Buckle up, friend. Here’s a smattering — just a little one — of headlines I woke up to.

The Washington Post saying about the American Medical Association warning of cratering life expectancy: “There’s something terribly wrong. Americans are dying young at alarming rates.” The ever so kind Walton family giving Walmart workers a tiny discount instead of…time off for Thanksgiving. Mark Zuckerberg looking the other way and whistling over propaganda. Another feel-good story about Americans desperately crowdfunding healthcare…on Thanksgiving. Republicans in Ohio telling doctors to…re-implant…ectopic pregnancies…which is…medically impossible…adding stupidity to violent misogyny…or else face murder charges.

I could go on, almost endlessly. But let me cut to the chase. That’s what a dystopia looks like. It’s a picture perfect portrait of one.

Yet every single day, I see elites like pundits and professors and just average people asking the same old question. “How is all this happening?! My God! What even is this?!” They ask it over and over and over again, about a thousand different flavors of American dystopia — like all the mind-bogglingly horrific headlines above (which are just a sample from one day.) The question…like it’s groundhog day…remains the same: “My God! How is all this happening!!”

It’s not a rhetorical question. I think Americans are genuinely confused and baffled by what’s happening to their society. Hence, this moment has a certain attitude: one of a kind of desperate bewilderment.“How is this happening!!”, asked over and over and over again about a million different things — as if the answers are beyond us. But the rest of the world, from Europe to Africa to Asia, knows all too well why America’s imploding. It wonders why America doesn’t. It wonders why Americans don’t really even know that…Americans are asking the same question, over and over again, in a thousand different ways. But it’s just one question. And it has one answer, too. One simple and straightforward answer.

All the forms of the question “why is this dystopian thing happening!!” Are really the same question. The answer to all those questions is the same, and it goes like this.

This is what capitalism is. This is what a capitalist society is. All of it. All the weird, gruesome, bizarre headlines that you read every day, day after day. All. Of. It. This is what a capitalist society is. This dystopia.

There are three simple facts everyone should know these days — and that’s number one. What are all the dystopian headlines we’re confronted with on a daily basis?What unites them? What’s the theme?

(This is the part where if you’re American, you’ll cry “stop being so condescending!!” — Americans don’t seem to understand that. At all. Even a little bit. Maybe you yourself do, but there’s certainly no general understanding at a social, cultural, or intellectual level of the simple fact…hello, this is what a capitalist society is.)

A capitalist society is based on exploitation. Exploitation makes the rich super rich, the poor destitute, and the merely affluent poor. What happens in a capitalist society? The rich become super rich, then ultra rich, the super ultra mega rich. Meanwhile, whatever middle class there was implodes, because their poverty is how the rich become super ultra mega rich, by underpaying them as “employees”, and then overcharging them as “consumers.”

With me so far? It’s elementary to see that basic logic behind what, maybe 50% of those dystopian headlines. The ones about Americans not being to able to afford decent lives anymore, or a tiny number of men like Bezos and Zuck having gotten so rich they could pay off the entire student debt and still be mega billionaires. The ones about Amazon employees not being able to take bathroom breaks, while Facebookers earn billions for selling ads that are really propaganda, or dynasties having gotten filthy rich by making millions of people poor, sick, and miserable. This is what a capitalist society is. It’s a place where exploitation is the only force that operates at a socioeconomic level anymore.

Why does the average American live paycheck to paycheck now? Because this is a capitalist society, and they were always just worthless commodities to it. Why do the majority of Americans struggle to pay even basic bills, like housing, food, utilities? Because this is a capitalist society — and they’re the exploited proles. Why did all the gains of the economy over the last few decades go to a tinier and tinier number of richer and richer people? Because this is a capitalist society, and capital takes all the winnings. Why all these strange, weird forms of daily dystopian exploitation? That is what a purely capitalist society is. A dystopia of exploitation, abuse, dehumanization, commodification. The answer to all the questions of dystopia is the same, and it’s simple: because this is a capitalist society.

