Embed Notice

A popular response to anticapitalist discourse is that capitalism is intrinsically good but it was corrupted at some point in the recent past and whatever anticapitalists are complaining about is really due to that fall from grace rather than capitalism itself. The election of Ronald Reagan is popular for this.

People who sincerely believe this are so historically illiterate that it's impossible to have a serious discussion with them so I don't (usually) engage, and when I do it's disappointing. But if they could talk sense about it what I'd really want to hear from them is when do they think capitalism got good? A fall from grace implies a prior state of grace and when was that for capitalism?

For hundreds of years, since its beginning, capitalism was fueled by slavery, murder, torture, armed robbery. Marx's famous characterization of its birth as "dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt" is an understatement. When did this end, do they think?

I mean, explicit slavery is mostly illegal, although that only happened generally within my great-grandparents' generation, so not that long ago, but slavery was pretty seamlessly replaced with systems of exploitation that were and are only *visibly* less violent. This has to be the case because the profits never shrank. When did capitalism get good in order to be able to get bad in the 1980s?

Anyway, yes, this is a subtoot. Since they're incapable of responding sensibly I'm shouting it into the void instead.

#Capitalism #Slavery

Edited for autocorrect and typos