We live in a sick country.
And I don’t mean ‘sick’ in the way the younger generation uses the word, to mean “impressive”. Like, you might hear a kid say, “That was a sick skateboard trick.”
I mean, sick like ‘suffering from a disease’. We live in a sick country.
That’s the impression I get, reading the news. People are sick, or afraid of getting sick. The political system is sick. Businesses are sick. The economy is sick. The environment is sick. The climate is sick. The only one who seems perfectly okay is our cat, Mutz… but I can’t say for sure, because he keeps his thoughts to himself.
One thing about being ‘sick’ however. It implies a temporary state. You might get well. The political scene might improve. Businesses might get back on their feet. The economy might rebound.
Or else, we could all die. In either case, it’s a temporary state.
Temporarily, I’ve been doing a lot of reading, with the aim of losing track, for a few hours, of how sick everything seems. It’s tempting, of course, to read about health and wellness — Lord knows, lots of folks are writing about the subject nowadays — but it always leads back to people, and everyone being sick. So instead I’ve focused on reading about capitalism.
If everyone and everything is struggling with sickness in the year 2020, it’s only fair that capitalism would also be on the operating table, with an uncertain diagnosis.
I first heard about capitalism back in high school, but I’ve never been sure who, exactly, invented it. Whoever invented it, they obviously missed the boat, because if they’d filed for a patent, or even a trademark, they’d be really rich right now. According to what I’ve been reading, even the Chinese have been encouraging certain forms of capitalism, although the Chinese government doesn’t like to use the word, ‘capitalism’, publicly. (They prefer their own word, 资本主义). When you get the Chinese involved in promoting an idea, the possibilities are practically endless. But perhaps inscrutable. (They would be unlikely, at any rate, to pay the required royalties on a patent or trademark.)
I did a little research into the famous German economist Karl Marx, because his name often comes up when people talk or write about capitalism, due to his popular book, Das Kapital, or in the English translation, Capital. There aren’t too many books written in 1867 that you can still buy, freshly printed, on Amazon. (And that are rated with four-and-a-half stars, to boot!) Marx didn’t invent capitalism, and in fact, he didn’t even use even word “capitalism” in volume one of Das Kapital.
Marx makes extensive use, however, of the word “capitalist” — a word that apparently became popular long before the word “capitalism” came into common usage. The earliest American example I’ve found of that word — “capitalist” — was in the book An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans, written in 1833 by abolitionist Lydia Maria Child.
“[American author John Taylor] treats merchants, capitalists, bankers, and all other people not planters, as so many robbers, who live by plundering the slave-owner, apparently forgetting by what plunder they themselves live.”
But I suppose a person could be a “capitalist” in 1833 — someone who has invested in economically valuable property, and who is growing wealthy off the labor of employees to whom they pay wages — without owing any allegiance to a philosophy called “capitalism.” A ‘capitalist’ is a real thing; a person. ‘Capitalism’ is not a real thing; it’s only a word that describes, vaguely and in a general way, an economic system. You can be a ‘capitalist’ without understanding anything at all about ‘capitalism’. It’s easy to confuse ‘participation in a system’ with ‘endorsement of a system’.
The word “capitalism” really came into its own following World War II, when proponents of America’s military-industrial complex began using the word to differentiate the US economy from the Soviet economy, defined as “communism”. In many ways, the two national economies were surprisingly similar — built as they were around heavy taxpayer investments in industry, the military, subsidized housing, subsidized education, subsidized agriculture, subsidized transportation, a centralized banking system, a nationalized old-age pension system… and a political system largely controlled by wealthy elites. Here in the US, the wealthy elites were the capitalists. In the USSR, they were the communists.
The power of those wealthy elites has only grown stronger, in both countries, as economic inequality has increased. The Great Recession and its effects, from 2007-2012, exposed the willingness of America’s federal government to subsidize corporations, bankers and the financial industry… and pretty much turn its back on the working class. The 2020 economic crisis has made the inequality of the current system even more obvious (for those who are paying attention to such things.)
As a result of these two significant economic crises, we’ve seen a renewed interest in socialism among many Americans, especially, perhaps, the Millennials — persons born in the 1980s and 1990s — a group that’s been particularly hard-hit by the downturns. Polls conducted during 2010–18 found that a slight majority of Millennials held a positive view of socialism, and that support for socialism had increased in every age group — except those aged 65 or older.
It should be noted that the policies actually favored by these surveyed groups differ little from the social-welfare programs instituted in the US during the 1930s, and wouldn’t serve to classify them as ‘hard core socialists.’ But it’s worth noting that Bernie Sanders — one of the most popular presidential candidates during the current election cycle — publicly labels himself as a socialist.
We haven’t seen a socialist with Bernie’s popularity in all the 75 years since World War II. And we can also note that Bernie’s popularity preceded the COVID crisis.
Where we will be, after the COVID crisis has passed?… Who can say.
Bill Hudson began sharing his opinions in the Pagosa Daily Post in 2004 and can’t seem to break the habit. He claims that, in Pagosa Springs, opinions are like pickup trucks: everybody has one.