Capitalism Is the Problem

[milestogo]

Saturday, January 07, 2017
By Richard D. Wolff, Truthout

Over the last century, capitalism has repeatedly revealed its worst tendencies: instability and inequality. Instances of instability include the Great Depression (1929-1941) and the Great Recession since 2008, plus eleven "downturns" in the US between those two global collapses. Each time, millions lost jobs, misery soared, poverty worsened and massive resources were wasted. Leaders promised that their "reforms" would prevent such instability from recurring. Those promises were not kept. Reforms did not work or did not endure. The system was, and remains, the problem.

Inequality likewise proved to be an inherent trend of capitalism. Only occasionally and temporarily did opposition from its victims stop or reverse it. Income and wealth inequalities have worsened in almost every capitalist country since at least the 1970s. Today we have returned to the huge 19th-century-sized gaps between the richest 1 percent and everyone else. Rescuing the "disappearing middle class" has become every aspiring politician's slogan. Extreme inequality infects all of society as corporations and the rich, to protect their positions, buy the politicians, mass media and other cultural forms that are for sale.

Capitalism in Western Europe, North America and Japan -- its original centers -- has boosted profits in four basic ways since the 1970s. First, it computerized and robotized, not to lessen everyone's work time, but instead to raise profits by reducing payrolls. Second, it exploited low-wage immigrant labor to offset wage increases won by years of labor struggles. Third, it moved production to lower-wage countries such as China, India, Brazil and others. Fourth, it divided and weakened the labor unions, political party groups and other organizations that pursued labor's interests. As a result, inside nearly every country of the global capitalist system, the rich-poor divide deepened.

The Great Depression provoked economic "reforms," such as FDR's New Deal. These included regulations restricting risky bank and other market practices. Reforming governments also established public pensions, unemployment insurance, public employment systems, minimum wages, monetary and fiscal policies, and so on. Advocates believed that such reforms would end the 1930s depression and prevent future depressions. They dismissed critics who diagnosed depressions as systemic and prescribed system change (or "revolution&quot as the necessary solution. "Reform versus revolution" was then a hot debate.

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/39011-capitalism-is-the-problem

[democratisphere]

1. Free Market Capitalism has and will continue to destroy economies

and financial systems throughout the world. For some it can never be enough; they want all of yours and mine to be theirs. F'um!

[Locrian]

2. capitalism is a zero sum game

and it's going to get beyond ugly when we hit the climate change wall.

[Hortensis]

3. All systems that eliminated capitalism have not only collapsed

but destroyed what existed of wellbeing of vast populations in the process. The systems that seem to be doing well are fusions with socialism that harness the energy and self interest of capitalism but keep it under control.

Notably, those successes are all based in cooler climates in nations that already had relatively liberal cultures. A serious reality for the U.S., of which only part enjoys that advantage.

Hot climates (and also any other climate that makes life very difficult) tend to develop more conservative cultures and personalities, as a glance at any world political map will confirm. We have yet to see advanced nations with liberal democratic frameworks by and for the people in develop in hot climates, although advances are being made.

Interestingly, the freewheeling me-ism of capitalism might just be the most free system that could develop in regions with currently strongly conservative cultures. Russia isn't managing even that, as attempts at establishing western-type capitalism have largely fallen to criminal plutocrats supporting a strengthening authoritarian kleptocracy that serves only them.

And, of course, in the U.S. a right dominated by hot-climate southern conservatives is currently pulling the same direction, putting us in the position of actually needing to protect independent capitalism, which has been under attack for a long time. Think Walmart.

Geography still rules, and so do the basic cultural orientations it fosters. IMO insisting "capitalism is THE problem," denying the very real benefits of capitalism as an economic place where conservative and liberal cultures that are still evolving can both function, is not sensible, but keeping it adequately muzzled and leashed--and protected--has proven promise.

[milestogo]

4. Explain Alaska please.

[Hortensis]

5. What about Alaska, Milestogo?

All I can think is that early Russian fur trappers never established a sustained Russian culture, whereas settlement post U.S. purchase by people raised in America's culture of a liberal republic virtually entirely occurred AFTER the Industrial Revolution, and most of that after electricity and other modern forms of power became available, negating most but definitely not all of the conservatizing effects of deadly climate and isolation.

As I recall, the state went for Trump, although votes were all over the place, depending. And bad as my opinion of trumpsters is, they probably shouldn't be lumped in the same basket as intensely authoritarian Russian conservatives, whose cultures formed around centuries of centralized czar-patriarch rule.

?

[FiveGoodMen]

6. "Inequality likewise proved to be an inherent trend of capitalism"

That is THE ENTIRE POINT of Capitalism.

Whoever has more money is entitled to make others work for as little as possible and turn over the profits to the already-rich.

That's it. That's all it's for.