New comic: Not Talking About Capitalism

Not Talking About Capitalism
Capitalism is the single dominant force that shapes our lives today.  But for some reason it is taboo to discuss the system that contains us.
http://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comic/not-talking-about-capitalism/ 

With just 10 sentences of text, this is a short comic by my standards!

Not Talking About Capitalism

The premise of the comic is that we simply don’t talk about capitalism any more. This is a strange state of affairs, since free market capitalism is arguably the force that most overwhelmingly influences our thoughts and actions.

In the second half of the 20th century, it was common to hear debates  about the relative merits of capitalism versus communism. About where  the line between public and private should be. This doesn’t happen any more. The default attitude is that “there is no alternative”, in the words of Margaret Thatcher (1980). Or that we are at the “end of history”, in the words of Francis Fukuyama (1992).

But is that really the case? Many people, including me, think we have blinkered ourselves to the shortcomings of capitalism.

Capitalism without a counterbalance

Arguably, the presence of communism as a viable threat to capitalism worked to ‘humanise’ capitalism  in the 1960s and 1970s. Governments in Western countries made massive  investments in public housing, public health, public education, and  similar programs.

The spoils of capitalism went into public investments. Even though the  Apollo program in the Space Race was touted as a “victory for  capitalism”, putting a man on the moon was achieved through a publicly-funded bureaucracy employing 400,000 people! Oh the irony. 

Yet in the 2010s, without communism’s presence as counterbalance, we see  what capitalism looks like without this humanising touch. Globally, the richest 1% own half of the world's wealth. In my country, the richest 1% own more than the bottom 70%. This "winner takes all" scenario seems to getting more exaggerated with time. 

I spent my summer holiday reading French economist Thomas Piketty’s blockbuster book Capital in the Twenty First Century. Piketty uses evidence to show that wealth has a tendency to accumulate in the hands who already have wealth.  He foresees a greater divide between the rich and poor without  redistribution measures like wealth taxes and inheritance taxes.

The artwork and tone

I wanted to give Not Talking About Capitalism an open-ended, thoughtful tone. 

I don’t have a particular axe to grind with this comic, and I hope it  will be a conversation-starter. Or at least a Rorschach Test!

Complementing the thoughtful tone are images of me walking through an urban environment, thinking and observing. The final double-page of the comic took me 22 hours to draw and colour.

Compared to other lengthy comics that I have published, this is an  example of my refocused art style for the near future. My 2018  philosophy is to release shorter comics that feature more heavily detailed artwork.

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(OK, so my commentary of the comic is far longer than the actual comic itself! Thanks for your continued patronage, and I'll see you soon with more updates).