No one wants to seem a capitalist dupe, much less a capitalist pig. On the other hand, even to use the C word these days raises eyebrows—wary of Marxist woke rhetoric resurging in the shadow of the other now disgraced C word. But what is capitalism, anyhow? Any ism suggests a belief underlying a cultural practice. Reduced to essentials, capitalism is the belief that money can make money. But, underlying that truism is the assumption that money is actual wealth.

Genuine wealth consists of useful goods and services that benefit people. Actual goods have a material basis (as in manufacturing, which literally means making by hand), and actual services are grounded in the needs of the body and mind. Such wealth can only be produced by effort of some kind—work. The idea of profit is to get a return for the use by others of your money or property, beyond any effort you put in. While it is true that money can make money, only work can make real wealth. Profit from speculation and rents does produce inflation, however, because it increases the proportion of money circulating to actual goods and services the money is supposed to represent. Wealth comes from genuine productivity, while profit is a legal form of exploitation, a subtle form of theft.

Globalization is a euphemism for hypercapitalism, in which fictitious “derivatives” and “instruments” are speculatively traded for profit. The G word nicely suggests world-wide unity, cosmopolitanism, progress, modernity. (Coupled with liberalism and democracy, what’s not to like?) But the result is the accelerating gap between the extremely rich and everyone else. Globalism is the international financial system that enables profit to run rampant across borders. Cultural and political unification may be progress for the human race. But neo-liberal economics spells progress mainly for the few. Its purpose is to redistribute wealth—upward.

Apologists of globalism offer statistics about economic growth: increases of Gross Domestic Product or per capita income. In a society or world where people have roughly equal assets and incomes, it makes sense to speak of an average. It is extremely misleading (which, after all, is the whole point!) to speak of per capita income when the great bulk of what is being averaged goes to the top one-tenth of one percent. Averaging is no substitute for sharing.

It is equally misleading to point to the vast increase of “global GDP” in the past few decades as proof of the benefits of neo-liberalism. First, world population (the work force behind productivity) nearly doubled in that period. Second, much of any increase in real productivity is due to improved technology, which is only indirectly related to globalism through trade. Third, trade itself is not a proper index of productivity. (You can trade the same widgets back and forth, and each time it will register as an increase in GDP for each country.) Similarly, all sorts of things are counted as GDP that are not net productive, such as wars and ensuing reconstruction. And finally, most of increase of GDP goes into a very few hands. Ordinary people’s lives may improve marginally, but not in the measure suggested by statistics that are unfairly weighted by the gains of the few.

Capitalism is popular for the same reasons that lotteries are. Supposedly, we all get a fair chance to win the jackpot. Of course, gambling does not actually produce anything. It pits all against all in a zero-sum game (I win means you lose), whereas real productivity results in a potential gain for all. Are we then dupes after all?