These are the
conventional definitions of capitalism.
Capitalism is an economic
system based on the private ownership of the means
of production and their use for the purpose of obtaining
profit.[1][2][3][4][5]
This socioeconomic system has developed historically through several
stages and is defined by a number of basic constituent elements:
private
property, profit
motive, capital
accumulation, competitive
markets, commodification,
wage labor,
and an emphasis on innovation
and economic
growth.[6][7][8][9][10][11]
Capitalist economies may experience business
cycles of economic growth followed by recessions.[12]
(Source:
Wikipedia)
What
is capitalism?
The Editors of Encyclopaedia
Britannica
Capitalism is a widely adopted
economic system in which there is private ownership of the means of
production. Modern capitalist systems usually include a
market-oriented economy, in which the production and pricing of
goods, as well as the income of individuals, are dictated to a
greater extent by market forces resulting from interactions between
private businesses and individuals than by central planning
undertaken by a government or local institution. Capitalism is built
on the concepts of private property, profit motive, and market
competition. (Source:
Encyclopædia Britannica)
-
-
-
Capitalism
A term coined to describe the use of private capital to finance
economic activity. Investors and entrepreneurs
use their money to create businesses, hiring workers, renting
property and buying equipment as needed. Any surplus, or profit,
belongs to the entrepreneur or investors. Communism
is seen as the obverse of capitalism, as all economic activity is
controlled by the state. (Source:
The Economist)
However a more to the point definition of capitalism can be
expressed this way.
Capitalism: an economic system designed to
transform the labour of the working class into the wealth of the
owning
class. (Source:
The5thColumnist)
Capitalism started
unrestrained until workers organized and at the cost of thousands
murdered by capital (and the
Pinkertons) forced employers to bargain with them, arguing for
amongst other things a fair day’s pay for a fair days’ work.
Workers union organizing also led to political victories including
collective bargaining and labour standards legislation, as well as
workplace health and safety legislation, and of course the
weekend and extending the
middle class beyond, doctors, lawyers and merchants.
The capitalist class
was not content with earning a fair profit and invented the belief
that corporations must seek the maximum return for shareholders with
no regard to the workers, the community, or the environment and found
ways to do this.
It included moving
production abroad to countries with lower or no labour or
environmental standards and where jobs could not be moved such as the
service industry converting wage jobs to piece-work jobs or co-called
“independent contractor” jobs in the so- called gig or app
industry.
The result has been
unprecedented inequality
.
So what is the
solution
A purist Marxist
would suggest we just wait for (or hasten) the inevitable collapse of
capitalism and then “bring to birth a new world from the ashes of
the old”. But such a strategy esquires the collapse of society as
we know it and it will not be just the 1% (or 10%) of the wealthiest
that may deserve to suffer but everybody in the middle. Only those
with nothing to lose will lose nothing in this scenario.
This leaves the
dreaded incrementalism
as a practical solution that may even be able to achieve the
political will to make it happen if done strategically.
Let us look first at
the issues we want to address and I see two main issues.
Corporate
concentration
The first being,
despite capitalism’s claim of promoting competition, the reality is
that it has lead to economies of monopolies and oligopolies with
increasing
corporate concentration driving the small businesses it was
suppose to encourage out of business. Government regulation has been
continuously weakened regarding corporate concentration particularly
as it applies to the media, weakening one of the main pillars of
democracy, an independent press.
This needs to be
addressed and it is not a radical idea to go back to legislation and
measures that existed previously while capitalism was thriving.
Economic and
Political Inequality
The other being
that, along with this, it has lead to massive personal economic
inequality, and this massive economic power held by a few has become
political power where even in so-called democracies the concept of
one person one vote has been replaced one dollar one vote as far as
the reality of political decision making is concerned. See: Economic
inequality leads to democratic erosion, study finds | University of
Chicago News.
One of the easiest
ways to address inequality and redistribute wealth is through the
income tax system and again I suggest we start by going back to
taxation levels that existed while capitalism was thriving.
