
So in a social democracy, I am not spending every single day of my life competing with everyone else in society for life’s necessities — which are kept away from me in carefully controlled artificial shortages which maximize capitalist profits, precisely to enforce this contract of hostility and antagonism towards people who should be my equals (that’s a crucial point, and I’ll return to it shortly.) Instead, society has struck precisely the opposite bargain. We will give each other these things — healthcare, education, finance, etc — so that no one has to compete for them. That way, we are not only rivals, bitter antagonists, enemies, all the time — who must pretend to make nice with one another, frenemies carrying knives behind our backs always. Because we are truer equals, we can respect and know one another with less suspicion, fear, rage, dread, and anxiety. We can be gentle and warm and kind to another now. Our society will be a happier and friendlier place. But only because there is less capitalism. We’re not spending our days terrified by the prospect of choosing between chemotherapy or a roof ove…
Have you ever wondered why Americans appear to be such strange people, to the rest of the world? On the one hand, they are unbelievably cruel to each other — prole against prole. Who else lets their kids be shot at school, and their poor go without insulin, and never let their elderly retire? In today’s world, almost nobody, really. So capitalism breeding a kind of intense rivalry — by keeping life’s necessities from Americans, and forcing them to compete with each other for what is freely given to everyone in every other rich country in the world — goes a very long way to explaining America’s legendary cruelty. If you’ve been conditioned by capitalism to think of everyone else in society as a potential competitor for healthcare, education, retirement — then of course you will naturally feel a sense of hostility towards them, even if you don’t know you feel it. Antagonism will be as natural as air or water to you.