Capitalism Doesn't Work

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I. Introduction: The Great Manic Depression

One hundred years ago, the twenties were characterized by economic prosperity. Until the stock market crash giving way to the Great Depression, employment and mass marketing rates soared to create a growth of 42 percent between 1921 and 1929.

It was a time to be alive; it was a time remembered as “roaring.” Never had Americans been so liberated from financial turmoils, and with the stock market buzzed speakeasies and jazz clubs in every corner of the rapidly-expanding urban world. The Italian mafia, nursed from the bottle of the bootlegging industry, burgeoned in the same rooms frequented by the figureheads of the modernist literature movement. In the wake of World War I came an unprecedented zeitgeist of growth, the specific nature of which hasn’t been seen or replicated since.

Few parallels can be drawn between the twenties of the past and those in which we find ourselves now — between economic turmoil, political polarization, and plague, the world more faithfully echoes the decade both before and after. What characterizes the time in which we live now — what sets it apart from ninety years ago — is that it is no longer pure depression that looms above the heads of America.

Raging instability threatens the quality of day-to-day civilian life, and in the last year this is something of which the greater population has become sharply aware. The fragility of economics is nothing new, but amidst (in particular) the COVID-19 pandemic we have discovered a more worrisome and much more ancient disease among us: the suffocating presence of an economic system that strengthens, every day, its strangle upon human liberty and livelihood.