Excerpt from a book by Stephanie McMillan, illustrated with her renowned cartoons
A Basic Introduction: What Capitalism Is, Why It Sucks, and How to Crush It
There's an evil force dominating the people of the world and even destroying the planet itself. This force is our enemy, and the enemy of all life. Before we can defeat it, we have to correctly identify it. We have to understand its underlying structure, how it works, and who controls it, in order to pinpoint its vulnerabilities and effectively fight against it.
This enemy is called global capitalism.
"This is an especially tough message to hustle—that all these feelgood recycling type things individuals are doing mean nothing if we don’t shift systemically. We collectively don’t actually want to hear this message; we are trying to dodge it. But then these clever cartoons come along. And we like cartoons and we read them, and we are shaken up and we can’t just go back to pretending." —Paxus Calta-Star [book review]
PART 1: KNOW THE ENEMY
Global capitalism is a system
It dominates society economically, ideologically, and politically. It shapes what we think, the ways we spend our time, our moods,
our hairstyles, which TV shows we find amusing, whether we prefer popsicles or strawberries, the colors of our t-shirts, who
we love, and how we die.
Each social formation is defined by its mode of production (the way the society as a whole meets its needs, how it reproduces
itself from one day to the next). The current dominant mode of production is capitalism.
Our livelihoods have been threaded into this system, this giant social machine, like so many wires and tubes, so that we have become as dependent upon it as it is upon us. Mechanics called politicians are appointed to keep the colossus oiled and functioning smoothly. They hire economists to tell them how to do it. They promote culture that pacifies its billions of victims. It hires police and armies to protect it when its victims become disgruntled.
This exploitation machine has taken over all our lives and spans the globe. It converts human labor and the natural world into surplus value, in the pursuit of profit. A few people own it. The rest of us are its fuel.
Its complexity has become a liability to itself, and abrupt simplification is immanent. It’s about to downsize, hard. Some people hope and pray for its collapse. But it will not collapse. The machine will be simplified, but it will still run.
Unless we destroy it, capitalism will destroy the world.
Published under the Creative Commons license. Available for download (15MB) in PDF HERE. Second Edition 2015, INIP, 248 pages. “Capitalism Must Die!” is also available as a full-color ebook here:gum.co/capitalismsucks (You choose the price). A paper copy may be purchased directly from Ms. McMillan here, or from AbeBooks.
Author
Stephanie McMillan, a lifelong resident of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, has been a political cartoonist since 1992. She is the creator of the editorial cartoon Code Green, and the comic strip Minimum Security, syndicated through Universal Uclick. Her cartoons have earned several major awards, including the RFK Journalism Award (2012) and the Sigma Delta Chi from the Society for Professional Journalists (2010). They have appeared in hundreds of print and online publications worldwide including the Los Angeles Times, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Daily Beast, Yes! magazine, Climate Progress, Funny Times, Yahoo.com, San Francisco Bay Guardian, and The Occupied Wall Street Journal (of Occupy Wall Street).
