When I started writing this blog, I was tired of all the religious and political arguments that seem so common to America. I grew up in an environment where it was considered impolite to talk about sex, religion, and politics, and quite honestly, although I am a systems builder and dream about how systems will (or will not) work all day long, I do not enjoy argument. And because something didn’t gel inside me, I decided to take on capitalism.
I clearly recall in 1984, a month or so before my father died, saying to him that I didn’t like capitalism. I then explained to him what I meant. He said, “Tess, you’re a capitalist; you’re speaking about the excesses of capitalism.” Well, Robert Reich, the previous secretary for labor calls it super-capitalism and Dyan Rattigan calls it extractionaliasm.
So I started this blog - Capitalism and YOU - and my first blog was called, “So What has Capitalism Done for You Lately?” The more I read about it and the more I thought about it, the more I realized that far from working for me, capitalists had robbed me blind in their effort to get rich. Personally, capitalism has never done a single thing for me. In my last few blogs on this topic, I began to realize why. Capitalism was based on a principle - not of hard work - but on unequal exchange. I began to understand why, from day one, I always felt that I was underpaid - quite radically in many instances.
I began to look at the history of trade and how we arrived at this situation and why we keep repeating this cycle of super rich and incredibly poor. I looked at why trickle down economics used to work but no longer, and I thought about why Americans (and no other nation in the world) called people who were poor lazy and stupid. In fact, during the past three or four months, I’ve written about many aspects of capitalism, and just as communism didn’t work, I realized that Capitalism worked under certain circumstances but not under others.
I also realized that I have no more questions and answers about capitalism. There were times that I thought it could work if we had more checks and balances but in the end I realized that capitalism is based on exploiting resources, and if the resources run out, it becomes a dog eat dog world. As the robber barons have returned, and with too-big-to-fail corporations running the economy, I see little hope for those of us who are happy to do our share for a fair share of the rewards.
So I’ve come to the end of writing about Capitalism and YOU. I will be finishing my Civil War 2 series in the next few weeks and then moving on to write the sequel to Memories of a Magician.
Thank you for sharing my journey.
Tessa Schlesinger
Writer. Author. Editor. Citizen.
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