Capitalism's Inadequacies - And What To Do About It

Current Political System Incapable of Meeting Social, Economic and Environmental Challenges

It's a commonplace sentiment that politics in America is broken. Each week brings more evidence of deadlock in Washington, of social and economic decay and of disillusionment. The debased nature of politics, however, is only the most superficial symptom of our problems. Beneath the surface-level partisan bickering, much deeper currents have begun to shift.
Recent polls, for instance, show that roughly 80 percent of Americans believe their Congressional representatives to be "more interested in serving the needs of special interests groups" than "the people they represent." Almost four out of five believe a few rich people and corporations have much too much power. And only 37 percent - not much more than a third of the population - have confidence in the most solemn and august of American institutions, the Supreme Court.
It is clear that something different is going on - both with the economy and, more fundamentally, with democracy itself. The data on long-running trends are clear:
Real wages for roughly 80 percent of American workers have not gone up more than a trivial amount for at least three decades. At the same time, income for the top 1 percent has jumped from 10 percent of all income to roughly 20 percent. Put another way: Virtually all the gains of the entire economic system have gone to a tiny, tiny group at the top - for at least three decades.
Another disturbing trend: Almost 50 million Americans live in officially defined poverty. The rate is higher, not lower than in the late 1960s. Moreover, if we use the measuring standard common throughout the advanced world - half of median income - the number would be just below 70 million, and the rate almost 23 percent.
This is to say nothing of an unemployment rate that, if properly measured, is stuck in the range of roughly 14 to 15 percent. At the same time, a record 46.7 million Americans were on food stamps in 2012, up by 51 percent from the depths of recession in October 2008: another milestone on our collective road of decay.
And looming over all this, of course, is the mother of all difficulties: the building climate crisis.
The current political system is simply incapable of dealing with such challenges. It focuses on deficits, not answers. But long trends that don't change are a clear signal that it's not simply partisan bickering and Congressional stalemate - or even politics in general - that are the problem.
The trends were moving steadily downward long before the rise of the Tea Party, long before the Citizens United Supreme Court decision allowed corporations and the super-rich to pump big money directly into politics, and long before many other changes that have been heralded as tipping points of one kind or another.
When long, long trends, do not improve - when they grow steadily worse, year in and year out - it is clear that we face systemic problems, not simply political problems in the usual sense of the term. The question is: How do we deal with a systemic crisis - something built in to the political-economic system rather than the usual garden-variety political or economic crisis? How do we really confront that question squarely?

[The remainder of the article, by Guy Alperovitz, here , is more about long slow piecemeal reforms than any kind of revolution but if we are to take his claims of the climate crisis seriously then, if only for that reason alone, there is no time for the long painful path of tinkering with the system here and there, again and again and again. And are sentiments and conditions anywhere else in the world vastly different from those in the US? SOYMB's position on this is clear. Reforms, however valuable to one or more sections of the working class, are just not enough. Reforms are like travelling endlessly round a roundabout with no hope of turning off onto the right road. The only solution is to CHANGE THE SYSTEM root and branch by calling on all workers to strive together to abolish the capitalist wages system and all the ills that go with it.
To end, a short video by George Carlin, for those who still don't believe that capitalism has us by the short and curlies.]
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