In WDRL 136 I added an article to the “Going beyond” section called “The Mental Disease of Late-Stage Capitalism”. As I got some very interesting reply via email and I decided to publish it so others can read this as well.

Hi,

Just a quick note about some of the "Going beyond ..." articles you have promoted.

You should be careful about conflating capitalism with whatever economic system is prevalent in today's developed world.

Capitalism is about the voluntary cooperation between human beings. It has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and should be promoted by everyone who cares about our welfare, especially that of the poor. But there's no doubt that the system has been "rigged" by special interests on a scale that could never happen if those in power didn't have so much ... power. Crony capitalism and corporatism is dangerous, free markets and free minds are the opposite.

FWIW, I'm from Scandinavia which is, thankfully, more capitalist than the US in many ways, and in others less so.

I apologize in advance if I've misunderstood your stance.

Kind regards Nicolai

Hey Nicolai,

first, thank you so much for pointing this out. It’s very important to me to get active feedback on controversial things like this and I don’t want to offend anyone with my linked articles.

So, I read this article and linked to it because I felt it’s important to think about it. I know that discussing about the pros and cons of capitalism is a tough choice, so I hoped to have chosen neutral words for it. This does not seem the case though, as your reply indicates. When writing my link descriptions I usually stick to the wording used in the article itself, which does not make a differentiation as you suggest into which sub-variant of capitalism is meant here. I think the best way to describe what’s meant by the author has been written in this article in the Washington Post:

“They’re not rejecting the concept,” Della Volpe said. “The way in which capitalism is practiced today, in the minds of young people — that’s what they’re rejecting.”

That’s also my personal feeling and I even think that your opinion is on the same line as you said that corporatism etc hurts the rest of the world. And of course we can assume that capitalism in the recent decades has led to more wealth for most people in the world. By no means I’m a fan of completely different approaches to that but on the other hand, we now are reaching a state where we see the limits of growth due to environmental and resource limits (the world itself has limited resources) while capitalism is designed to work with infinite growth. So we’re now in an age where I feel we should figure out how to improve from pure capitalism towards something more clever. There are already concepts to improve (fixed base-income for example would be a great way to prevent average getting poorer while it still supports the possibility to get richer and do more meaningful work [which is following capitalism strategy]). What I want to say is basically, that ethics are (hopefully) getting more important these days and with redesigning the existing forms of capitalism (whatever they might be, because they’re, as you say, very different in countries around the world) to improve them.

Hope that explains my motivation a bit better but by now I realise that I’d never could have expressed this in a shorter way and this is likely a bit too much for the content of a WDRL link :D

Cheers, enjoy the Sunday and no need to apologise btw! — Anselm