2.

Dig Deeper

Polls conducted in recent years have found that almost a third of Americans1 prefer socialism to capitalism. Breaking down the results, researchers found that socialism beat capitalism outright—49 percent to 46 percent—among people in their twenties and absolutely crushed it among African Americans (55 percent to 41 percent) and Latinos (44 percent to 32 percent) of all ages. Socialism also edged out capitalism (43 percent to 39 percent) among low-income people of all ages and races.2

The media response to these polls is revealing. Coverage focused almost entirely on the results among young people, which prompted many articles about generation gaps and those crazy “millennials.” By contrast, I couldn’t find a single analysis outside the radical left press about the far more dramatic results among people of color. People of color are going to be a majority of this country by 2050, but those in power don’t seem to give a shit about their opinions on how this place should be run. On the bright side, at least Blacks and Latinos were counted in distinct categories, unlike many other groups that might have unique perspectives about capitalism, such as folks with disabilities, Native Americans, or even that tiny segment of the US population known as women.

It also shouldn’t be surprising that nobody in the media cared what poor people think about capitalism, even though there is a widespread assumption that low-income white folks in the middle of the country are almost all Republicans who put conservative values over their own economic self-interest. This has been a convenient myth for the Democrats, who often tell supporters that they sure would like to tax the rich and eliminate poverty but don’t want to scare away less educated voters with such radical talk. (Speaking of the Republicans and Democrats, both parties have an average approval rate of about 40 percent, only a few percentage points higher than socialism. So why don’t we have a Socialist third party? That’s a long story and a subject for another book . . . which I wrote.3 )

What is more relevant for this book is the fact that these polls even happened. Until a few years ago, nobody asked Americans for their views on capitalism and socialism—not even the middle-class white ones! It’s a remarkable thing to consider. Every day we are asked to “like” a product web page or stay on the line to complete a customer survey, but until recently no major polling organization had ever sought our opinion about the economic system that sets the terms for every decision we will ever make. Sometimes we’re asked if we think the economy is improving or if president whoever has been good for the economy, but never whether we think this economy itself is rational.

This is less conspiracy than closed-mindedness. It probably never used to occur to pollsters to question capitalism, which would have made as much sense to them as polling anteaters about their opinion of ants. So what changed? That’s no mystery. The great economic crisis of 2008 not only threw millions out of their homes, jobs, and colleges, but it did so in the most obviously unjust way imaginable. In case you’ve blocked it from your memory, here’s a recap in four steps:

1. Financial institutions commit massive fraud that brings the world economy to a halt because not even the bankers know how much of their money is real and how much is fake.

2. The US government bails out the criminal banks with trillions of dollars.

3. The same government then doesn’t help the millions facing layoffs, foreclosures, and student debt because of the recession caused by the banks.

4. During this process, George Bush is replaced in the White House by the very different Barack Obama, and yet almost nothing changes.

No piece of socialist propaganda could make the case any clearer. These four steps read like an IKEA instruction manual for how to assemble an unjust system. Inequality had been growing for decades—from 1979 the richest one-tenth of the One Percent saw their incomes quadruple while the number of people in poverty grew by fifty million. But that was a slow, mysterious process. In 2008 people saw the same thing happen within a few months, and it was obviously the result of a system that was stacked against us.

2008 was a glitch in the Matrix, a clue that all this time our supposedly fair and democratic system was an elaborate hologram. To switch metaphors, if we were all unwitting participants in a play called Capitalism about a world where people are rich or poor because they (or their ancestors) had earned that station in life, then in 2008 the back wall of the set fell down, revealing all the elaborate rigging equipment behind the scenes.

And yet the show must go on, so we continue to go to work and school as if nothing happened—but we can’t erase what we saw. In millions of conversations in the last few years, someone has uttered these five words: “They bailed out the banks.” The topic could be local school budget cuts or fast-food workers going on strike. The speaker could be seventeen or seventy, a longtime radical or someone who “hates politics.”

This is the environment in which pollsters got the idea to find out what people think about capitalism. To even ask the question is somewhat to answer it. “Capitalism,” Terry Eagleton writes in Why Marx Was Right, “is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism. It indicates that the system has ceased to be as natural as the air we breathe, and can be seen instead as the historically rather recent phenomenon that it is. Moreover, whatever was born can always die.”4

It’s been hard for capitalism to pass itself off as “natural” over these past few years. Banks like Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase may have gotten away with crashing the world economy and still making a profit, but even they couldn’t fool us into thinking that was in accordance with the laws of nature. Nobody looked at the massive government bailouts from Presidents Bush and Obama, took a deep, wondrous sigh, and thought, “Ahh, the circle of life.”

