When you get home exhausted and with barely enough time to get your personal affairs in order before you have to rest in preparation for tomorrow's workday, you are proving that capitalism works. When the state of your very health is wholly dependent on whether you're making someone else money, you are proving that capitalism works. When you are always three paychecks away from homelessness because you don't make enough to save, you are proving that capitalism works. Despite what is seems, capitalism is a highly effective and functional system. The reason why this is a surprise to most people is because they find themselves under the misconception that capitalism exists to benefit them. It doesn't. Similar to how libertarianism exists to benefit the independent, theocratism exists to benefit the faithful, and fascism exists to benefit the conformist, capitalism exists to benefit a specific group of people. Those people are the bourgeoisie, the owners of the means of production. Once you realize this fact, it becomes clear that capitalism is extremely successful at what it does. If you have free time, you're not producing for them. If you have free healthcare, you don't need to produce for them as much. If you have savings, you might not need to produce for them at all. Capitalism ensures that that doesn't happen. By chaining you to massive debt right out of college, it immediately forces you to produce in order to pay it off. By requiring a high credit score to escape housing dependence while not letting rent payments contribute to it, it forces you to continue renting and therefore producing. By not keeping wages in step with inflation, it forces you to produce more to achieve the same standard of living. But just as it exploits us, capitalism privileges the bourgeoisie. It deems them worthy of the lion's share of their workers' productivity just because the means of production are held under their name. It allows their enterprises to enjoy the benefits of personhood while requesting only meager fines for offenses that would condemn a real person to death. It guarantees their right to make more money this year than they did last year, even if they must do so at the expense of workers and consumers. Capitalism definitely works, but just for them. Even the strawmen who claim that the solution to all of our problems is just to “StArT a BuSiNeSs” unconsciously admit that. After all, it's easier to escape abuse by becoming one of the abusers than by actually ending it. Under the capitalist system, the bourgeoisie have cultivated a docile population happy to sell their labor for an ever-shrinking portion of its value while paying ever-growing costs to live. Honestly, it's almost perfect. Almost. You see, we are still not yet slaves. They own our labor, but they do not own us, and it frustrates them to no end. They pray for a day not only when they won't have to pay us to work, but when they won't have to treat us like free people. If given the chance, all of them would support our enslavement without a second thought. But alas, that chance has not come. So instead, they use capitalism to approximate slavery. Every slight and annoyance they add upon us, no matter how small, is a step closer to their dream of our forced servitude. They make things worse because it'd be counterintuitive for them to do otherwise. If capitalism is an ally of the bourgeoisie, it is, by definition, an enemy of the proletariat. When you look at the state of the working class, do not claim that it is proof that capitalism has failed. In fact, everything is going to plan.