I would say that capitalism is like a big toilet but that would be incorrect. For 1.2 billion people in today’s capitalist world, capitalism is no toilet at all, and these people have to defecate without one.
Big business apologists like to claim that capitalism meets people’s needs! Yeah, right. Here is what the World Health organization states is the world condition in sanitation. 2.5 billion live with poor sanitation facilities That’s not a very good record in meeting people’s needs. Are these people without a toilet because communism took their toilets away?
Here in the US health care is a big toilet, but the WHO did not address that in this report. Capitalism is a big toilet; go ask the people of Iraq and Afghanistan if you doubt my word.
So are you saying that capitalism took their toilets away? Hell, before that famous capitalist, John W. Crapper, invented the toilet, ALL of the world lived with “poor sanitation facilities”. Do any of these 2.5 billion live in capitalist countries??? Or do they live in backward countries where the leaders use whatever foreign aid you do gooders send them to build palaces for themselves?
I’ve reacted, at greater length than a comment allows, to this post at my blog. http://washparkprophet.blogspot.com/2008/07/not-my-tribe-considers-toilets.html
Ohwileke, both you and Michael seem to labor under some of the same misconceptions about capitalism, though you wrote a still very thoughtful and long commentary on your website, Ohwilleke, and one that is well worth reading IMO.
First off, Michael, the capitalist system is well on way to destroying the entire planet’s ecological balance, and yet after several hundreds of years, has been unable to solve many of the problems of pre capitalist economic systems, like building people places to shit. Why
is that?
It is as simple as that the capitalists are too busy shitting on people to solve these important problems. To you Reaganites though, capitalism is freedom… to take a shit in the woods even, because that’s all that capitalism leaves many folk to do. Not that they have left them with many woods to shit in, Michael.
I’d like to look at this comment by you on your website article with dealing with this issue, Ohwilleke. Here is what you write…
‘What kind of society do we need to have to secure the good life?
The most of the Third World is neither capitalist nor communist. Many Third World monarchies, dictatorships and one party systems are for practical purposes feudal or neo-feudal. Other places, like Somalia, Northwestern Pakistan, and the rural portions of most Third World countries that are far from their small numbers of government officials and sprawling haphazard cities, are often pre-feudal, with fractured tribes and warlords having predominant influence locally.’
This is an entirely mistaken analytical framework though. These Third World countries that you call neither communist nor capitalist are in fact capitalist countries. They are merely the other side of the railroad tracks, and this is what you don’t seem to understand too well. Let’s give capitalism credit for keeping billions of people in feudalistic conditions rather than claiming that capitalism doesn’t yet exist in these places, which is a pile of crap… pardon… but we are talking toilets now.
Ohwilleke, I find that you refuse to recognize existing capitalism every much as our Reaganite, Michael, does. You both are living lives of great pretense. Sorry to put you two together this way, but it just seems sadly to be true.