It’s not complicated, and it’s not hard. But it does require growing up a little, and seeing things as they truly are. That brings me to my second fact.

A capitalist society is not really a modern society at all. A decent, enlightened, civilized place, where people are bonded together by and for a higher purpose. It’s a Darwinian jungle of bitter self-preservation, where the weak perish, because only the strong must survive.

What do the new super rich do with all their billions? Well, they don’t pay taxes, so there’s nothing left to fund a working society with. You can hardly have a working society on what’s left over from the pittance a teacher or a van driver earns. So a capitalist society never becomes a working one — at least in a modern sense.

Why doesn’t America have functioning healthcare, education, transport, media, retirement, safety nets…a single working social system? Because it’s a capitalist society, duh. Not only is there nothing to invest in them — there’s no reason to have them, according to elites, because, well, capitalism can always do it better. Hence, not once in my lifetime or yours has an American economist or thinker ever — ever — supported public healthcare, education, retirement, or any other public good. Capitalism can always do it better, according to…thinkers and pundits trained only in the logic of capitalism.

So instead of functioning social systems, Americans have capitalism, which exploits them mercilessly, for the very things they could simply give each other. It exploits them literally to the death: Americans are now dying younger and younger, because they don’t have healthcare, education, jobs, incomes, support, safety nets, and so on. What reason is there to go on living, many ask, in a society which denies you any real opportunities to be free at all.

American society isn’t really society in the sense of a place where people respect one another, are bonded with one another, see themselves as part of a joint endeavour. It isn’t a society even in formal senses: it’s legal system literally has no working conception of the common good, only power, it’s economic system has no functioning notion of the common wealth, only profit, and it’s social norms and mores literally don’t value equality in any genuine sense whatsoever ( which is why, for example, black people are poorer today than at the dawn of civil rights — what the?). America isn’t a society at all — people aren’t together for any larger reason or higher purpose. They are only there to survive. And the only real way to survive left is to prey on someone weaker and even less fortunate than you.

That explains another maybe 30% or so of those dystopian headlines. Why doesn’t Bezos pay taxes? Because this is a capitalist society. Why do Americans have to beg each other online for pennies to pay medical bills with? Because this is a capitalist society. Why is there massive student debt that cripples entire generations? Because this is a capitalist society. Why, why, why? Because. This. Is. A. Capitalist. Society. But a capitalist society is not really a civilized place of kindness, empathy, wisdom, and humanity. It’s not really a society at all. Just combat.

That brings me to my third fact.

Capitalist societies implodes into dystopias, by way of fascism, authoritarianism, theocracy, tribalism and many, many more forms of organized violence and hate.

This is the place where Americans really get stuck — even the well-meaning types who’ve studied a bit of European thinking. How did America end up with a fascist-authoritarian President? Why is it that the average American flinches — like maybe even you did — when anyone says that, even though this Prez has literally put little kids in cages in camps, which is a textbook crime against humanity? Why is supremacy resurgent, and why do hate, fear, and violence rule the political landscape? Because capitalism implodes into fascism.

How? Well, consider all those millions of downwardly mobile Americans. They were promised better lives than their grandparents. And one day, not so long ago, they woke up the bitter reality that they were going to live worse lives. Vastly worse lives. Lives of something very much like neo-servitude, lives without much real freedom, opportunity, or prosperity. What happens when a…whole middle class…just implodes?

They tend to turn on those even more powerless than them, in rage and hate and vengeance. They’re the easiest target, after all. And usually, demagogues spring up to help them. “It’s not the billionaires fault!”, cries a demagogue, usually funded by a billionaire or three. “It’s those dirty, filthy people’s fault. Those Jews, Muslims, Mexicans, women, gays. Why, they’re not even people at all. They’re subhumans! Why, then, are you allowing them to live among us like human beings, and infect us? They’re the ones responsible for our poverty and despair!! All we have to do is eliminate them — and we will be Great Again!!”

