America’s conducted a great social experiment — though many Americans don’t know it. Every bit as grand as Soviet communism — and just as much of an epic, disastrous failure, too, riddled with many of the same social problems, from inequality to poverty to suicide, corruption, despair and broken dreams.

America’s strange experiment tested the following hypothesis. If we left capitalism to its own devices — if we unmade all the rules that reined it in, and took away all the regulations that held it to account we could imaginably get away with — it would “regulate itself.” That is, the magical utopia of the classical French laissez-faire economists would finally emerge — or the darker one of the modern American libertarian. Competition would make sure that no one built a monopoly — and something like a wonderland of noble, virtuous capitalists, serving society like kind and gentle helpers would emerge.

Now, you might be right to laugh a little at this point. Who with a modicum of historical knowledge thinks that capitalism would “regulate itself”? Did the slave traders regulate themselves? The workhouses? Do sweatshops? When has capitalism ever regulated itself? And if by definition it’s only concerned with maximizing profit, by way of ownership — at least American style capitalism — why on earth would it regulate itself? Aren’t these two goals fundamentally and diametrically opposed?

In fact, wouldn’t it do the opposite — regulate those who wished to regulate it? For doesn’t the very idea that capitalism will “regulate itself” also mean that we don’t need democracy, society, and government? Oh, hi Newt Gingrich, Paul Ryan, and the gang. That fundamental, comical error is what at this point fully five decades of American thinking have been built upon — and the results have been catastrophic, catapulting authoritarians to power, corroding the polity, shattering norms imploding the middle class, and swinging like a wrecking ball through society.

As anyone with common sense might have predicted, the magical wonderland of self-regulating capitalism never came to be. The capitalists didn’t serve society like kind and gentle helpers — they rampaged through it, and laid waste to it, like feudal barons. Competition didn’t emerge on any scale whatsoever — instead, industry after industry was “rolled up” (it’s an explicit strategy they teach at business school) by literal capitalists, private equity funds and so forth — which is to say, the construction of huge monopolies was constructed not just in public, but actually celebrated and lauded and rewarded as an intrinsically worthy cultural and social goal.

Capitalism didn’t just not regulate itself — it began to regulate society. It rewrote the rules so that debt would follow you beyond bankruptcy, and then past death. It amped student debt up to usurious rates. It made it legal to raid pension funds, and stash the loot offshore. What little was left wasn’t placed in public systems — but in 401Ks, which earned financial industries billions, maybe trillions, but by now, American were barely retiring. Incomes had been stagnant for decades — and Americans were deep in debt just to make ends meet.

And yet capitalism wasn’t done — it was barely beginning. It was remaking society in its image — just as communism remade society in its image, before it. It altered cultural norms and values — naked, aggressive greed, vanity, inauthenticity, and superficiality was now something to be celebrated, lionized, and rewarded. It changed social structures — the middle class simply fell apart, while the rich lived isolated in guarded enclaves, and the poor were worked to the bone. It pounded apart the notion that people could ever invest in one another — no high speed trains, no public healthcare, no social systems of any kind, really. But with no common ground, with nothing shared between them, what was there left to unite people? Ah, but did capitalism want people to be united at all?

As an ideological force, capitalism spread the strange, bizarre, upside-down idea that all this was good for the average person, too — and the average person, inundated with a tsunami of misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda, spread on Faux News etcetera, came, often enough, to believe it. The only cultural ideal that was allowed by now was that a person was there to be a self-interested, profit-maximizing individualist, because society was an arena for the survival of the fittest, an endless Darwinian contest. Kindness and goodness became weakness. Frailty was something to prey upon — not to protect. All this was reinforced over and over again, in endless reality TV shows, gameshows, articles, books, theories that grew more and more divorced from the obvious truth of a collapsing society. The myth of the predatory lone wolf as the new Zarathustra, the ideal ur-person of capitalism, wasn’t a hard myth to push, particularly, in a society founded on the belief that some people weren’t people at all. Ironically, not even to proles who had less chance of ever becoming capitalists than a snowball does of rolling uphill in hell.

