The human condition has been around for ages

Writing in today's Sunday Telegraph Janet Daley says:

Properly speaking, capitalism is not a system at all... it is just the human condition in economic form. As such, it contains all of the common vices – greed, selfishness and, as the current crisis demonstrates, a peculiarly unattractive mixture of ruthlessness and recklessness. But it also embodies some of the finest human traits: creativity, courage, intellectual inventiveness and adaptability. Indeed, it was precisely the need to suppress those invaluable traits – arguably the ones that are most characteristic of human independence of spirit – that made communism untenable.

For my money (to coin a phrase), that isn't properly speaking; it's speaking in a confused way. Daley surely wouldn't want to assert that the human condition, with its mix of vices and virtues, was absent from pre-capitalist or other non-capitalist social formations. Did, and do, the denizens of non-capitalist societies not experience such features of the human condition as birth and death, joy and grief, love, hatred, illness, old age, indigestion and that dream where you're trying to get away from some looming threat and your legs just won't move fast enough, if they'll move at all? What Daley means to say, I think, is not that capitalism is just the human condition, as if other types of society might not be the human condition, but that capitalism is the optimal form of society for bringing out the best in human nature. Whatever one may think of this claim, she hasn't chosen the most profitable way of expressing it. Someone she could read on this question, and expect to get a good return for the investment, is Karl Marx.