Marginal Tax
Rates
Today in 2025 the
marginal tax rate on the highest earners in the United States is 37%
while in Canada it is 33%, but it has not always been that low.
Source:
Comparing Income Taxes: Canada vs. USA in 2025
Between 1951 and
1963 the United States marginal tax rate on the highest earners was
over 90%, while in Canada during the same period the marginal tax
rate on the highest earners varied between 90% and 75%. Capitalism
was thriving over that period, albeit without the ridiculous levels
of income and wealth inequality we see today. As a first
(incremental) step in tax reform I propose we go back to those
levels.
Source:
Bradford Tax Institute
Source:
Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives
Wealth Tax
The next
(incremental) step in tax reform to address excessive individual
income and wealth inequality should be a wealth
tax. As of 2021, five out of 36 OECD
countries implement a wealth tax on individuals. The New
Democratic Party and Canadians
For Tax Fairness both propose a modest wealth tax of 1% to 3%
depending on level of wealth. The United States Democratic Party does
not appear to have a consistent policy on wealth taxes, but both
Bernie
Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have proposed wealth taxes of 2% to
3% depending on level of wealth. I would propose we start with a
wealth tax similar to those proposals.
Final Stage of
Tax Reform
The
existence of billionaires (and now trillionaires) is, to put it
bluntly, immoral. The final stage of (incremental) tax reform, after
people have been eased into the idea of a wealth tax, is to use the
tax system to tax back all income over a million dollars a year and
all wealth over 100 million dollars. I consider this to be modest
proposal as it still allows for
a considerable level of inequality but not the blatantly excessive
and immoral levels we currently have.
Reigning in
Capitalism
Render
unto the public sector the things that are the public sector’s, and
unto the privater sector the things that are the private sectors
There may be a place in the economy for capitalism and the private
sector but it should not dominate our lives and society as it
currently does. It needs to be put in it’s place.
Health
Care
Nobody
should profit from someone else’s misery. It is a simple matter of
ethics and morality. Health care should not be provided for profit
but should be funded and delivered by a single-payer
public system that
provides is better
health care
and better
economics.
Source:
Canadian Medical Association
Water
Water
is
essential for human survival so our access to it
should not be dependent on someone else making a profit. As water
becomes scarcer it becomes vital that governments protect our vital
water supplies and not sell them off to the highest bidder. Our
water supplies should not be put at risk for data centres to store
the high tech industry’s (or even government’s) surveillance data
on us
and
certainly not for it’s ill fated so called artificial intelligence
dangerous
LLM
bullshit.
Local
water supplies should not be privately owned but preferably be
municipal utilities. Water resources should only be made available to
the private sector when there is a surplus to public needs.
Food
Access
to food should also
not be dependent on monopolistic
corporations making excessive profits.
Something
needs to be done about the corporate concentration in
the
oligopolistic corporate agrifood industry.
Corporate
Control of Agriculture – Farm Aid
GRAIN
| Top 10 agribusiness giants: corporate concentration in food &
farming in 2025
The
Monopoly Problem at the Heart of Canada's Food System | Perspectives
Journal
Corporate
concentration | Food Policy for Canada
The best way to do
that is to support family
farms as well as agricultural
cooperatives (agricultural
cooperatives in Canada) and the supply
management system including marketing
boards
At the retail end of
the food chain, the grocery sector. there is a similar oligopoly
corporate concentration problem.
Canada's
grocery business doesn't have enough competition — and shoppers are
paying the price, report finds | CBC News
5
takeaways from the Competition Bureau’s study into Canada’s
grocery sector - National | Globalnews.ca
Increasing
Retail Monopoly Power Poses a Threat to
Canada’s Post-Pandemic Economic Recovery [Op-Ed]
Walmart’s
dominance of groceries should receive antitrust scrutiny, group says
| CNN Business
The best way to
counter that is for consumers to have a real choice to not support
the monopoly grocery industry. Governments can best aid that by
supporting non-profit food food
co-operatives to ensure all consumers have a choice.
