Read this cogent comment on capitalism

Great comment I just read on an Adbusters comment thread, original article: https://www.adbusters.org/magazine/92/crack-capitalism.html

I think this deserved to be reposted here where people will appreciate it. This sums up much of my feeling on 'capitalism', while the context of the comment illustrates the struggle we have in front of us to unite seemingly disparate social elements in order to create a new, better system of government / dismantle the current one.

November 02, 2010 04:17 pm Link The advance of capitalism is more accurately characterized as the advance of humans, since humans after all created capitalism. And its walls expand and contract as the growth of the economy slows and speeds, but in the long run capitalism has done more to expand the boundaries of what is possible in the world than anything.

The argument accounts for government, family, and other social institutions otherwise considered to be exempt from the capitalist system. A thorough review of the purveyors and analyzers of markets shows that the mechanics which make markets tick can be shown to make myriad levels of human behavior tick as well.

When two people trade, they do so because it makes them both better off, not because they are forced to by a government monopoly on violence cloaked as democratic capitalism, not because they are tacitly coerced by a social system propagated by elites whose interest is their own, onto a poor whose interests are assumed more noble.

We trade love, microwaves, favors, and of course $7.95 for an issue of Adbusters magazine because we are social, because we all benefit and consistently create a more optimal world, one whose walls expand relative to periodic contraction. We trade because we are human, not because we are capitalists. And we advance the boundaries of what is and what is possible in the world, creating not cracks in the walls of scarcity of information, resources, marriages, but dealing with those walls rationally and moving them sometimes carefully, sometimes recklessly, outward.

The project of finding another way to live beyond capitalism is a project of finding a way to live beyond being human. It is a project humanity has pursued to perfect its insufferable imperfection since humans were human, but it is a project that must recognize its own slow gains, while always accepting that those gains are made from being human and imperfect.

— Graham Peterson, BA Candidate Economics: UIC