Bert Picard is an activist, having retired as a Teamster truck driver who has organized with various unions and a workers’ center over the decades.
GUILFORD-Capitalism works better than socialism.
That’s what a supporter of Gov. Phil Scott told me the other day, when I was canvassing for Amanda Janoo, his opponent. This was a reasonable conservative. We were having an honest discussion, and they were very against the Trump regime.
We hear this claim often when we want to make any rational economic changes. On the other hand, we see Democratic Socialists being elected in New York City and elsewhere. It seems socialism is quite popular with young people and capitalism is no longer so much in favor.
Of course, the billionaires and their mouthpieces in politics bray about “communism” and tell us the end of civilization is near if we even think of voting for social democracy; but then, they would. And we can ignore that predictable silliness. They don’t seem to be getting the traction they did under McCarthyism.
But what are we talking about? What is this socialism and capitalism that everyone is either for or against?
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On one level it is obvious: If Elon Musk can buy an election for $300 million, if DOGE can gut minimal social benefits like SNAP and healthcare subsidies at will, if huge water- and electricity-guzzling data centers can be imposed on any community by force, if perpetual wars must be fought for oil — well, then, hell no! We don’t want that, and that is the modern, actually-existing capitalism we know.
And if free childcare, a rent freeze, subsidized grocery stores (talking about you, Mamdani) are socialism —well, that sounds pretty good for a start.
Certainly, our extreme times of the Trump regime have clarified things and have brutally exposed the rule of the billionaires against everyone else. Gone is the façade of a benevolent capitalism that Obama did such a good job of showing to the world while he quietly did the bidding of Wall Street,crumbled to dust like the East Wing of the White House. And that has its benefit.
And yet.
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Back to that sincere Phil Scott supporter. They are a victim of the story the ruling class tells us through their pundits, a story repeated so often it appears as “common sense” — as unquestioned background.
We are told that capitalism equals markets equals democracy; that socialism equals no free markets equals no democracy. But this is exactly backwards, a through-the-looking-glass view of the reality we live in.
To take a line from Amanda Janoo: What are we proud of in our communities? Local, decentralized, farmers markets; local, self-employed trades like carpentry and electricians; small, local farms, food carts, and local restaurants, not chains; bookstores. Also mutual aid — volunteer efforts to help our neighbors.
These are all markets, at human scale, controlled directly by us, the producers, and the people we employ to help us.
There is nothing “capitalist” about these local markets under our direct control. We are, as Karl Marx wrote in 1872, all the social classes that do not live from the labor of others.
If you rent out an apartment in your house, if you own a bookstore, if you need help on your small farm, you are not living from the labor of others, and you are not a capitalist. This is, if you will, local “private enterprise.”
On the other hand, when an un-elected (by us) board of directors in some Texas boardroom decides to force a data center or nuclear plant on the town of Vernon; when a lumber mill in New York state chooses to close and throw hundreds out of work in New York and Vermont, where is the free market or democracy in that?
When an out-of-state hedge fund buys the local school bus company and tries to break the union and force down wages, is that freedom and democracy?
When an out-of-state hedge fund buys up hundreds of private homes in Vermont to rent them out at maximum rents or turn them into vacation rentals, who decided? Where is the democracy?
That is the capitalism we know and suffer.
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This world of corporate rule, and that of our local “private enterprise,” are not one and the same, despite that the corporate giants have it in their interest to confuse us by conflating those two opposed worlds. The fatcats want us to confuse their ability to make obscene, endless profits at the expense of our local economies and our local markets, where freedom and democracy reign.
These are two irreconcilable worlds. This is the class divide.
As to capitalism laying claim to having invented democracy: If you have ever worked in a capitalist enterprise, you know as well as I do that once you punch the clock, the Bill of Rights goes out the door. Freedom of speech? Freedom of assembly? Have you ever talked back to the boss or the supervisor, ever tried to form a union with fellow workers?
No, there is no democracy at work. Capitalism fears democracy.
From the earliest “enclosures,” in which small farmers were driven off the land in old Europe, to chattel slavery in the “new world,” through the sweatshops and steel mills and mines of 20th-century America, we have had to fight bloody battles for the modicum of democracy we had.
Socialist labor leader Eugene Debs received a million votes for president of the U.S. from his jail cell in 1920. Union organizing was met over and over by armed Pinkertons, meetings broken up, organizers jailed, beaten, deported, killed.
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This is our history. We have faced adversity a long time. This is not new.
But we owe it to ourselves to see clearly and not be confused about socialism and capitalism. There are whole realms of life that should not be subject to the dictatorial whims of distant boardrooms: healthcare, education, electricity, transportation, food, housing, and so on.
The socialism people are talking about would reclaim these areas for the commons, for common good and social well being: a “well-being economy,” to steal another line from gubernatorial candidate Janoo.
This is more democracy, not less; more freedom, not less.
If that is socialism, then it is a good beginning.
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