Unfortunately, corporations also haven’t forgotten about the bailouts, which taught them a terrible lesson: if you are “too big to fail,” you can get away with literally anything. Unlike many people these days, I use the word literally literally. Consider the case of HSBC bank, which was caught laundering billions of dollars for Mexican drug cartels and groups linked to al-Qaeda. That is so villainous we can only assume that company board meetings took place in a secret lair inside a remote island volcano. And yet because HSBC was considered too big to fail (or jail), it got off with no criminal charges.5 Think about that the next time you see the police throwing a Black kid up against a wall looking for drugs or read about a Muslim suspected of terrorism without any hard evidence.

What all this means is that even though the sharp crisis of 2008 and 2009 eventually faded, the “normal” capitalism that we’ve returned to isn’t even the same place we were in—or if it is, we are seeing it with new eyes. It is a capitalism that has dispensed with even a pretense of justice or efficiency and openly operates on the principle that might makes right.

The bald-faced immorality goes far beyond bailouts. Because corporations have enough money to buy off politicians with what to them is just pocket change, most of them pay lower tax rates than someone making a salary of $40,000 a year.6 Huge firms like Boeing and General Electric haven’t paid a cent in taxes over the past five years—at a time when the government claims it can’t possibly figure out where to find the money to keep bridges from collapsing, tuition to public universities from soaring, and food stamps from being cut.

Even the tech companies have lost their halos. Remember when Apple was idolized as a bohemian rebel, capable of making any product cool with a sleek design, a cute ad campaign, and a $200 price bump? Apple was supposed to be a new breed of business—an iCorp. Today it’s widely seen as just another bunch of soulless suits who horribly exploit Chinese factory workers, produce junk products designed to break or be obsolete in three years, and set up bogus headquarters in countries with lower tax rates.

Capitalism is being widely questioned today because the past few years have shown that what is good for this thing called “the economy”—usually defined by stock prices and growth rates—doesn’t have much to do with what is good for most of us. As the polls show, those with the most doubts are those who have gotten the rawest deal: African Americans have faced the highest rates of layoffs and foreclosures. Latinos have seen their communities broken up by the most deportations in the country’s history. Poor people have endured cuts to every vital service, from public transportation to assistance heating their homes. Adding insult to injury, each of these groups has been scapegoated as freeloaders while the real leeches of taxpayer dollars remain above the clouds in their private jets.

Capitalism deserves all the questioning it’s getting, but we should make sure that the questions probe deep. When many people talk about capitalism, they are only thinking of its surface features: government policies that favor big business and the arrogant and selfish values of many business and political leaders. By the same token, socialism is assumed to simply mean a more generous society that allocates more resources to education, health care, and reducing poverty. That’s a great start—don’t get me wrong. But as the next section will explain, capitalism is a lot more than a few laws and attitudes that can be quickly reversed.

Here is a surface-level question: Should the government provide better unemployment benefits? Here are some deeper ones: Why is anybody unemployed who wants to work, given that this world has so much important work that needs doing? Why are employment decisions not based on what society needs but instead on whether businesses can profit? And finally: If anybody should face hunger in a society with so much food, why should it be the victims of that society and not the incompetent fools who are running it?

Questions like these dig way down to the rotting foundations of capitalism. Bring a flashlight and some thick boots. It’s not going to be pretty.

 

1. I’d rather not call people from the United States Americans, which actually describes anyone in this hemisphere from Argentina to the Yukon, but no other single word does the trick. If you think I’m being “politically correct,” imagine how people in France and Poland would react if Germany started calling itself Europe. I blame the Founding Fathers for having absolutely no imagination—just think, they could have named us the United States of Awesome. Maybe we should just count our blessings they didn’t go with Slaveryland.

2. The polls were done by Pew, Rasmussen, and Gallup. Search “polls socialism capitalism” for details.

3. America’s Got Democracy!, which is available from HaymarketBooks.org and where all fine socialist humor ebooks are sold. I promise I won’t try to sell you anything else for the rest of this book. Unless you’re interested in a slightly used printer, in which case talk to me after you finish reading.

4. Eagleton’s book is a great follow-up for readers who like this book but would prefer one that is wittier, smarter, and better written.

5. Look it up. I promise that I am not exaggerating HSBC’s crimes. They paid a $1.9 billion fine, which is huge, but only about five weeks’ profits (not even income) for those assholes.

6. Check out Citizens for Tax Justice for more details.