Sound familiar? It’s the story of Weimar Germany turning into Nazi Germany. And it’s also the story of America in decline turning into dystopian America. Authoritarian America. Fascist America. How much more obvious does it need to be? Do you know who has the world’s highest number of children in concentration camps? America does. Grow up, wake up, get real.

What happens, to put it another way, is that people revert back to older systems because capitalism has failed them. Those systems usually involve a heaping dose of hate, supremacy, bigotry, and misogyny, and allegiance to the most violent and dumbest man — because all those offer a kind of refuge from capitalism’s predations. People go atavistic, they turn back the clock, society regresses and retreats into pre-modern tribalisms made of hierarchies of violence, race, and power, because capitalism can’t offer a better life anymore.

So middle class implosions, economic stagnation, and downward mobility produce collapses, in which nationalism goes extreme, and becomes white-hot fascism, as sure as the day follows the night. History has shown that pattern over and over and over again so often that it’s as predictable as the seasons. Germany. Russia. China. India. Why would America have been immune? It wasn’t. The problem was that its elites thought it was immune from fascist collapse — and still, bafflingly, even when there are a hundred thousand kids in concentration camps — think it is. They think it’s not happening here. And maybe you still do too.

Newsflash: it did happen here. Some part of you knows it. The only question is whether you can admit it to yourself, because doing so involves shame, guilt, fear, rage, and despair.

Let me sum all that up, even more simply. Capitalism implodes into fascism. When its left to its own devices, when its unrestrained and unleashed to loose the full fury of its greed and the venom of its savagery. Capitalism implodes into fascism by hollowing out middle classes, promoting envy and resentment as values, corrupting polities, producing a sense of fatalism and despair, commodifying human life and emotion and accomplishment until everything with a heart and soul in it feels worthless. Capitalism implodes into fascism by exploiting the hapless prole so hard he has nothing left — yet all he believes in, really, is the principle of exploitation: only the strong should survive, and the weak should perish. All there is left to do is find someone weaker, to exploit even more brutally than he himself has been exploited. Voila — tribalism, violence, hate…fascism.

If Americans understood these three principles, they’d be able to make much — much — better sense of what’s happening to their society. That’s not my ego talking. It’s just a simple reality They’d be able to stop asking the same question, over and over again, every single day, in a thousand ways — and never being able to answer it. They’d stop having to grasp in the dark like blind people, unable to touch the obvious. They’d understand what more or less the rest of the world does, from Africa to Asia to Europe, where people are all amused and baffled by why Americans don’t seem to able to grasp the basic, simple fact…

This is a capitalist society. This is what happens to a capitalist society. All of it. It implodes into a dystopia. It repeats the horrors and stupidities of history’s darkest moments, by way of exploitation, poverty, hate, fatalism, and despair. The answer to all the dystopian questions is the same: because this is a capitalist society.

Americans are going to struggle with that — all of it, because in their heads, even if they don’t know it, unconsciously, they’re still fighting a Cold War against “communism.” They can’t help it. It’s been drilled into them over and over again every day from the moment they were born. Capitalism good, communism bad! But the world isn’t so simple. And that war is over. Guess who won? Nobody did. The communists lost, sure. But so did the capitalists. American collapse mirrors — and perhaps even exceeds by now — Soviet collapse. The communists failed. But so did the capitalists.

Those three facts above are the lessons too many Americans, I think, still struggle to grasp. I don’t blame them. Nobody much teaches them otherwise. In fact, all their leaders and pundits go to bizarre and hilarious lengths to avoid even ever coming close. But it’s up to Americans to try to learn these lessons, finally — or keep on asking that same old question, all the way down the abyss. “My God!! What happened to us?!!” Ah, my friends.

This — this dystopia — is what a capitalist society is.

Umair

November 2019