Our Capitalism Trains You to Stay Poor
You have a decent income, but you are still frequently broke? There are reasons why this is so. And it has nothing to do with whether you’re smart or stupid.
Capitalism produces poverty. This is nothing new. But when people say that our Western economic system produces poverty, they usually mean the underpaid workers and the exploited people in the Third World.
But what about the middle and senior workers in our service society? Who talks about the people in the suburbs with two cars and a mortgage on their house? We do not call these people poor. And compared to those who are usually called poor, they certainly are not.
Nevertheless, millions of people have nothing left at the end of a month despite working in a well-paid job. At first glance, this is mainly their own fault. They spend more than they earn and thus slip into the debt trap.
The neoliberal economic theory still assumes that man is a homo oeconomicus, i.e., someone who makes his decisions rationally and according to economic criteria. According to this theory, there should be no poverty among the higher earners. A rational person would stick to a budget, save for emergencies, and make consumption decisions based on a cost-benefit principle.
Capitalism, however, is already much further along. It knows that homo oeconomicus does not exist, but at the same time, it claims the opposite.
To bombard people permanently with advertising and present consumption as meaningful can only be justified if one can refer to the economically acting individual’s rationality. You don’t have to buy all these things, says capitalism. But you have the opportunity to do so. Pointing out the possibility, in turn, is sold as freedom. And who did not want to be free? Isn’t freedom one of our fundamental values? Individualism and liberty are the foundation on which Western democracies are built.
But what good is freedom if we do not use it? The freedom to consume without limits seems worthless to us if we don’t really do it. So we buy. We buy a lot, and we buy more than we can afford.
Capitalism thinks this is great because one of its pillars is interest. If you consume more than you can afford, you have to take out loans. With it, one creates new money. Yes, that is true. Because you get into debt, the money supply grows, and the economy flourishes — just not your own.
Of course, there is no person called capitalism who could want anything. Nor is there an international conspiracy that actively seeks to keep the working population in poverty caused by debt. This mechanism is inherent in the system and is based to no small extent on the fact that homo oeconomicus does not exist.
By making it easy for us to spend more money, we do not shy away from it. Companies are even actively promoting the idea of getting into debt. Can’t you afford it right now? Then decide now for twelve small installments and order today.
Capitalism does not need a nation of MIllionaires. If everyone were debt-free and wealthy, the system would quickly come to a standstill. Where would economic growth come from if everyone would only act rationally and consume what they really need?
Someone who has a lot of money in the bank without spending it is useless for capitalism. If, for example, the cost of housing were so low that we could really save a large part of our income, many would perhaps work less. But workers who are not dependent on taking every low-paid or meaningless job because they consume little are damaging to growth. At a certain point, growth is only possible if the production costs for goods and services keep falling, and this requires an army of people who are forced to work for little money.
This is where the higher earners come into play again. They always keep the danger of economic decline in mind. Everyone knows that losing your job can quickly lead to real poverty and that you would then be forced to join the army of those who have to take on any job for a pittance.
But since it is not up to us whether we can keep our job and our status, we live in constant subconscious fear in the long run. In turn, anxiety is unbearable in the long run, so we have to numb it and bury it under a mountain of things.
Capitalism sells us consumption as an expression of individual freedom, but every purchase reduces the degree of our freedom in reality. Capitalism does not want you as a free human being. It needs you as a fearful, driven consumption machine that voluntarily makes itself more and more dependent on the system.
What sounds like Marxist propaganda here is not meant that way at all. It is not capitalism itself that is bad. It is its pure, uncontrolled form that is problematic. Capitalism is initially nothing more than the idea of supply and demand, the ratio of which determines the price of something. Even a communist country like China can practice capitalism.
Capitalism has nothing to do with the freedom or lack of freedom of individuals or even with their happiness. One can develop capitalism in manifold ways. In the western world, we have chosen a turbo-capitalism that puts the economy in the center and marginalizes people.
Even countries like Germany, where I come from, are now infected by the neoliberal plague. For decades, the so-called social market economy was considered the leitmotif of the German economy. Nobody should fall through the cracks, and everyone should participate in social life and satisfy their basic needs, regardless of their ability to perform.
But this is long gone. Over many years, the state has withdrawn from more and more areas and left them to the private sector. But when even hospitals today have to make a profit first and foremost, something has gone terribly wrong.
As I wrote in the headline, it is not THE capitalism that trains us to stay poor, but OUR capitalism.
The world doesn’t have to work the way it works at the moment. Everyone doesn’t need to get deeper and deeper into debt and live in constant fear of social and economic decline. These conditions are not based on natural laws but on our decisions.
How do we decide when we are asked what our future should look like? Will we accept that our capitalism drives us deeper and deeper into fear and debt, or will we start to look for a more humane capitalism that puts the human being and the community in the center? Will we finally insist that the economy must serve the people and not the other way around?
It doesn’t matter what we decide — we will deserve the result.
René Junge a published author writing on ILLUMINATION.
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