Top Five Ways Capitalism Failed Us in 2021

I think it is fair to say that 2021, like 2020, was an awful year globally, and sadly there is no reason to believe that 2022 will be any better. The best that I can say is that we live in interesting times. In this year in review, I will not be offering any cruel optimism or false hope about the year to come. We are enmeshed in endemic crises that the capitalist economic and political system has either caused or cannot respond to adequately. 

If we want a future, we will have to fight for it - it’s clear now that a better tomorrow requires challenging, changing, and finally, abandoning capitalism. Toward that end, I have listed the top 5 ways capitalism failed us in 2021. The point of this is to present the facts on how capitalism has shit the bed. 

If that depresses you - fair. Make sure you tune in for my final column of the year next week, where I go over the top 5 ways working-class people fought back in 2021. The stories of resistance and organising from all around the world this year should offer you hope. Even in these dark times, we have seen ordinary people stand up and show extraordinary courage in the face of overwhelming odds. I will be toasting them this New Year’s Eve with a beer in hand. Anyways, before we talk about solutions, let’s go over the problem. 

5. Capitalism is Killing Art 

Suppose you think that creative practice is a fundamental part of being human and that art has intrinsic value that cannot be expressed or captured in dollar signs - sorry. It has been a bleak year for those who value art for the sake of art. 

Let’s start with NFTs because, unfortunately, NFTs have been everywhere. NFT stands for non-fungible token. As far as I can tell, NFTs attempt to apply the logic of private property and intellectual property to easily replicable digital art and assets. The high-end art market has long been a place where the wealthy can funnel their wealth to evade taxes and whatnot; with NFTs, that practice seems to have gone digital. James Rushing Daniel points out that there is increasingly little difference between art and capital itself, and NFTs represent a conscious effort to entangle them further. This is a negative development in many ways, not least because increasingly blurring the line between art and capital makes it very clear that art is the purview of the elite. Just as an aside, the NFTs I’ve seen are incredibly mediocre, though there’s no accounting for taste. 

Speaking of incredibly mediocre cultural artefacts, the only films that get made are Marvel movies. I find this quite depressing because these ‘films’ are awfully dull and homogenised, and I’m not the only one who thinks so. Legendary filmmaker Martin Scorsese points out that the film industry’s commercial structure creates a clear incentive not to take risks. You go with what is guaranteed to make money. That means sidelining original and creative filmmaking and instead putting millions of dollars into repeating what works again and again and making Wasp Man 2: Stung in Manhattan (Feel free to steal this one, Marvel). This trend will only intensify as our media landscape becomes more and more monopolised by global media conglomerates who only want to invest in ‘products’ that offers guaranteed returns. When even established critically acclaimed filmmakers struggle to get funding for their films, what hope is there for young and upcoming artists? 2021 was a bleak year for creatives, and I think we need to point the finger at the culprit: capitalism. 

4. The Neverending Housing Crisis 

Capitalism has been failing to provide housing for people since its inception. Rather than view housing as a human right, property and land are treated instead as commodities to be profited from. Where profit or surplus is extracted, there are winners and losers. The winners are property owners, and the losers are renters and unhoused people. This is not a system designed to build houses for people to live in; it is about maximising the returns of existing property owners, which means creating scarcity and driving prices up.

In New Zealand, despite the pandemic and economic disruption, house prices have continued to skyrocket. House prices in Auckland increased by 26.3% and by a staggering 36.1% in Wellington. In New Zealand, house prices have increased sharply over the past few decades, far outstripping stagnant wages. The housing crisis is the central driver of the Victorian levels of wealth inequality we see in New Zealand today. You really cannot underestimate how these kinds of class cleavages eat away at social cohesion. In 2021, like most other years, the political system watched as the property market created profit for owners and failed again and again to provide housing for people who are not already on the ladder (that’s most of us). Solving the housing crisis means moving away from this failed model; providing housing should not be left to the profit-seeking market. In 2021 it should be clear that capitalism cannot solve the crisis it has caused. 

