This year, I've read a lot and tried to pay attention to the news. And everywhere I look, capitalism appears to be responsible for a seemingly endless list of atrocities. It's the economic system that brought us Bhopal, the military industrial complex, Superfund sites, sweatshops, the financial crisis, climate change and the Gulf oil spill.
Right now, we're witnessing what seems like the Last Days of capitalism. Every passing day brings new evidence that this system is unsustainable, exploitative and killing the planet. As our economy crumbles around us, people are taking it as evidence that the entire philosophy of capitalism is wrong. And though it might make me unpopular in some circles, I want to defend the core tenets of capitalism. Not because I don't agree with every single criticism people have made of the way our system operates, and not because I don't think we need radical change. Not because I'm harboring some illusion that our political system is capable of fixing the world's problems, and not because I'm defeatist and think we have to accept the current system and be "realistic". There's nothing realistic about pretending that changing our lightbulbs and waiting for Congress to pass an even more flawed version of Waxman-Markey will stop climate change.
Here's the thing: I think the core idea of capitalism--individuals coordinating their desires and abilities through a market--is actually a really good idea. On its most basic level, capitalism is about matching up someone doing or making something with someone willing to pay them for it. Capitalism encourages research and innovation--for drugs to treat HIV/AIDS, for alternative energy sources, for better water infrastructure in developing countries. Capitalism provides rewards for people who provide goods or services that meet needs. And I don't think there's another economic system that does that.
Where capitalism becomes problematic is when it gets large, global, industrialized and values maximizing profit at the expense of everything else, including human life or ecological health. Some people would argue these problems are inherent in the system, but I disagree. A woman in Ghana running a sewing business which makes traditional West African clothing for customers is still a capitalist enterprise, and one which, I would argue is fundamentally different from the likes of Dow Chemical or Monsanto. We need a system which will preserve those enterprises--the independent bookstores, clothing makers, hippie juice bars, creative dance teachers and farmers--without allowing corporate behemoths to commit state-sanctioned murder.
How do we get there? I'm not sure. I'm skeptical about the effectiveness of our political system to create change, especially on the scale we need in the time we have. I think overturning both Citizens United and its underlying precedent--corporate personhood--would be a good start. Holding corporations legally accountable for their actions would be better. That's a change that won't come from our legislative or executive branches, but a few rogue judges could get us somewhere. And if courts in the US won't hear it, we need to drag Coca-Cola, Nestle, Dow and anyone else we can think of in front of the International Criminal Court.
More than anything, I think we need to break the cycle of materialism and consumption. As Adbusters loves to say--"When you cut off the flow of oxygen to a person's brain, their brain dies. When you cut off the flow of nature to a person's soul, their soul dies. It's as simple as that." We need to get everyone in the developed world outside, starting at a young age. We need to resist media intrusion into our lives. We need to take down billboards, and any other ads that we're forced to look at. We need to remember how to value nature, and how to see ourselves as connected to it. We need to learn to be happy with what we have. We need to remember how to be people.
All of that's going to take a while. And it's not everything we should be doing, by any means. We need people sitting in front of bulldozers. We need people who won't come down from trees. We need anger and outrage and giant posters of people killed by methyl isocyante paraded in front of every single politician in this country. We need to find a way to take our government back, and I'm not talking "helpful tips" like calling your elected officials to tell them what you think. But when we get there, if we get there, and we get to re-write our world, I think capitalism should stick around. I don't mind paying someone to grow my food, as long as I know who they are and how they're growing it.
16 comments:
Capitalism is fundamentally flawed in that it is a system which is based on greed and self-interest. It meets the economically manifested needs of the wealthier classes. It does not meet the needs of the poor and prevents everyone from addressing their deeper and more important needs (community, connection to nature, love) by focusing their energies on economic survival or self improvement. One will never be paid to be a part of a strong community, understand their proper role in the natural world, or to attend to loving relationships, so these needs will always be neglected in a capitalist society. Capitalism also creates poverty and inequality. Anytime you have a system which unequally distributes wealth and power, those who are more powerful will use their influence to expand their power at the expense of the poor and middle class. The self-interest that is inherent in capitalism suppresses compassion and selflessness, ensuring that the powerful will never exercise restraint for the benefit of others. All of the non-oppressive activities which occur within the context of capitalism can be preserved in a system where all people are equals, but oppression can never be avoided in capitalism since it demands inequality of wealth, and subsequently power. The government and the corporations who control the government are too entrenched to create a sustainable and equitable society. All three branches of government have given elites the ability to enforce inequality with state-sponsored violence, and powerful interests have succeeded in making the masses adopt and fight for their interests (see Power: A Radical View by Steven Lukes). Since the wealthy have a firm grip on popular opinion, we have no hope in changing it, so we must somehow dismantle the oppressive systems which control the global economic and political spheres. I ask all those who truly believe in equality, justice, and liberty to join me.
