[If you're not in the mood
for a lengthy proof of Capitalism's evil, or you already knew it was
evil, then check out Cassiodorus on
Class Divisions,
Utopia, or
Democracy; Jerome a Paris on the
Media's role in all this; veritas curat on the
systemic accounting errors that hide Capitalism's evil; or Marcion on an Internationalist approach to
global regulation of capital.
But if you think Capitalism might not be evil, I encourage you to read on...]
Moore attempted to reveal Capitalism's dark side by showing how
Capitalism systematically causes serious, unnecessary harm, inconsistent
with our basic moral commitments. Perhaps more important, Moore
attempted to break the taboo around criticizing Capitalism and to say
the words aloud -- "Capitalism Is Evil."
But breaking down the layers of capitalist-apologist propaganda that
have accumulated in our brains, and challenging our preconceptions about
Capitalism, is no small job. People's reactions to the movie revealed
many of the false meme's lurking in our subconscious, like, "Capitalism
may be bad, but the alternatives are worse," and "Capitalism has some
negative effects, but the overall benefits of Capitalism would be
positive if we protected against its harsher aspects," and "Replacing
Capitalism would surely eliminate freedoms, so we might not be better
off, and we could be much worse off."
I will confront these memes not with my own arguments, but instead
with the much deeper thinking of several subject matter experts: Michael
Albert, Joel Kovel, Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, and Michael
Moore.
Michael Albert's book,
Parecon; Joel Kovel's book,
The Enemy of Nature, Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis' book,
Capitalism and Democracy, as well as Moore's documentary,
Capitalism: A Love Story,
thoroughly consider the question of whether Capitalism is Evil, and
their combined arguments carry more force than any one argument alone.
Albert approaches Capitalism from the standpoint of
economic justice, and argues forcefully that Capitalism's methods and
outcomes are intrinsically destructive of people and institutions.
Kovel
presses an environmental critique, showing that regardless of the
negative social implications (which he nonetheless details
impressively), Capitalism necessarily will result in the destruction of
our environment, nature generally, and eventually the planet -- so
Capitalism is inexorably opposed to humanity, and indeed all life.
Bowles and Gintis consider
the conditions necessary for Democracy, and the extent to which
Capitalism not only undermines the institutions of Democracy, but also
makes people less capable of governing themselves. Finally,
Moore
approaches the question from an ethic of caring, attempting to
illustrate that Capitalism exacts an intolerable and unnecessary toll on
people's lives, and is inconsistent with our most basic values.
I will first lay out the four arguments in greater depth, and then
consider whether the most popular defenses of Capitalism can survive the
heat of these critiques. We will see that they do not, which in turn
begs the question of possible alternatives to Capitalism that might
create for us a better world, or at least a sustainable and less-bad
world. That question I will answer, too, but separately, as part of my
Economic Power series.
Michael Albert
Parecon: Life After Capitalism
Michael Albert sums it up like
this:
[C]apitalist globalization produces poverty, ill-health,
shortened life-spans, reduced quality of life, and ecological
collapse...Humanity's well-being does not guide the process, but is
instead sacrificed on behalf of private profit.
That's why it's bad. The cause of this badness, according to Albert, is that:
"Capitalism revolves around private ownership of the means of
production, market allocation, and corporate divisions of labor. It
remunerates property, power, and to a limited extent contribution to
output. Class divisions arise from differences in property ownership,
and differential access to empowered work versus subservient work.
Class divisions induce huge differences in decision-making influence
and quality of life."
Albert argues for an alternate vision, which he calls Participatory Economics (or "
Parecon"),
that reverses each of these paradigms. So, for example, instead of
private ownership of the means of production, each workplace would be
owned in equal part by all citizens. Top-down hierarchical
decision-making structures would be replaced with bottom-up democratic
institutions. Instead of remunerating property, power, and output,
Parecon would reward effort and sacrifice. Instead of creating
differential access to empowered work and decision-making influence,
people would have balanced job-complexes that allow everyone to engage
in some empowering work, and require everyone to engage in some grunt
work.
