Marianne WilliamsonVerified account

1/You are stressing the debate between the possibility of “reforming” capitalism (a “moral” capitalism? Hmm….) and the belief (my belief!) that capitalism can’t be reformed and is ultimately the root cause for most of our societal ills, including of course climate change.

2/This is a complex debate and one that I can only scratch the surface on Twitter. In short, your nostalgia for a time when capitalism was “ethical and moral” stems from I would argue a blip in time for the overall trajectory of capitalism.

3/That is, we had a brief period when capitalism was controlled by our “socialist democratic” system, spanning about 2+ decades, the 40s/50s. Capitalism was indeed stymied by the Great Depression and WWII, but I would contend that this moment in time was an anomaly not the norm.

4/The “robber baron” era (ruthless businessmen doing anything to increase their profit) before the Great Depression/New Deal era is more the trajectory of capitalism. This trajectory was interrupted by the Great Depression/WWII.

5/ But capitalists soon began to chip away at the usurpation by our democracy, culminating in the 60s/70s with the emergence of Milton Friedman and his 'Chicago School' economists, who developed ultra free-market ideas based on deregulation and privatization.

6/In short, capitalism’s modus operandi is more and more profit, even when the profits are already in the millions. Capitalist entities do this through depressing wages (disempowering and dismantling unions, etc.), cutting or eliminating benefits, especially outsourcing.

7/Outsourcing leads to extremely low wages and little to no benefits and few to no regulations. The horrors inflicted on the “developing” world have been chronicled at length but if you haven’t read it, I would highly recommend Mike Davis’ brilliant work Planet of Slums.

8/Globalization is really what has been called “advanced capitalism,” which means capitalism doing what it has done since its inception in the 17th Century, expand and find more and more ways to make more and more profit.

9/Again, I’ve really collapsed a number of complexities here including how capitalism in itself, even when it seems like benevolent entity (e.g., the 50s) is as many scholars have cited, an inhumane economic system because at its base it needs a working poor to make its profit.