The Rotting Corpse of Capitalism: Post-Capitalism Rot and Why It Kills Us

By the time you finish reading this, you'll understand why capitalism's putrid stench is suffocating our dreams—and why Donny McFartface's obsession with this dying system will be the final nail in America's coffin.

America is Dead

It's a fucking Tuesday morning in any American town. The alarm screams like a banshee at 5:30 AM. Your eyes burn from exhaustion as you drag yourself to a job that pays less than what your parents made thirty years ago. The refrigerator's half-empty because groceries cost what your rent used to. Your kid's college fund is actually just an empty coffee can with a hopeful label slapped on it. And that pain in your tooth? Better learn to live with it, because your "insurance" has a deductible higher than your monthly take-home pay.

Welcome to post-capitalism America—where the system isn't just broken, it's actively decomposing while we're all still using it.

I can smell the rot from here. Can't you?

The stench of late-stage capitalism has become unbearable, filling our nostrils with the putrid decay of a system that's well past its expiration date. What we're experiencing isn't just economic inequality—it's the death throes of a failed experiment that promised prosperity but delivered precarity.

Research published in the journal World Development reveals a shocking truth that capitalist cheerleaders desperately try to hide: the expansion of capitalism from the 16th century onward was actually associated with "a decline in wages to below subsistence, a deterioration in human stature, and an upturn in premature mortality." So much for the fairy tale that capitalism has always improved our lives.

That's right—the system that promised to lift all boats has actually been drilling holes in them for centuries.

The Body Count Keeps Rising

Let's not mince words: capitalism is fucking killing us. Literally.

By 2018, more than 158,000 Americans were dying annually from what researchers call "deaths of despair"—suicides, drug overdoses, and alcoholic liver disease. That's up from 65,000 in 1995. These aren't just statistics; they're siblings, parents, friends—actual human beings ground down by a system that values quarterly profits over human dignity.

When you can't afford healthcare, when your job disappears to maximize shareholder value, when your community becomes a corporate sacrifice zone—despair isn't just an emotion. It's the logical endpoint of a system that treats people as disposable assets.

You can feel it in your bones, can't you? That gnawing uncertainty that keeps you up at night. That's not just anxiety—it's your body's natural response to living in an economic meat grinder.

The Fall of the Middle Class

Remember the middle class? That quaint concept our parents and grandparents used to belong to? It's become America's favorite ghost story—something we tell ourselves existed once upon a time but that nobody actually sees anymore.

Economic mobility has slowed dramatically, and the once-celebrated middle class has shrunk from 61 percent of American households to just 52 percent. The American Dream hasn't just been deferred—it's been foreclosed on, packaged into a toxic financial instrument, and sold to speculators who bet on its failure.

Meanwhile, the rich keep getting unfathomably richer. They're not just winning the game—they've rewritten the rules, stolen the dice, and convinced half the players that their losses are somehow the fault of the other losing players.

Walk through any American city and witness the evidence with your own eyes: luxury condos sprouting like gleaming fungi from the rotting log of affordable housing. People sleeping in tents beneath the shadows of sparkling bank headquarters. Food banks with lines stretching for blocks while grocery stores throw out tons of "unprofitable" food.

This isn't success. This is systemic failure disguised as economic inevitability.

How the Fuck Did We Get Here?

The transition from functioning capitalism to this decomposing zombie system didn't happen overnight. It was a slow, deliberate disembowelment of the regulations and social contracts that once kept the system's worst tendencies in check.

The turning point came with the "Nixon shock" in 1971 and its aftermath, when we moved away from the gold standard, initiating an era of fiat money and free credit. What followed was the neoliberal revolution of the 1980s—deregulation, union-busting, tax cuts for the wealthy, and the systematic dismantling of the social safety net.

From about 1937 to 1947, a period called the "Great Compression," income inequality fell dramatically. Progressive New Deal taxation, stronger unions, strong post-war economic growth, and regulation by the National War Labor Board broadly raised market incomes and lowered the after-tax incomes of top earners. But we've spent the last four decades deliberately unraveling those gains, returning to Gilded Age levels of inequality.

The result isn't just economic inequality—it's a profound fracturing of society itself. Communities hollowed out, social bonds severed, democracy corrupted by the toxic influence of money. What we're left with isn't capitalism in any functional sense, but a grotesque parody—a system of socialism for the rich and merciless market fundamentalism for everyone else.

