Capitalism: Like and Why It Matters

6G internet. Supercomputers the size of our palms. Endless highways. Self-driving cars. All the information we could ever need at our fingertips. Diet pills to make us slimmer. And A.I. to tell us we're always right. In the world of Peter Thiel, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk, this is only natural. This is progress. The thinking goes that since the Industrial Revolution, we've been on a linear or perhaps even exponential path upward towards a better world. Life expectancy is better, education numbers are up, people are living more comfortable lives, and environmental issues like pesky

deforestation or climate change will get solved soon thanks to new technologies like nuclear fusion or the genius of A.I. Thought leaders and elites have told us time [play clip] and time again [play clip] that more stuff, more growth, and more production has made the world a better place [play clip]. But what if they're wrong? What if everything you've been told about the beautiful progress we've achieved over the last 200 years is wrong? What if that endless climb upwards isn't always upwards? What if that 5G internet and the latest smartphone model, have just masked a

festering cesspool of inequality, exploitation, and environmental degradation all along? This video is sponsored by Climatize "Progress" was never progress 10:32 am, January 19th. Bill Gates tweets out a graphic displaying several different graphs that reveal life has improved significantly for many people over the last 200 years. As if to soothe himself for being one of the richest people in the world for well over two decades, Gates seemed to argue that, actually, things were getting a whole lot better for a whole lot of people.

Bill Gates [play clip of Gates claiming things are better], alongside academics like Steven Pinker, who authored Enlightenment Now [play clip] or this professor of international health [Hans Rosling], have taken up the mantel of what's been called "New Optimism." A collection of academics and elites that wield graphs and cold, hard facts to explain that, actually, the world is doing just fine. Exemplified in Bill Gates' January 19th tweet and Pinker's Englightenment Now, the underlying argument of New Optimism is that capitalism has been a net positive for

humans and the planet. If you just look at the graphs, you can see we've made so much progress since the Industrial Revolution. Progress for these new optimists is a linear path. The more production there is, the more wealth there is in the world, the more capital accumulated, the better life is for people around the world. A rising tide lifts all boats. But let's be clear here. "Progress" really means capitalist progress. The unspoken message of all of these graphs, of books like Enlightenment Now, is that we've advanced socially and technologically because of

capitalism. As professor Jason Hickel explains, ["this strange narrative out there that says that um social progress improvements and social outcomes uh are sort of the spontaneous um gift of capital accumulation right as though it's kind of handed down to us by capital"] Social progress, such as life expectancy or poverty reduction, in the minds of capitalists, is tightly tied to growth. The economy needs to continuously grow if the cycle of capital accumulation, which involves investing money in labor and materials to produce goods that then sell for even more money, is to continue. And that accumulation of capital,

the narrative goes, occasionally sloughs off into the social realm, leading to better education, higher life expectancy numbers, and better well-being. All you have to do is look at the graphs! So let's go back to some of those graphs that Bill Gates tweeted almost seven years ago and really examine their claims. This graph looks at the number of people below the extreme poverty line. Poverty is an imperfect metric for well-being, but a good enough yardstick for getting a glimpse of quality of life under a capitalist world order. According to this graph, the number of

people living in extreme poverty has plummeted since 1820. This sounds amazing, and I wish it were that simple. But the graph unfortunately, hides some truths. The first of which is that accurate poverty data doesn't exist before 1980, so the majority of the graph is just guesswork. Next, extreme poverty, according to the graph Bill Gates tweeted out, is defined as living with under 3 U.S. dollars per day. A number which numerous institutions, including the UN and the World Bank, have admitted is so far below what is needed just to survive. More accurate numbers for

what is needed to sustain a somewhat normal life hover around $8.00. One economist puts the poverty level around $7.40, while The New Economics Foundation concludes that around $8 is necessary to reduce infant mortality by a meaningful margin. This paper even concludes that we should throw out the "dollar per day" metric and instead look at the costs of a collection of bare necessities needed to survive in any given context, which is often far over $3 per day. Creating a new graph based on the lower end of poverty metrics, $7.40, Jason Hickel found that "the number of people in poverty hasn't declined at all. Rather,

it has grown dramatically since 1981, going from 3.2 billion to 4.2 billion, according to World Bank data." And when he took the population of China, whose country straddles the line between socialism and capitalism, out of the picture, Hickel notes that "the proportion of people in poverty today is almost exactly the same as it was in 1981, with no net progress at all." And finally, there's an assumption in Bill Gates' graph that poverty rates will continue to decrease as time marches on. The future, however, is never assured. Yes, that means we can greatly

increase people's well-being, but it could also mean a fossil fascist takeover like we're seeing play out today with Trump in the U.S., which could make this graph reverse in no time. Ultimately, graphs like these paint a remarkably convenient narrative for someone like Bill Gates, who is at the top of the capitalist food chain. They weave a tale that, if you just zoom out, capitalism and capitalist growth have been a positive force for humanity over the last two centuries. As we will see later, though, progress, especially social progress, but also

