Капитализм (Capitalism)

Somewhere Karl Marx is shaking his shaggy head and smiling. When a bastion of the capitalist right, Time Magazine, publishes an article validating ANYTHING Karl Marx said can Armageddon be far behind? I am most definitely not an economist. Show me a budget report or some financial spread sheet and my eyes glaze over in stupor, but lately I have been reading with some fascination many unflattering reports on the sacred free market. The imaginary capitalist guiding hand of self-regulation and its sister, the imaginary self-leveling playing field are, all of a sudden, being called into question. What is going on?!

The catalyst for this conversation has been the release of economist Thomas Piketty’s new book, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”. It has created a welcome (by some) dialogue on the true nature of capitalism as it manifests itself in reality. The book has some of the trickle down faithful sneering and calling it “Marx Lite”. It’s funny, but once you get past the Pavlovian negative response we in the US have been inculcated with since birth, Marx had some interesting things to say. For example this prescient little gem, “Accumulation of wealth at one pole is at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality and mental degradation at the opposite pole”. Dangerous sweat shops in Bangladesh, Mexico and India and American cities in ruin, as public money is gobbled up by private interests, are vivid proof of this polar economic disparity Marx talked about. We are led to believe that sweat shops and misery are the natural order of things and those poor souls in the throes of crushing poverty are beyond hope or relief. How convenient for us. Economic theory on paper is fine and dandy, but when it is put to the acid test of the real world, let’s just say it can be dicey. Prime examples are Stalin’s perversion of Marxism and, most recently, Ronald Reagan’s perversion of the capitalist free market raised to the level of religion.

I am amazed at the continuing faith of some of our working poor that they will somehow someday be included in the one percent club and keep voting for those pols that only represent the interests of said one percent. The criminals of capitalism are counting on the “lottery” mentality and that Pavlovian response to the standard hot button issues of this voting demographic and, so far, have been validated.

There is a chicken/egg analogy here. Did capitalism create and legitimatize greed or did greedy sociopaths create capitalism? Are greed and avarice in our nature hard-wired or a bi-product of the economic last-man-standing capitalist mentality? I’m going to go with capitalism is the mother of greed and simply attracts the sociopaths from amongst we gentler folk.

Thomas Piketty’s book is full of informative statistics with charts and graphs illustrating his years of research of the economic histories of twenty countries going as far back as the eighteenth century. It is a bit presumptuous of me to say this, but in a nut shell his conclusions are, what many of us know intuitively, that our present course is on the way back to the eighteenth and nineteenth century haves and have-nots of yore and secondly that course in unsustainable.

Where it gets interesting is Piketty’s solution to the juggernaut of exponential income/capital disparity is, wait for it…, heavy taxes on inherited wealth! What?! His reasoning is the rest of the world cannot keep up with the accumulated capital of the super wealthy passing that capital on to subsequent offspring creating even more super wealth and a super imbalance of capital. I would venture a guess that heavy taxation on the one percent is a non-starter in our one hundred percent one percent controlled governance. Mr. Piketty, if that is the solution that will save us, we are doomed.

Canadian, Fred Guerin, an independent scholar with a Ph.D in philosophy has written an even more damning mini-treatise on capitalism. The piece accuses Piketty of stopping short of exposing the true nature of capitalism with, “The excesses of capitalism are not simply a question of bad management and a political unwillingness to properly regulate it by imposing the right sort of checks and balances, but symptoms of a fundamentally and irretrievably flawed system that tends toward destruction of human and other life.”

Mr. Guerin, as you can see, has a very dim view of and little faith in the capitalist ideology and I would agree. The quote attributed to English economist John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) would best describe my skepticism; “Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men, for the nastiest of motives, will somehow work for the benefit of all.” I hate to be all gloom and doom, but as our three branches of government become the hand-maidens of corporate interests and, we the people, become irrelevant, we are well on our way back to the bad old days of the robber barons, but with the added bonus of environmental/ecological destruction and degradation never before seen.

Is there an alternative to the dog-eat-dog-winner-take-all current model of capitalism? Yes, but it would take fundamental and painful changes in our culture and attitude that I am not sure we have the stomach for, let alone the political will. The Scandinavian countries seem to know something we don’t. Perhaps it is unfair to compare the diverse US and Southern European countries with the more homogenized Nordic countries, but the latter seem to be avoiding the economic pain and suffering of the former. The Norse are statistically some of the happiest and fulfilled people on the planet with a pragmatic blend of hard working sensible free market trade and social security for all. The fundamental difference between us and them is precisely our adversarial “us and them” mentality. In order for anything to work well there must be cooperation and common goals, a “what is best for all” attitude. As our ever increasing fixation on self-centered individual liberty in this country becomes morally acceptable and we forget the history of our own cooperative spirit, we stand little chance of avoiding the inevitable dystopian future that Exxon/Mobil/ Monsanto/Halliburton have in store for us.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

 

 

Alex lives with his wife, Anna in Key West, Florida. He enjoys writing poetry and prose and making the complacent uncomfortable.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

More on this subject from other sources:

http://business.time.com/2013/03/25/marxs-revenge-how-class-struggle-is-shaping-the-world/

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/24489-the-compelling-conclusion-about-capitalism-that-piketty-resists#.U6yg17PWCHI.facebook

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674430006

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jun/17/thomas-piketty-lse-capitalism-talk

http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2013/02/11/why-nordic-nations-are-a-role-model-for-us-all/