Capitalism is Regressing Society

This System is Moving us Backward When we Need to be Moving Forward

Author

Comrade Drew
March 28, 2025

Introduction

Following up on my last article about socialism being the only choice if we want to move forward, I wanted to write about why I think capitalism has reached its peak and is now causing a regression in our lives. There are many reasons why capitalism is moving us backward, but I wanted to touch on three specifics: technology dumbing us down, the far outdated landlord system, and the “free and fair” elections in capitalist societies. I believe these three reasons are having, and will continue to have, major drawbacks for us as the next generation.

Technology is Moving us Backward

We, in general, are losing our ability to think critically, focus, read and write, articulate ourselves, and speak to others. This is a big deal, especially when the data shows that the average literacy rate in the United States is at a 6th grader’s level and below—54% of adults are below a 6th grade level, while 20% are below a 5th grade level—that’s frightening. Although total literacy rates have increased steadily from 1975-2025, the general level of literacy has declined. The National Center for Education Statistics released data in December 2024 showing that 28% of adults ranked at the lowest literacy levels compared to 19% in 2017.

Look, technology probably isn’t all to blame here, we need to take responsibility for this as well. You—who is reading this on your phone or computer—aren’t doing yourself any favors, but what choice do you have? If we don’t want to be left behind then we must keep up, but what does that mean for our brains? It means we get used to having so much information shot at us whenever we look at something that it becomes second nature to ignore ads, sidebars, pop-ups, and the like. It means that our attention span decreases due to having an ocean of articles, essays, videos, movies, music, etc. at our fingertips every second of every waking day. It means that we become so accustomed to filtered information that we lose our ability to self-filter through all the garbage, find out what’s necessary, and store it in our mind. It means that we are losing our ability to speak with strangers because we rarely have to nowadays. It means that we are, in a way, moving backward.

Technology isn’t inherently a bad thing—it’s made way for incredible advances that have changed our entire world. The thing is, it changes so fast that we never have the chance to harness it to its full potential. We need to make technology serve us and not the other way around. Capitalists have us right where they want us: becoming dependent on technology to get through our day-to-day lives. What does that make the capitalist? It allows the capitalists to control us through pushing the information they want us to see, read, and hear; it allows the capitalists to “upgrade”, and I use that term loosely, the technology we use every year so we can keep up with the “latest and greatest.” Technology, as it stands right now, and where it’s headed, is a tool for the bourgeoisie to distract us from the perils of life, to dumb us down, to entertain us to death, and to keep us, ironically, disconnected from each other and from reality so that we never realize the potential we have if we unite against the rich and powerful.

Does that mean we need to leave technology in the past? Of course not, that would be damn near impossible and impractical. What it does mean is that we need to be more mindful of technology and not let it take control of us. It means we need to view artificial intelligence in fast food drive-thrus as a threat to us rather than a benefit, it means we need to fight against the mechanization of factories where machines and robots are replacing skilled workers, it means we need to demand that companies that replace workers with machines must retrain all their replaced workers to do new jobs and not kick them to the curb. We must not feel a burden to try and keep up with robots because that’s impossible for humans, we must not allow ourselves to be replaced from our skilled labor positions without retraining, we must not let corporations set the precedent of taking advantage of humans through the use of technology in or out of the workplace.

In a world where technology is only going to become more prevalent, we cannot allow ourselves to become second class to machines when we are already treated as sub-humans by the ruling class. When you have a little bit of free time, do your mind a favor and read a book, teach yourself how to do something useful, or perhaps even teach yourself a new language—whether it be human language or programming language. Speak to other people, not over the phone, but in person and face-to-face. Don’t purchase everything online, try and stop in to get some human interaction—even though it’s more tedious. Don’t look at the news every single day unless it’s a part of your job. Give yourself the time and space to slow down and feel connected to nature, other humans, and education once more. My point is that technology will continue to advance, so we need to continue advancing with it and not get left behind or become dependent on it.