Capitalism’s Idiot Dunce: Donald J Trump

Enter Donny McStinkface, capitalism's court jester masquerading as its savior. He struts and preens as the self-proclaimed champion of the "forgotten Americans," all while advancing policies that accelerate their economic disembowelment.

His strategy is as transparent as it is effective: amplify genuine economic pain, misdirect the blame, and offer simplistic solutions that actually worsen the underlying disease. It's the oldest con in the political playbook, and we're falling for it like marks at a rigged carnival game.

Trump's predatory capitalism is nothing but a spoils system where the head of state surrounds himself with cronies and abuses his powers to tax, spend, and tariff to dole out favors. His advisors even admit it: "Tariffs are a tool the president enjoys because it's personal power."

Despite campaigning on promises to raise taxes on "hedge fund guys," Trump's tax plan actually gave them a hundred times more in breaks than it took away. He claimed he'd protect Social Security and Medicare while proposing budgets that would eviscerate them. He promised to drain the swamp while stuffing his administration with the very Wall Street vampires who helped create this mess.

The most devastating irony? The communities suffering most under late capitalism's decay are often the same ones most fervently supporting Turdburg Trump. They're drowning and praising the man who's holding their heads underwater.

Post-Growth Reality: Why It’s Real

Here's the uncomfortable truth that neither political party wants to acknowledge: we live on a finite planet with finite resources, and the myth of endless economic growth is exactly that—a myth. A deadly, ecocidal fantasy.

The "post-growth" movement recognizes that on our physically finite earth, economies cannot grow infinitely, and beyond certain thresholds (approximately $25,000 GDP per capita), economic indicators other than growth become more important for human wellbeing.

Yet we continue to measure success by GDP growth, stock market performance, and other metrics that have increasingly little connection to the lived reality of most Americans. The economy can be "booming" while most people's lives get worse—and that fundamental disconnect lies at the heart of our current crisis.

Climate collapse isn't some separate issue from economic justice—it's the ultimate expression of capitalism's fatal flaw: the inability to value anything it can't immediately monetize. The future has no lobbyists, so it gets no say in our economic decisions.

How To Get Rid of the Rotting Corpse

So here we stand, up to our necks in the decaying remains of a system that's failing most of us. The question isn't whether capitalism as we know it is dying—it's what will rise from its putrid remains.

We're already seeing glimpses of post-capitalist possibilities emerging from the decomposition. Mutual aid networks sprouting like resilient mushrooms from the decay. Worker-owned cooperatives creating islands of democracy in the authoritarian sea of corporate control. Community land trusts reclaiming housing from the speculative market.

These aren't just cute alternatives or quaint experiments—they're lifeboats being built as the capitalist ship takes on water. And more importantly, they're proof that we can organize economic activity around human needs rather than profit extraction.

Where progress has occurred historically, significant improvements in human welfare began several centuries after the rise of capitalism. In core regions of Northwest Europe, progress began in the 1880s, while in the periphery and semi-periphery it began in the mid-20th century—periods characterized by the rise of anti-colonial and socialist political movements that redistributed incomes and established public provisioning systems.

The path forward isn't a mystery. We know what works: robust social safety nets, universal public services, progressive taxation, strong labor rights, democratic ownership, and ecological planning. The obstacles aren't technical—they're political.

The Hard Choice

As capitalism's corpse continues to rot around us, we face a stark choice: find ways to move beyond this failed system, or continue pretending the stench is just our imagination.

Donny McDumpTrump and his cronies are betting on the latter—that we'll keep huffing the putrid fumes of late capitalism while blaming our nausea on immigrants, or liberals, or some other convenient scapegoat. They're counting on our collective Stockholm syndrome, our inability to imagine an economy that isn't structured around their exploitation.

But the cracks in this strategy are showing. People are waking up to the con. The question is whether we'll wake up fast enough to build something better from capitalism's remains, or whether we'll let fascism's false promises lure us into something even worse.

The rotting corpse of capitalism won't revive itself, no matter how many tax cuts for the wealthy we administer like economic smelling salts. It's time to stop pretending otherwise and start having honest conversations about what comes next.

Because right now, we're all trapped in capitalism's decaying carcass. And the stench is becoming unbearable.

---

References:

1. Sullivan, D 2023. "Capitalism and extreme poverty: A global analysis of real wages, human height, and mortality since the long 16th century" Science Direct

2. Case, A. and Deaton, A. 2020 "Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism," Princeton University Press.