Albert's enterprise is primarily to show why these alternative
arrangements are in fact feasible, and could be administered fairly,
without making us crazy, and without the frustrating or inefficient
bureaucracy that people worry would engulf us if we ever attempted to
replace our Dilbert-esque workplaces with something better.
But for the purposes of this essay, we do not need to establish that
Albert has a better idea. Only that Capitalism does in fact necessarily
"sacrifice humanity's well-being on behalf of private profit." Albert's
arguments toward this conclusion are strong.
Capitalism DOES reliably remunerate property, as any trust-funder
knows, but not necessarily hard work, as any good janitor, day laborer
knows, or even some school teachers, bus drivers, and airline pilots.
The class awareness around accumulated property is deeply engrained
in our consciousness -- children's stories frequently revolve around
the contrasting fates of peasants and kings, princes and paupers. By
adulthood, we are accustomed to separate-but-equal accommodations for
the wealthy in nearly all public places -- airplanes, sports stadiums,
freeways, and airport waiting lounges. Nearly everywhere in modern
society, the wealthy have created for themselves a separate shadow world
of superior facilities in education, training, transportation,
entertainment, athletics, information, and shopping. We are even seeing
fast-tracks for the wealthy in hospitals and airport security lines.
The end result of these superior accommodations is a
self-perpetuating cycle that better prepares the wealthy and their
progeny to successfully assume positions of influence and leadership,
and thus further expand their wealth. This cycle, of course, fatally
undermines the alleged justification for the wealth disparities in the
first place -- that they were somehow "earned" or "deserved," rather
than received by inheritance, marriage, or appointment.
But Albert goes further, pointing out that "each of these modes of
connecting actors imposes on the economy pressures that subvert
solidarity, equity, diversity, and self-management." In other words,
the foundation of a just society is a culture of shared understanding
that we are all in this together, that we have to depend on each other,
that we have to help each other, and that we have to do these things
while respecting our differences and granting each other the right to
uniqueness and self-actualization, so that we can truly know freedom.
It's no small task to credibly define such institutions, although Albert may in fact have done it; give him a read.
But it is not hard to see that Capitalism institutionally ensures
outcomes that are approximately as devastating as Albert describes, and
approximately as devastating as we see in the real world after a few
centuries' experiment with Capitalism. Further, the precise features
that define Capitalism -- private ownership of the means of production,
hierarchical control of the workplace, remuneration of property and
power -- can be pretty clearly shown to lead to class divisions, unequal
opportunity, and huge discrepancies in decision-making opportunity and
quality of life.
When the benefits of the system are concentrated in a very few, and
most people are left dramatically worse off, it is indeed fair to say
that humanity's well-being has been sacrificed on behalf of private
profit. And the system that causes it may be called by its true name,
"Evil."
But if structural sociological analysis is not your thing, Joel Kovel takes a very different approach.
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Joel Kovel
The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World?
Kovel intends quite literally the harsh dilemma posed by his
book's
subtitle. He spends considerable effort showing that our society will
either end Capitalism or it will end us -- at least most of us, and life
as we know it.
One of Kovel's more intriguing suggestions is that the western
environmental movement is misguidedly attempting to reconcile Capitalism
and Environmentalism (e.g., Clean Water Act, Emissions Cap-and-Trade)
is misguided and cannot succeed. Some of his best analysis focuses on
the way Capitalism tends to shape the behavior of people and
institutions, so that disasters like the explosion at Union Carbide's
Bhopal chemical plant, which killed 16,000 and injured perhaps 500,000
more, should be understood as inevitable, rather than aberrational. I
recommend the entire book.
But I am going to extract just a piece of Kovel's argument, which
directly considers the structural elements of capitalism that (in
Kovels's view) ensure that capitalism will destroy the world, and why
incremental reforms cannot adequately mitigate this dire outcome.
Obviously if this argument is true, then Michael Albert's notions of
social justice hardly need be considered: we either jettison Capitalism,
or we die -- or at least most of us and our descendants die.
