Capitalism Has Likely Never Been Less Popular in America

Even before I got a master’s in finance, I was writing anti-capitalist screeds explaining how what most people think is capitalism isn’t capitalism—it’s markets. Markets are good. Capitalism is bad. Both can be true, even if a lot of socialists and capitalists see a contradiction because of how broadly fucked up America’s view of capitalism is and how poorly we teach economics to people before college. It’s also because of the largest propaganda machine in human history creating a black and white dynamic around a field defined by shades of grey. Every time you watch a football game, you’re inundated with black and white capitalist propaganda. We have been trained to think this system is something it isn’t, and it was the animating existential battle cry of the late 20th century, further distorting people’s views of what that word means. In general, I don’t like steadfastly adhering to -isms outside the one that demonstrably governs the world because most people never studied -isms and even for those who did, ideology gets messy to enforce uniformly when the rubber meets the road, and a lot of folks have conflicting beliefs that cannot be summarized in an Economics 101 class.

As the IMF notes, there are two central tenets that make capitalism what it is: private property and profit maximalism. The word property evokes the idyllic American dream of four walls and a picket fence to all who want it, but in practice, it means corporations. Stock, debt, etc…capitalism is about capital, the people who control the most shares and thus can dictate how private property operates. Capitalism is ideological at its core, not pragmatic, believing that profit maximalism is the best route to a broad-based and sustainable world. This ideological belief in profit maximalism and perpetual quarter-over-quarter steady growth has led us to this present moment of the complete and utter breakdown of the entire 20th century social and political infrastructure as well as an increasingly warming planet where major finance is projecting the entire world to be uninsurable should we continue down this apocalyptic track. Great job folks.

Capitalism existed in small pockets of humanity throughout our history, but it didn’t become the dominant global economic and political system until the Transatlantic Slave Trade came along and turbocharged its ability to maximize profits. In most businesses, labor is capital’s largest cost, and so the logical conclusion of profit maximalism is slavery. This is what capitalism is at its core, and why powerful capitalists try to destroy unions and labor’s ability to collectively bargain. It’s quite telling that a core tenet of capitalism’s adherents is that it requires the government to put on guardrails like the minimum wage to stop it from doing what it wants to do. The very existence of anti-monopoly laws is an admission by our government that without proper management, capitalism trends towards Kings.

And Americans know this. They know their boss’s boss’s boss wants to pay them a fraction of what they’re worth while working them twice as hard. They know that big business has read The Innovator’s Dilemma and its solution is to pull the ladder up behind them and crowd out competition. Major capital does not want competition because that means less profit. There is a very simple reason why the whole world is seemingly a choice between McDonald’s and Burger Kings and Pepsis and Cokes: Economics 101.

Supply and demand existed long before capitalism did, as it’s just the natural governing force in markets that were created the moment man realized you could sell your labor for goods. Capitalism has a basic economic flaw in it that explains exactly why corporate consolidation has steadily trended in one direction over time, and I can demonstrate how with some silly little questions.

Would you buy a private business worth a million dollars for one dollar? Of course. That’s a stupid and dumb question for babies. What about $50,000? Yeah probably, a bank would certainly lend it to you so long as the business had some cash flow. What about $500,000? Well, now we need to get some accountants in here and look at the debt and the projected future cash flows and such.

The point in that line of questioning is to demonstrate that under a certain price point, demand for private property is infinite. Given that the supply for private property is not infinite and is limited by the contours of the economic and physical world we inhabit, over time, along with the aid of profit maximalism, this should push the price of private property up, which is what has happened in America since the end of World War II. This naturally means that fewer and fewer people can afford private property, delivering us to a time where a mainstream media once owned by 50-plus companies nearly half a century ago is now owned by just five while America experiences its worst housing market in 30 years amidst all-time high housing prices.

Socialists should not spike the football over this Gallup poll, as only half the work has been done, and there is a massive opening for our project if we are willing to try to adapt it to win more Independents who are still clearly skeptical. As Gallup notes, “Americans are overwhelmingly positive toward small business (95%) and free enterprise (81%).” The left will not win in America with any kind of anti-small business stance, and if our solutions are perceived to encroach on this central tenet of Americans’ belief systems, the neoliberals and fascists will just keep trading off power until the oceans swallow us whole. This poll should be a wake-up call to socialists that the potential for our movement to win is there, we just have to find ways where we can expand the tent that still align with our values, even if it’s not perfectly in line with our stated -isms.

Americans get a lot of flack for being braindead idiots, and we are a lot of the time, but a love of free enterprise and a hatred of big business is a perfectly logical thought to have in your head. Big business would rather put mom and pop stores out of business than sacrifice one percent of their market share, and now many have proven that they are more than happy to install America’s new autocratic King just dying to crash the economy and then thank him for the honor while licking his boot on live TV. A lot more Americans have soured on capitalism than realize it.

You can still have small business-centric free enterprise under a socialist system, it’s called market socialism, and there are varying degrees of it being pitched around America right now. Elizabeth Warren’s classic good but not great idea to have 40 percent labor representation on the boards of companies is for my money, the best and easiest way to directly implement a form of socialism in America, just if you actually implemented socialism and gave labor unions clear majority control over the companies they work for. There can and should still be a space for capital, because someone has to take the risk of investing in an idea while it loses money figuring out how to build a business, they just should not get rewarded for its success by becoming economic demigods. Capitalism is a preposterously inequal system by design, where Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and all sorts of other psychotic weirdos create nation-states more powerful than most countries on the planet, and Americans know it, even if many don’t know they know it.