The answer is No. The true Capitalists, otherwise known as the 1%, are doing quite well.

Interesting, jessia, but lets not throw out small individual capitalists with the one percent. The pro one percent guy with the tie sure did have shifty eyes, I think that's because the capitalist system is bankrupt and afraid of a leaderless democracy that includes the economy. There are huge, invisible profits to civilization waiting for the new way.

First there were coalitions of humans, typically for war or for mutual defense.

Within the boundaries of those coalitions, trade developed in food, in scarce metals for weapons, in slaves. Then merchants specialized in trade.

Capitalism always was a controlled marketplace, a governing tool tolerated and somewhat set up by the kings within their own kingdoms. The king or the Caesar was responsible for issuing a currency that couldn't easily be counterfeited, for detecting and punishing the counterfeiters and sneak thieves, for not allowing inflation to make the currency worthless, for maintaining limits on which nobles had a license to trade, for destroying the largest armies of bandits in the wild places of the kingdom, and for letting the merchants set up their tables in safety inside fortified cities. The king, seeing a lucrative market, could easily enough raise taxes on that one market until he collected most of the wealth, and the merchants collected just enough to keep trading profitably.

So, capitalism never was a totally wild animal. If there was an invisible hand guiding the market, it was the king's hand.

The English and American industrial revolutions were led by industrial revolutionaries, Quakers, who dominated the banks and industries of England and America. Their revolution had a specific internal purpose, and that was to raise up all of the community's people, the poor in particular people. In the early Quaker industrial revolution, the rules of capitalism (you had to make a profit) applied to the outside world, but the rules on the inside were much different. Individual Friends meetings would take one meeting member after another and set them up in a business or in a trade, guaranteeing all of their debts to the outside world. In return, all meeting members had strict internal rules concerning honesty and forthstraight ethical business behavior. Capitalism worked well with these internal idealistic rules. Armed with verifiable honesty, the Quakers crushed all competition.

Capitalism isn't dead. It just needs strict internal rules.

As Michael Moore has put it ...

"Capitalism is an evil and you can't regulate evil."

Capitalism is finished -- we just haven't buried it yet.

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But the process was increasingly contradictory, for, as Trotsky explained, “the capitalist states were led to struggle for the subjection of the world-embracing economic system to the profit interests of the bourgeoisie of each country. What the politics of imperialism has demonstrated more than anything else is that the old national state that was created in the wars of 1789-1815, 1848-1859, 1864-66, and 1870 has outlived itself, and is now an intolerable hindrance to economic development. The present war is at bottom a revolt of the forces of production against the political form of nation and state. It means the collapse of the national state as an independent economic unit.” [2]

The task confronting mankind was to ensure the harmonious development of the productive forces that had completely outgrown the nation-state framework. However, the various bourgeois governments proposed to solve this problem “not through the intelligent, organised cooperation of all of humanity’s producers, but through the exploitation of the world’s economic system by the capitalist class of the victorious country, which country is by this war to be transformed from a great power into a world power.” [3]

The war, Trotsky insisted, signified not only the downfall of the national state, as an independent economic unit, but the end of the progressive historical role of the capitalist economy. The system of private property and the consequent struggle for markets and profits threatened the very future of civilisation.

“The future development of world economy on the capitalistic basis means a ceaseless struggle for new and ever new fields of capitalist exploitation, which must be obtained from one and the same source, the earth. The economic rivalry under the banner of militarism is accompanied by robbery and destruction which violate the elementary principles of human economy. World production revolts not only against the confusion produced by national and state divisions, but also against the capitalist economic organisation, which has now turned into barbarous disorganisation and chaos. The war of 1914 is the most colossal breakdown in history of an economic system destroyed by its own inherent contradictions.” [4]

“Imperialism,” he wrote, “represents the predatory expression of a progressive tendency in economic development—to construct human economy on a world scale, freed from the cramping fetters of nation and state. The national idea in its naked form, as counterposed to imperialism, is not only impotent but also reactionary: it drags the economic life of mankind back to the swaddling clothes of national limitedness.” [5]
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/sep2005/le51-s21.shtml

Poor Adam Smith must be turning in his grave. There are many who hold him up as the founding father of capitalism but if you read what he actually wrote he simply explained the social role of money but was also deeply suspicious of the power of money. In effect he predicted the sort of mess that we are in, if people were not careful enough about regulating the excesses of how money operates. The capitalists have just hijacked his name to try to pin some intellectual legitimacy on their madness. He more or less explained how and why their excesses could and would produce very bad results. If only some of them would actually read THOSE bits!