Capitalism Is Dead...

Capitalism is dead. Now, to many of you that might sound like good news, until you find out that it’s been replaced by a much worse, more exploitative, and aggressively unsustainable economic system that we can best describe as “decapitated capitalism” or “decapitalism”.

It’s the reality that we’re living in right now where the very few protections afforded to us under capitalism, simply because the billionaire class needed most of us relatively healthy and alive to generate capital through labor, are gone, because technically, they don’t need us at anymore. 

The simplest way to describe what has happened is that the health of the economy is no longer tied to the economic health of its population - which we all can clearly see happening today, as the stock market skyrockets in value, and billionaires double their net worth, while most of the country struggles to afford even basic necessities.

Decapitalism is best described in an example by Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis: in August of 2020 the United States was experiencing a blatant economic and societal collapse by every possible metric. Much of the country wasn’t working, unemployment figures were impossibly high, consumer spending was in the toilet, and the GDP was tanking, while the US was undergoing the largest protest movement and labor crisis in history. 

In previous decades, when all signs pointed to a market crash, the market… crashed. But in this case, it didn’t. Instead the S&P 500 hit a record high, billionaires made a trillion dollars while the rest of the country went bankrupt, and under traditional capitalism, that’s impossible. There’s no way to build that much capital if your workforce is unemployed, unproductive, and dying at an alarming rate. Without workers and consumers, where is the money coming from? And the answer is, out of thin air. The money that flooded global markets during the COVID-19 pandemic doesn’t really exist in the way it ever has before.

In response to the very obvious and prolonged market crash that should have happened during the pandemic, the Federal Reserve in the United States, and central banks in other countries, quickly printed trillions of dollars to pump into the stock market, which went directly to stock market shareholders and business owners in the form of inflated stock prices.

Approximately 80% of all US dollars in existence have been printed in the last two years, skyrocketing the money supply from about 4 trillion dollars in January of 2020, to 20 trillion dollars in October of 2021. And nearly all of it went directly into the pockets of the ultra-wealthy, while devaluing the comparatively small amount of money held by the middle and working class.

Today, the bottom 50% of Americans, about 165 million people, hold $3 trillion dollars in total net worth - while just 745 billionaires hold $5 trillion dollars in net worth. And the economic health of the bottom 50% has almost no impact on billionaires, as clearly evidenced by the absurd stock market gains we’ve seen this year.

The entire reason the stock market went up during an otherwise economic crash, is because the billionaire class KNEW that money was coming because when the market crashed 15 years ago and industries were deemed “too-big-to-fail” and bailed out, it served as a guarantee that going forward, that billionaires and their companies would be protected by taxpayer dollars and debt. That change severed the connection between the real economy and the stock market.

It doesn’t matter anymore what the poverty rate or unemployment rate really are because if it gets too hot for people like Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk, they can count on a wild spending spree by central banks to keep them afloat. Instead of helping the working class rebuild the economy from the bottom up in the aftermath of a cataclysmic once in a lifetime pandemic, the world’s economic power brokers realized they could just funnel trillions of dollars to themselves, keep the stock market afloat, and ignore everyone else. And the hugely negative impact that this new decapitalist system has on the real economy doesn’t matter to the ultra-wealthy.

On an individual level, rampant inflation has absolutely no bearing on the quality of life of a multi-millionaire or billionaire, who doesn’t care how much a gallon of gas or loaf of bread costs, while being absolutely devastating and life-altering to a person living paycheck-to-paycheck, whose purchasing power is shrivelling down to nothing.

It used to be the case that under capitalism, it was in a business owner’s best interest to make sure their exploited workers were able to generate capital for them to steal through wage theft - but now that capital comes almost entirely from debt-generated investments and bailouts in an inflated and unsustainable economic system that’s based on just printing money - and when that very obvious house of cards collapses, the ones at the top won’t fall down with the rest of us, they’ve got helicopters and golden parachutes to save them. They’ll be fine, and we’ll be f*****.