Why a Report About Capitalism Doesn't Mention Capitalism

Richard Mellor

This is a report from a major capitalist institution, Bloomberg Inc., yet there is no mention of the term "capitalism". There's no suggestion that we live in a system of production and that debt is inherent in this system of production.  Michael Bloomberg incidentally, is number 10 on the Forbes 400 list of world's richest men worth $96 billion.

But what is the role of debt in a capitalist mode of production?  It allows the system to go beyond its limits, and avoids crisis only to postpone it and have crises return in a more violent form; debt has to be repaid and it is the working class that pays it. It was once explained to me akin to an elastic band that can function to a degree if it is stretched out. But at some point it will snap back or break altogether.  Marx, introducing crisis as an integral and repeated aspect of capitalist production wrote 180 years ago:

"In these crises, a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity — the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce."

In previous systems of production that preceded capitalism, Feudalism, Slavery,  tribal communities where the social product was not privately owned, if people died from hunger it was generally because of our inability to produce enough food. We had not developed the science to treat certain diseases or even recognize them as such. The development of agriculture and domestication of animals changed much of that.

With the rise of the capitalist system and its now global dominance, millions die though we have the means to feed them. They die of diseases we have cures for but are not treated. They have no safe drinking water because capitalism cannot provide access to it despite having the resources to do so.  They have no homes (human shelter) despite millions of them standing empty. Capitalism produces not for social needs, that's incidental. Capital is thrown in to production with the goal of having more of it returned to its owner than was laid out.

This surplus value, what the worker produces over and above the cost of production and the workers wages in that process, is the source of the capitalists' profit.

We live this experience, that society has more than we need to live a secure life. There in no reason on earth why hunger or poverty should exist except that it is a by product of the capitalist system, of how human society is organized and structured; it cannot be eradicated without eradicating the system, without a revolutionary transformation of society. But Bloomberg or the big business media in general, cannot entertain this idea. No ruling class would commit class suicide. It's not about greed in the abstract or an inherent human nature to think only of oneself.

Human society grew and prospered because we learned long ago that collective activity and working together if you like, was to our advantage; it benefited all. Crisis is inherent in capitalism because it is an unplanned system where production is for profit and not human wants. It is this we have to change.