I just received my copy of “Capitalism Must Die!,” the new book by my friend
and colleague Stephanie McMillan. This book is sorely needed right now —
it explains what capitalism is, how it works, why it’s irredeemable, and
how to end it (hint: revolution). It stripped away all the opaque Marxist
academic jargon, and uses plain language so anyone can understand it.
I’ve been a fan of her cartoons since before I signed her up for
syndication at United Media. They’re funny and cute, and they illustrate
the book perfectly to make the concepts even more clear.
Stephanie’s won major awards, written six previous books, and her stuff’s
been carried in hundreds of venues worldwide. She also walks the walk:
she’s been a communist battling capitalism since she was in high school.
If you want to understand the mechanics of this disgusting and murderous
system, why it’s in crisis and where it’s headed, and even better if you
want do something about it, check out “Capitalism Must Die!” here.
20 Comments.
What we’ve got now certainly must die. The economic state of the entire planet is seriously broken, but I chalk that up to *unregulated* capitalism rather than to capitalism itself.
Adam Smith’s writings were more to explain “how it all works” than “how it should work.” Marx came along and showed how that model created a new ruling class if left to itself. Later, John Maynard Keynes refined governments’ role in keeping it working properly and ensuring everyone gets a piece of the pie. Even Smith maintained that government had an obligation to keep the capitalists from grabbing everything for themselves.
Me, I favor some sort of blend over a pure Marxist or pure Smithian approach. Everyone who *can* work should have a place to do so, and anyone who can’t should have a safety net. Everyone who works should at least get the basic necessities of life (“From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” – Marx) OTOH, if there are no rewards for innovation, then there is no incentive to innovate. Those who work harder, contribute more, etc, should be rewarded for their efforts. (Note that the Boeing machinists and engineers contribute far more to society than the current CEO who is cheerfully flushing the company down the shitter in order to line his own pockets.)
I have no sympathy whatsoever for those who can work, but choose not to. But this is an altogether different thing than being able to work, but not being able to *find* work.
What we have now IS regulated capitalism.
You may not like that the greatest beneficiaries of capitalism find their place in it as its regulators.
Money is law and those with surplus money will dictate the regulations that will facilitate greater revenue, and lawful power, to themselves. Your opinion as to how capital should be regulated has absolutely no impact on its true regulators.
This was to be a reply to CrazyH.
> Your opinion as to how capital should be regulated has absolutely no impact on its true regulators.
😀
Best I can hope for is to have some small impact on those who work to support their oppressors. As to the oppressors themselves, the impact I have in mind involves a baseball bat.
The economists will probably faint — as will the rightwingers — but the purpose of society and of economics is to distribute wealth. Yes, that means some people get BMWs and some people ride the bus. That’s a normal system. What is not normal? When you’ve got some guy who worked for 25 years at survival wages being kicked to the curb and everyone looks the other way as he slowly dies on a heating grate while the New York Times reports about what kind of house you can buy for $1.4 million.
I don’t want “glorious proletariat workers paradise.” I want a world where no one starves because they can’t — not won’t, but can’t — find a job while other people pull in tens of millions a year in “compensation packages.” Unless you’re resurrecting the death, nothing you do could possibly deserve that sort of earnings structure.
“I want a world where no one starves because they can’t — not won’t”
All those wealthy heirs get a pass from you? A large portion of the 1% won’t work because they were born with silver spoons in their mouths.
Just because someone is so wealthy that they don’t have to work doesn’t mean they should get to parade about like aristocrats without getting a firm lecture from the likes of you.
So many people find the courage to kick down but find it morally reprehensible or aesthetically displeasing to kick up, preferring to strike an adoring pose before those they consider their economic betters.
Glenn, reread that please. What I said was that I wanted a world in which someone who is looking for work and cannot find it is not simply left to starve to death. Unemployment insurance should be perpetual. If you can’t find work, but are looking for it, you should be able to continue to exist without having to prowl the subways, “Excuse me ladies and gentlemen. I’m sorry to interrupt your commutes …”
As for the people who inherited wealth? Well, now we’re back to my sick socialist tendencies. I think someone should be able to pass on some of their wealth via a will, but there should be a limit. Say $5 million total. Everything after that goes back to the general fund to pay for schools and roads and such.
Perhaps if everyone realized there was a cut-off point, we wouldn’t have these fucking sociopaths running things. Maybe we wouldn’t have to go to the robber barons to build libraries and museums because they’d actually be enough money from the tax base for it. You know, because the corporations weren’t stealing hand over fist anymore.
@alex_the_tired: “Perhaps if everyone realized there was a cut-off point, we wouldn’t have these fucking sociopaths running things. Maybe we wouldn’t have to go to the robber barons to build libraries and museums because they’d actually be enough money from the tax base for it.”
