Pop quiz: who said the following?
Capitalism Is Dying. It’ll Probably Go To Hell. But Something A Lot Better Is Taking Its Place.
A) Karl Marx
B) Joseph Stalin
C) An UpWorthy writer
D) Crazed homeless man outside your local CVS
If you chose C, congratulations!
You win nothing, but keep reading.
Maz Ali of UpWorthy penned an article (well, not really an article. UpWorthy doesn’t have articles. They post videos with a couple sentences on top and call it an article. It’s like calling every YouTube video an ‘article’ because someone wrote a description) with this as a title:
Capitalism Is Dying. It’ll Probably Go To Hell. But Something A Lot Better Is Taking Its Place.
No, that’s not a line from Marx’s diaries. The description is even better:
If the economy is working well for you, congratulations! You’re among the lucky few who are served by capitalism. But if things go the way they have been for the last several decades — with poor people staying poor and a lot of others getting poorer — capitalism as we know it won’t last. Thankfully, we have options. Revolution is one of them. But probably not the kind most people think of.
Since when was the government bailing out major companies anything like capitalism?
Also, as far as the poor staying poorer—the world poverty rate fell 80% from 1970 to 2006 (coinciding with communism’s decline).
According to the New York Times:
Africa’s poverty is declining in part because its growth rate picked up from 2.3 percent per year during the lackluster years of 1990-2000 to 5.7 percent during 2000-10. Without economic growth, there cannot be sustained gains in income, health and other areas. Continued progress depends on heavy investments in major infrastructure — water, electricity, waste management — and these in turn depend on large-scale private financing, hence a suitable market framework.
So anti-market sentiment is no friend of poverty reduction.
If things go the way they’ve been for the last several decades, poverty as we know it won’t last.
So why would someone try to stop that process?
As far as the “something a lot better taking [capitalism’s] place”—the provided video points to two examples: a worker-owned co-op laundry and a solar-panel company in Cleveland that’s “radically decentralized community-based, building from the bottom up, democratizing the ownership.”
These co-ops only survive because of capitalism. They only work because people have the money to use the laundry or buy the solar company. Whether businesses are owned by one individual or all the workers, they’re still businesses in a capitalist system that need capital to buy materials, buy or rent land, and pay their workers.
It’s a good thing capitalism isn’t dying. It’s a shame so many are trying to kill it—and the millions it’s helping to bring out of poverty.
