This Deep Dive is entirely free!

Normally, our Sunday Deep Dives go exclusively to our NOTICE News+ paying members. We think today’s message is so important that it should be totally free. But we still need your help to keep the vast majority of our journalism free! For as little as $6 per month, you can help keep NOTICE News going.

😷 The symptoms

The destruction isn't random. There's a clear pattern to how America is being torn apart, and it shows up everywhere ordinary people live their lives.

Your paycheck disappears faster every month. Wages have stagnated for decades while everything costs more.

• Housing, healthcare, education—have all been turned into profit centers where human need comes second to shareholder returns.

Our communities are falling apart. Instead of investing in mental health, childcare, or stable jobs, we spend billions on police, courts, prisons, and deportations.

• Crime isn't a mystery—it's what happens when people have no hope and no way out. But hopelessness is profitable.

Our tax dollars fund endless wars. Defense contractors need conflicts to justify their budgets. Oil companies need resources to extract. Wall Street needs new markets to penetrate.

• So we bomb countries, prop up dictators and genocidal regimes, and call it "spreading democracy."

BOTTOM LINE: Every crisis in America—from homelessness to mass incarceration to foreign wars—traces back to the same source: a system that puts private profit above human welfare.

🦠 The disease

That system has a name: capitalism.

But most Americans have never gotten an honest explanation of how capitalism actually works—or why it creates the problems we're living through.

DEFINING CAPITALISM: Capitalism is an economic system where the primary goal is the accumulation of more and more private wealth.

• In this system, individuals and corporations use their capital—factories, land, money, and other resources—to hire workers, produce goods or services, and sell those new goods and services for more than it cost to make them.

The goal isn't to meet human needs. It's to turn money into more money, as efficiently as possible.

(To be fair, this isn’t the only defining characteristic of capitalism; nor is profit motive exclusive to capitalism. But only in capitalism is profit the main goal of almost all economic activity.)

BUT BUT BUT: This system creates three fundamental problems.

• Everything else becomes expendable. When profit is the only measure of success, worker safety, environmental protection, and public health become costs to minimize rather than values to protect.
  

• Workers get robbed. The people who create all the value—through their labor, ideas, and time—receive only a fraction of the profits from what they produce. Owners collect the rest—often without contributing anything except owning stuff.
  

• The whole system crashes regularly. The endless drive for growth creates boom-bust cycles that devastate working people while the wealthy buy up assets at fire-sale prices.

ONE MORE THING: But that's not all. Because capitalism centers profit over everything else, the basic needs of most human beings—housing, food, education, healthcare, income, and meaningful work—go unmet. With those needs unmet, humans are robbed of any real chance to flourish.

• This idea may have made sense prior to the 20th century when we didn't have the technology to feed or house everybody—but today, scarcity is a lie. We have the ability to offer not only every American, but every single human being these basic necessities, but choose not to.

Pair all of these problems with modern communication technology that allows humans to see the wealth gap more vividly than ever—and you have a very unstable situation on your hands.

⚔️ The fight

These problems aren't new. Since capitalism took root in America, the left has fought to tame its worst impulses.

EARLY SUCCESSES: Workers formed unions and faced down armed thugs to win basic safety protections. Consumers organized to force food safety regulations. Environmentalists pushed through pollution controls.

• But the biggest success came during the Great Depression when socialists, communists, labor unions, and populists forced the government to create Social Security, unemployment insurance, and massive public employment programs.

All of these efforts pushed the federal government into uncharted territory—offering goods and services without the goal of generating profit for a wealthy minority.

Each reform was a direct attempt to tame the brutal byproducts of an unstable economic system.

BUT BUT BUT: With each restraint the people were able to put on capitalism, business owners and the ruling class became more resentful.

• According to the historian Heather Cox Richardson, capitalists began their campaign to roll back the New Deal in earnest while FDR was still president.

That campaign turbocharged with the election of Ronald Reagan, who promised that unfettered capitalism would mean prosperity for all.

• Fast forward forty years, and the rollback of restrictions placed on capitalism by the government has led to record inequality, decreasing life expectancy, and growing working-class outrage.

👀 The cure

Sadly, the “logic” of capitalism has been so ingrained in the Western mind that to many, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.

But ending capitalism doesn't mean ending markets, money, or private property. It means putting human needs first and letting private enterprise compete around the edges.

Think of utilities. We don't let private companies decide who gets electricity based on profit margins. We treat power as essential, then let companies compete to improve it.

The same logic works for human survival:

• Healthcare as a public service where everyone gets care, but private companies can still innovate and offer premium options

• Housing as a guaranteed right where everyone has shelter, but developers can still build luxury or experimental designs

• Food security for all where nutrition is guaranteed, but restaurants and specialty markets still thrive

This isn't Soviet-style central planning. Different sectors need different approaches—some public utilities, some worker cooperatives, some small businesses, some public ownership of natural resources.

THE REAL DIFFERENCE: Instead of organizing society around what's profitable, we organize it around what people actually need to live dignified lives.

• Private enterprise still exists—it just operates within boundaries that prioritize human welfare over shareholder wealth.

We're not talking about government controlling everything. We're talking about ensuring that the basic requirements for human flourishing aren't left to the mercy of market forces that see people as profit centers rather than human beings.

• We’re also not talking about going more into “debt”—we’re talking about rethinking how money works when it’s not tied to a reserve like gold.

This isn't utopian thinking. It's how every other developed country already handles healthcare. It's how we already treat public education, fire departments, and libraries. We're just extending that logic to cover the full range of human needs.

BOTTOM LINE: The choice isn't between capitalism and authoritarianism. It's between an economy that serves capital and one that serves people. It’s a moral economy.

• We have the resources, technology, and knowledge to build a society where everyone's basic needs are met. The only thing stopping us is a system that puts profit before people—and the belief that there's no alternative.

There is. And it's time to build it.

Like what you just read? Support us!

We’re not owned by big business or billionaires. We’re a small team of independent journalists and to stay that way, we need your support! Consider joining our membership program for as little as $6 a month. You’ll get full access to our Sunday Deep Dives and access to a troll-free community. Our members are the reason we’re able to produce fearless, anti-fascist, anti-capitalist journalism.