So-called "free market" or "unregulated capitalism" is really nothing more than the cancer-stage of capitalism. And that uninhibited cancerous growth has spread, so that now even our political system is infected with the cancer of corporatism.
Donald Trump's candidacy is an example of how our political system is being eaten alive by the cancer-stage of capitalism.
But to really get what that means, we need to step back and look at the nature of cancer itself. A new study published in "Philosophical Transactions B" titled "Cancer across the tree of life: cooperation and cheating in multicellularity" flushes out how cancer exists across every multicellular organism.
The abstract of the research begins: "Multicellularity is characterized by cooperation among cells..." But cancer, of course, is the opposite of cooperation. It's when a cell decides it's going to suck up all the energy and resources of the organism for itself. And it grows continuously until it kills its host.
It's not a stretch to look at a society - as well as the economic market and the political system that make up society - as a multicellular organism that could easily become infected with an economic or political cancer.
At the base of a society are individuals. Those individuals divide the labor and form specialized groups, because people working together get more done than people working alone.
George Johnson at the New York Times paraphrased Darwin's proposal of life beginning in "some warm little pond." He writes: "a few simple chemicals sloshed together and formed complex molecules [...] as the primordial cells mutated and evolved, ruthlessly competing for nutrients, some stumbled upon a different course. They cooperated instead, sharing resources and responsibilities and so giving rise to multicellular creatures - plants, animals and eventually us."
Societies, economies, and governments could be described as the equivalent of humanity 'evolving' from single-cell behavior to multicellular behavior. But, just as researchers found that cancer sometimes pops up in every multicellular organism on Earth, our economy has now spawned its own cancer. And Donald Trump's candidacy is what happens when our economic cancer spreads to our political system.