Capitalism knew what every great system before it, from feudalism to tribalism to empire, had. The ultimate form of regulation wasn’t extrinsic, money — it was intrinsic. When, if, people believed — then not a finger needed to be lifted to control them. And by now, capitalism used its cultural hegemony to control American society wholesale. Not a single dissenting view — was capitalism really good for Americans? — was allowed in a single mainstream article, book, essay, on a single TV show, movie, or film. Capitalism was the only thing that was allowed to be — and though no one really understood it, this was the ultimate form of social regulation.

The result was catastrophic to a degree unseen, perhaps, since the days of the Weimar Republic. Today, while private equity funds celebrate “rolling up” the pharma industry, 40% of Americans struggle to afford basic medicines, medical bankruptcy is commonplace, as is having to choose between medicine and a home. 80% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, and 70% can’t raise emergency savings, while the most successful capitalists now own trillion dollar companies, and are richer than kings of old — and society has no real support systems left to speak of.

What would be considered moral abominations, colossal failures, or outright crimes, in other societies, are everyday features of American life. Crowdfunding insulin, because it costs a hundred times what it does in…Canada. Your kids being massacred at school. Your parents living in their car. Your grandparents choosing to die because they can’t afford elderly care. None of these things were remotely normal — nor moral, nor acceptable, nor decent — and yet because capitalism had cultural regulated American, while Americans felt frustrated, ashamed, angry, and even outraged — they directed their anger everywhere but at capitalists.

The right directed its anger where it always had — at those it considered subhumans, whether migrants or blacks or women (even if the angry were all those things.) The left directed its anger at the right, for being angry at the vulnerable, the powerless, the dispossessed. But no one much in all this seemed to remember — even to understand — any of the above. That the failure wasn’t just one side’s, or the other’s — but that of a system, an ideology, a way. And neither left nor right in America had questioned that ideology — but championed it so much so that it had become all there was, could be, the alpha and omega of everything, from culture to politics to economics, from work to play to relationships. On Sunday, sure, some Americans said they were Christians. But Jesus threw the moneylenders out of the temple, and on Monday, Americans welcomed them with open arms. Capitalism had become in America what communism had been to the Soviet Union — the fundamental ordering principle of all human thought, action, endeavour, imagination, all life itself, from cradle to grave, from seed to leaf, root to branch.

Just as Soviet communism had many sides, liberal, conservative, reformist — but no dissent — so too American thought and life devolved, whatever “side” it might consist of, to slightly different flavors of capitalism — but not a word of dissent. No dissent, no disagreement, no questioning, was ever possible, of the fundamental idea: is a society, a life, a mind, only built on capitalism — to the fullest extent it can be, which in America is 75% of the economy, probably the highest in history — good for us? Just as in the Soviet Union — only one system was allowed, permitted, discussed, seen, or understood. And to venture beyond that system was forbidden — grounds for exile from the job, the career, the academy, the media, and so on. Now capitalism was the only idea left in the American mind — the only thought inside all the other thoughts, which were only its pale reflections. Would capitalism be the last idea America ever had? And would slavery be the first? That would be fitting, after all, in a way.

America had gone Soviet by now. But was that any great surprise? These two empires, though testing different hypotheses, were mirror images. One tested communism, the other capitalism — but though the ideology differed, the structure of the hypothesis did not. In both bases, it was totalist, dissent-free, required and demanded absolute ideological purity. Not a single American economist, politician, newspaper columnist, or intellectual, for example, stood for a simple thing like a genuine public healthcare system (not “Medicare for All”, which isn’t), at any point from 1980 to 2018 — even while poor nations began to build such things. This was Soviet style rigidity, inflexibility, avoidance of reality, mixed with hubris, arrogance, and ignorance. Capitalism had gone from hegemonic cultural force to the last idea in the American mind — and now become an unquestionable sacrament, an article of faith, a secular religion, a plastic god to beg for alms, and prove one’s faith and piety to by sacrificing one’s neighbors, young, and old.

Is that how the American story ends? You’re going to have to answer that question. Here’s the reason I brought all this up (LOL). My Twitter was abuzz with the idea of busting monopolies today — one of the latest notions racing across the American left. It doesn’t take a genius to see that monopoly has become a very big problem in America — industry after industry is “concentrated”, or dominated by just handful of companies, in many cases, just one. With monopoly, come a number of daunting socioeconomic problems — inequality, stagnant wages, predation, corruption, to name just a few.

