Need for Anti-Capitalism

With the largest shopping holiday weekend ( Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Cyber Monday ) rapidly approaching, a curious trend is emerging. Despite the COVID lockdown, Stock markets in the US are reaching record highs. The average person’s living standards are in rapid decline and small businesses are shutting down at an alarming rate. Stable, full-time employment is close to being a relic of the past. While app-based gig economy employment is booming. Jobs that are void of any benefits and perks that traditional employment provides.

Conservatives have a number of explanations for this phenomenon: labor unions, high taxes, regulations, and any explanation so the Capitalist is always above criticism. Conservatives give these Capitalists the mystical title of “job creator”. Ignoring the evidence of the typical large scale Capitalist writhes in horror at the thought of hiring more than the absolute bare minimum. Yet here in the United States of America, history is also being made. America’s largest multi-nationals pay few to no taxes, while lesser plutocracy exploits the infinite amount of loopholes to legally evade. Labor union membership has been sinking in the quicksand of illegal immigration and a reduction in the militancy of advocacy for labor rights. The few private-sector labor unions that are still around. Are more interested in fighting for the neoliberal cause of "social justice" than labor rights.

While conservatives come up with a million arbitrary nightmare scenarios about what will happen if people confront Wall Street. The main fact cannot be denied, unrestrained Capitalists will always utilize their resources to break down barriers and borders (physical and political), as this gives them an edge. After gaining enough power, they collectivize investment and privatize profit. While also evading any responsibilities to treat the nation and its citizenry with dignity. Ultimately using the money for social engineering or investing abroad the money they make. For this reason, nationalists from the Kuomintang to the NSDAP have always been hostile to large accumulations of capital. For the large bourgeoisie are only loyal to themselves and empty cosmopolitan fads that give their sterile materialistic lives superfluous value.  Economic planning by the few exists in both capitalism and socialism. The only distinction is whether $1 trillion dollars worth of Amazon's surplus-value will go towards lowering our taxes and getting Americans universal healthcare or to line Jeff Bezo's pockets.

In the realm of light industry the market does better, but the idea that Socialism has “failed” is an a priori, ideological assertion with no backing. Was post-Meiji Japan’s decision to distance itself from previous liberal economic models towards a self-reliant planned economy a failure? Its emergence from World War I as a rapidly industrialized superpower would beg to differ.  Did the average factory worker in NSDAP Germany vacationing on the Italian Riviera in the Kraft durch Freude system have anything to envy from his American equivalent starving in front of department stores full of rotting food nobody can afford?

Even in the case of the Soviet Union, if you were to tell a Frenchmen, a German, or an American in the 19th century that one day Russia would beat the West to space, he would laugh in your face. But a more humble machine running at 100% capacity can get close to overtaking a flashier one operating on 70% (typical rate of labor force participation in a capitalist system). After decades of drinking Pepsi, listening to the Beatles on repeat, and going through countless pairs of Levi’s jeans. 64% of Russians today have concluded that after trying both systems, they would vote to re-establish the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.  Even in the realm of supposed self-evident superiority, consumer goods, East Germans and other ex-Eastern bloc citizens find themselves returning or yearning for the old brands. After figuring out that the difference between DDR washing machine soap and American washing machine soap is that the latter spends more on the advertisement.

Socialism failed depending on your value system. Is success gauged by how many millionaires/billionaires a nation has? The East German government in the 1980’s mitigated the falling birth rate through a program that provided generous stipends to college women in exchange for marriage and child-rearing. The West German capitalist lobbies pushed to import Turks instead.