It’s Time to Throw the Landlord System in the Trash

I have a huge problem with the landlord system: it’s outdated. It’s so outdated, in fact, it’s feudalistic. The modern landlord system is believed to have its origins tracing back to the year 1066—the year that William the Conqueror had become the King of England. William split over half of the country between 170 Barons making them “Lords of the Land.” The Barons would grant land to “Under Tenants” who would then sub-let (rent) the land to peasants in exchange for money or labor (serfdom).

When capitalism became the dominant system in Western society, it established a landlord-tenant relationship in the form that we know today. Landlords, often very wealthy urban men, would buy land and build rental properties, forming estate empires, to rent out to people. This erased the need for a middle-man. The majority of the renting first occurred in rural villages where people typically made less money so property was cheaper to buy.

Eventually rural renting became less popular as farming declined as a primary form of subsistence and more people moved to cities. Landlords, by the 19th century, had built empires in the form of companies. These companies would build rental properties that were very cheaply constructed, sub-standard, and had minimum regulation to follow. These rental properties led to very poor living standards and unsanitary conditions for the tenants causing them to become known as slum-dwellings and tenement homes.

Today rentals have to follow safety regulations and must be up to code. However, that doesn’t mean that exploitation has gone and went for the tenants. This very form of private property was a product of a time when certain people literally thought they were better humans than others as their noble status was believed to be established by God. The landlord system is inherently exploitative and must be abolished. Nowadays, there are more corporate landlords than individual ones which is even worse for the tenant as corporations have no faculty for faculty to feel human suffering.

It’s disgusting to me that I even have to ask the question in 2025 of why there are rental properties with vacancies while there are people out in the cold with no place to call home? I know the answer—greed. Capitalism has one goal and that is to maximize profit for the capitalist. Profit breeds greed and capitalism is the system that shelters it. I, as Marx and Engels did in 1848, rebuke the ownership of private property to its very core, the system that perpetuates the interest of the minority over the right of the majority. We have no reason to allow such an exploitation to continue in our day and age. We have no reason that we can’t put a dent in the homeless crisis, except the greed of the bourgeoisie—whom seem to matter more than the rest of us. It’s long overdue that we abolish the landlord system and begin moving in the right direction of housing all people, as is their human right.

Elections Aren’t About Policy, They’re About Profit

This is a point that I will continue to hammer home because it’s so important. Elections are not about who has the best policies for the greatest number of people, like they should be, they are about who can sell-out the most to corporations so they can make the most profit. The harsh truth is that everything about capitalism always leads back to profit. Unfortunately, that includes politics. What should be about creating positive change for the masses is really about catering to mega-rich corporations so they continue to fund and back candidates. The truly devastating part is that money has infested politics to such a point that, in Western capitalist nations, almost all of the majority parties are filled with corporate lackeys who will always vote in favor of their rich funders rather than the people they supposedly represent.

In the United States, we look back to Andrew Jackson as the first president who enlisted modern campaign tactics. Jackson had powerful political friends who would distribute pro-Jackson pamphlets to people all the way back in 1828. As a reward, Jackson would give his political loyalists federal positions in what we know as the “spoils system.” Doesn’t that sound oddly familiar? This marked the start of a long timeline of money in American politics that would take an entire article to cover alone, so I’ll leave a link to the timeline in my sources below if you want to check it out for yourself. What we do know is that capitalists have always used their financial power to blur the lines and acquire massive amounts of political power.

Political financing does not reach the billions in the United Kingdom like it does in the States, however, it may be even more corrupt. 20% of ALL major political donations between 2001-2021 came from 10 men. As of 2021, those 10 men had an average age of 70, 4 of them were billionaires, 9 of them were white, and all 10 had given money to the Conservative Party at some point. The majority of them were Brexiteers and donated to Eurosceptic causes. Brexit, looking back now 5 years later, has turned out to be a disaster for the UK’s working class. Currently, the UK has no cap on the amount that any individual can donate to a party as well as lax controls on donations, so it is difficult to know where exactly the money is coming from. There isn’t a strong element of public funding which makes the United Kingdom more susceptible to dark money and big money donors.