Kovel focuses on three essential elements of Capitalism:
1. Capitalism tends to degrade the conditions of its own production.
2. Capitalism must expand without end in order to exist
3. Capital leads to a chaotic world-system, increasingly
polarized between rich and poor, which cannot adequately address the
ecological crisis.
The combination makes an ever-growing ecological crisis an iron
necessity so long as capital rules, no matter what measures are taken to
tidy up one corner or another.
Kovel's first point, that Capitalism tends to degrade the conditions
of its own production, is intended to apply broadly to the intrinsic
destructiveness of Capitalism. Capitalism cannot function without
profit, and so the capitalist firm is pressured to maximize the gap
between cost and price.
Because competitive pressures tend to limit price, cost-cutting
becomes a paramount concern of capitalists. In theory, the cost-cutting
is focused on efficient production of commodity inputs. But in
practice, the cost-pressure is extended to three non-commodity inputs:
public infrastructure, people's labor, and nature itself.
Kovel argues that the pressure to squeeze as much as possible out of
people, public infrastructure, and nature, while paying as little as
possible, fouls the world by breaking people, disrupting ecosystems, and
filling our society with externalized costs, such as pollution.
This degradation may be localized, such as in the Bhopal explosion
that resulted from a blizzard of risky cost-cutting measures, or may be
generalized, such as the overall global crisis resulting from global
warming. However, Kovel insists, neither scenario should be
characterized as industrial accidents because they are inevitable
outcomes of a system that generates profit by intentionally imposing
hardships and creating risk.
The standard business school rejoinder is that all would be well were
capitalist institutions merely required to internalize their costs, and
so these tragedies reflect only market distortions, not systemic flaws.
And this brings us to Kovel's second principle:
Capitalism Must Expand In Order to Exist.
Any firm that ceases to grow becomes a relatively less attractive
investment, and capital is withdrawn and moved to faster growing (i.e.,
higher returning) firms. CEOs who cannot increase the rate of profit
are removed. Any firm that fails to grow will simply disappear, its
assets purchased by another. No matter how large Microsoft or Wal-Mart
become, their urge to grow further is unabated.
As a result, efforts to internalize costs are consistently defeated
by firms clever enough to find a previously unnoticed opportunity to
create an externality. Or if protective regulations have closed one
loophole, the unquenchable thirst for profits will result in political
action to open a new loophole.
The pressure to do so is extraordinary, because for capital, it is
literally a matter of life or death, and that is a defining element of
Capitalism. Although a natural person or a non-profit organization of
any size can cover its costs and continue in business indefinitely, the
objective of a capitalist organization is not the underlying work, but
the extracted profit, so if the profit ceases to grow, capital is moved
elsewhere, and the business begins to implode. To resist this result,
capitalist firms will seek to squeeze additional profits, even if it
ends up crushing the life out of what otherwise was a well-functioning
business. It happens over and over.
Kovel is particularly critical of proposed capitalist-oriented
solutions to the inevitable economic crisis posed by the quest for
endless growth. For example, Kovel argues against the Kyoto
carbon-trading scheme:
"Kyoto proceeds on a two-tiered front: to create new markets for
trading credits to pollute among the industrial powers, and to
create...'Clean Development Mechanisms'...in the South that would offset
carbon emissions by building projects, like tree farms, whose goal is
the sequestration of carbon. This immense superstructure...rests on two
guiding assumptions: Give the corporate sector and the capitalist state
the leading role in containing global warming; and do so by making the
control of atmospheric carbon the site of new markets and new nodes of
accumulation...
The defects of this mammoth blunder are myriad. The scheme is
inherently incoherent, for it entails innumerable points that simply
cannot be measured or compared. This is essentially because it tries to
evade the point of a rational policy, which would be to leave the
carbon in the ground in the first place -- in other words, one that
would put limits on capital. In doing so, Kyoto offers opportunities
for swindling of all kinds.
