use that money to do idiotic things like strap a luxury sports car onto the nose of a space rocket and launch them both into the sun, for no reason other than to amuse the bored man-child who owns his own personal NASA (except far better funded, far worse regulated, and with no obligation to create anything of value for anyone)
Or they decide on a whim to buy up an entire social media platform, then decide they want to renege on the deal, then get forced by the courts to keep their end of the contract they signed and buy it anyway, and then immediately start destroying the company by issuing idiotic decrees from on high, costing countless innocent people their jobs, degrading the quality of our national discourse, and somehow making an already controversial segment of the internet even worse and more widely hated.
(All for the low, low price of $44 billion! That's more money than the total annual expenditures of 169 different countries! That's 73% of the countries on the face of the planet! And a single psychotic man-child was permitted to take that fantastical amount of wealth, and throw it into the fucking toilet out of a mixture of stupidity, arrogance, and Dunning-Kruger poster-child levels hubris! Yay, Capitalism! He "earned" that money, so he gets to spend it however he wants, and damn the consequences for the peons whose lives get ruined in the process!)
2/?
Billionaires didn't make us fantastically wealthy. Income inequality didn't make us fantastically wealthy. Bankers and businessmen and landlords didn't make us fantastically wealthy.
You know who did?
Men like coal miners - who literally broke their backs to literally fuel our economy. Men who frequently lived in squalid shacks, while their bosses lived in sprawling mansions. Men who couldn't afford to buy enough of the very coal they mined out of the earth to keep their wives and children warm in the winter, while the the product of their labor got sold by the kiloton to profit "industrialists" in a hideously lopsided arrangement that any sane person should be able to identify as formalized theft.
Men who lived and died in crushing poverty; men who dedicated their lives and bodies to enriching the country, and who were cheated and robbed for their troubles. Men who undertook heroic efforts to organize and educate themselves and stand up against incredible odds in the pursuit not of greed or excess for themselves, but merely the pursuit of fair treatment - and who were threatened, bullied, blacklisted, beaten, and murdered for their troubles. Men who went peaceably to their ostensible democratic "representatives" in the government seeking redress for their legitimate grievances, and who were answered only with machine gun fire from government soldiers, serving corrupt politicians who stood to line their own pockets by serving the interests of the rich over the justice of the poor.
And yes, coal miners specifically are now more or less obsolete, and we can't bring back coal mines, and blah, blah, blah. That's not the point.
The point is that the trend applies across the board. Millions and millions of Americans work awful, unpleasant jobs, and get paid a pittance, despite their collective labor reaping colossal rewards for their "betters". The companies they work for report record breaking profits, and then MORE record breaking profits, year after year - and yet when it comes time to share out those profits, the people who actually did the work that produced that wealth get barely anything, while the bulk of the profits go the C-suite executives and shareholders - rich men, whose only contribution was to "invest" money into the company, with the ironclad expectation of being handed back every penny they offered up and then getting a nice fat percentage on top of that.
Why is it when the average worker invests labor that creates $100 worth of value for the company, they by definition get paid a mere fraction of that back; but for every $100 that an investor gives to the company, they expect to get 100% that value back, and then MORE on top?
Or put another way... why is that when two people make otherwise equivalent contributions to the wealth and resources of a company, the solution to having to pay them back is to rob Peter in order to pay Paul?
...could it be something to do with the fact that Peter wears blue jeans and is friends with his local postman, whereas Paul wears a three piece suit and is friends with his local senator? Hrrrmmm... I wonder...
You know who else helped make us wealthy?
Men like Jonas Salk, who refused to patent the polio vaccine. People my age live in an unimaginably richer world because of Salk's humility and beneficent generosity. We grew up not knowing the horrific specter of polio haunting us as children - and our own children will never have to face that threat, nor will we know the terror of being parents gripped with fear that our own innocent children will be struck down at random, with us helpless to watch.
Salk wasn't a rich man. He wasn't an industrialist. He wasn't an investor, or and entrepreneur, or a CEO.
And thank Christ, Buddha, Shiva, Amaterasu, and all the rest for THAT! Because if he had been such a man, it's almost certain he would have decided that while eradicating polio was all well and good, making stunning amounts of profits would be even better. So what of the hardships it might create for the poor? So what of the many lives that might be needlessly lost?
"Just because we CAN eradicate polio doesn't mean we SHOULD", says the businessman! "If you utterly annihilate a disease, how can you keep profiting from selling a treatment for it? You're destroying your own long-term prospects! No, the ticket is to ensure the demand stays more or less constant, so you can reliably meet that demand and secure a steady revenue stream!"
