Is Capitalism Broken?

i've argued before that neo-liberalism advanced itself on a utilitarian ethical basis...
and that, by any rational standard, those arguments have been falsified.
so consistency with the utilitarian ethical arguments themselves would force neo-liberals, were they ethical, to admit failure and open up to alternatives.
but they don't.
what can one conclude from that?

you can see the problem without even starting on pesky things like the current distributions of wealth in the land of the free and all that.
or, even worse, on the distribution of power.

at the same time, it seems that most fading empires have collective reality problems.

 

that's only possible because, for some reason, there's no agreed-upon notion of reality.
so what counts moves around.
this is not a good thing in a "democracy"---or in a republic, which is quite different---unless you imagine that the night committee of plato's statesman an awesome thing.

 

It is a matter of perspective. In the market place some people own capital, and some people own labor. Capital has value in the market as does labor. A capitalist attempts to maximize the value of what they bring to the market, a good capitalist makes sure there is fair compensation for what they bring to the market.

If those who control and bring labor to the market are either not maximizing the value of the labor or not making sure they get fair compensation - it is not the fault of the system or those that own or control capital resources. No one is going to voluntarily pay more than they need to.

I have no problem with labor organizing through unions to maximize the market value and compensation for labor, my problem is with forcing people to employ unions - it should be a choice. Two things have been happening with the emergence of a more global economy. US labor's value is declining relative to labor from other source. Two, US regulators have been making alternatives to US labor more cost effective. On the other hand US labor has not responded with a counter strategy to respond to these trends - other than to complain. I would suggest US labor develop a strategy or plan. If nothing else, transition from solely providing labor to taking an ownership interest in capital. Get in the game. Understand where the value is, maximize the value, get compensated for the value - preferably in cash as opposed to benefits.
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Henry Ford paid more because he had to pay more to attract the labor he needed to make his cars. His rhetoric was of no importance, other than to the degree it helped him sell cars.
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Occasionally people do suffer from a loss of "get up and go", a loss of optimism, a loss of a feeling that anything they do will make a difference. There are many causes - at some point it helps to get a kick in the butt to get going - a dose of "get off your a$$ and do something". That is my preferred approach, and if I ever need it, I want someone to look me in the eye and do the same for me. What is your preferred approach?
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When I was about 10, my mother had a friend who would come to our house after she would get beaten by her husband. One day I asked my mother, why does she keep going back. After what may have appeared to be a thousand questions to my mother, she finally said that I would understand when I got older. I am older and I still don't understand. If a person works for a company that takes advantage of their labor, why stay?

I don't suggest doing anything unwise. And I respect a person who goes to work with the attitude that they are going to do what needs to be done today so that in the future they have better options. You work, you learn as much as you can, you network, build goodwill, you save, you get your resume together and when you are in a position of strength you negotiate the best deal. How is that you disagree? I don't you terms like "loser" or "drain on the system" - never have, never will. some people don't know - I say that all the time because it is true. Some need coaching, some are insecure or lack confidence, etc. there are answers to these issues.

 

My preferred approach is to not denigrate millions of workers on the margin or living paycheck to paycheck or temporarily relying on the social safety net, most through not fault or lack of will on their own, with sweeping attacks on their character.

 

In a free market capitalist system (there are different systems with varying degrees of freedom) when workers have an option of obtaining greater skills, they will be compensated accordingly. In a system that is continually seeking improved efficiency, labor is at risk if it fails to keep pace. So today we have low unemployment and need for high skilled workers and we have high unemployment and less need for low skilled workers. In the US we have a failing education system and policy makers who fail to address obvious trends.
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This is not clear. How are you actually helping anyone? If the implication is that looking a person in the eye and saying "get off of your a$$ and do X, Y and Z is denigrating - how does not saying that to them help, if they are in a state of feeling helpless?