Finally, and most revealing, the scheme will fail precisely insofar
as it succeeds -- for the money that is to be made as a bribe to get
corporate cooperation will of course not be placed in anybody's
mattress. It will enter the great circuits of capital
where it will be used to make more money -- perhaps by building golf
courses, or expanding air travel, or going wherever the never-ending and
cancerous pressure for growth leads.
In other words, Capitalism cannot be used to defeat itself, and if
Capitalism is itself the cause of our most deadly problems, as Kovel
demonstrates persuasively, then it will have to be replaced not
reformed.
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Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis
Democracy and Capitalism:
Property, Community, and the Contradictions of Modern Social Thought
Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis'
Democracy and Capitalism
may be perhaps the most thorough analysis of the manner in which
Capitalism opposes and even undermines Democracy, but it is a little
dense for the non-academic reader. I will attempt to tease out the
basic argument.
Bowles and Gintis conclude that "no capitalist society may be called
democratic in the straightforward sense of securing personal liberty and
rendering the exercise of power socially accountable." A true
commitment to Democracy, they argue, requires "establishing a democratic
social order and eliminating the central institutions of the capitalist
economy."
The reason that Capitalism and Democracy are fatally opposed to each
other is because Democracy entails the expansion of the rights of
people, whereas Capitalism embodies the expansion of the rights of
property, and these rights necessarily clash.
Liberal theory considered the state public, and the economy private.
Therefore, the design of the liberal state balances obligations to
respect both democratic rights and property rights. However, because
the economy was considered a private sphere, corresponding democratic
controls were not devised, and Capitalism was allowed free reign,
instead of designing an economic democracy analogous to our political
democracy.
Bowles and Gintis argue that this is a fundamental error in the
design of our polity, because in fact economic decision-making has as
much public impact as political decision-making, but Liberal theory
cannot justify the lack of public input or democratic controls in the
economy, given its justifications for both public input and democratic
controls in the state.
Moreover, "Democracy [not only] promises the collective
accountability of power," but it also promises "the ability of people to
effectively carry out their individual and common projects unencumbered
by arbitrary restraint."
Capitalism, or, the failure to apply
democratic principles to the economy, allows all kinds of domination to
occur, including who gets privileged opportunities to win or lose within
the economic sphere, as well as significant distortions of democracy in
the political sphere. Or, as Bowles and Gintis put it,
"The rules of chess make it immaterial who plays with white and
who with black; the rules of the game that make up society, however,
generally confer systematic advantage on one group or another...The
asymmetry of the games is the key to our understanding of domination."
But despite their excellent analysis of the specific forms of
domination that occur in an undemocratic economy, their final blow is
aimed at the nature of the market itself, which Liberal theory mostly
understands as a mechanism for the exchange of goods and services.
Bowles and Gintis point out, however, that "exchanges are far more
than a simple transfer of ownership. They are complex social
relationships"as illustrated by the kinds of exchanges that occur
"between boss and worker, lender and borrower, or between buyers and
sellers of different nations." A market arena of self-interested and
anonymous interaction might reduce not only the need for compassion, but
also the sentiment itself. In this respect, the economy produces
people as well as things, and the capitalist economy produces people
that are not ideally equipped with the democratic sentiments and
capacities.
In all these ways (and more, do read the book), Capitalism fatally
undermines Democracy, including Democracy's promise of the freedom to
carry out our individual and common projects free from arbitrary
restraint. To the extent that Democracy is just and good, Bowles and
Gintis conclude, Capitalism is the opposite.
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Michael Moore
Capitalism: A Love Story
The movie's
website claims that all his films revolve around just two questions: Who are we, and why do we behave the way that we do?
In film after film, Moore's answer to the first question is that we
are just normal people -- friends, neighbors, people who work hard,
people modestly trying to make their way in the world. When Moore looks
at America, he does not see celebrities, politicians, or athletes -- he
just sees people. And each of his movies introduces us to a new cast
and their stories.
