The story that’s told to Americans by their wise men, and that they believe, and then tell the world — which makes me and everyone else in it chuckle — goes like this: “Look! Billions of people have been lifted out of poverty!! Woo-hoo!! Capitalism!! High-five me, Tucker!! Let’s go get a beer!” (The situation’s so absurd, by now, that even if you’re a mediocre white dude, you can have a skyrocketing career propagating this myth. Steven Pinker’s a linguist, for heaven’s sake — and yet he’s up to what, three books? Four? I’ve lost count — telling it.)

LOL. The story that capitalism is what saved the world isn’t just not true. It’s so not true that it’s somewhere between a Big Lie, a Ponzi scheme bigger than Bernie Madoff’s, and a child’s soothing fairy tale. Does that make you angry? Aghast? Furious? Good. Those are all forms of ignorance, and it’s high time that you learned something about the world, my friend. Let me prove it.

Capitalism didn’t power the stunning gains in human progress the world has seen over the last few decades. It never has. Socialism did. Now, Americans don’t understand that — and that’s exactly why they’re unable to save their own society, because how can you save yourself when you don’t understand what saved the world? — but that’s a subtle link that I’ll come back to. First, I want you to understand the true story of human progress — the one they don’t teach you at school, or on the news, but they should.

It’s true that billions were lifted out of poverty. From about 1990 to now, the poorest people in the world have seen stunning gains in everything from literacy to life expectancy to income to health. Why is that, though? Because the world’s slumdogs became millionaires, armies of beggars who are miraculously, today, listed on the NYSE? Even because capitalism “gave” them jobs — out of the goodness of its heart (my, how generous, wait — why didn’t it do that before)? Of course not. LOL. Get real, my friend. What happened was this.

In 2000, the UN, World Bank, OECD, and others came together to formalize something so remarkable and ambitious and beautiful, it was a landmark in human history. For the last ten years, an idea had been bubbling up among its greater minds. They called them the Millennium Development Goals — and the idea was to plan a better future, through a set of goals for people. Whom? The people of the world. All of them. To make them genuinely more prosperous — not just financially, but to raise everything from literacy rates to child survival rates to longevity. Think about it for a moment. What vision. What ambition. Such an idea had never, not once, ever happened before in history —a whole world planning a future for everyone? That’s the stuff of distant science fiction, isn’t it? No, i’s reality. So — how come you don’t know this story, my friend?

Fast forward twenty years. Bang! A miracle, of sorts, had taken place. Those very goals were on the cusp of being achieved. Was this history’s greatest coincidence? The most improbable one ever? Of course not. It was because all these institutions came together to make it happen. The UN set the goals, and monitored progress. The World Bank, OECD, and many others invested in them. Billions rose. Something like the Marxist revolution occurred — the proles might not have overthrown the bourgeoisie with rifles, but something even weirder and better happened: the world came together in peace, and planed better lives for everyone, on their terms, not capitalism’s..…and it worked better than anyone had imagined.

Now, I want you to see how great an accomplishment that really was. No one — and I mean no one — knew whether this would work. In fact, the whole time this was going on, American elites of every kind — economists, politicians, Presidents — had mocked and devalued and laughed at this idea, as futile and foolish: “let them eat cake!” Hence, today, the world’s greatest economic success is the one the world, but especially Americans, don’t know anything about. So here American pundits are, proudly telling the world that all this was capitalism — and mostly, Americans still believe them.

LOL.

None of this was capitalism. None of these institutions were or are capitalist. They are social institutions. The greatest ones human beings has ever made. They are socialism in the truest and most sophisticated sense of the word. They don’t have profit motives. There are no shareholders trying to maximize them. They are funded by members, for the purposes of establishing and nurturing a collective interest. They exist for purely social purposes and reasons, and are governed that way, too. The World Bank, for example, is owned by 187 countries. The UN is made of, and funded by, 193 member states.

(Let’s be clear. This wasn’t Soviet style communism — totalitarian, dictatorial socialism: the Cold War caricature which is the only kind Americans seem to know. It was something very, very different, a delicate fabric of the world’s countries, not one communist party, coming together, to envision the kind of world they wanted. So there was no nobody violently overthrowing the bourgeoisie, no secret police monitoring everybody’s moral purity, no dictatorship of the proletariat, no Stalinist assassins hunting down dissidents on the run. Was it “truer” socialism? I’ll save the hair-splitting for pundits. For our purposes, let’s just say it was global, democratic, bottom-up, and consensual, versus ideological, political, totalist, and tyrannical. It was still every bit socialism.)

Who was building dams to protect villages? Who was investing in sewer systems, water pipes, and toilets? Who was funding hospitals and schools? Who was laying their bricks and staffing them? Walmart? Apple? Google? Facebook? Were they sending armies of engineers to Kinshasa? LOL. The World Bank, UN, OECD, and so on were the ones not just funding and investing in it — but targeting it, monitoring it, measuring it, encouraging it, nurturing it. That took armies of people and vast amounts of resources, from money to time to ideas to plane flights. Get real, my friends. Capitalism didn’t save the world. Socialism did.