technological progress, is very rarely spurred on by profit incentives or the engines of capital. Yes. We can't deny that capitalism does encourage a fair amount of technological advancement. As Marx writes in volume I of Capital, "capitalist production, therefore, develops technology…" But this progress is almost always shaped and twisted by those in power, indeed Marx finishes that argument with ". only by sapping the original sources of all wealth - the soil and the labourer." So, the type of progress is decided by those in power. By the Bill Gates's,

the Elon Musk's, the Trumps of the world, the capitalists. The car is a perfect example. We have had mobility technologies for hundreds of years that could make cities car-free. A city with streetcars, light rail, and regional trains, a city where the streets aren't deathtraps, where we don't develop asthma from smog, where greenhouse gas emissions drop dramatically. Where you don't have to sit in hours of traffic every day just to get to work. We can create that city, and indeed urban centers in the early 20th century were beginning to build along that model,

but then the forces of capitalism came town. You see, streetcars and public transit just aren't that profitable. It's hard to accumulate capital, it's hard to sell people more and more stuff, when their needs, in this case mobility needs, are met. So, General Motors and Standard Oil went around and bought up streetcar companies across America, not to expand them, but to shut them down. The future of the American city would be a car-centric city. Thus, the shape of progress, both social and technological, was decided by corporations following the undeniable scent of profit.

Here we begin to glimpse the problem. When Bill Gates and the New Optimists champion progress, who really benefits from that so-called progress? And when considering that climate change, inflation, wars, and increased political polarization are on the upswing, is this "progress" coming instead with profound costs? The Cost of Progress Throughout the 19th century, the British were hard at work bringing "progress" in India. British capitalists enclosed and privatized the communal forests, waterways, and lands of millions of Indian peasants. As Jason Hickel writes, the colonists wielded these policies to make the rural farmers

of India "at the mercy of hunger so that they would have no choice but to intensify agricultural production for export (to London) if they wanted to survive." In short, British capitalists brought the wonders of capitalism to India. Markets, privatization, and global trade weaseled their way into India, and an estimated 12.2 to 29.3 million people died from famine. With capitalist growth, with capitalist progress comes capitalist destruction. Capitalism has, historically, been constructive in developing methods of production. We cannot deny this.

But with that progress and growth has come ruination. With the cotton gin came increased exploitation of enslaved people, with the power loom came the brutal factory system, and with the internal combustion engine came the climate crisis. Capitalism develops the productive forces of our society as a means to exploit and extract even harder. As Karl Marx notes: "On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces, which no epoch of the former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand,

there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman Empire… The new-fangled sources of wealth, by some strange, weird spell, are turned into sources of want." We live in a world where the vast amount of wealth created is funneled into the coffers of just a few people. The top 10% of the richest people on earth own 76% of the global wealth. Meanwhile the bottom 50% account for just 2% of wealth. How can we call this progress? Indeed, you cannot talk about social or technological progress without also recognizing the ways in

which capitalist production builds and sustains that so-called progress. You cannot talk about the wonders of the smartphone, which, by the way, was conceived of thanks to state-backed programs, without also recognizing the vast network of colonial plunder and exploitation in "artisanal" mines like those in Kolewzi in the Democratic Republic of Congo. And you cannot talk about capitalist progress, without talking about fossil fuels. Fuels that we rip from the ground, burn into heat-trapping gasses that cause climate change, and facilitate the exploitation of workers

by allowing capitalists the flexibility to build their factories anywhere and produce commodities at all hours. In our current version of capitalism, fossil capitalism, fossil fuels are what lubricate the engines of capital accumulation. Regardless of whether you think capitalism has directly fostered the betterment of humanity over the last 200 years since the industrial revolution, there is no shying away from the fact that it has plunged us deep into the climate crisis. It's plunged us deep into biodiversity collapse, ocean acidification, and is marching us towards various tipping points. Let's

switch back to the smartphone for a moment. A device that is held up as the pinnacle of innovation and progress in today's world. And in many ways, it has made life easier for so many people. It allows us to navigate where we need to go, access information anywhere, and talk to our friends at the push of a button, but the ecological cost of smartphones under capitalism has been tremendous. Thanks to the relentless pursuit of profit, capitalists produce new smartphone models every year that barely iterates on the last one. Quickly,

your phone becomes obsolete, whether through planned obsolescence, lack of software support, or perceived obsolescence, and soon the mountains of e-waste pile up. In just 2022 alone, an estimated 5.2 billion smartphones were thrown away. We plow deep into the earth and burn hundreds of millions of gallons of fossil fuels to produce these smartphones, only to trash them a couple of years later. And even when we do use them, one researcher calculated the emissions from just the smartphones in use to be 1% of global annual carbon emissions. But of course, smartphones are just one piece of the puzzle. We've deforested 1 billion hectares