But is the problem today’s monopolies — or is the problem that capitalism causes monopoly? It might sound like a distinction without a difference — but the answer leads us to very different places. If we believe that the problem is just these monopolies, then we’ll bust today’s, Amazon, Facebook, Google, and so forth — and all will be well. But if the problem is that capitalism causes monopoly — then no matter how many we bust, new ones will be built, and all the very same maladies will emerge all over again. And such a country will be stuck in a kind of cycle that goes nowhere, really — which is where America’s been for half a century now. So which is it? Do we need to regulate a handful of monopolies — or capitalism’s to produce monopoly? Do we prune the tree — or plant a different one?

What do the results of the strange American experiment capitalism say? I’d say that all the above pretty unequivocally proves that capitalism is the act of constructing a monopoly. That is, left to its own devices, capitalism will capitalize…and capitalize…and capitalize…until it’s chewed through everything, including the planet, democracy, the future, and your grandkids. But that also means that there can only be a few really big winners of the game. It’s in capitalism’s nature to produce monopoly just as much as it’s in hemlock’s nature to produce poison. We can prune the hemlock — but the poison is in its nature.

Now, if that’s the case, then regulating today’s monopolies is besides the point. Sure, we can regulate Apple and Google and Amazon and so on — and should — but that doesn’t solve the problem in any whatsoever. It merely means that we have mitigated the worst effects for a few years, until tomorrow’s monopolies emerge, and have to be broken up all over again. Of course, this is a lengthy and costly process for a society — it takes decades, and lawyers, and courts, and huge amounts of money, to even begin to conceive of such a thing. And it’s an uphill battle. But in all that time, we haven’t done a single thing about the underlying problem — which is that capitalism regulated society, for its own benefit, its own advantage and profit, and still does, in every regard, socially, culturally, politically, economically. In fact, we have reinforced that very problem, by suggesting that society can only intervene to regulate capitalism in special, exceptional cases. Otherwise, capitalism works more or less just fine. It’s an orange tree, not a hemlock bush.

But is capitalism something that needs powerful, fundamental rules to govern it — or merely an intervention here and there every now and then to correct it? Do you see the difference? It’s the difference between saying: “everyone has a right to healthcare which no one, no entity or organization, can ever take away, for profit’s sake”, and saying: “capitalism will give everyone healthcare, we just have to design the right kind of marketplace!” America’s tried the second approach for coming on five decades now — and it’s failed spectacularly time and time again. Yet it seems to never try the first. So seemingly similar approaches take us to very different places when it comes to sociopolitical systems.

Is capitalism something that’s gone temporarily wrong, or something that can’t go very right — is it something which just can’t be an ordering principle, ideology, rule, for a whole society, culture, economy, polity, without causing them all to collapse? That’s the real question for America. It was exactly the same for Soviet communism — and not answering that question correctly is why it fell. Yet American thinkers are every bit as ideologically wedded to capitalism as Soviet ones were to communism, as the only one that is allowed to be, even to be thought about — and so cannot seem to understand that it might need fundamental governance and transformation, not just corrective guidance and occasional reformation.

When we ask the question of monopoly, we’re really asking: at what scale does capitalism work best? And when we ask that question, we are really asking: how much will capitalism regulate itself? The answer, if you think about all the above, goes something like: LOL — capitalism isn’t going to regulate itself anymore than a mosquito’s going to stop itself from biting, or a shark from eating. It’s insatiable — by design. It is not designed to ever be satisfied — it could eat the whole universe, and still be hungry for profit. And that means that capitalism works best at the scale that you and I probably enjoy — our local neighborhood bars, cafes, restaurants, and so on — the human scale.

To design societies that are fit for human beings, not corporations, who want to just be decent people, not voracious predators who aspire to own everything under the sun, is going to take rethinking political economy along those lines. It is going to take asking bigger and deeper questions, I think, than we are prepared to ask yet. And that is probably because many of us are still convinced, deep down, that capitalism really cares about us. Doesn’t it? That it might not, and never did, is too painful to face. After all — who would we be then?

Maybe, just maybe, we would be free.

Umair

November 2018