The Left Has Been Proven Right About Capitalism

By Jared Yates Sexton | July 30, 2024 | 9:55am

Photo by Maryam Majd/Getty Images

Billionaires Capitalism

The Left Has Been Proven Right About Capitalism

It is wild seeing conservative voices like Bret Stephens begin to question capitalism.

For those of us on the Left, we have spent our lives talking about this fucked up system and its fucked up consequences, only to be told that we were naïve, stupid, unrealistic, and just plain wrong. To see Stephens and other conservative and mainstream commentators, the privileged priest class of capital, start to come around is truly something.

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And there’s a reason they’re starting to get there. Because it is undeniable now. At long last, it is time to say something true and definitive that so many people have been afraid and unwilling to say: the Left has been right.

We were right in the 1990’s, when we warned that neoliberal hypercapitalism was going to have disastrous consequences as corporations were not only given the green light to accumulate capital and power but promised total fealty by a government dedicated to fulfilling their every desire.

We were right at the turn of the century when globalism required an illegal, murderous world war using the veneer of a Manichean struggle of “Good” vs. “Evil,” and a bipartisan supermajority waved the flag and told us not to believe our own eyes and ears and hearts.

We were right when the financial system melted down in 2008 and, rather than putting the house in order, we watched as the government bailed out the criminals and raised them back to their pedestals while hard-working Americans were left to suffer.

We were right through the 2010s as the military-industrial complex and the growing empire merged with burgeoning tech oligarchs to automate a system of murder and exploitation and surveillance, creating an abomination the likes of which the world has never seen before.

We were right as accumulated capital did what accumulated capital does and corrupted our government and took advantage of our minoritarian institutions, resulting in a state where the populace holds earned distrust and has come to believe, appropriately, that means of democratic accountability and leverage are closing rapidly.

We were right that, as history taught us, that corruption and co-option would eventually lead to an authoritarian movement working on behalf of the wealth class to roll back the progress of the 20th century, recreating the Industrial Age’s environment of cruel exploitation and looking to drive us back to a capitalist-feudal synthesis in which the wealthy ascended to theocratic total power.

We were right because it was obvious all along.

We were also right about the minutiae of that process. We saw the many betrayals of neoliberals like President Bill Clinton, the squandered promises of President Barack Obama, and the vulnerabilities of nominating Hillary Clinton and lifting old neoliberals like President Joe Biden to the presidency without a concrete plan for succession or the future in general.

While the transition from Biden to Kamala Harris began as a recognition of harder truths, the elation now threatens to obscure some of the more pressing matters. Realizations that have simmered just out of sight for decades may stay suppressed — namely that unchecked and accelerated capitalism have wrought the crises we face and that, should we ever dig our way out, the political culture at large will not only have to begin listening to the Left’s solutions but recognize what they have done to get us to this crisis point.

You hear “the Left” a lot in discourse. Whenever I’m interviewed, I flinch when I hear it. “Don’t you think the Left has gone a little too far?” I’m asked. And it never fails to bother me. Understanding of the political spectrum is shallow to the point of absurdity and what passes for “the Left” now is merely progressivism or what should be centrist positions in a more just world. Acknowledging how trillions of dollars have been redistributed from the working and middle classes to the 1% isn’t radical. It’s a statement of fact that should inform everything. Protecting established rights and liberties and calling for common-sense reform of corrupted institutions should be base-level stuff.

The truth is that the Left is absent from the elite halls of power. Why? Because the Left was systematically hunted down, sabotaged, and strangled in the post-World War II environment. As the United States and Great Britain recognized the defeat of Nazism was in sight, they quickly made peace with the Fascists in order to prepare for war with the Soviet Union. To this end, they brought war criminals into the burgeoning military-industrial complex, manipulated outcomes around the world in order to stifle democracy wherever the Left might prosper, and supported systematic murder and terrorist actions in order to literally kill Leftists.

In the United States, labor unions and civil rights groups were infiltrated, surveilled, plagued with violence and murder — all to create our modern world and ensure the Left would be disempowered and cast aside.

The resulting duopoly has held us hostage and ushered in our present putrid conditions. You won’t hear any of this on cable news because it is a corporate-controlled ecosystem dedicated to presenting our Center-Right paradigm as something altogether different in order to benefit their bottom-line and political agenda. Debates around the role of government are not allowed to wrestle with the facts of the matter and instead substitute shallow culture-war spectacle for actual consideration.

It is changing, however. The internet and social media have at least given us a glimpse of what many people truly believe. And the Left, despite the violence and murder and subterfuge, never goes away. That’s because, when presented with the necessary information and allowed to communicate, people will always recognize the true nature of our fucked system. It is self-evident, and the growing outrage is spilling into the tried-and-true discourses and ecosystems.

I doubt Stephens or others of his ilk will ever fully realize the problem. Their livelihoods and privileges depend on them continuing to carry water for the status quo that has given them everything they have. To see him and others, including David Brooks, fumble about in the dark in search of answers is a frustrating delight. They are nearing something very, very large, but if they adhere to old world ideals, they will never get there.

Instead, we the Left hold firm to our convictions and understand that, even though the decrepit status quo rumbles on, we have been right. They may not listen to us. The pundit class and those in power may not reach the obvious and self-evident reality of the situation, but many others will. The question is whether the oligarchical class and their ecosystem of lapdogs will use their technologies and influence to continue covering up their wrongs and abuses.

As for us, we just need to keep telling the truth.