Grocery
co-ops an alternative to corporate grocers amid anger, mistrust:
experts
Co-Ops,
Mutual Aid, and the Movements Against the Grocery Industrial Complex
| Loose Lips Magazine
Toward
fair and sustainable food systems: The role of food cooperatives and
solidarity grocery stores – Food Secure Canada
Housing
North
America’s dependence on the private sector for housing has not
helped the current homelessness crisis, indeed it probably
contributed to it. On the other side of the ocean in
Finland at the end of 2021 long-term homelessness only affected 1,318
people and that is considered unacceptable under Finland’s
Housing First Initiative which is not only the right thing to do
but less costly than providing the social programs need to deal with
homelessness.
North America needs
to adopt a more European approach to public and social housing where
public housing is not just for the very poor but also for ordinary
working people.
Canada
is facing a housing crisis. Could it take a page from Europe? | CBC
News
What
European housing models could do for Canada’s affordability
problems
Europe’s
affordable housing revolution: The power of leading by example -
Affordable Housing Initiative European Partnership
We need to provide enough public or co-operative (being preferable)
housing so that all Canadians that want to can access affordable
housing on a rent geared to their income without being forced to deal
with the predatory private market. The private market can still
compete in niche and higher end markets and of course home
construction will still be dominated by the private sector.
Governments should also provide incentives and assistance for
families that want to purchase their own modest homes.
Energy
Choices and Climate Change
No
discussion of capitalism would be complete without dealing with
energy policy and climate
change.
We built an economy based on planned
obsolescence and
waste
because
that was good for capitalist profits. And we powered that economy
with fossil
fuels. The
result:
Climate change is real.
Climate change is caused by human’s energy choices.
Climate change has done irreversible harm, and
Climate change s poised to do catastrophic harm.
All of this is true and highly documented. I am not going to insult
the intelligence of those of you who choose to be informed by citing
pages and pages of proof. Those who choose to be wilfully ignorant of
the facts will not be swayed by any proof.
We need to act. The solutions are known. We need to phase out fossil
fuels. No new projects. Governments that continue to support fossil
fuels are putting private profits (and short term economic
indicators) above the health of the planet and it’s human
population.
We
need to put a “price
on carbon ”
and disincentivize it’s use while providing
support and incentives for the development and use of renewable
energy. We
also need to build a more sustainable
economy that
does not depend on waste and planned obsolescence. But that is a
whole other book.
Failure
of High Tech as Saviour
This section will be primarily informed by my own personal
experience and observations (and research) over the last 60 years or
so from first using punch cards to program Statistical Package for
the Social Sciences on the Laurentian University mainframe, as part
of my Techniques of Political Inquiry course, to my first personal
computer, the Osborne 1 accessing Bulletin Board systems and freenets
up to today’s Windows 11 machine accessing the Internet. For this
reasons it will not include many, if any, citations and because doing
so could overwhelm the user once I started. I was considering making
this a separate blog post but I believe it belongs here.
There was a time when we made things in North America, even
electronics and computers, and then the capitalist owners of the
means of production thought it would be more profitable to make
everything abroad in low wage countries with lax labour, health and
environmental regulations. But don’t worry they assured us we were
becoming a post industrial society with a knowledge economy and an
information super highway. We would no longer work in factories with
our hands but in offices with our minds. High tech was the new thing
and it was going to save us all. It was great for awhile for a few
who got the new high wage jobs, but many of the jobs turned out to be
lower wage tech support jobs that did not replace the higher wage
manufacturing jobs that were lost, and that they soon discovered
could be sent overseas as well.
However it was a boost to planned obsolescence, with a twist that the
electronic waste created was much more hazardous than broken down
furniture and appliances in our landfills. Computers had to be
replaced ever 18 months and smartphones every two years. At the
beginning there probably were enough computer advances to justify
that, though I got away with upgrading every three years but lately
it has been more like every 7 years. However it was remarkable how
capable those early PCs were. The Osborne 1 or original IBM PC, were
capable of running full office software like Wordstar and Supercargo
and even Dbase II. Programmers worked hard to get every bit of
capability out of the software and hardware. Lately it seems the goal
has been to bloat software and add unnecessary options to force users
to upgrade their hardware. This is even more so in the smartphone
industry where a new phone is needed so you can have rounded coiners.