As for the second question, why do we behave the way that we do,
Moore never finds a satisfying answer. Why do we shut down local
economies? In
Roger and Me, he couldn't get an answer. In
Bowling for Columbine,
he wondered why do we immerse ourselves in guns, violently endangering
ourselves and our children -- especially when other societies seem to
successfully limit the prevalence of both guns and violence?
Fahrenheit 911 explored the corruption of our political system, and
Sicko
of our medical system. Both films concluded that we had submitted
ourselves to regimes that made no sense, at least compared with the
alternatives.
Finally, in
Capitalism: A Love Story, Moore addressed
Capitalism itself, revealing it as the moving force behind corruption of
judges, foreclosures, heartless evictions, underpaid-and-overworked
airline pilots, and massive, institutionalized theft. Juxtaposed
against this, Moore shows that the basic principles of Capitalism are
not consistent with moral and religious codes, and he presented the
possibility of worker-owned enterprises as an alternative.
Essentially, Moore asked whether, given the extraordinary weight of
evidence that Capitalism is harmful, and the apparent availability of
alternatives, why we should tolerate it? In an
interview with Naomi Klein, Moore elaborated his argument:
"Capitalism is the legalization [of] greed. Greed has been with
human beings forever. We have a number of things in our species that you
would call the dark side, and greed is one of them. If you don't put
certain structures in place or restrictions on those parts of our being
that come from that dark place, then it gets out of control. Capitalism
does the opposite of that. It not only doesn't really put any structure
or restriction on it. It encourages it, it rewards it."
Summary
So from Albert's standpoint, the fundamental principles of Capitalism
systematically degrade the conditions of social interaction, thus
dividing us from one another, impoverishing us, and eventually
sacrificing our collective well-being for the benefit of the few.
For Kovel, Capitalism will inevitably consume all of nature and the
ecosystems that we depend on to survive. Thus, if we were to exercise
what Thomas Hobbes would have characterized as our right and our duty to
survive, then destroying Capitalism before it destroys us is an
imperative.
Bowles and Gintis find in Democracy and the self-actualization of
people the ultimate objective of our creating a society together, and
Capitalism is undermines this fundamental social obligation.
For Moore, Capitalism destroys that which we love, and is opposed to our most basic moral principles.
All conclude, explicitly, that Capitalism is harmful, destructive,
unjustified, and must be replaced. Moore calls it "evil," and the
others are similarly unequivocal in their denunciation.
Objections
The objections I cited originally are not as well-developed as the
critiques I then attempted to summarize. Indeed, Michael Moore
mentioned in his
interview that those taken aback by his conclusion frequently ask, "
What's wrong with making money? Why can't I open a shoe store?"
This objection seems to capture well the common concern -- If
Capitalism is Evil, then how can we engage in economic activity? What
is allowed instead? Is it okay to do honest work and be able to buy
things I want in return?
These very practical questions do not express any kind of
disagreement with the logic of the arguments I have summarized, nor any
disagreement with the underlying premises of the argument. Compare
these additional objections noted at the beginning:
"Capitalism may be bad, but the alternatives are worse," and
"Capitalism has some negative effects, but the overall benefits of
capitalism would be positive if we only protected against its harsh
aspects," and "Replacing capitalism would eliminate freedoms, so we
might not be better off, and we could be much worse off."
The focus is consistently on whether better alternatives exist, and
do those alternatives have unknown risks, and what is the likelihood
that we could successfully transition?
These are fair questions to which we must now turn. We are lucky to
have a rich literature exploring the possibilities, and enough clarity
that we could begin to chart our course should we summon the courage to
change. These will be the subjects of future essays.
Conclusion
Let us close this topic then, with a clear commitment not to
reforming Capitalism or rationalizing Capitalism, or making Capitalism
better or kinder, but instead to replacing it, and eliminating it,
because the facts and the logic, and the weight of the argument
demonstrate, beyond a reasonable doubt, that
Capitalism is Evil.
(We have actually known this for a long time)
[Cross-Posted at
Jay's Right of Assembly Blog]
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