Student Radicals Mistaken in Assault on Capitalism

Students and young people from Pitt and around the country have been planning protests against the G-20 Summit and, later this week, they’ll have a chance to prove their radical credentials and rail against capitalism in a public space.

            

At permitted and unpermitted protests throughout the city, radical students will, as one proclamation endorsed by Pitt’s Students for Justice in Palestine put it, “take to the streets of Pittsburgh to disrupt the summit and the institutions of capital that profit from its domination.”

            

At a meeting in David Lawrence, Students for Radical Change and Liberation even brought a speaker from Pittsburgh’s own anarchist group, the Pittsburgh Organizing Group, to teach them about participating in mass actions and managing their “arrest-risk” during the G-20 protests, PittBriefly reported.

            

Whether online or on campus, radical student groups at Pitt have assaulted capitalism as our great oppressor and planned to bring it to its knees during the G-20 Summit. But while students and other protesters will undoubtedly get lots of media and police attention during the G-20, the only thing they’re likely to disrupt is the lives of Pittsburghers.

            

The real assault on capitalism is being perpetrated by the heads of the G-20 themselves whose nations are less free market giants than bloated, planned economies. Remember, the list of G-20 states includes Communist China, the Oil State of Saudi Arabia and social-democratic Brazil whose current president, Lula da Silva, is the leader of something called the Workers’ Party.

            

If anything, the G-20 is an organization of major planned economies seeking to turn the world market into a safer, planned market devoid of the sort of risks and rewards inherent in capitalist economies.

            

In fact, the most capitalist nation on that list may well be the United States but President Obama, by proposing caps on wages at financial institutions and an expansion of federally funded health care benefits, is steadily moving our country toward a more statist economy.

            

But protesters would rather identify lack of health care, lack of jobs and global warfare as products of a global capitalist cabal than the result of their own inability to pay for health care, get a job or elect anti-war candidates to office.

            

Of course, the problem with scapegoating is that it’s an easily debunked charade perpetrated by those unable (or unwilling) to engage in serious debate about the facts.

            

The fact is that capitalism lifted this world out of the feudalism and perpetual warfare of the Middle Ages.

            

Capitalism popularized and funded the inventions that improved every American’s life from the steam engine to the telephone.

            

Capitalism made it possible for people to devote four years of their lives to studying Marx at a university.

            

Whether protesters like it or not, capitalism has done more to lift humanity out of bondage and poverty than any tent city in the history of man. Protest China’s human rights policies, Saudi Arabia’s treatment of women or the United States’ continued discrimination against the LGBT community but don’t build up a false enemy in capitalism as an excuse to disrupt businesses and communities in Pittsburgh.