What capitalism has done to Western nations
Capitalism is possible only in the species Homo sapiens, which has image thinking and conceptual thinking as well: man thinks of, designs and fabricates or concocts reality. Capitalism is not based on life’s togetherness, that has been implanted by the evolution into the „backward” species. Capitalism is based on invented self-reliance, which liberalism – as the belief system of capitalism – imposes on people. Programmed self-reliance has divided people into those who can, who have and who fulfill their whims, and those who do not have and who cannot meet even the basic needs of life. All creatures have needs, which in all species except in our one are to be met collectively. Only the members of the „capitalist” species are pressed to meet their needs in competing with each other in the markets. Mutual competition among humans is considered a virtue.
Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, capital has systematically increased the supply of labor to the industry. Capitalists have permanently used science and technical inventions to transfer more and more work to machines. In addition, capitalists attracted laborers to the industry in waves: first agricultural workers, then women and mothers from families and later immigrant laborers, and finally the Western capital went after the unexpensive labor available in distant countries. With such capital transfers began the process of deindustrialization of the West. Most recently, goods manufacturers and even providers of services began using outsourcing or temporary intake of workers from private employment agencies. Such workers, as well as regular employees of employers, sign mostly short-term employment contracts. They are de facto day laborers. Today, fewer and fewer workers have a permanent or guaranteed job. This creates a great uncertainty in life, which latently eats away people.
Due to the high supply of work, workers have little bargaining power compared to employers. It had caused the weakening of the labor movement, which is now being rebuilt thanks to the dependence of large trade and other service networks – on-line trade, air transport and others – on the skill of workers, who have so far been poorly paid and whom is difficult to replace in a complex and tuned-up system.
The continued pulling new, lower-paid workers to production and service sectors of the economy led to the temporary withering of the trade union movement, as the unsatisfied workers could be easily replaced by new recruits. Now, employees are gradually joining unions and threatening shutdowns especially in network systems such as rail, air transport, strained health services and education. Due to relative scarcity of very skilled workers, corporations – which depend on the smooth operations of their business infrastructure and their distribution system or „logistics” – started paying their workers better after the weakening of coronavirus pandemic. (The word „logistics” comes from the Greek word logis meaning headquarters, so logistics consist of calculating, planning and predicting the events in a operational network.) Now, properly skilled workers are hard to find – especially if they are offered low remuneration – and the import of inept workers has been abandoned in many economic sectors. Nevertheless, every worker who enters into employment with the usually whimsical Western employers falls into uncertainty.
The employment of women and mothers led to the destruction of the family. Consequently, our species has abandoned the upbringing for real life, although our species – due to the long development of the brain, which allows for conceptual thinking – needs a much longer upbringing than other animal species. There is only a media upbringing of young people for the market, which with its unpredictability brings to people all the surprises of life, which they are finding increasingly difficult to cope with.
Due to the general uncertainty of life to which they are exposed, young people marry late in life, indulge in mating without reproduction and consequently have few children, who – due to the age of their parents at the time of conception – are often born with mental and physical shortcomings. People’s poor preparation for family life and the lack of a clear intention when marrying often leads to divorces, which create single-parent households. In 2020, there were 10.7 million single-parent families in the U.S., 80% of whom were led by women. (In such families there is no male role model for raising boys.) In the United States in the past sixty years, the percentage of families with both parents decreased from 88% to 67%. Of the 50 million children who live with both parents, 3 million have unmarried parents.
Due to the unsettled state of relationships in the families, many children leave the family. It is the greatest source of homelessness. According to a White House estimate, there are now about 600,000 homeless people in the United States. They die on average at the age of only 50. Afro-Americans make up 40% of the homeless. Men and boys make up 61% of homeless people. Children make up 20% of the homeless, 7% of whom live in abandoned cars. Among homeless children, 42% of them become LGBT. It is so in the richest country in the world, which in recent years still struggles to minimise homelessness.
(Unlike in many developed countries, where children often flee their families on their own, the practice of taking children away from their parents has settled in Norway. The Norwegian Child Welfare Service (NCWS) has extensive powers to take children away from their parents. There are 12,000 children taken away from Norwegian families and they are placed in other families or in special foster homes for children. There are many cases, that children are taken from Muslim mothers and placed in evangelical families. Five children were taken from a Christian family by the NCWS because their parents „imbued them with Christianity”.)
