Why We Need to Democratize Wealth—The U.S. Capitalist Model Breeds Selfishness and Resentment
Throughout its history—wherever it arrived and settled in as the dominant economic system—capitalism provoked struggles over the redistribution of wealth. In other words, this system always distributes wealth in a particular way and likewise produces dissatisfaction with that particular distribution. Those dissatisfied then struggle, more or less, consciously or not, peacefully or violently to redistribute wealth. The struggles are socially divisive and sometimes rise to civil war levels.
The French Revolution marked the end of French feudalism and its transition to capitalism. The revolutionaries’ slogans promised the transition would bring with it “liberté, égalité, fraternité” (liberty, equality and fraternity). In other words, equality was to be a key accompaniment to or product of capitalism’s establishment, of finally replacing feudalism’s lord-serf organization of production with capitalism’s very different employer-employee system. Transition to capitalism would erase the gross inequalities of French feudalism. The
— source rdwolff.com | Richard Wolff | May 31, 2021