What’s wrong with capitalism?
We could fill several issues of the Socialist Standard with details
about the problems caused by capitalism, but let’s see how much we can
say within the confines of a single article.
One pervasive aspect of capitalism is poverty. By this we do not mean
destitution, as when people literally cannot afford food or clothing or
a place to live. There are certainly plenty of homeless people in
Britain, but poverty is far more pervasive than this. It involves
people not having access to what they want or need, and having to make
do with second- or third-best. Shopping at a cheap supermarket,
waiting for the sales to buy what you want, telling the kids they can’t
have what they’ve set their hearts on - all these are examples of
poverty. So is living in a house that’s too small for your family, or
booking the cheapest holiday you can find. And so is working after your
anticipated retirement age because your pension will not be big enough.
Another illustration is the amount of debt with which people get
landed, an average of œ16,000 for each man, woman and child in the UK,
and therefore much more than that for many individuals. Every day
around a hundred people become bankrupt - the ultimate expression of
how poverty causes people to live beyond their means.
It’s not just that the vast majority are forced to go without; it’s
also that a relatively small number of people live in the lap of
luxury. This inequality is not a matter of your neighbour having a
bigger car than you or being able to afford two yearly holidays abroad.
Instead we are referring to the millionaires and billionaires who own
land, companies or shares, and don’t have to worry about
two-for-the-price-of-one offers or whether they can afford a night out
on Saturday. These people live in grand mansions, probably have a
holiday home or two as well, own their own private jets, and employ
armies of servants to look after them. Moreover, it’s not they who do
the useful work in society: those who drive the buses, teach the
children or work in factories or offices are the ones who suffer
poverty. Socialists argue that there are two classes under capitalism:
the working class (who work for wages and always struggle to make ends
meet) and the capitalist class (who receive their income from rent or
profit and get the lion’s share of wealth). Belonging to the working
class is what makes you poor.
It also means you are likely to suffer from stress of one kind or
another. This is partly the result of the daily fight with poverty, but
there are many other sources of stress for workers. Many jobs are
boring or dangerous, and many more offer little satisfaction to those
who do them. Worrying about deadlines or targets, or feeling at the
whim of your boss’s moods - all these increase the stress due to
employment. And the farther you climb up the “career ladder”, the
chances are the more responsibility you will bear and hence the more
stress you will encounter. Add to this the insecurity of many jobs and
the consequent fear of unemployment. Then there’s the stress of the
daily journey to work, whether by car or public transport. Life under
capitalism means worries and more worries.
A term sometimes used for people’s general feeling of unhappiness and
rejection is alienation, a notion intended to cover the idea of
rootlessness, of not belonging to a community, of being isolated, of
seeing no real goal in life, of being powerless under the wheels of the
capitalist juggernaut. Capitalism views people not as human beings with
feelings and desires but as economic units, only useful if you can
create profits. So people far too often relate to each other by means
of money or comparable considerations (what’s in it for me?), rather
than by cooperating with other humans. We are essentially viewed as
individuals, not as part of a society. Many social ills can be
attributed to alienation, from casual violence to suicide. The
pressures of capitalism are not just financial but permeate all aspects
of a dog-eat-dog social system.
One reason why people feel stressed and alienated is the lack of
democracy which obtains under capitalism. It is true that in Britain
there is more or less free speech and the opportunity to elect
councillors and MPs. But there is no real democracy in the sense of
people having control over their lives. Rather, we are subject to the
decisions of others, both within and outside our workplaces. Decisions
about shutting factories or moving an office to another part of the
country are taken by a small group of bosses rather than the people
most closely affected. Often it is the impersonal force of the market
which determines what happens. Companies may be closed down or merged
because they do not make “enough” profit, not because they do not
produce anything useful. All political and economic decisions, whether
about the siting of houses or quarries or new roads or whatever, are
made within the context of a social system that puts profit above human
need, and in such a system there can be no proper democracy, however
many democratic institutions exist.
We mentioned above that many jobs are unhealthy and even dangerous. The
violence inherent in capitalism is yet another problem thrown up by it.
Industrial accidents and the violence perpetrated by many of those on
the receiving end of capitalism’s oppression are vivid illustrations of
the system’s shortcomings. There is also the ever-present danger of
full-scale war. In the course of the twentieth century the nature of
warfare changed, from a situation where victims were primarily
combatants to one where it is now overwhelmingly civilians that are
killed or maimed. Consider too that wars are fought in the interest of
the capitalist class, as in the quest for sources of raw materials -
oil wars are just a particularly clear case of this. Workers therefore
kill and are killed on behalf of a bunch of wealthy parasites.
It is true that capitalism has had a tremendous transforming impact on
the world, and that workers nowadays live longer and more rewarding
lives than those in the days before the development of industry.
However, comparisons should be made not with the distant past but with
the present and future potential of Socialism. Judged by this
yardstick, and on its own terms, there is so much wrong with capitalism
that it is more than high time it was done away with.
Paul Bennett
Socialist
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