Why U.S. Capitalism is So Brutal

Cliff Notes on the 1619 Project #2 — Capitalism

Back in July 2020, when U.S. Senator Tom Cotton made news by saying that slavery was a “necessary evil” on which the United States was built, I learned a number of things they never taught me in school — mostly via The 1619 Project, the collection of scholarly essays that Cotton was trying to smear.

From Nikole Hannah-Jones — the Project’s founding mother, New York Times journalist, and Pulitzer Prize winner — I learned that Black people have done more to realize the ideals of this nation than any other group.

Think about it.

Probably the most famous line in the U.S. Constitution is that “all men are created equal.” But when it was written, it didn’t apply to women. It didn’t apply to Blacks, or indigenous people, or people of color. And it didn’t apply to white men who didn’t own property or pay taxes. In fact, it only applied to about six percent of the population at the time. (This paragraph is from my first story on the 1619 Project.)

So how did the American ideal change from promising life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to just six percent of its people to all of them? In large part by Black people fighting for their human rights — repeatedly, forcefully, and bravely endangering their bodies and their lives to open the eyes of the white men in power so that they might consider the other people in the room.

It’s true other marginalized groups have fought for and sometimes won equal rights, but none has had the breadth and impact of the Civil Rights Movement, which was led by Black people and paved the way for the rest.

Hannah-Jones’ introductory essay is about the overarching idea of America.

“Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were first written. Black Americans have fought to make them true.”

Why U.S. Capitolism is particularly brutal

The second essay in the collection is written by Matthew Desmond, a Sociology professor at Princeton University. He posits that the American iteration of capitalism is particularly brutal because it is based on the plantation model, where one man or one family takes all.

How did America become a world power in the first place? How did it rise up from a loose collection of scrappy rebel colonies to a global powerhouse? Was it because everybody worked hard and did their best? Nope. The huge increase in national wealth was accomplished via land stolen from Native Americans and labor stolen from enslaved Blacks.

What made the cotton economy boom in the United States, and not in all the other far-flung parts of the world with climates and soil suitable to the crop, was our nation’s unflinching willingness to use violence on nonwhite people and to exert its will on seemingly endless supplies of land and labor.

And the effects of the plantation system went far beyond catapulting the United States to the top of the global money heap. It also shaped our society in cruel and inhuman ways, convincing poor workers that freedom is merely the absence of bondage — that they better not complain about horrific conditions because things could always get worse.

This plantation attitude was dramatized earlier this month when extreme weather and power outages left people freezing and without water in Texas and one mayor responded to requests for government help by calling his constituents lazy and weak. “The City and County, along with power providers or any other service owes you NOTHING! I’m sick and tired of people looking for a damn handout!” Colorado City Mayor Tim Boyd wrote on a Facebook post.

Ask why America doesn’t treat all its people fairly, and a common reply is that “it’s a capitalist country,” as if homelessness, slums, lack of physical and mental health care, food insecurity, mass incarceration, needy children, hordes of poverty-wage workers and a handful of obscenely rich company owners are a natural consequence of a capitalist economic system. But they aren’t.

Many capitalist systems around the world take care of their citizens and work to mitigate these ills via social democracies like the one that powers Germany.

But Americans put up with brutal conditions in part because they were indoctrinated by the plantation culture that grew the nation, Desmond writes.

It is the culture of acquiring wealth without work, growing at all costs and abusing the powerless. It is the culture that brought us the Panic of 1837, the stock-market crash of 1929 and the recession of 2008. It is the culture that has produced staggering inequality and undignified working conditions. If today America promotes a particular kind of low-road capitalism — a union-busting capitalism of poverty wages, gig jobs and normalized insecurity; a winner-take-all capitalism of stunning disparities not only permitting but awarding financial rule-bending; a racist capitalism that ignores the fact that slavery didn’t just deny black freedom but built white fortunes, originating the black-white wealth gap that annually grows wider — one reason is that American capitalism was founded on the lowest road there is.

How things could change for the better

The first thing Americans need to do is kick people like Tom Cotton to the curb. Pretending that white American men are exceptional and everyone else is disposable fodder is evil and foolish and over in 2021.

Cotton’s smear of The 1619 Project and promotion of “patriotic” education only adds poison to the already-polluted well. We need to teach our children, and ourselves, the true history of this country, so we can finally move beyond the brutal policies born of shameful beginnings. Personally, I’m in favor of reparations for Black and indigenous people, whether it’s money or free college or whatever else the experts decide is best. Like a good former Catholic, I want to pay my penance. It’s like James Baldwin said,

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

Next, we need to tax the rich to provide social programs like healthcare and college and preschool for all. When 1 percent of the country owns 40 percent of its wealth, and when a larger share of our working-age citizens live in poverty than in any other developed nation in the world, the American “Dream” needs a re-write.

Finally, we need to be politically active and support peoples like President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris who’ve listed four crises they want to address: the pandemic, climate change, economic collapse, and racial inequality. The last two on that list are direct consequences of the plantation-style capitalism that has so hurt the working class people in this country. We can do better. We have to do better. So I’m in, Joe and Kamala. I’m all the way in.

For further reading…

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