This post is dedicated to responding to specific points you made on fb (going off memory) and on blogspot
I was using money in a very broad sense. Money=ES textbooks, assets, anything which can exchanged for currency. The transaction you mentioned is one where no one turns a profit, so it is completely irrelevant to my point about how capitalism leaves some worse than others. Corporations do not turn a profit by accepting currency in exchange for assets of equal value. The transactions of corporations large and small exploit the customer and the worker by funneling the profits into the hands of the investors, who are well-to-do in the first place. Thus, it keeps money and power in the hands of those who were born with it. One could argue that they deserve the profits because they came up with the idea, the entrepreneurship. Such an argument masks the fact that 99% of the population is denied the capital necessary to realize entrepreneurship, and that most businesses depend on an excess of poor who are willing to work for low wages. Ultimately, capitalism rewards those who are born with money and exploits those who do the actual work.
Loans are not a unique condition of poverty, but loans to the poor are not the fundamental thing that I am taking issue with. I am taking issue with the fact that some are born with more money than others, and that those with less money depend on loans from those with more money. I am taking issue with inequality, made much viler by the fact that it is inequality of birthright. And the very poor (such as those who depend on microloans) are denied access to traditional loans; they cannot go to the bank and take out a mortgage because they do not have enough property because they were born into a position of lower standing.
Why did you fan Fertile Ground on fb, when you are arguing against what they are fighting for? "This culture will not make a voluntary change to a sustainable lifestyle" is in direct opposition to your belief in gradual change.
Rich interests created the US court system and the International Court system. You will not be able to end corporate oppression by fighting it within systems which it created. The most you will be able to achieve is to stop individual violations, which Nestle, Dow, etc. will find some way around. You will never get a court to say "no more human and environmental exploitation," which is what we need.
Since capitalism is based on greed and self-interest you will never end greedy, selfish acts like materialism and consumption within capitalism.
Acts based on the futile cause of changing public opinion (posters that create outrage, attracting media attention by sitting in front of dozers) should not be the core of a resistance.
We cannot take back "our" government since it wasn't ours to begin with. It was founded by rich interests to expand and preserve those interests (see An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States by Charles A. Beard)
I do not know how dismantle systems of oppressive power; I just know that it must be done. If I knew how I would be doing it and not going to college.
I fanned Fertile Ground because:
a) while I don't agree with everything they say in general and particularly about capitalism, I do agree with them about the environmental movement being pointless unless we get people back to a place where they value and depend on nature
b)I don't believe gradual change is the best option we have, but I think it's important to think about getting the non-radical people of the world on board, and that's only going to happen gradually. Also, as I've pointed out previously, y'all in the "no gradual change" camp have yet to offer any kind of alternative
c) I appreciate people thinking along these lines, whether I agree with everything they say or not, because I think it's important to have a variety of opinions in environmental debates
d) mostly, the simple fact that the world is so completely fucked up that it will be several generations before your interests, their interests and my interests ever diverge, so for now, we're fighting the same fight.
I don't think capitalism being based on self-interest is a fundamental flaw. The entire point of capitalism is that your self-interest allows you to interact with people in the marketplace who will pay you to do something you love that they want. It doesn't prevent people from addressing those needs any more than any other economic system where you have to work. In any economy, people have to get food, shelter, clothing, etc. Those all take time, and therefore take away from time for nature, community and love. That's not a feature of capitalism, it's a feature of survival. And also, capitalism is what allows people to specialize so that some people can get paid to lead outdoor trips or run farmer's markets and do all those other productive things. If we all had to feed ourselves off the land, we'd have a lot less time for those things.
I think most of your arguments have to do with giant global industrial capitalism, not the core philosophy of capitalism itself. People are all too happy to exploit things they can't see in their self-interest. Capitalism in small doses, in communities, won't produce the kinds of abuses that we see now. And self-interest is not a bad thing. Everything I do is in my own self-interest. I fight for the natural world because I would go crazy in a world without forests. I volunteer because it's fun and it makes me happy. All kinds of good things happen every day that are purely from self-interest. Like I said earlier, people motivated by the large quantity of money they will make if they're successful are working to develop drugs to cure or prevent HIV.
As hard as I try, I cannot understand the sentence, "People are all too happy to exploit things they can't see in their self-interest"
Us over in the "no gradual change" camp have offered an alternative, which is to dismantle the oppressive systems that degrade humans and the environment. As I have said before, I don't know exactly how to do this but you don't know exactly how to gradually get moderates on board. Add to that the fact that bringing people over doesn't end oppression or environmental destruction, and I'd say the "no gradual change" camp comes out ahead.