of forest since 1900, and land-use change has driven us into what is now being called the sixth mass extinction. Not to mention that this land use change, alongside capitalist intensive animal agriculture, brings us closer to wild and diseased animals, causing pandemics like COVID, SARS, and Swine Flu. And thank god we have our modern medical system in the face of these pandemcis, right? Well, once again, the forces of capitalism are holding us back from saving as many lives as possible. Once private companies developed their proprietary vaccines,

thanks to the substantial backing of taxpayer dollars, they didn't turn around and hand them out for free everywhere. Indeed, the New York Times reported that Modern seemed to be withholding crucial vaccine supplies to countries that couldn't pay the high prices for them. Our pharmaceuticals are not based on providing the most care to the most people, but instead creating the drugs that sell the best and make the most profit. You only have to look so far as the OxyContin crisis to see that our medical system revolves around the profit

incentive. Or the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, when the primary push for research on drugs, medical treatment, and clinical trials wasn't coming from pharmaceutical corporations or the government, but instead activist groups like ACT UP fighting for their lives. At this point, you might say, why are you trying to make the world seem like a terrible place? The goal of all of this critique, and indeed the goal of all critique in my opinion, is not to wallow in misery. Instead, it should be to figure out the real causes of why things are going well or why things are going wrong. The goal is to get to the root and then figure out a way to build a world where we can make actual progress.

Towards Real Progress Despite all of the ills of capitalist exploitation and degradation, things do look remarkably different today than they did 200 years ago. So, does that automatically mean that engines of capital are the cause of any sort of social progress we've achieved? No, indeed, most social progress, environmental repair, and climate action have come not from the continuous growth of capitalism, but despite it. The 8-hour work day or even occupational safety measures and monitoring were not just handed down to us by factory owners out of the goodness of their hearts; instead, it was because workers banded

together to make change. Strikes like that in 1872 in New York City, where over 100,000 workers walked off the job to demand an eight-hour day or in 1886 when 350,000 workers across the country struck with the demand "Eight-hour day with no cut in pay," were common throughout the late 19th and early 20th century, and eventually forced employers to standardize the 8-hour day. Progress in well-being, then, comes most often from movements, unions, and everyday people struggling against capitalists for a better life. And the same goes with climate change. Most of what we've accomplished so far in

terms of emissions reductions didn't come from corporations following the good of their heart, let alone following profits. Climate progress came out of pressure from the climate movement. Whether they've directly blocked the construction of pipelines, shut down coal plants, or pressured regulators to actually do their job, climate action has been driven by courageous people everywhere working against the insatiable appetite of capital accumulation. So, reforms within capitalism like the 8 hour workday, cleaner air, decreased child labor have all come from labor and movements fighting for their lives against the forces of capital. But even those wins are constantly under threat. Capitalists in the U.S.,

for example, have successfully started to roll back child labor laws, environmental regulations, and hunt down and disappear immigrants in ICE raids. So, as we look forward, toward the future, it's crucial to remember the true engines of social progress. It's not profit, it's not capital accumulation, it's real people struggling for better lives and a healthier environment Systems of progress: If we know that capitalism is not the driving force behind our social progress, behind education, well-being, or planetary health, but instead what is holding us back, we must get rid of it.

Indeed, we can't keep holding up how bad life was 200 or 400 years ago as a comparison for how good capitalism is now. There have been no other global economic systems in that time span for us to actually know whether capitalism has truly done a good job. And alternative economic systems that have been tried have been heavily besieged by capitalist forces. As Thomas Pogue notes, our yardstick for progress should not be how much we've done compared to 200 years ago, but instead the extent of the problem now compared to our capacity to fix it. From this viewpoint,

as we have seen, our capitalist system is failing, and failing badly. We have all the food we need to feed everyone, and yet billions go hungry. There's enough wealth for everyone to live a good life, yet it's overwhelmingly concentrated in the hands of the few. And we have all the technologies and capacity we need to live in a zero-carbon world that heals our relationship with the land, yet we continue to extract and burn more and more fossil fuels. We have the tools to solve so many global problems but aren't, or if we are solving them, we're doing it at a snail's pace.

What is the alternative then? In my mind, it is a system of planned ecosocialist degrowth. We need an economic system, a social system, a culture that prioritizes the well-being of people and the planet. Our decisions should not be predicated on profits and the endless cycle of capital accumulation. They instead must be rationally planned based on use, well-being, and planetary health. Planned ecosocialist degrowth means a lot of things, but most of all it means doing away with waiting and hoping for market forces or the altruism of the super-rich to change the world, and instead organizing our economy intentionally so that food

goes where it needs to go, renewables and zero carbon transit and industry flourish, and people can actually be comfortable wherever they choose to call home. It means investing in the things that actually make us happier, more comfortable, and live more sustainably. Like accessible public transit, or community farms, or even renewable energy. Of course, that world doesn't come by just sitting around. We need to organize and struggle for that future. We need to struggle, as we've always done for true progress. But if you want to start investing in renewable projects before that world is built, you can right

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