Capitalism in 2025 is a wild beast that needs to be slain

That the issue is and has always been capitalism falls into the category of an accomplished fact. And how could it not? Because chaos everywhere, cohesion nowhere, constitutes the grim fruits of that anti-human economic and value system — one that kills everything in its path, up to and including the planet.

When Adam Smith wrote his capitalist bible, Wealth of Nations — published in 1776, the same year as the US Declaration of Independence — the centre of the world that was western Europe at the time had just emerged in from its feudal swaddling clothes. The result was a rural economy, sufficient to meet the needs of a bone idle landed gentry for whom labour was the curse of the lower orders, being forced to make way for its urban variant required to meet the needs of a rising mercantile class.

Said class of merchants were the harbingers of the future as, per Karl Marx, ‘All that was solid melted into air, and all that was holy was profaned.’

Adam Smith:

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest.

Adam Smith was a product of the 18th century Scottish Enlightenment. Along with other world-renowned philosophers and thinkers during this seminal period — and also engineers, scientists, and the famed poet Robert Burns — he turned Edinburgh into the most important city in the world.

Adam Smith, it should be borne in mind, was promoting his then revolutionary creed — as were the founding fathers of America along the same Enlightenment ideas — at a time when millions of Africans were being held in bondage. No white man’s European Enlightenment ideas touched their lives, other than at the end of the whip.

And this is the fine point of it. Capitalism is a system that is predicated on contradiction and hypocrisy. It is not and never has paved the way along some benign road of human progress and uplift. Instead it stands, still today, as a predacious, violent, brutal, and cruel assault on the human condition and the planet’s ecosystem entire.

Savagery in a top hat and tails is still savagery. Barbarism emanating from Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard and Yale universities is still barbarism.

In the process, how many young men — overwhelmingly men from poor backgrounds with no stake, none whatsoever, in the status quo — have died in the name of capitalism? To ask the question is to answer it.

The 1861–65 US Civil War was fought in the name of capitalism. 600,000 perished so that free labour would triumph over slavery as the basis of production. But were those African slaves really set free? Or was it more the case that their iron chains were replaced by economic ones? And those workers in the growing factories and steel and textile mills in the North, condemned to lives of unending toil and drudgery: were they beneficiaries or victims of the outcome of the same conflict?

The US Civil War was part of the brutal process of industrialisation of the American economy and society in the mid-19th century. A century before the Highland Clearances, involving the forced dispossession of thousands of men and women in the North of Scotland, played the same role as part of the UK’s Industrial Revolution. The rural poor in both cases were forced out of the farms and into the factories as beasts of burden — appendages to the machine, as Marx described.

No single figure in human history understood more the beast that is capitalism than Vladimir Lenin. Writing in his classic work — Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916) — the future leader of the 1917 October Revolution laid it all out.

Lenin:

Capitalism has grown into a world system of colonial oppression and of the financial strangulation of the overwhelming majority of the population of the world by a handful of “advanced” countries. And this “booty” is shared between two or world plunderers armed to the teeth (America, Great Britain, Japan), who are drawing the whole world into their war over the division of it.

Lenin and his fellow Bolsheviks envisioned the Russian Revolution as an emancipatory break in the chain of world imperialism, hoping to catalyse thereby a world revolution by the proletarians (workers) of all lands. History records that this noble attempt failed to materialise, even amid the unbounded carnage of the First World War. The slaughter involved was a struggle between the contending ruling classes over colonies and a share of the exploitable human and natural resources of the global south.

Likewise, World War Two was fought on the same basis and for the same prize, though in a different part of the world. Hitler was an ardent admirer of the British Empire, especially its control of India in the subcontinent, and he aspired to replicate it in Eastern Europe. The toll exacted in consequence was in and of itself more than enough reason to discard capitalism and all its works, up to and including fascism, as the arch enemy of human-kind.

This is where the patriot game has proved so successful in sustaining the accomplished fact. It is how the merchants of capital and their political servants in London, Paris, and Washington et al. have been able to sustain themselves in their power and privileges. But what kind of patriotism is it that can allow millions to live in squalor and poverty at one end, and a select few to wallow in material luxury and ostentation at the other?

The broad masses have up to now been afflicted by a surplus of ruling class propaganda and a deficit of class consciousness. As Russian novelist, Fyodor Dostoevksy is said to have opined: “The best way to stop a prisoner from escaping is to make sure that he never knows he’s in prison.”

Old Fyodor was never more right. We, in effect, are our own prison guards, in that we have been convinced by their propaganda — pumped out by their media, their politicians, and by their compromised culture merchants— that this veritable shitshow we are living in is the best of all possible worlds. This is where the understanding of capitalism as a value system rather than merely an economic system, begins. Because demonstrably antithetical to the material interests and needs of the masses of the people, it is the value aspect of capitalism that has ensured that it continues to hold sway in human affairs.

And whenever capitalism the economic system enters periods of crisis, such as it has now, the role of the scapegoat comes into play. For Hitler and his Nazi brethren, the so-called rootless, cosmopolitan Jew was assigned the blame for Germany’s economic woes and worries in the 1930s.

Today in the US and across Western Europe, it is the non-white migrant who is the scapegoat of choice. Indeed, as with Hitler in the 1930s, so with Trump in the here and now, the alien other has been identified and is being mercilessly attacked as the root of society’s problems. The result has been the whipping up of a moral panic.

This is where one Malcolm X steps into the picture:

Oh, I say and I say it again, you been had! Ya been took! You been hoodwinked! Bamboozled! Led astray! Run amok!

As Adam Smith lies a mouldering in the grave, we can only speculate as to where we might be now, in the year 2025, if his mother had excused herself with a headache on that fateful night.

‘Self-interest,’ he argued, is what motivates economic activity. The malign legacy of capitalism, since his bible of capitalism was let loose on the world, leaves no doubt that self-interest as the driver of human affairs has been responsible for a mountain of corpses higher than Mount Everest.

Driving a stake through the heart of capitalism — this beast in civilised form — has never been more necessary. The alternative in this period of brutal conflict in Europe and genocide in the Middle East, simply and absolutely does not bear thinking about on current trajectory.

End.

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