The world is fucked up, but that does not mean it will take several generations to unfuck it up. We need to cut society's ties to oppressive systems with swift blows, as one does with any abusive relationship.
I am all for people doing things that they love and that other people want, but I believe that this can occur organically. In addition, capitalism only provides this luxury to the wealthier classes, while the lower classes become slaves to the desires of the bourgeoisie. Capitalism forces the poor to do something that they don't want do in order to get by, and it will always do that no matter how small you make it. The small-scale capitalism that you speak of might have less oppression than large-scale capitalism, but it will be oppressive nonetheless. It still motivates people to act in order to be wealthier and more powerful than others, and it still will result in such ends. With capitalism, people who have more land and power, even if it is only slightly more, will exploit this advantage.
Capitalism demands inequality, if you are against equality please address this.
We do not need capitalism to have specialization, I am okay with specialization as long as it comes from a person's genuine desire to specialize rather than the economic demands of capitalism and of the ruling elite.
Capitalism incites greed, especially on the part of those who are already wealthy. This begets consumerism, vanity, and such things which distract people from love, nature, and community.
I was using self-interest in a much more conservative sense than you are, in the sense that you are seeking to benefit your self and no one else, oftentimes at the expense of others. This is the kind of self-interest which is required for capitalism. I believe in a world where people are motivated to do things for the good of the community and out of compassion. An example, the inventor of the polio vaccine gave it away, reducing the cost and thus giving more people access to it, providing a societal benefit much greater than if he was motivated by capitalist greed. When people do things that run contrary to their personal self-interest, the masses benefit. We need a society that motivates people to think of the community first and the self second.
People are all too happy to exploit things they can't see in their self-interest means that it's easy to exploit people when you work in a corporate office in New York and never have to see the factory workers who put in fourteen hour days without enough food to make you rich. When capitalism is practiced locally, in a community-based way, it's a lot harder for that type of exploitation to occur.
Of course capitalism demands inequality. Human nature demands inequality as well. Some people are smarter than others. Some people have better ideas than others. Some people get lucky. As long as we treat everyone well, with respect and dignity, and as long as everyone has access to enough food, clean water, shelter, free expression, reproductive freedom, health care and education, who cares if everyone isn't perfectly equal? You have access to all those things right now; do you lose any sleep worrying about Bill Gates being richer than you? The problem isn't inequality; it's a lack of access to the basic rights of being human. And you can say that some people are rich because they exploit others to get that way, and maybe we can't get everyone access to all those things without eliminating inequality, and that's fine. But my end goal is getting everyone those things, so that's my starting point. If, along the way, we have to fundamentally reshape our entire economy, then cool, that will happen.
You mean "people are all too happy to exploit things they can see in their self-interest".
In any case, if you look through history books your postulate about exploitation is quite false:
First off, you're forgetting that the factory workers used to be in New York, where the corporate board members saw them just down the street living in slums infested with sewage and typhus.
The Founding Fathers and the generals of the Revolutionary War had no problem watching young men die in battle and denying the maimed survivors suffrage on account of their not owning property.
The South before and after the Civil War was community-based; no corporate board-rooms, just people who lived on their land. That didn't stop the wealthier ones from enslaving people who suffered just outside their front door, and continuing to commit numerous other human rights violations after the war.
Women have been described by Howard Zinn as "The Intimately Oppressed" because they have been and continue to be exploited within their own households.
Similar abuses continue today. Those in board rooms are not the only ones who profit from capitalism; there are numerous wealthy bottom-feeders who exploit people right before their own eyes: loan sharks, pimps, human traffickers, orchard-owners, factory managers. Not having to see the exploitation that makes one wealthy is a luxury which has been secured by investors and executives, eliminating the distance between the exploiter and the exploited will not stop or hinder exploitation.
I would think long and hard before using human nature to justify inequality, as it is scientifically baseless and justifying human activities as "natural" has a blood-soaked record. It has been used in support of sexism, corporal punishment, manifest destiny, racism, etc.
"Smart," "better ideas," and "lucky" are wholly subjective terms and you cannot argue that people are unequal based on your valuation and society's valuation of people on these bases (pl. basis). The primary inequality that capitalism demands is property rights, and it is from this that most/all other inequalities stem. In addition, one can value it objectively up to a certain extent. Property rights are not engrained in human nature; in almost all Native American communities north of Mexico land was held communally.
