Any proposal for serious social or economic change will contain two lists of assertions: one will concern the status quo and its alleged faults; the other will be an account of what improvements the proposed change will bring about. Neither assertion is to be trusted, and neither can predict how things will actually change over time. The public must therefore review both the validity of those claimed faults and, if the change is adopted, whether the change has corrected them, or perhaps created unanticipated, undesirable problems of its own.
Capitalism, I admit, was never really offered to the public as a comprehensive change in the way I’ve described. It evolved over decades, as a consequence of a number of social, political, environmental and economic changes. Nonetheless, its claims can be stated and assessed as though it had been so presented.
What capitalism claimed was that the medieval economy was inefficient and self-limiting. It promised new ways of producing goods that would lower their cost to the average buyer, create new sources of employment, and new ways for business owners to make profits.
In support of its claims, it pointed to a steadily growing population which assured increasing public demand for goods and the availability of needy workers. It assumed readily available energy sources to power machine production, and abundant raw materials that could become products. It also claimed that the competitive marketplace would ensure that product prices would be as low as possible, product quality as high as possible, and that producers would be unable to make excessive profits.
And what has the future in fact brought us? A clear realization that competition does not render capitalism immune to cheating the public. Producers lie to consumers. They aim at controlling the market for their products in order to increase profits. They exploit workers by paying less than a living wage. They use their money to buy political influence and acquire government contracts. And, they manage to instill in the public a
craving for their latest products by making the possession of those products a measure of each buyer’s personal achievement.
Capitalism, until recently, has rarely been held responsible for the side-effects of its production processes and the use of its products. Before a product lands on the shelf, and after it’s been purchased, a company traditionally owes no accountability to the public. We now know that industrial emissions of greenhouse gases are responsible for global warming, a phenomenon that has already caused enormous suffering and death around the world. We also know that industrial chemical emissions contaminate land and sea, and that the careless disposal of products and their packaging materials is an environmental catastrophe. If my personal actions cause damage to someone else’s property, I will be held responsible, yet companies have not been expected to, for example, facilitate the recovery and re-use of the products they produce. Asking a company to spend money in the public interest is contrary to capitalistic principles.
Capitalism’s assumption that population growth will continue has proved false, and that assumption was essential to its predicted benefits. Take note that today, when the news media report on economic growth, it’s the degree of growth that matters, for some degree of growth is assumed. Doesn’t a “healthy” economy grow constantly? Cities and states all seek population growth because it’s taken to mean more customers, more businesses, more income for governments, and more progress. That’s the capitalist gospel.
Opinion column after opinion column in the New York Times predicts economic disaster if population growth ceases. “Alarmist” is too weak a word to characterize their attitude. They tell us that we face an emergency, a catastrophic collapse of our economy, a devastation of the business world, a reduction to rubble of the economic structure that we all depend upon. There MUST be growth, for it's “grow or die.”
Let me pose this question: If our species were to reduce its numbers by half, limiting its population to four billion people rather than its present eight, would we anticipate that the lives of our clever and knowledgeable species-
members would, by necessity, become unsatisfactory? Would our skills vanish? Would our urge to better our lives, and our ability to do so, disappear? Perhaps capitalism would suffer. Would we sink into misery and despair if we couldn’t count on having a “new and better” device for cooking our food every six months? Would we regret making “progress” that has enabled us to possess nuclear weapons that could annihilate life on the planet, or a technology that promises to make human labor unnecessary?
We humans have multiplied without restraint. We have become the world’s most ecologically devastating invasive species. We’ve destroyed ecological diversity wherever we’ve spread and caused the extinction of thousands of species. But we can be our own predator; we can restore some semblance of ecological diversity if we reduce our own numbers. Not having a child harms no one, and the means to reduce the birth rate are available to all.
Capitalism acknowledges that there is a domain - let’s call it the friends and family domain - in which human beings’ natural social instincts for friendship, affection, sympathy, generosity, empathy, and mutual respect are appropriately activated. But it tells us that there is another domain in which the opposite instincts - greed, competitiveness, selfishness and insensitivity to others – must be cultivated, for they alone sustain human life and ensure progress.
Socialism, as its name suggests, advises us to be guided by our social, not our anti-social instincts. It takes the position that there needn’t be a total suppression of those instincts in order for humans to prosper; that societies as a whole can practice, to a significant extent, the interpersonal behaviors that sustain and reward families and friends. And that is, in fact, the direction in which our society is moving. Social Security, food stamps, Medicare, aid to the disabled, aid to the children of the impoverished, etc. are all socialistic in that they express the public’s desire to help our fellow-humans; to treat them as more than money-sources.
Trump asks us to return to the capitalism of the past. The capitalism in which exploitation is extolled, profit is a sacred goal, poverty is always deserved and produces a good incentive to work harder, and the luxury of the rich sets a goal for the rest of us. Let’s say “no way!”
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