Why We Hate Working for Big Companies
29th April 2024
A worldwide conflict between communism and capitalism defined the latter half of the twentieth century. The United States’ ideological battle was the central drama of my childhood, and it was with a combination of glee, pride, and “told you so!” that my fellow Americans watched the wall fall in Berlin, and the USSR dissolve shortly thereafter. I expect few would deny that the US is the standard bearer for capitalism.
Yet, there’s a flaw at the heart of this claim. While the United States operates as a free market economy, the key agent within modern capitalism – the corporation – works more like an authoritarian state. Given how much of our world is built around corporations, this truth and its impacts are critical.
The confusion between ‘capitalism’ and ‘free market economy’ is endemic in the modern world. ‘Capitalism’ is the accumulation of resources for use in production, which is the hallmark of modern industrialism–indeed, if you were to substitute ‘industrialism’ for ‘capitalism’ wherever it is used in modern literature you would clarify things tremendously–and ‘capitalism’ is just as much present in ‘socialist’ and ‘communist’ economies as in free market systems.