3. The Biden Administration 

The pathetic lack of achievements of the Biden administration is an important reminder that liberal capitalism does not seem able to reverse the general downward crisis-ridden trajectory the capitalist system is on. Biden was elected because he was not Trump; the pitch from liberals was that they could save the world from Trumpism and the worst excesses of capitalism. Liberals were responsible custodians of the economy, and they would not mismanage the pandemic - this was the dawn of a new day. Instead, things have gotten worse - more Americans have died of COVID during Biden’s tenure than Trump. The administration can barely pass legislation, never mind attending to the desperate needs of working-class Americans. Rather than ‘Build Back Better’, the Biden administration’s legacy will be the further erosion of Americans’ trust in government and institutions. How do the Democrats expect young people to vote for them after Biden reneged on his promise to cancel student loan debt and restarted payments amid the recent Omicron wave? To add insult to injury recently, White House press secretary Jen Psaki mocked the idea that the federal government should send rapid COVID tests to every household in America. I’m laughing as well. The idea of the American government serving the people does seem far-fetched. The failures of the Biden administration to even moderately reform American capitalism is a pertinent reminder that Liberalism will not save us. We need socialism. 

2. Astroworld and the Tornado Outbreak

What do these two tragic events have in common? In short, lives were unnecessarily lost because of greed. The horrific scenes of Astroworld management ignoring the desperate pleas for help from concertgoers mirrors Amazon’s refusal to let workers evacuate during a tornado. These were tragedies and casualties of a system that prioritises profit over working-class people’s lives. If you don’t believe me, I encourage you to listen to the victims. Security guards hired at Astroworld are suing Travis Scott, alleging Scott and the producers prioritised cost-cutting over security and safeguarding concertgoers. These workers, who ended up traumatised, reported that there was no crowd surge plan and not enough staff. On top of this, the staff hired received no crowd management training. The producer of the show had previously received fines for safety violations, but the system didn’t prevent them from producing Astroworld with fatal consequences. 

The negligence and greed seen at Astroworld are similar to Amazon’s behaviour towards their employees during the recent tornado in Edwardsville, Illinois. While natural disasters are no one’s fault, this tragedy, in particular, appears to have been avoidable. Amazon is required by law to have emergency plans and train their employees on what to do in an emergency. Despite this, Amazon workers report that they receive virtually no emergency training and that they are discouraged from taking time off during natural disasters because it would “slow down production”. In texts sent during the tornado warning Amazon workers, who later died, told their loved ones at the time that the company would not let them leave. 

Capitalists are always trying to get rid of regulations and red tape in favour of a supposedly free market; these tragedies are an example of why socialists oppose this. The trade union movement won health and safety legislation and regulations through a brutal and bloody class struggle in which many working-class people lost their lives. Recent events show us this struggle is ongoing. In its pursuit of profit above all else, capitalism too often fails to safeguard and protect life.  

1. The Pandemic 

Only one thing can take the top spot on this wretched list, and it’s the perpetual pandemic we are stuck in. Capitalism is not responsible for viruses, but its need to infinitely grow the economy on a finite planet is driving an explosion in infectious disease outbreaks. How? A combination of climate change, the resulting loss of biodiversity, deforestation and the destruction of the small pockets of remaining wildland mean that the ecosystems natural defence systems have been demolished. As farms and people expand into the wild and as animals are displaced from their natural habitats, we come into closer and closer contact with diseases waiting to jump from animals to humans. 

If creating a fertile environment for a pandemic was not enough, capitalism is also incapable of responding to a global outbreak of deadly infectious diseases. We have the knowledge and expertise to know what we should do but capitalism is incapable of long-term thinking - this is a system all about short-term profit for long-term pain. In the first instance, when the pandemic first started, we could have eliminated the threat of COVID-19 with a coordinated global health response and a sharing of resources ensuring that all countries were able to take basic public health measures to protect us from the virus. Failing that, in 2021, once we developed an effective vaccine, the logical thing to do would be to suspend any patent on this critical public health tool and ensure that it was globally available to one and all. This would have prevented the very predictable outcome of the virus mutating to avoid immunity - conferred either by vaccines or previous infection by earlier strains. But no, instead, let’s have a perpetual pandemic; it makes sense for the Global North to hoard vaccines while the Global South acts as a petri dish for new variants. It’s not like our health is interconnected. Some countries like the United States nowadays begrudgingly support the call to suspend the patent on COVID vaccines. Still, the World Trade Organisation is dragging its feet on meeting to vote on this. The system can’t even act to save itself. The perpetual pandemic and the emergence of Omicron is the number one way capitalism failed us in 2021. 

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