What’s more, the idea that social institutions came up with — a plan to fix the world — is the one thing that capitalism fears and despises the most. It’s “central planning” — not “free markets.” It wasn’t a binding plan, as in “everyone has to do this” — but it was something like history’s most ambitious plan, ever, period, as a set of targets and goals, “this is what we want for everyone.” Hence, planning — at the very grandest scale imaginable — the people of the world: see how we’re already in strange, almost Marxist territory? It is not just “not capitalism” — it’s anti-capitalist in the most elemental sense of all, which is to say, in its bones, its principles, its philosophy. (That’s why American politicans and economists and pundits loathed all this so — and why they still don’t tell you the real story of the greatest economic success in human history, and how it was driven by socialism. They can’t. They’re so brainwashed they don’t know it themselves, mostly, and those who do can never admit it — because they’d also have to admit every single thing they believe in is fatally wrong.)

Now, it’s certainly true to say that “capitalism played a role in lifting people out of poverty.” Of course it did. But it’s truer to say that socialism needed to operate first, for capitalism to be able to at all. In other words, the ultimate cause of human progress is socialism, and only the proximate cause is capitalism. Sure, eventually, capitalists came in and set up factories and so forth, and exports grew, and countries got richers. But they could only do so because people had hospitals, schools, roads, pipes, sewers, and so on. Then nations could join institutions like the WTO, which India joined in 1995, and China in 2001 — but even those are socialism, funded, owned, and managed by their members, yet which modern capitalism cannot function for a day without. When people were dying of dysentery, capitalism stayed far away — because sick people don’t make profitable labourers. Socialism created the conditions for capitalism and free trade and whatnot to happen at all — as it always has — and they were fundamental, primary, and necessary conditions.

(Let me digress for a moment, and skip this if you’re not American. Now, imagine that Americans had some of these ideas and institutions. Let’s say something like a set of Millennium Development Goals for America. Don’t you think they need them? I do. Every single social indicator is blinking red and falling, from life expectancy to maternal survival during childbirth to income. Then imagine that they had public banks to invest in institutions to achieve those goals. Better hospitals, schools, finance, safety nets, and so on would be the almost instantaneous result. I’d bet we could turn America around with a plan like that in a decade. After all, it took the world only about thirty years.

And yet, sadly, America isn’t allowed to think such thoughts, and therefore develop such plans, and build such institutions — the very things which fixed the world. Because they don’t believe that socialism is what lifted billions out of poverty, and that story isn’t allowed to be told. If I or anyone else tried to publish a book about it, for example, we’d be laughed out of New York — but Pinker can publish the same child’s fairy tale over and over again, and he’s just one on a bookshelf of dozens, which all say the same thing. Do you see the problem there? How ironic is that? America can’t save itself because it doesn’t understand what saved the world. LOL. Karma’s a bitch.)

The World Bank, OECD, UN, and even the IMF are the closest thing to the Marxist revolution the world has ever seen yet. Probably the closest thing that ever will be. A genuine global revolution in living standards, which worldwide social institutions brought about — by dreaming up, envisioning, planning, and then bringing to life. One that was for the world, by the world, not for capitalists, by capitalists — funded by it, planned by it, targeted by it, and accomplished by it.

American politicians and economists and leaders have always genuinely despised and hated this story for precisely that reason — it is not the triumph of capitalism, but the ascendancy of socialism. And yet this story it is the the true one. Socialism did something astonishing, beautiful, world-changing, and noble — it sparked something very much like the promised Marxist revolution, only more sophisticated, modern, inclusive, and peaceful. It is the one thing that genuinely changed the world. Socialism already created the revolution — only the world still hasn’t quite figured it out.

Capitalism? It was just a dull, boring passenger along for the ride, staring out of the window, waiting for it to end.

(Now, weirdly, and tragically, it’s true at the very same time to say that these great socialist insitutions are also maligned even by the left as evil capitalist tools. In a sense, that’s true — but only in a childish and ignorant one. Sure, the IMF and World Bank are full of American-trained economists, which is like saying a hospital is staffed by medieval surgeons. But that doesn’t make the hospital itself an unworthy thing for a city to have. In the same way, while they championed nonsensical American ideas too much, like “fiscal discipline” and “export led growth”, that doesn’t mean that these great global institutions are not socialist, or that socialism hasn’t worked genuine, historic wonders for the world, by lifting billions u, where capitalism only drags them down. It’s childish to call the world’s greatest social institutions capitalist — and it is how the left has lost its way, too, especially in America, where a kind of foolish, ignorant leftism now means identity politics, not genuinely transforming the world.)

All that is a story everyone should know — especially Americans, who bask in the warm and comforting glow of ignorance. Do you think that’s mean? Unfair? Perhaps, perhaps. Still, I wonder. Why don’t you know this story — and why does no one tell it?

Umair

August 2018