Capitalism's Big Lie (Wilberg on Wednesday)

1. Competition generates jobs. Right?

WRONG! Competition may initially create jobs but leads inevitably to over-production of the same commodities or over-provision of the same services by competing companies, resulting in takeovers, redundancies or export of jobs to countries providing cheaper labour. This is what is casually accepted as ‘the economic cycle’.

2. Competition offers greater choice and diversity. Right?

WRONG! Everyone knows that the multiplication of television channels just creates more of the same. Similarly competition among manufacturers of cars and most other commodities leads not to greater diversity but to greater standardisation. That is why vast sums of money need to be wasted on ludicrous advertising – to create a grand illusion of distinctiveness between virtually identical products and services. ‘Brand identity’ replaces true diversity and choice.

3. Competition results in cost-efficiency. Right?

WRONG! The pursuit of profit and low-cost production results in the greatest imaginable wastage of natural resources and human potentials. For example the production of one ounce of gold produces thirty tons of toxic waste and depends on labour so cheap it is a form of slavery – thus also wasting the productive human potentials of every worker involved.

4. Capitalism can create full-employment. Right?

WRONG! Capitalism can only ever create anything near full-employment by massively under-employing the potential skills of its employees – instead employing ever-more workers in exportable, low-skill, low-paid work – and employing even university graduates in ‘McJobs’, call-centres and the like. And when capitalism is in crisis the first thing it slashes is jobs – except those of corporate bosses.

5. Capitalism protects women’s rights and the family. Right?

Wrong! An economy such as America’s, in which millions of mothers have to leave their children alone and travel often long distances to do two or more minimum-wage shift jobs – and still not afford decent housing or even medical care – is hardly ‘family friendly’. Protecting ‘women’s rights’ and the family means protecting the right of women to be minimum-wage slaves.

6. Capitalism values the individual. Right?

Wrong! Capitalism buys the individual, and values them according to their market value alone. What made capitalism different from earlier forms of market economy is that people don’t sell products they make themselves, they sell themselves as employees – they sell their bodies, brains and time to be ‘employed’ as instructed by their employer. Capitalism is economic prostitution of the individual.

7. Capitalist societies are mostly democratic. Right?

Wrong! The most politically powerful and important institutions in capitalist states – and the ones in which most people lead their lives – are private companies in which there is no democracy, no elections of any sort and rule is principally by management decree – it is determined by financiers and corporate shareholders.

8. Capitalism could reduce its energy needs and cope with ecological problems with the right will. Right?

WRONG! Firstly, no gas, oil or nuclear energy corporations would ever tolerate losing their profits to community groups or towns that decided to declare energy independence – to go ‘off-grid’ and generate energy from their own wind generators, solar, wave or waste-generated energy sources. Secondly, capitalism relies on increasing economic growth for its own sake – irrespective of the waste produced by industrial production and over-production. Thirdly, the greed for short term financial gain from exploiting natural resources will lead inevitably the total devastation of the oceans, forests, water supplies and farming land of the world.

9. Capitalism means a free trade and a free market. Right?

WRONG! Capitalism just can’t cope with global free trade, and ‘globalisation’ is the biggest attempt to restrict it – for example by imposing unfair trading agreements and by subsidised agriculture which restrict imports from and impoverishes developing countries. Capitalism certainly can’t cope with a global ‘free market’ economy – for that would mean free movement not only of capital but free movement of labour (‘immigration’) across countries and continents. Not even the European Union can allow a free market – ever tried getting low-cost mortgages or loans from Germany or lower-cost cars from Europe?

10. Capitalist societies are free societies. Right?

WRONG! Capitalism forces individuals to sell their time to their employers. Freedom means being free to use one’s time to engage in freely chosen creative activity that fulfils an individual’s unique potentials and allows them to contribute to society through them. But the only types of productive, creative activity or work allowed in capitalism are those with market value in the creation of profit for employers. Education in capitalism does not cultivate each individual’s gifts so that it can transform them into a valuable contribution to society. Instead its focus is only on skills with a market value in the creation of profit. The capitalist press and media are no more ‘free’ than those in so-called totalitarian societies, all disseminating the same ‘news’ and ‘issues’ and never questioning the ‘Big Lies’ which shape how they are analysed and interpreted.

11. Capitalism is wealth creating. Right?

WRONG! Not only is more than 90% of the wealth of capitalist economies owned by less than 10% of the population, but is gained by creating general time-poverty and by exploitation of low-wage labour, both here and in developing countries. The type of labour that has the market value to create most monetary wealth tends to be of a purely self-serving, calculative or mind-numbing type that impoverishes the soul and distorts, demeans or denies time for human relationships. Wealth in capitalism is a ‘Faustian’ bargain – selling all richness of soul to the Devil in order to attain material gain. Yet throughout the ‘boom years’ of the Western capitalist economies the income of the majority effectively fell by 30% – except for the richest 10% of the population.

12. Markets are needed to know what people want. Right?

WRONG!  How about just asking them? Today’s information technology provides the perfect means of finding out what sorts of products people want, in what variety, with what new features or changes, and at what sort of prices. Markets only offer them ranges of products to choose from over which they have no democratic choice. Worse still, it uses advertising to make them think they can fulfil their deepest spiritual needs by buying material commodities.

13. National governments depend on taxes or borrowing from banks to finance public expenditure. Right?

WRONG! This is one of the biggest lies of all. National governments could, as Lincoln attempted to do, issue their own money, interest-free, to pay for public expenditure – were it not for the fact that they are effectively puppets of international banks and banking cartels, and forever afraid of upsetting what they call ‘the financial markets’.

14. National governments accumulate financial deficits through overspending on public services and investment. Right?

WRONG! This is part of the same Big Lie. Financial deficits arise principally from ever-increasing debts to the private banking sector, a problem which could be overcome by nationalising the banks, re-establishing control of the nation’s money supply and funding industry itself directly.