I don't want to sit around with clean water, shelter, free expression, healthcare and education while other people are controlling the political arena because they have more money and public attention than I do. It is not the job of progressives such as yourself to decide what human rights are. It is the job of the humans whose lives are in question, and the only way to make that happen is to eliminate the political and economic inequalities that empower certain people to decide what the rights of other people should be. You cannot treat others with respect and dignity if you disempower them.
I'm going into the woods until July 7th
So, you don't seem to be responding. Just wondering whether this is because you suddenly agree with me or because you are just tired of arguing. I saw your realizations that were in your most recent post, but I am curious as to where you stand on the nature of exploitation, inequality, the distribution of power, and your thoughts on Power: a Radical View.
I agree with you enough that I'm too tired to keep arguing the insignificant details.
I haven't read Power yet because I'm busy reading all my Semester in the West pre-departure environmental literature.
I think the issue of exploitation existing even when it's visible (pimps, loan sharks etc.) points to a flaw in human nature more than capitalism. I'm skeptical that any economic, political or social system will change the fact that some people have no problems treating other people like that, but I hope I'm wrong. I suppose there's fairly compelling evidence that a lot of indigenous cultures don't treat people like that.
And as I've said, at the end of the day, this disagreement over future hippie utopias doesn't matter. We're going to be fighting the same fight for a very long time.
I am strongly opposed to assertion that we will be fighting the same fight for a very long time. Liberal strategies are for achieving liberal goals and will never bring us closer achieving radical goals. I am not interested in pursuing the fights that you have suggested, from microfinance to lawsuits to sitting in front of bulldozers (I am presuming that you mean nonviolently). Such methods legitimize existing power structures and will never achieve the radical goal of dismantling systems of oppressive power because they work within existing systems rather than confronting them. Yes, civil disobedience is technically illegal but you are letting yourself get arrested, so it is still legitimizing the laws and conforming to the system.
Radical change requires militant action. Such a statement does not come easily from someone who has never held a firearm. Since there will likely be few willing to do this, this action must be covert, whether that be attacking infrastructure that support the powerful to some Boondock Saints type stuff.
As for human nature, the fact that you and I are not driven to exploit people, along with many other people makes a pretty compelling argument that it is not intrinsic in human nature.
Also, don't call me a hippie. If you think I'm a hippie than you have a very strange understanding of the word hippie.
In other news, you need to read The Vegetarian Myth by Lierre Keith NOW. It is more important than Power: A Radical View, readings that Phil Brick would assign, or anything for that matter.
I didn't call you a hippie, I'm going to read the Vegetarian Myth as soon as the used copy I ordered arrives, I don't appreciate your tone or implied assertion that you know better than me how to solve every problem the world faces, and I think tangibly improving the life of a single person or living being is worthwhile every time I can do it and is not in opposition with dismantling existing power structures.
Also, has it ever occurred to you that it might be a bit pretentious for you to assume you know best for people in developing countries, people living in poverty, women and people of color, seeing as how you've never been any of them?
I did not intend to have a condescending tone, so I apologize for that. I truly do want to have a healthy discussion.
On that note, please do not put words into my mouth. I never said that I knew what was best for disadvantaged groups. Quite to the contrary, it was you who did this by listing off what those people need. I want to eliminate the power relations that allow other people to dominate them and control their lives; it is the job of the people whose lives are in question to decide what is best for them. The progressive approach is to ask the people but this is much less than ideal since “people's wants may themselves be a product of a system which works against their interests” (Steven Lukes). Oppressive power systems must be wholly dismantled in order to create a just world where each individual's interests are valued.
In addition, I never said that progressive solutions were in opposition to radical solutions. Expanding access to clean water and all that jazz by no means works against dismantling oppressive power. It also is by no means an essential step in dismantling oppressive power, which is why I am am opposed to the statement that we will be fighting the same fight.
I would argue that saying "we need to dismantle existing power structures" is a form of saying you know what's best for those people. Some people in developing countries who can barely survive from day to day might prefer a capitalist system. Some women prefer traditional, sexist, patriarchal gender roles. And I know a lot of that comes from being born and raised within the system, and you can definitely make a case that people need to be educated and that they might be better off under an equal system. I just want to make the point that you need to be really careful when allying yourself with oppressed groups you're not personally a member of, because there's often a lot of debate within feminist groups, anti-racist groups, etc. about the proper role of allies in terms of stating movement goals, etc.
Two other notes: 1) I'm almost done with the first chapter of The Vegetarian Myth, and I've determined there's no ethical way to feed myself in our current food system, which sucks, and 2) I just got a book called Ecodefense which is a guide to monkey wrenching, and you should let me know when you're home because you'll probably find it very helpful in achieving some of your goals. On a related note, read The Monkey Wrench Gang if you haven't already. And The End of Nature. And really you should just raid my eco-library.
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