There Are Good Alternatives to US Capitalism, But No Way to Get There

Continued from previous page

In June 2011, the Nation published a special issue on “Reimagining Capitalism,” edited by William Greider. In his introduction, Greider asked respondents to “imagine you have the ability to reinvent American capitalism. Where would you start?” Greider acknowledged that the political parties “are locked in small-minded brawls, unable to think creatively even to tell the truth about our historic crisis.” As a result, he said, it would be extremely unlikely for the proposed ideas “to have any traction in regular politics. . . . [But] at some point, it will become obvious that our economy will not truly recover until American capitalism is refashioned, stripped of its self-aggrandizing excesses, and made to serve the interests of society rather than the other way around . . . this will require deep structural change, not simply new politics.”

One response to Greider’s call came from Villanova University professor Eugene McCarraher: “ Why should we want to reinvent capitalism? The nature and logic of capitalism are incorrigibly avaricious. As a property system driven by the need to maximize profit and production, capitalism is a giant, ever-whirling vortex of accumulation. . . . Capitalism compels us to be greedy, callous, and petty. It takes what the Greeks called pleonexia—an endless hunger for more and more—and transforms it from a tawdry and dangerous vice into the central virtue of the system. The sanctity of growth stems from this moral alchemy, as does the elevation of market competition into a model of human affairs.”

Certain aspects of capitalism seem okay to me, at least if they’re small and local. For example, I don’t see a problem with privately owned small businesses, in which someone begins an enterprise and it supports him or her, plus their family and community. But by “small,” I mean small! Serving a single community. Rooted locally. No outside controllers. Predefined maximum size. Focused on a single line of products or services. Like the furniture store in the first graphs of this book. Or local farmers. Or the publisher of this book. Or the most marvelous small neighborhood coffeehouse/café located in Japantown, San Francisco, YakiniQ, run by a young woman who is there every day, Christy Hwang, and an ardent and cheerful young staff of students and artists. They are making a little profit but have no wish to be Starbucks.

Scale is paramount. We don’t want Starbucks dominating the coffeehouses of the world. We don’t want bookstores buying other book stores in other towns—and we don’t want any Amazon.com shutting down our local bookstores or turning reading solely into an Internet experience. We don’t want banks buying other banks, or banks buying corporations, or banks or corporations buying governments. We don’t want military contractors like General Electric buying up mass media. We don’t want Rupert Murdoch owning hundreds of newspapers and broadcast outlets. We don’t want some rich guy coming into our neighborhood and buying up all the property and local businesses for himself. We don’t want a few companies like Google or Apple or Facebook dominating global communications in every form, as seems to be rapidly developing.

Some aspects of capitalism could be easily reformed, if only the laissez-faire, anti-government capitalist fundamentalists weren’t depositing gifts into the pockets of legislators. Regulations could be advanced to control pollution and resource use, to prevent banking excess, to stop the buying of all politicians and government, and to promote equity.

Theoretically, we could quickly start mitigating inequity problems. We could require that the wealthy pay taxes at the same rate as the middle class, or at “surplus wealth” rates (graduated rates that went as high as 90 percent) that rose from the presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman through Dwight Eisenhower. We could/should have “excess profits” taxes on corporations to cover their externalized costs, or their depletion of the public-resources commons. We could ban tax havens and the many subsidized tax rates on financial transactions and inheritance. We could establish maximum and minimum guaranteed income levels. We could place controls on salary ratios within corporations. That’s all good.