Inheritance of any amount undermines the notion of meritocracy. As long as your parents give you $20, and mine don’t, you have a head start. As for philanthropy, even that’s a form of power I find reprehensible. Why should someone get to decide what kind of museum gets built, and what goes into it, simply because he’s a better thief than me?
I stand corrected.
I saw the “won’t” in another post and read yours in the wrong context.
I just don’t like someone being judged as undeserving because, in another’s opinion, he just won’t work, while the real parasites, wealthy heirs who won’t work, strut around with airs of superiority.
This obviously has nothing to do with you, Alex.
Glenn,
Absolutely! I see these blowhards all the time, acting like they’re Christ down off the Cross because they managed to succeed when all the roadblocks were removed before they got there.
I wonder what would have happened to the world if Dubya had been tossed out on his ear at 24 and told to figure it out for his goddamned self. Imagine what just a year waiting tables or having to ride the bus to and from work in a polyester uniform would have done to make him realize the world is actually one hell of a hard place.
@alex_the_tired, The problem is, you can’t get to a world where no one starves without the glorious proletariat workers paradise. Capitalism’s inexorable tendency toward aggregation of power and wealth ensures that starvation will continue no matter how many reforms occur, and are soon rolled back.
I can’t accept that. I don’t mean that from a moral POV, I mean from a logical position. It should be possible to arrive at a situation in which codification of laws makes it all-but-impossible for such situations to arise.
Remember, the problem isn’t that some people take the bus and some people are driven around in a limo. The problem is that some people demand that their limo back up onto someone’s head.
The problem is that laws aren’t static. People are constantly lobbying for changes. So even if there were an upheaval that were to result in the desired reforms and controls, the upheaval would eventually subside. People’s attention turns to other matters. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, the greedheads plot and scheme and bribe the politicians to get the laws that rein them in watered down and repealed. The last 50 years have been an example of this, as the greedheads wiped away the reforms of the New Deal and Great Society. You can’t just wish greed away. Some people will always be greedy. The key is to create a society in which those the greedy are jailed and/or killed as soon as they make themselves evident.
I don’t believe that pure Marxist communism would work either.
How would you ensure that each and every one of three hundred million people gets everything “according to his needs”?
It’s easy in an old hippy commune, everyone knows everyone else & can see that everything is distributed fairly.
But that model doesn’t scale up to 300,000,000+ You’d need some sort of centralized committee – kinda like the “Communist” Party of the old USSR.
In Marx’s view, socialism is a necessary intermediate step between bourgeois capitalism and communism. Yet somehow, whoever hold the reigns in a socialist society never gets around to handing them over to the people.
Say we did bring about a Marxist non-state, now what? Is everyone really going to give “according to their abilities”? Why? If I get the same rewards for for doing mediocre work as I do for working my ass off, then why would I bother with the latter?
If I am working my ass off, and the guy next to me is a slacking while getting the same rewards, that’s gonna build bigtime resentment. I might – oh – punch him in the nose someday and there goes paradise.
I can tell you from personal experience, lots of people take pride in their work aside from their paychecks. For example: teachers. They’re not in it for the big bucks.
… or, to avoid nose-punching we’d need a strong government ensuring that everyone did their part, and someone to enforce that. Jack-booted goons, perhaps. At which point, the government is once again in control of the means of production. Paradise Lost.
Or, we could increase the rewards for people who do contribute more in order to provide an incentive – and we’ve got economic inequality again.
Ted sed, “The key is to create a society in which those the greedy are jailed and/or killed as soon as they make themselves evident.”
I’ve wondered about that – in a hunter-gatherer tribe, the sociopaths are easy to spot, and are quickly introduced to the working end of an antelope’s thighbone. But in our new, enlightened, society sociopaths thrive. Makes me wonder if we’re passing on genetic defects which previously would have been selected out.
Ted also sed, “lots of people take pride in their work aside from their paychecks.”
True, dat. It also applies to innovators, artists, and political cartoonists. If it was universally true, communism would work just fine. (As would capitalism, monarchy, socialism, or any other socioeconomic model we cared to explore.)
Hint: You want to replace capitalism with Feudalism and play right into the hands of those who want to rule, try revolution.
Revolution only improves things on the historical and geographic time scales. In the short, medium, long and generational time scales it will make things much, much worse.
Our version of capitalism is looking a lot like Feudalism.
The wealthy are in power, their spawn will inherit that power, and those of us who work for a living are working for their benefit less than our own.
Our version of capitalism is beginning to look like Feudalism, yes- in large part due to the “stuck on stupid” election strategy of the left.
You want to make the jump to full on Feudalism- there is no faster way to do that than attempting revolution.
It plays right into the hands of the people who want to rule, and that alone is reason enough not to do it.