Fans of capitalism in its latest neoliberal iteration – and they are all over the place in Europe and the USA, at least among elites and the middle classes – tend to shut their eyes tightly against its latest horrors and the very real fact that the planet’s majority are not enjoying capitalism’s spoils, nor can they ever do so, although they may be unaware that capitalism is a zero sum game. The fans point with great determination at socialism’s failings, pinpointing the worst horrors of communism, many imagined, mostly dredged up from a decades-old past carefully not compared with other decades-old pasts.
Capitalism’s historical horrors are also, well, horrific. A thousand years ago, life expectancy, once childhood was overcome, was around 60 or even 70, especially if one had survived past 30 years of age. Studies of the skeletal remains of affluent people from over 2000 years ago paint the same picture. Childhood and war brought very grave dangers and, without them, healthy life expectancy was not dissimilar to our own. However, at the height of the industrial revolution, life expectancy for the poor in England’s major industrial cities was shockingly low, around 15-17 years in the 1840s.
In the 1960s, Russian life expectancy was above 64 for men, and 73 for
women, similar to that of France. Current life expectancy in Cuba is over 78
years (80 for women; 76 for men). For China it is 79 years.
The point is that capitalism’s successes are
extremely variable. The US, our capitalist hegemon has an overall life
expectancy just below that of Cuba, a small and poor country that has
suffered crippling sanctions imposed by its mighty rival, the US, for the best
part of a century. Geographical differences are reproduced between the 1%
richest and the 1% poorest in the USA, where a massive 15-year difference in
life expectancy exists. Healthy life expectancy in the US is a mere 64 years.
Because it is extractive. It extracts resources from poorer or weaker nations and does not pay the real price for them. France’s current economic woes and political unrest are in large part due to 14 African nations joining together and refusing to allow their former colonial powers to continue to steal resources without paying for them and without paying for the environmental damage. These countries are also attempting to put an end to the French imposed currency – the CFA franc - that keeps Paris in control and, from the start, has ensured that wealth is automatically transferred to France. The CFA franc was pegged to the French franc, and is now pegged to the euro. France demands that those 14 African countries maintain 50% of their foreign exchange reserves with the French Treasury.
Another factor is uranium mining. This is incredibly damaging both to the environment and to those who mine it, and Niger is no longer handing it over virtually for free. Thus, France’s historically low nuclear energy prices are a thing of the past and consumers have suffered significant increases. The future cost of decommissioning the nuclear plants and the extremely long storage problems associated with the spent fuel are also unresolved.
The “Green Revolution” is based on filthy lithium mining, unrecyclable wind turbine blades (often full of asbestos) and solar panels, rare earths, unresolved technology and has nothing to do with improving the environment and everything to do with the creation of a new boom. It has hit a snag, however, in that hydrogen cells need iridium which is extremely rare (although Russia has a lot of it), lithium deposits are in places like Afghanistan, Bolivia and Australia (and the latter needs the Chinese to process it), and everything else needs rare earths which are also, well, rare and mostly to be found not in the EU nor the USA, but in African and China, and need costly (both economically and environmentally) and complicated processing. The current wars promoted by our elites as being all about democracy and human rights – killing thousands of innocent civilians as collateral damage – have cut off the tap to the cheap Russian gas that our industries and computing rely on. The problem is that, while we had all the money, they (the “others” in the world) had all the resources (and all the time).
Capitalism’s second inbuilt feature is that it is debt-based. Its extraordinary ability to out-produce other systems is because it relies on money taken from future output. Compound interest means constant and exponential growth and rising populations among which to spread the ever-increasing debt, faster and faster, until the entire Ponzi scheme collapses, as it inevitably will in the cyclical systemic crises faced every few years. Meanwhile, more GDP, more destruction, more construction, more, more, more. Until our modern-time day of reckoning, the Great Reset, in which almost everything we own will be stolen from us. Remember “You will own nothing and be happy”? The first part looks set to be on the way really soon; the second part, never. As a cautionary tale, when the USSR collapsed, life expectancy there fell 10 years over a decade and rampant corruption, crime and murders soared. Our own economic collapse promises to be imminent and no less terrifying.
National debt is nothing but debt that others will have to pay, mostly future generations, but also precisely those who received almost nothing from the billions borrowed. This inbuilt feature leads to political corruption and excruciatingly bad uses of the incoming money today, which is generally not used to build infrastructure, nor useful technologies but for vanity projects and to line the pockets of our elites.
Capitalism also builds up personal debt. The 80s smashing of union power and the opening up of work to foreign competition, and low wages, together with significant immigration and preference for technology over workers, meant that downward pressure was put on salaries and, for consumerism to continue to rise – in order for the products to be sold -, personal debt was actively encouraged.
However, the most damning feature of capitalism is that everything, absolutely everything has a price put on it. The only value is monetary. Surrogacy, unnecessary surgeries, trans mutilations, dubious psychiatry, opiate crises (yes, in Europe as well), sex “workers”, Only Fans, AI pornography, illegals picking fruit without labour protections, unnecessary caesareans and induced births in private clinics, the purchase of babies, “assisted” dying (in other words the assisted murder of the economically useless), the theatre of democracy with the only choice between Team Blue and Team Red, both funded by the same corporations, two-tier justice…; you name it, it’s all for sale. People on disability pensions due to mental illness have tripled over the last 35 years. Why? For the combined reason that our society is alienating, hard to do well in for the 99%, ruthlessly competitive and, to top it, mental health is seen as an individual problem, requiring psychopharmaceutic remedies that are highly profitable for Big Pharma and of almost no use for solving the problem even were it an individual, rather than a social one.
In the chilling documentary The
Alabama Solution you can see how the logic of capitalism results in
excessive sentences, overcrowded prisons, scarcity of guards, poor personnel selection,
lack of rehabilitation, shocking mistreatment of prisoners…, all of it making
perfect business sense. Modern-day slavery. In Alabama the mostly white and
filthy-rich elites distract the white and black uneducated poor with cheap pageants
and other spectacles.
Capitalism's successes rely heavily on unpaid and underpaid labour, that of the illegal immigrant fleeing from countries whose economies have been devastated by the very countries the immigrants go to, “volunteer” firefighters and other workers from among the incarcerated, unpaid overtime… Indeed, fire protection units are being defunded just at the same time as climate change narratives should logically dictate that they should be a priority. Immigrant labour works for peanuts, without proper legal protection, accrues no sick leave nor pension rights, especially if the immigrant is then deported; and, more importantly, it exerts downward pressure on all salaries being competed for. The immigrant who does not return to his or her original country will inevitably further weaken social and ideological cohesion in Western countries. Historically, such weakening has always resulted in rapid civilizational decline.
Additionally, capitalism traditionally relies on women’s unpaid labour, in the home, bringing up the next generation, and as carers and as workers in many of the badly paid professions (which are ironically many of the utterly vital professions).
But the very worst feature of capitalism is the
lack of empathy it engenders in its populations. It belittles all moral value. From
the 1980s film Wall Street, Gordon Gekko’s “Greed is good” has so permeated our
consciousness that we cannot see how grotesque it is. A social system without
moral values is not worth saving. Morality requires courage, itself an
intrinsic value, in juxtaposition to our societies’ fetishist competitiveness,
hustle, greed and grift. War, famine and pestilence stalk us in the West as we
chug down our cocktails on the deck of the Titanic, and we are currently not
worth saving.
