Still a world to win
THE BRITISH Marxist Terry Eagleton has observed, "You can tell that capitalism is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism. It indicates that the system has ceased to be as natural as the air we breathe, and can be seen instead as the historically rather recent phenomenon that it is. Moreover, whatever was born can always die."
Certainly, in the last several years, "capitalism" has become a frequent subject of mainstream discussion. Radicals like myself are fond of citing opinion polls showing that young people today have a more favorable view of socialism than capitalism. But as remarkable as the results is the fact that the question is even asked. For decades, we were told that there was no alternative to the free-market system. But the financial crisis of 2008 shook capitalism so violently that questioning its legitimacy became acceptable.
There is no shortage of reasons to question that legitimacy. We can charge capitalism with being a profoundly unequal system; the world's 85 richest individuals control more than half of the world's wealth. We can charge it with being a racist system; the American gulag now houses more than 2.2 million men and women--disproportionately Blacks and Latinos.
We can charge it with failing to meet the basic needs for subsistence of the majority of its population; more than 80 percent of the world's population lives on less than $10 a day, and 22,000 children die each day due to poverty. And--if not most damningly, at least most dangerously--we can charge it with threatening the very ecosystem on which all life of the planet depends.
More at http://socialistworker.org/2014/03/26/still-a-world-to-win .