In the two largest Western nations, money has infested the political system and made it more about who you know than what you know and plan to do. It has made politics a game of sucking up and being controlled by trusts, corporations, billionaires and millionaires, and PACs and Super-PACs. Capitalism has allowed politics to become this way and it has no chance of turning it around. You cannot change a system from the inside out, especially not when that system is controlled by the big money elites who’ll dish out obscene amounts of money to ensure that no meaningful campaign financing reforms are passed into law.

It’s disturbing how capitalists have so much control over the rest of us. They spend money to ensure we don’t get laws that would better our lives. It’d be a difficult task to find a combined 10 politicians who haven’t been bought by big money. The vast majority of politicians and candidates have sold us out for their own financial gain, which means they’ll never work for us, while they’ll always vote in favor of the people paying them ridiculous amounts of money.

Capitalist nations can say that they have “free and fair elections,” but the truth is that the rich and powerful have bought the elections, the candidates, and their political influence to ensure nothing passes that would harm them. There are no free elections when people can spend millions ensuring a single candidate gets elected. There is no fairness in a political system that, due to capitalism, always bends the knee to the interests of the wealthy. This guise of democracy is a complete and utter lie meant to blind us from the people keeping us chained down—the bourgeoisie. We need to open our eyes to reality!

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Conclusion

Capitalism tells us lots of nice things: that we live in democracies where we get to choose our leaders through free and fair elections, that private property is a good thing, that technology is the key to unlocking the future and that it will only increase our quality of life. In reality, these things are not true. The capitalist system has outlived its usefulness and it’s time for it to be put to rest, for good. We cannot allow ourselves to continue to be fooled through the lies and false promises of capitalism. It isn’t making our lives better. It definitely isn’t making the lives of those around the globe better either.

Capitalists have put a leash around our necks with technology. They overload us with information, products, and updates while they never get around to harnessing technology to improve the lives of millions of people. They sell us a product with built-in malfunctions and then sell us the solution. Capitalists are foaming at the mouth to replace us with robots who can work around the clock, who don’t require a break or a wage or basic human rights. For us, capitalism has outlived its usefulness, but to tech capitalists, we have outlived our usefulness.

There really isn’t much to say about a system that survived the transition from feudalism to capitalism. The greed and exploitation of it is so apparent, yet we do nothing about it. There is zero reason why anyone should be considered a lord over land in 2025, but we allow it to be so. The landlord system isn’t doing us any good, so it should be abolished. When something has survived for a thousand years with minimal changes to the basic principle of somebody or something (corporations) being above a person then it has lived long past its life expectancy, and it should be killed for it has become a parasite to modern society.

There was a time when elections weren’t about profits. Back during the very founding of the United States, campaign funding from citizens would’ve been a very foreign concept. Instead, the rich would fund their own campaigns, so I guess not all that much has changed. Looking through the history of politics and capitalist nations, it’s truly difficult to find a time when a regular person of no significant background became the leader of one of these nations based off their character and policy, not by accepting funding from the bourgeoisie. This tells us that capitalism has always meant for the elite to run these countries and for them to serve their elite buddies rather than the masses.

I say again that capitalism has outlived its usefulness for us, the regular, the working class, the poor, the majority just trying to get by. There is not a point to be made about keeping the vast majority of people under a system that controls and exploits them, is there? I ask the question: would it be better to fight—no matter how tough that fight may be—or to sit down and continue to be taken advantage of? My friends, the system which has not just kept us in chains and shackles, but enslaved the majority of the world at some point or another, is nearing its deathbed, is nearing the time where we can throw it in the hall of antiquities along with all other things that have outlived their usefulness; this fight will be tough, it will be arduous, but it is absolutely necessary in securing the freedom of all people of the world, in ensuring that our children and their children are granted all human rights, in destroying the most oppressive form of governance we have ever known!

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