Capitalism has always sucked. Business owners have long got up to scummy and sometimes downright monstrously evil bullshit for the sake of making a buck (United Fruit Company ring a bell?). But there was a brief period of time from the 1940s to the 1970s, often known as the Great Compression, where income inequality was massively down, when many businesses actually gave consideration to their stakeholders, where the wealthy were taxed heavily, where the minimum wage was much higher (in inflation-adjusted terms, it peaked in 1968 at the equivalent of $14.61 in current dollars), where average wages in general across all income groups grew in tandem with inflation and productivity, and where government gradually cracked down on still-existing abuses by instituting various regulations and regulatory bodies (e.g., OSHA, the EPA). There was still a lot of serious problems, and minorities were still being shit on by the government, but the economy still worked for most Americans.
Then the Reagan Era came, and corporations started to change course, focusing solely on "shareholder satisfaction." The GOP went all-in on supply-side economics, slashing taxes and regulations. Income inequality skyrocketed, with executive pay exploding. Real wages stopped growing despite continuing increases in productivity. We heard a "giant sucking sound" as good-paying jobs were offshored. Business are seeking ever more inventive ways of making sure they can run their operations with as few human workers as possible. Goods and services increase in price and decrease in quality, with planned obsolescence being the name of the game for everything from tech to fashion. Housing is treated as a financial instrument first and foremost, and even our transportation leaves us dependent on and at the mercy of auto makers and oil companies, turning our cities into massive, dangerous sprawls that are unaffordable and unsustainable (both ecologically and economically). American capital has spend the last 40+ years steadily moving us closer to the Gilded Age 2.0, and they've continued to succeed in stacking the deck in their favor. The government allows ever more consolidation, they wait many years between increasing the minimum wage (the last increases were in 2007-09, and the last time before that was in 1996-97), and they do the bare minimum to fight climate change, all while the big megacorps continue to amass ever-greater sums of money at the expensive of everyone else.
But God forbid we actually do something to stop this bullshit, because even the bare minimum efforts to reign in the excesses of capital get castigated as "socialism," even though most Americans wouldn't know actual socialism even if it jumped up and bit them in the ass. If it were up to me, all these big megacorps would be broken up and the fragments converted into worker-owned co-ops, where the employees regardless of station vote on who their bosses are. I guess you could call me a "market socialist." I have no idea how such a system would actually work (I'm not an economist), but I don't trust the state to administer the economy any more than I do private capitalists. Governments absolutely should administer the big-picture public goods like infrastructure, education, emergency services, defense, and health insurance, but I doubt anyone aside from the most diehard Leninist would like to see some central planning committee staffed by likely unelected bureaucrats decide things like what movies get made, what flavors of ice cream get made, and what components and features TVs have. The choice of "unregulated capitalism" and "Soviet-style command economy" is a false dichotomy, and economic power needs to be as diffuse as possible regardless of what system we have.
At minimum, if we're going to have privately-owned for-profit businesses being things that exist, we need some heavy duty trust busting and the complete and total removal of private money from the political process. Sadly, we'll be lucky to even get back to an economy that at least somewhat prioritizes society as a whole over wealthy business owners, much less something approaching workplace democracy. But unless the capitalist class is at minimum taken down several dozen notches and kept on a really short and very tight leash, they'll continue to fuck over every and the whole planet for the sake of "maximizing shareholder value," all the way up to when the whole thing implodes on itself like the house of cards it is. Such is the fate of any sort of unsustainable system.
Then the Reagan Era came, and corporations started to change course, focusing solely on "shareholder satisfaction." The GOP went all-in on supply-side economics, slashing taxes and regulations. Income inequality skyrocketed, with executive pay exploding. Real wages stopped growing despite continuing increases in productivity. We heard a "giant sucking sound" as good-paying jobs were offshored. Business are seeking ever more inventive ways of making sure they can run their operations with as few human workers as possible. Goods and services increase in price and decrease in quality, with planned obsolescence being the name of the game for everything from tech to fashion. Housing is treated as a financial instrument first and foremost, and even our transportation leaves us dependent on and at the mercy of auto makers and oil companies, turning our cities into massive, dangerous sprawls that are unaffordable and unsustainable (both ecologically and economically). American capital has spend the last 40+ years steadily moving us closer to the Gilded Age 2.0, and they've continued to succeed in stacking the deck in their favor. The government allows ever more consolidation, they wait many years between increasing the minimum wage (the last increases were in 2007-09, and the last time before that was in 1996-97), and they do the bare minimum to fight climate change, all while the big megacorps continue to amass ever-greater sums of money at the expensive of everyone else.
But God forbid we actually do something to stop this bullshit, because even the bare minimum efforts to reign in the excesses of capital get castigated as "socialism," even though most Americans wouldn't know actual socialism even if it jumped up and bit them in the ass. If it were up to me, all these big megacorps would be broken up and the fragments converted into worker-owned co-ops, where the employees regardless of station vote on who their bosses are. I guess you could call me a "market socialist." I have no idea how such a system would actually work (I'm not an economist), but I don't trust the state to administer the economy any more than I do private capitalists. Governments absolutely should administer the big-picture public goods like infrastructure, education, emergency services, defense, and health insurance, but I doubt anyone aside from the most diehard Leninist would like to see some central planning committee staffed by likely unelected bureaucrats decide things like what movies get made, what flavors of ice cream get made, and what components and features TVs have. The choice of "unregulated capitalism" and "Soviet-style command economy" is a false dichotomy, and economic power needs to be as diffuse as possible regardless of what system we have.
At minimum, if we're going to have privately-owned for-profit businesses being things that exist, we need some heavy duty trust busting and the complete and total removal of private money from the political process. Sadly, we'll be lucky to even get back to an economy that at least somewhat prioritizes society as a whole over wealthy business owners, much less something approaching workplace democracy. But unless the capitalist class is at minimum taken down several dozen notches and kept on a really short and very tight leash, they'll continue to fuck over every and the whole planet for the sake of "maximizing shareholder value," all the way up to when the whole thing implodes on itself like the house of cards it is. Such is the fate of any sort of unsustainable system.
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