Health and wealth: The downfall of capitalism and the uplift of humanity

Posted on April 4, 2009 by ari

Category: Activism, Economics, Environment, Food, Housing, Human Rights, Media, Oppression, Politics

Read this excerpt from Jobless rate bolts to 8.5 percent, 663K jobs lost (AP):

Orders placed with U.S. factories actually rose in February, ending a six straight months of declines, the government reported Thursday. Earlier in the week, there was better-than-expected reports on construction spending and pending home sales. And last week a report showed that consumer spending — an engine of the economy — rose in February for the second month in a row — after a half-year of declines.

Note that in this article, the authors and the economists they’re quoting say that the following are indicators of health in an economy:

  • orders placed in factories
  • construction spending
  • home sales (presumably with mortgages attached)
  • consumer spending

All of these things involve people spending money. That is, the indicator of a healthy economy does not appear to be, “are people’s needs being met?” but “are people spending enough?” But then, who knows, maybe spending a lot of money is somehow meeting people’s needs. Is that so?


When someone buys a house with a mortgage, they’re paying the owner for the house, and they’re paying a bank an additional sum, 2-3 times the value of the house, as a fee for borrowing that capital. And yet, when many people purchase many mortgages, we say that this is an indicator of a healthy economy. It seems to me that it is not. It does, however, indicate that:

  • People don’t like paying rent and want to build some kind of security for themselves, and think that this is a good way to do it despite the grossly inflated price they’re forced to pay
  • The people who control and profit from banks are making an assload of money off of people’s mortgages
  • Houses (a basic human need) cost so much that ordinary people can not afford them and have to incur massive debt and pay huge fees for the privilege of actually acquiring them – “mortgage” literally translated means “death pledge” – you’ll be paying for 30 years

