Timothy Gorton Ash: Could Global Capitalism Destroy Itself?

[marmar]

from the Guardian UK, via Truthout:


Global Capitalism Now Has No Serious Rivals. But It Could Destroy Itself
By Timothy Garton Ash
The Guardian UK

Thursday 22 February 2007

Our planet cannot long sustain the momentous worldwide embrace of the manufacture of desires.

What is the elephant in all our rooms? It is the global triumph of capitalism. Democracy is fiercely disputed. Freedom is under threat even in old-established democracies such as Britain. Western supremacy is on the skids. But everyone does capitalism. Americans and Europeans do it. Indians do it. Russian oligarchs and Saudi princes do it. Even Chinese communists do it. And now the members of Israel's oldest kibbutz, that last best hope of egalitarian socialism, have voted to introduce variable salaries based on individual performance. Karl Marx would be turning in his grave. Or perhaps not, since some of his writings eerily foreshadowed our era of globalised capitalism. His prescription failed but his description was prescient.

Here is the great fact about the early 21st century, so big and taken for granted that we rarely stop to think how extraordinary it is. It was not ever thus. "Can capitalism survive?" asked the British socialist thinker GDH Cole, in a book published in 1938 under the title Socialism in Evolution. His answer was no. Socialism would succeed it. Most readers of this newspaper in 1938 would probably have agreed.

What are the big ideological alternatives being proposed today? Hugo Chávez's "21st century socialism" still looks like a local or at most a regional phenomenon, best practised in oil-rich states. Islamism, sometimes billed as democratic capitalism's great competitor in a new ideological struggle, does not offer an alternative economic system (aside from the peculiarities of Islamic finance) and anyway does not appeal beyond the Muslim umma. Most anti-globalists, altermondialistes and, indeed, green activists, are much better at pointing out the failings of global capitalism than they are at suggesting systemic alternatives. "Capitalism should be replaced by something nicer," read a placard at a May Day demonstration in London a few years back.

Of course there's a problem of definition here. Is what Russian or Chinese state-owned companies do really capitalism? Isn't private ownership the essence of capitalism? One of America's leading academic experts on capitalism, Edmund Phelps of Columbia University, has an even more restrictive definition. For him, what we have in much of continental Europe, with multiple stakeholders, is not capitalism but corporatism. Capitalism, he says, is "an economic system in which private capital is relatively free to innovate and invest without permission from the state, green lights from communities and regions, from workers, and other so-called social partners". In which case most of the world is not capitalist. I find this much too restrictive. Surely what we have across Europe are multiple varieties of capitalism, from more liberal market economies like Britain and Ireland to more coordinated stakeholder economies like Germany and Austria. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/022207H.shtml

[Atman]

1. "Perfect capitalism" will bring about it's own demise. By design.

The whole point is to return profits to shareholders/owners, and to leverage and expand your markets. If "capitalism" works the way it is designed, eventually we'll be left with just a few extremely large companies who own everything, and there is nothing left to acquire, expand, etc, and it becomes impossible to experience any more "growth." Eventually -- and we see it happening today -- the system just will collapse under it's own hugeness.

I'm no economist by any measure, but I've heard this position discussed on NPR and other places a couple of times in the past. "Perfect capitalism" actually destroys capitalism.

.

[marmar]

3. Interesting. That's clearly what's happening today.....

:think:

[The2ndWheel]

2. Isn't that the point?

That's why empires always have to expand. If you base your entire way of life on growth, you have to destroy something, be it your own, or someone else's, but most times both.

"Most anti-globalists, altermondialistes and, indeed, green activists, are much better at pointing out the failings of global capitalism than they are at suggesting systemic alternatives."

I got one. Small scale, local economies(or whatever you wish to call it) that don't require growth.

Growth has led to everything we've done, from going to the moon, to the Holocaust. I guess the question then is; where are we going, and will it be worth it?

[BayCityProgressive]

4. capitalism will fail

check out the CPUSA party program. First we need to unite against the ultra-right to prevent a facsist dictatorship (the GOP),then we need to build a mass people's anti-monopoly party, then when people see that these ultra-right elements will always make a comeback under capitalism, a mass movement for socialism can be started.

[The2ndWheel]

6. A mass people's anti-monopoly party?

Wouldn't that then become a monopoly?

In my mind, anything mass will end up the same way. It requires growth in order to be a mass movement. It just builds on itself, and it eventually collapses.

This is why I'm a pessimist, and to a fault. I get sick of it myself. If we stop now, billions suffer and die. If we don't stop now, we destroy our habitat in our quest for perfection, and billions suffer and die eventually. Unless we push those problems off into the future by growth. But the larger we make society, the more complex we make society(although in an odd way, making it less diverse), the more energy we need just to stay at normal. The same way an addict needs more and more each time, because the amount that got them high when they started just isn't doing it anymore.

[marmar]

11. I'm an optimist by nature....

but I must admit that the last six years have really blunted that optimism.

[jollyreaper2112]

5. INTELLIGENT small-scale economies

Back before the ag and industrial revolutions, 90% of the people spent their time raising food for themselves. There wasn't much surplus left over for anything. The other 10% were in the cities.

Now we've moved to less than 2% in this country. What the hell is everyone else doing? Not much of value, if you really think about it. Lawyers, claims adjustors, celebrities, pet psychologists, it's a bunch of wasted effort by wasted people who continue to suck up resources and contribute nothing of value back to society.

Back in the feudal days, the landowners could extract rents for nothing in return. That's the ideal that corporations pleasure themselves to late at night. Insurance companies have almost gotten it right but they're still having to pay out claims so there's room for improvement. But manufacturing concerns have to sell you something in order to get your money. In times past it was decent stuff but now it's just disposable plastic crap. The sooner it breaks, the sooner you replace it, the more money they make.

Going back to local economies would RUIN international capitalism as we know it. That's not a bad thing but revolutions can be messy affairs.

For you local economy entusiasts, have you taken a look at the state of the art in 3D fabrication and rapid prototyping? You're talking about a factory in a box here, all of the cost benefits of mass production and standardization but on an artisan scale.

[wuushew]

7. Will capitalism necessarily fail in the inevitable zero growth future?

does extreme wealth concentration move any system of capitalism to neo-feudalism?

What is capitalism? The article doesn't give us a satisfactory answer.

[BeyondGeography]

8. We'll only change when we're forced to

and the disappearance of cheap energy will be the catalyst. More localized economies, in a civilized country (I'm not sure we qualify as a country, but I think we have a decent chance of success in the Northeast), would be a good thing.

As for when this happens, I'll have to get back to you on that.

[marmar]

10. Agree with you wholeheartedly on the cheap energy....

Proactivity be damned. :(

[WinkyDink]

9. Hedonism and greed will never die. Bigger yachts, mansions, gems and jewels~~~

Not going away any time soon.
Not trying to sound simple-minded here, but what else IS Capitalism except the pursuit of luxury and leisure for its top-echelon, who, by virtue of their power and numbers, have forced the rest of the world into this system, so that the middle- and lower-rungs are seeking sustenance and survival?

And now Bush wants to make health-care from employers taxable income, while the wealthy will just pull out their pocket-change and buy the best, WITH a tax write-off.

[La_Fourmi_Rouge]

12. One can only hope.