Remember Capitalism?

Yah, me neither... It's existence was only imagined in the minds of Marxists and those who couldn't help but to use the language of such a beautifully explicative false-narrative.

Anyhow, James Bowman makes me feel smart again in his latest piece from TNC. It's subscribers only, so here's some snippets...

"Well, the old stories are always the best, I suppose. The day before, the Post had run a front-page “Analysis” piece by Anthony Faiola titled “The End of American Capitalism?”.... Certainly, after the government’s $700 billion bailout of the credit markets, followed by a partial nationalization of the major banks, he had a point. Suddenly everyone was reviving the saying attributed to the British liberal statesman Sir William Harcourt in Victorian times that “We’re all socialists now.” So it could hardly be surprising if we were using socialist language to tell a socialist story based on the Marxist legend about something called “capitalism” which was once supposed to exist precariously poised between the two historical eras of “feudalism” and “socialism,” one of which hadn’t happened yet but doubtless would in short order.

"It seems to me an attractive idea to classify Marx not as a great philosopher or economist—still less, of course, as a prophet—but as a great journalist. For he did what all journalists seek to do, which is to construct a story (or “narrative” as even quite ordinary people are now learning to call it) that accounts for confusing, complex, and often unwelcome events in a way that becomes widely accepted not only by his readers but also by the readers of his readers and even by people who don’t read at all. The enduring nature of his story was obviously owing to the fact that it had clear-cut heroes and villains, that after many a difficulty and setback the heroes were portrayed as triumphing (or bound to triumph) over the villains, and that there was a sense of fate or inevitability, even divine guidance—with “History” in the role of God—about this happy ending. Most importantly, it encouraged a mass audience to identify itself with the good guys and their sense of grievance against the bad guys who were few in number and different from them in having lots of money. One of the things that people demand from journalism, now as then, is guidance as to whom to hate...."

"..those who positively repudiated the Marxist narrative also retained the Marxist language, proclaiming themselves proud capitalists and insisting that the capitalist system must bring about, in fact and for everybody, the workers’ paradise that socialism could only promise. It should have been foreseeable that this would get them into trouble when hard times came along the next time. “You said capitalism ‘worked,’ didn’t you?” the socialist might reasonably ask. “So what have you got to say now?

"Of course, “capitalism”—the socialist word for economic reality—does work, just not to produce the utopian dream of easy abundance for all. That remains a fantasy no matter what the words used to describe it."

That's what I would have said if I were a better writer...