Also, many people can’t afford mortgages (or the downpayments required to secure them); some of these folks are ostensibly still renting, from people who can afford mortgages. I don’t usually hear about renting at all when I hear about the economy. Do people who rent not matter? What about people who can’t even afford rent? What are these numbers like, and what would they tell us about the health of the economy? In NYC sometimes new high-rise apartment buildings pat themselves on the back for offering a selection of “affordable units.” Doesn’t this imply that the other units are, by definition, unaffordable?
What about “construction spending”? Are we talking about nuclear power plants, prisons, slaughterhouses, missile silos, gun factories, firetrap skyscraper office buildings – are those healthy? Or maybe we’re talking about unsustainable housing developments lacking public transportation and packed full of energy inefficient houses that people will have to pay mortgages to live in. Here in Ithaca, Collegetown wants to change zoning so they can raze perfectly fine buildings and replace them with new ones that have higher ceilings on their ground floors so stores will pay more rent, because the high ceilings will make them more attractive so they can lure in more students to consume the goods they’re selling. Would this construction spending indicate a healthy economy, despite the fact that it doesn’t meet any pressing human needs? How much of this construction is actually meeting human needs for shelter? As we do all of this “construction spending,” are fewer people living on the streets?
“Orders placed in factories” and “consumer spending,” could be positive, but are they? What kind of orders and consumer spending are we talking about here? Are they bombs, bullets, cancer-causing unrecyclable plastics, contaminated infant formula, Twinkies and Kentucky Fried Chicken parts, open heart surgeries, bottles of water and plastic bags, the latest teeny tiny iPods to replace last year’s teeny tiny iPods? Our GNP went up when Katrina devastated New Orleans, and I wouldn’t call that “profit” an indicator of a healthy economy. I would think a healthy economy would spend its surpluses on better levees, healthy food to avoid future medical expenses, and other things that prevent disasters while meeting people’s immediate needs. Many people are quick to buy a cheap Big Mac to satisfy their hunger, but can’t afford the healthcare they’ll need to repair the damage their food does to their bodies.
So, this is how we measure a healthy economy. We want to know if people are spending a lot of money, even if they’re not meeting their needs. We want to know if the banks are getting richer, and if the capitalists who control the means of production (factories) are getting richer. This is what it means to say we have a healthy economy.
Of course, right now, they’re saying we have an unhealthy economy. We measure this not only in terms of money being spent, for good or ill, but also in terms of jobs. After all, people can’t spend money unless they’re earning money to spend. In our culture we’ve replaced self sufficiency and skilled labor (growing or foraging for vegetables, roots and legumes in harmony with the natural environment; building efficient homes of natural and local materials; caring for our bodies using locally-available and healthful means; and other things that are derided as “primitive”) with the “service sector” and other jobs that place workers at the whim of employers who may or may not offer health care, fair wages, support for family life, challenges and interest, and other things that people need. So when they say we have an unhealthy economy, they’re saying that these jobs are being cut. The capitalists, the people who own the means of production, aren’t making enough of a profit to employ people, and so people don’t have money to give spend (i.e., give back to capitalists). An unhealthy economy is one in which this loop is not working because the capitalists aren’t making enough money.
Where is all the money going, why isn’t there enough money to keep that cycle in play? Well, how can a loop like this keep generating more money – where does the money come from? It seems to me that the primary indicator that we have for a healthy economy is whether the poor are making the rich richer, and the rich are making the poor poorer – and I don’t see how exactly the poor can be wrung any drier.
The solution, we’re told, is a “stimulus” – giving more money to the banks so they can loan money (at a profit) to the poor, increasing their debt load and fueling consumerism (which may be “good for the economy” but is clearly not good for the environment and for many of the people in it). This solution is about the saddest solution I can imagine.
How disempowering all of this is. What little faith we have in ourselves and our capabilities, that the chance to have our labor exploited and our wallets emptied by this cruel cycle is portrayed as our only hope for survival. And what a strange thing, our all working so hard to preserve this system, this “economy” and its perverse idea of “health.”
We can do better. We can share and barter, and we can exchange labor and goods and services (fairly) for money so we can exchange that money (fairly) for things we need. Hopefully we don’t need to buy too much. After all, if we have the things we need, hopefully we won’t need more and more and more – our needs are already met.
We’re a smart species. We crave the satisfaction that comes from working and accomplishing things. We can work to meet the needs of our communities so that we all have a roof over our heads, clothes on our backs, healthful and clean food and water in our bellies, and preventative care to keep us healthy. We do not need to put two dollars (or three, or four, or one hundred) in the pockets of the fabulously wealthy for every dollar we put toward our own needs. To believe this is to lose faith in ourselves. To believe this is to believe the lies of capitalism.
What is capitalism? Like all -isms, it’s an ideology, the ideology of capital. Capital is not human health or wealth. It is simply accumulated money, sums that are so great they can be used to purchase and control the means of production. Those with this control command the world. They make us believe that we all need to work harder, for the “health of our economy.” But that economy serves capital and those who control it – not the people whose labor generates that capital. Capitalism is an ideology that says that profit is more important than people and their needs.
This is why capitalism is fundamentally oppressive and doomed to failure. Marx made a very useful graph that shows what happens when you follow this ideology. A little line showing profits made – the “health of the economy” – climbs higher and higher over time. It goes up and up and up and up. And then it falls far, far down, all of that “progress” lost.
This is because that profit is based on the exploitation of labor and resources. You can only exploit labor and resources so much – at a certain point no amount of printing new money, or inventing more artificial “capital gains” on paper for hopeful future cashing-in, or lowering of wages, or cutting of benefits, or corner-cutting on materials or quality or safety or regulatory controls – will allow your “progress” to continue. Those who work – the people – and that which provides – our earth, and the other animals and plants we share the planet with – can only take so much exploitation. They get wrung dry. There are no generative inputs left to fuel industry. The little line on the graph has nowhere left to go.
We can build up our economy and start climbing up that graph again, but we can’t keep going up. We’re in a closed system, here, on planet earth. Endless profit, endless growth, is a myth. Our economy has no true correlation to health or wealth except for the capitalists who maintain this system for their personal benefit. The rest of us can push these folks up that graph again and again but we’ll just keep falling back down. We have to decide when we’re tired of pushing. We have to remember how powerful and capable and productive we are. We have to believe it. And then we need to begin to meet our own needs, instead of depending on those who exploit us to meet them for us.
The graph we can draw together, meeting our own needs, doesn’t go up and up and up. It’s a nice steady plateau. Well, maybe it goes up a little bit over time, as we build community health and wealth through collective endeavor. But there’s nothing wrong with meeting your needs and finding satisfaction in just-enough-ness, as a friend put this idea recently. Humans have done it before and we’ll do it again (capitalism is just a tiny blip in human history). Fortunately, it’s a lot cheaper and more sustainable and healthful and satisfying to meet your needs when you’re not paying other people top dollar to do it for you. If you don’t believe me, research your options. The capitalists don’t want you to know you have them, but you do. They’re beautiful.

Related posts:

  1. Capitalism is dead: London Protests G20 (photos)
  2. Vermont Commons: The Decay of Capitalism
  3. Shirari’s Peace and Love Podcast #6: Economies
  4. Utopia now
  5. Anti-capitalist / environmentalist / tech news mashup

Comments

Leave a Reply





  • Get the DVD of Empowered!

    From solar and wind to veggie oil and geothermal, Empowered: Power from the People tells the story of one community’s role in the energy independence revolution.
    Buy the DVD and organize a screening!

  • Featured Video

    Disgorging with Ezra and Autumn from Shira Golding on Vimeo.

  • Buy a Shira Original

    Choice Mushrooms (hardcover) by Shira Golding "Lesbians Eat Local" t-shirts, aprons, mugs...

  • Find Us on Facebook

  • Our Credo

    We believe that all struggles for social and environmental justice are interconnected. We strive to practice radical solidarity with humans, non-human animals and the environment. More...

  • RSS Bookmarked!

  • Subscribe

    RSS Feed