Mine is an anti-capitalism that will be quite content with the equity-in-diversity of an environmentally sustainable social democracy in which universal healthcare, education, income, expression, recourse to law and franchise is funded by steeply progressive taxes even if everybody decides to call that "capitalism" for whatever reasons perversely appeal to them.
More Dispatches from Libertopia here.
What you describe isn't capitalism but capitalism does exsist within that framework. We've got real world examples in the Scandanavian countries for instance.
ReplyDeleteWhat you describe isn't capitalism
ReplyDeleteNonsense. The systems that have been called capitalism have varied enormously in their institutions and emphases, extractive-industrial, colonialist, corporatist, financial, neoliberal, and I see no reason why what I describe might not also be so designated. All that has to happen is for everybody to say so. Of course, I hear the kids these days like the word socialism better than capitalism anyway, and I certainly have no problem with what I am fighting for being called democratic socialism either.
Scandanavian social democracies are indeed appealing comparatively speaking, but I would advocate for a level of universal income higher than even they have managed, one high enough to function as a permanent de facto strike fund allowing labor/consumer to bargain/contract on equitable terms, hence democratizing the terms of commerce such as they are.
> The systems that have been called capitalism have varied enormously. . .
ReplyDeleteThe Great Awful Truths And What To Do About them
by Scott Bidstrup
http://www.bidstrup.com/great-awful-truths.htm
"There are three great awful truths which must be kept carefully
hidden from the population. If we know what they are and accept the
consequences of them, and know how to use them, our use of them
gives us a tool by which we can maintain control of the masses."
-Leo Strauss, in _Natural Right And History_
. . .
Strauss Was Right, But He Very Conveniently Forgot
Two Other Great Awful Truths. . .
The fifth great awful truth, about which Strauss' followers and their
fellow travelers, the free-market fundamentalists are in complete and
total denial and which directly undermines their economic arguments
for unregulated free markets, is the cold hard reality that money
equals power, and the unrestrained accumulation and concentration of
money therefore equals the unrestrained accumulation and concentration
of power - and since power corrupts, concentrated power inevitably
leads to concentrated corruption and with it, tyranny.
I am quite certain that Strauss and his fellow travelers, such as the
late economist Milton Friedman, were not so stupid that they did not
actually understand this, but that they simply chose to ignore it
and never teach their students about it, because keeping quiet served
their interests and those of the elite. I don't believe, for example,
that it is any accident that Friedman never spoke of this problem
in his many years of tenure as a professor at the University of Chicago -
while being driven around the campus in a chauffered limosine for
most of that time. I seriously doubt that there are many other
college professors granted such a privilege.
The most direct consequence of this truth is that this is why a "free market"
simply cannot remain "free" for very long. Inevitably, in a free and
truly unregulated market, someone will accumulate significantly more
wealth than his competitors, and this will give him a certain amount
of economic leverage that is not enjoyed by his competitors. As it
should be, the free marketeers would insist. Competence should be rewarded.
But the flip side of that coin is that if our market participant is
good enough, he may even gain sufficient leverage to give him the ability
to impose rules by which all buying and selling is done - and the market
at that point can no longer be called free. . .
When big business concentrates so much wealth that its concurrent power
is inescapable, even the President of the United States is forced to
take the call. When the overarching incentive of business is to make
as much money and aggregate as much power to itself as it can possibly
manage, all other interests, including the public interest - even the
stability of democracy itself - become secondary and unimportant, and
very often get run over. I cannot believe that such a situation is
healthy for the public interest over the long term. Adam Smith,
the revered high-god of the "neo-liberal" free-market economists,
actually understood this and wrote about the consequences of it in
_Wealth of Nations_ (1776), showing why large market players and
corporate power had to be severely regulated and tightly constrained
before they can aggregate enough power and influence to individually
influence market prices or activity. Too bad that the free market
fundamentalists who revere the man have never actually read his book.
It is my firm conviction that one of the legitimate functions of
government is, as Adam Smith said it should be, to curb the abuse of
economic and political power by corporate interests, and regulate
the consequences, both economic and environmental, of the single-minded
pursuit of profit as business seeks to maximize its income while
externalizing its costs.
My impression is that the cheerleaders for canonical texts almost never actually read them -- actually reading Smith's Wealth of Nations (and heaven help me, also the Theory of Moral Sentiments), Hobbes' Leviathan, Machiavelli's Prince (not to mention Gramsci's re-make), Spinoza's Ethics, Aristotle's Rhetoric and Ethics, Plato's Dialogues, the Federalist Papers, Kant's Critiques, Marx's Capital (all three volumes byotch), Mill's On Liberty, Keynes' General Theory, Freud's Interpretation of Dreams and Beyond the Pleasure Principle (not to mention the usual 20C suspects from Adorno, Arendt, Barthes, Benjamin, Butler, Debord, Fanon, Foucault, Gilroy, Haraway, Latour, Marcuse, Orwell, Rorty, Spivak, Williams, blah blah blah) and so on has left me thinking people are definitely right to talk about these texts, but that unfortunately almost nobody talking about them knows what the hell they are talking about when they are at all. This annoys me to no end.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of canon, I bought a set of Harvard Classics at a used bookstore last summer. My goal is to read the whole set cover to cover by the end of 2012 (I'm 4 volumes in).
ReplyDeleteI was thinking it would be fun to create a similar set that was made up of female and non-white authors. Who do you think you would include?