Do you scoff at my characterization? Think me to be erecting strawmen, exaggerating and bloviating and all the rest?
Because history is replete with proof that it's not remotely exaggeration. Time and time and time again, rich men have behaved in cartoonishly EVIL ways in order to pad their checking accounts, at the mere expense of the lives of innocent people. And live saving medicines are fertile ground for such hideousness.
Take another example of the nobility of doctors seeking to save lives, and see how their actions were perverted and corrupted by corporate CEOs in order to manufacture profits out of human misery and death - the monopolization of insulin in this country, and the resultant price gouging.
Frederick Banting discovered insulin in 1923. He refused to put his name on the patent on moral grounds, believing that a doctor has no right to patent life saving medicine that should be available to all.
Co-discoverers James Collip and Charles Best didn't share his distaste for attaching their names to the patent, but they nevertheless shared his belief that the medicine should be available to anyone who needed it, and so they sold the patent to the University of Toronto for a token $1.
And for a time, that magnanimous act helped to achieve exactly their intent - insulin was affordable for everyone who needed it.
In 1996, you could buy a vial of insulin (a month's dose) for $8.
In 2023, you could buy that same vial of insulin for $275 - $300.
That's a three thousand percentage increase in cost. (Actually a 3,337.5% to 3,350% increase.)
What on earth happened?!? Did manufacturing costs skyrocket unexpectedly? Did the pandemic throw production and distribution into chaos?
No. What happened is that the rights to manufacture insulin in this country got bought up by pharmaceutical companies who realized they could just... increase the price, and people would be forced to pay whatever price they dictated or die, and that was 100% legal.
Now, naturally, people noticed, and they complained, and since this was literally resulting in the deaths of innocent people it eventually got taken to Congress, and to the courts, and the government has had some "stern talking-tos" with the companies involved, and now these companies have "voluntarily" reduced prices!
...to $35 a month. That's "only" a 337.5% increase in cost over 1996 prices! That's "only" 5 to 10 times what it should cost! (And what it does cost in other affluent countries!) Because it only costs about $4 - $6 to actually manufacture a vial of insulin!
Hooray! Democracy in action! Instead of corporations being allowed to rip people off to a COMPLETELY OUTRAGEOUS extent, now they're only allowed to rip people off to a MODEST extent! The system works! Who says the government doesn't serve the needs of the little guy? Hah!
Ironic, no? For all that we are so much wealthier today than we were a century ago, that's completely the opposite when it comes to getting life saving insulin.
But hey, at least we have air conditioning, right John? How plush and luxurious are the lives of diabetics! Lounging in the cool breeze of their rusty, decade-old window AC unit, as their kidneys slowly shut down and they develop permanent blindness because they have to underdose and ration their insulin until payday!
Their wretched forebears of a century earlier may have enjoyed the prospect of insulin being cheap and plentiful enough for even the poorest among them to have ample supply - but they did not know the GLORY of conditioned air! Can you even call that living, I ask you?
Regardless, the problem isn't that we're employing Capitalism to bake a bunch of rhetorical pies to feed the nation.
The problem is that once everyone chips in to bake our collective pies, our particular brand of Capitalism decides that more pies should go into the mouths of literally just the three richest men in the country, than should go into the mouths of the bottom 50% of the population.
We're swimming in pies. We could feed everyone. But instead, we take Peter's pie and give it to Paul (and the two other richest men in the land) instead. And then we also give Paul and his friends the pies of 166 million other people.
And then we leave it to Paul and his pals to decide how many of those pies they feel like giving back to half the population - and unsurprisingly, they decide "Just enough to prevent them from starving or rioting, in order to ensure the maximum number of pies for US instead!"
And we're fine with this! Because it's "what the market will bear", or some other bullshit slogan that doesn't actually logically justify the injustice, it merely describes it pithily!
I fail to see how the amazing success of vaccination is an argument against capitalism. When I say "capitalism" I don't mean some theoretical anarcho-capitalist state with no state power, I mean the world we live in. Which is, whatever its faults, by far the richest, healthiest, longest-lived, and most dynamic society humans have ever created. Whining about our economic circumstances in a world where billions of people live in truly miserable conditions strikes me as at least poor taste. I also disagree that people criticizing "capitalism" are only opposed to the neo-liberal version; I see people online all the time proudly calling themselves communists.
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