If you read my articles, you either think that capitalism is bad, or you write for the Atlantic. I’m not going to argue the case against capitalism. It’s been done better elsewhere, and I assume that you’re well aware of that and have detailed opinions on the subject.

There is one thing that most anti-capitalists think is good about capitalism: that it develops the productive forces. As Marx (as much as I disagree with the Marxists) wrote in the Communist Manifesto:

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones… The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication… compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production… The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.

Photo by Lenny Kuhne on Unsplash

The one confidence that anti-capitalists have almost always had in capitalism is that it is growing ever-faster: that it is intensifying itself. Most have thought that this was good — that our master, capitalism, was building fantastical things for us to eventually seize when we killed him.

Except, well. That isn’t actually true.

Here, have a look at this chart:

From here.

It’s a chart of the total real value of all the physical means of production in the US, for every year from 1950 to 2017.

At a glance, doesn’t the slope of that graph look rather gentle to you?

Let’s take the raw data, pop it into Sheets, and process it into something that’ll tell us the yearly percent growth. Which results in this:

Yeah, that’s as bad as it looks. That high peak, at a little more than 4% growth, happened in 1966. Since then, it’s been a clear downward trend.

If that trend was linear (it’s not) the slope would be -0.05756. That would give a growth rate of 0% in 2042.

Capitalism isn’t growing the productive forces faster and faster. It’s growing them less and less, every year.