Ill-mannered children without a firm life attitude, that is usually acquired in the family, often make experiments in life. Thus, children engage in drug misuse, although they must be aware of the dangers of addiction. It is reckoned that there are 60,000 drug addicts in Scotland or one addict per 60 inhabitants aged 15 to 64. Scotland is the „world capital of drug deaths”. In 2019, 1,264 Scottish families were bereaved because of a family member overdose. In the U.S., 3% of all deaths are caused directly by drug overdose. In 2020, 20.6% of people died from heart disease, 17.8% from cancer, 10.4% from COVID, and 5.9% from accidents. Therefore, dying from taking drugs is not negligible.
In recent years all over the Western world there has been a common distribution of food to poor families through “food banks”. It is not only about distributing food to unemployed workers or the elderly, but very often to the families, who do not have sufficient income from employment to buy enough food for themselves. Instead of every worker having a salary high enough to be able to take care of the family, many workers depend on charitable helping hands. Low-paid workers really live in life’s uncertainty.
Life’s uncertainty particularly affects children, many of whom without supplementary nutrition at school cannot preserve their health and cannot have the expected physical and mental development. Instead of all children getting a free meal at school, poor children are among the other children marked by getting a daily free meal. This was especially true for children during the fierce coronavirus pandemic, when children stayed at home instead of attending classes and getting a daily free meal. In England in January 2022, there were 1.9 million children eligible for a free meal or 22.5% of children in public schools. (In private schools, all children receive a meal, the expense for which is included in high tuition.) In England in January 2021 there were 1.74 million children entitled to a free meal or 20.8%. In Western countries, protection is provided by the market, not by the community or by the state.
Recently, more and more Western school children need the help of psychiatrists and psychotherapists, whom schools do not usually employ. In England this year, more than 400,000 children a month receive medical attention due to mental health problems. This is the highest number of children receiving help to date and that gives a serious warning about a looming crisis among children under the age of 18. Psychiatrists familiar with the troubles brought about by the coronavirus pandemic find among school children anxiety, depression and attempts to self-harm. Psychiatrists have warned the public that the spread of mental distress among children can threaten the entire health system, which suffers everywhere in the West from insufficient numbers of physicians and other healthcare professionals.
Mental disorders are the main cause of the occurrence of mass murders, carried out by young people. Recently, U.S. Senator Chris Murphy pushed for a tougher restriction on gun ownership. After a recent attack on a primary school in Uvalde in Texas, Senator Murphy made a proposal to deny the purchase of weapons to people under the age of 21. He supported this with his conclusion, that the attackers in schools are under the age of 18-19. When the media began to dispute data published by Senator Murphy, the Washington Post made a breakdown of 200 cases of assaults against children in primary and high schools. The paper found that two thirds of the attackers were under the age of 18 and that their average age was 16. The newspaper also reported that since the attack on a high school in Columbine, Colorado, on April 20, 1999, more than 310,000 students have been exposed to gun attacks. State terrorism largely disappeared at the end of the last century, but it was readily replaced by ideological terrorism and by terrorism of Western minors and young people for whom human life does not mean much.
The capitalist destruction of families in the West led to the shrinking of population. This has changed the age composition of the population in „developed” Western countries, which have more and more elderly people and which are increasingly dependent on immigration of young people from „underdeveloped” countries, what in itself carries great troubles to both the countries from which people flee and the countries where younger people seek to come legally or illegally. (The initial low productivity of immigrant workers makes these people winners in the existing social protection system, whereby the domestic elderly population receives significantly weaker health and life care.) The current overwhelming migrations are caused by the uneven economic development in the world, which is also the effect or a mortal sin of capitalism.
As time goes on and private capitalist science and medicine discover or make more and more diseases and come up with new methods of their treatments, people with lower financial incomes receive less and less healthcare. Medicine and healthcare are increasingly being privatized and consequently expensive healthcare must be purchased in a market, where those who have taken more and who have more are doing better. This harsh reality is best revealed by long waiting lists for specialist medical examinations and especially for routine medical procedures in public hospitals in all capitalist regimes.
For the evil that capital, capitalists, liberalism and the market have inflicted on life and on our species through the destruction of Earth and disruption of the climate, I shall say only that the elderly persons consider themselves fortunate, that – unlike younger people and children – will not experience the worst that will bring further and already irreversible change of the climate.
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