As Richard V. Reeves, a senior fellow in Economic Studies at The Brookings Institution, pointed out, one of the main reasons why we can say that capitalism is failing is because it can not provide a decent wage to those who want a job.
"Before markets, before even money, there was work," Reeves wrote. "Our remotest ancestors, hunting and gathering, almost certainly did not see work as a separate, compartmentalized part of life in the way we do today. But we have always had to work to live. Even in the 21st century, we strive through work for the means to live, hence the campaign for a 'living wage.'"
The economist highlighted that it took two revolutions (one agricultural, one industrial) to turn 'work' into its own category but even after all of this effort, it still can't satisfy our needs.
"Industrial capitalism sliced and diced human time into clearly demarcated chunks, of 'work' and 'leisure.' Work was then bundled and packaged into one of the most important inventions of the modern era: a job. From this point on, the workers' fight was for a job that delivered maximum benefits, especially in terms of wages, in return for minimum costs imposed on the worker, especially in terms of time," Reeves continued.
"For Karl Marx, the whole capitalist system was ineluctably rigged against workers. Whatever the short-run victories of the trade unions, the capitalist retained the power; the ultimate control, over workers' time. And the worker would remain forever alienated from their work. The goal was to assert sovereignty over our own time, free of the temporal control of the capitalist, able 'to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner.'"
That sense of being powerless is what Slovenian philosopher-scholar Slavoj Žižek also thinks the western society needs to get rid of. To illustrate his point during the Occupy Wall Street protests, Žižek recalled an old joke from Communist times.
"A guy was sent from East Germany to work in Siberia," the scholar began the joke. "He knew his mail would be read by censors, so he told his friends: 'Let's establish a code. If a letter you get from me is written in blue ink, it is true what I say. If it is written in red ink, it is false.' After a month, his friends get the first letter. Everything is in blue. It says, this letter: 'Everything is wonderful here. Stores are full of good food. Movie theatres show good films from the west. Apartments are large and luxurious. The only thing you cannot buy is red ink.'"
This, according to Žižek, is how we live today. "We have all the freedoms we want. But what we are missing is red ink: the language to articulate our non-freedom."
What makes it hard to have a constructive dialogue about capitalism for its supporters is the fact that it's not entirely broken. "In terms of material conditions of life, across the broad sweep of economic history, capitalism has delivered pretty well for most workers," Reeves said.
"Wages rose, hours fell, life (mostly) got better. Global poverty halved. As an economic system, socialism fell from grace, and, by and large, and in spite of recent rhetoric on the American political left, continues to fall."
But over the last decade, the logic of markets and the workings of capitalism have been intensely questioned and challenged, both from the populist right and the socialist left. "Young Americans and supporters of the Democratic party are now more enthusiastic about socialism than capitalism (by 6% and 10% margins, respectively)," Reeves highlighted. "Leading candidates now proudly describe themselves as socialists – unthinkable just a few years ago. (Whether they are in fact socialists by any sensible definition of the term is of course another matter.)"