At one point, because of a few successes, people were blindly
investing in any company based on the web, regardless of any actual
earning potential and then the “dot com bubble” burst. We are
seeing the same thing with AI now, billions being thrown at to
produce a massive GIGO machine that just makes stuff up, resulting in
a massive waste of water and power and environmental degradation, not
to mention the suicides caused by AI addiction or the AI directly
telling them to kill themselves. Of course when the “AI bubble”
bursts it might take the rest of the economy with it.
And high tech gave us the corporate and government surveillance state
with the corporations saying they are doing it to make our lives
better and the state saying they are doing it to make us safer, when
in reality it is to consolidate their wealth and power.
Facebook,
Twitter, Amazon, no need to detail the harm caused by
them.
Then
we have the
so-called gig industry which
is just a
way to avoid unions and exploit workers and
the
high tech billionaires exercising their political power to the point
of buying the United States Presidency. More could be said but let’s
leave it at that for now.
High tech saviour, my ass, just a better way to exploit workers,
destroy the environment, and buy politicians,
Necessity
of Government Regulations to Protect Workers Rights, Public Heath and
The Environment
Deregulation is the darling of the capitalist media that argues all
our economic problems would be solved if we did not have those pesky
government regulations and just trusted corporations to put workers
rights, public safety and the environment ahead of maximizing
profits. They like to claim the market will regulate everything but
the only thing the market regulates is maximum profit in the short
term. It cannot even ensure a corporations’ long term growth or
success. The market is very shortsighted and focused on profit only.
So fuck the market.
The
best proof
of
the
need for government regulations to protect public health,
the environment, and
workers rights (including
a minimum wage that is a living
wage ),
it is what happens when we deregulate.
10
Unforeseen Effects of Deregulation - UMA Technology
Disaster
in the Making: he Quiet Erosion of Canada’s Regulation System
The
Dangers of Deregulation – State of the Planet
The
deregulation gamble: When worker safety becomes a political pawn | HR
Law Canada
Trump’s
crusade against health and safety regulations endangers workers,
hobbles the environmental justice movement, and sets the stage for
our next public health crisis | Economic Policy Institute
Public
Ownership and Worker Co-operatives
The best way to counteract the power of the wealthy capitalist elites
is to not give them the power that private ownership of the means of
production gives them The best way to do that is to turn that
ownership over to the actual workers that, to put it obviously, use
the means of production to produce, whether that is things, services
or information. The best way to do that is through worker
co-operatives.
Worker
cooperative - Wikipedia
What is a
Worker Cooperative
History of Worker
Cooperatives
Canadian Worker Co-op
Federation
U.S. Federation of Worker
Cooperatives
That being said, there are situations where centralized public
control is preferable for strategic national interests, such as the
creation of a nationwide electricity grid, or a nationwide
electrified rail system, although I am sure there are others. There
may be other sectors where a public presence, but not dominance, is
desirable, including a public broadcaster, a public renewable energy
agency and likely others.
Universal
Basic Income
Capitalism’s
secret (well maybe not so secret) weapon is maintaining a level of
unemployment that forces workers to take underpaid exploitative
employment. Universal
Basic Income is
the counterbalance to that. While Universal Basic Income
does not deter people from seeking employment it empowers then to
refuse to be exploited.
(Source: UBI Works - Canada's
advocate for Basic Income)
Further references on Universal Basic Income:
Universalbasic income program could cut poverty up to 40%: Budget watchdog |CBC News
Universal
Basic Income In Canada 2025 - Active Programs And Pilots You Should
Know About
Why
UBI Works: Hard Evidence of its Impact on Poverty
People
kept working, became healthier while on basic income: report | CBC
News
Universal
basic income is having a moment. What is it?
The
Final Stage: Workers Control
In the final stage of reforming capitalism we give workers the right
to seize the means of production and take control of their
workplaces.
Workers
of the world, unite!