 

What

What we have most recently (yesterday) is a Republican House that passed a bill, the SKILLS Act that effectively gutted the Workforce Investment Act by removing requirements to target workforce training to those most needing such training and with input from unions, businesses, advocacy groups, educational institutions (including voc ed), local governments and allowing governors to use the funds in any manner they chose that can be loosely characterized as workforce training.
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How is it helpful for Republicans (and I include you from past comments about those on UI) to characterize an entire group of workers as lazy, dependent freeloaders?
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Or patronizing comments like they should "eat cheaper lunches like peanut butter sandwiches" when many dont eat three meals a day as a result of being among the 40+ million facing food insecurity at one time or another.

 

I remember when I was in California there was a vocational rehabilitation required component to worker compensation in some circumstances - I saw countless numbers of people who took advantage of Flower Arrangement and Fang Suei. Millions of dollars wasted. People in Washington don't know best what is needed in small local businesses or large multinational corporations. Unless the Workers Investment act sends money directly down to the local or state level with business leaders in control - I would be against it too. Or, better - government eliminate the bureaucratic obstacles created by government and let the market address the issues.

On another note - I don't buy into legislation based on its title.

I know what I think and I know what you think about me - outside of that do you have an answer?

 

I see that you dont want to address the Republican " lazy, dependent freeloaders" commentary heard on a regular basis.

The answer is NOT to gut social safety net, but to make the programs more effective. Nor are tax policies, like Bush/Reagan and even more tax cuts for the top one percent, that significantly contributed to growing income inequality.

The Clinton-Republican welfare reform is a good model....balancing the reform of the broken welfare system, while at the same time bolstering other anti-poverty programs... like doubling the EITC, a new welfare to work tax credit, a minimum wage increase, doubling federal assistance for Head Start and School Lunch Program...and marginally raising taxes on the wealthy to offset costs.

The Republican approach, particularly the Tea Party types, of gutting or significantly reducing safety net programs to put an end to the "freeloaders" along with more tax cuts for the rich is ignorant and intolerant of those working paycheck to paycheck.

 

ace, you don't even understand how actually existing capitalism operates at the most basic levels. the nonsense you talk about compensation for labor puts aside how capitalist production is actually organized---can you say deskilling?---and substitutes for it yet another fantasy. as usual, in this fantasy world, what matters is perky attitude.

funny stuff.

 

I have many things to do over here. I think I will just ignore the fact that what I've said here has just been repeated back to me in the voice of Jiminy Cricket.

 

first off, that concedes way too much to the idiot language of neo-liberalism, cowboy capitalism, the washingtoon consensus, which simultaneously neutralizes any connection between capitalism as a specific way of ordering both the relation of ownership to production and of organizing production--vaporizing capitalism as a material social system in short, and assimilating it into the dysfunctional stories particular to that dysfunctional ideology---which is, believe it or not, socially and politically specific and not the general theory of capitalism as a whole---this despite what you might imagine were you to rely on the rather sad and reactionary american media apparatus to get your ideas not just of factoids but of the frames with respect to which those factoids might, theoretically, make sense. in those dysfunctional stories, everything is really a matter of attitude--whether an individual is perky and optimistic or beat down and sad...

it's idiocy, all of it.
what conceals it's idiocy in the states is an insidious preference for self-congratulation.
it's amazing to me, the power of the circle jerk in american political life.

i keep thinking, pollyanna that i am, that there'll come a point past which this circle jerk of self-congratulation will break down and people will look the fuck around and figure out that what the dominant ideology has enabled is profoundly fucked up and that it doesn't have to be this way.
but apparently people settle for hand jobs in exchange for autonomy.

i keep thinking, pollyanna that i am, that people in the states in particular might figure out that settling for a hand job in exchange for autonomy is the way almost every other fading empire has accelerated its own fading and do something different.

but no, apparently.

so it follows that people in the main, even in this thread, can't bring themselves to recognize the legacy of the actually existing history of capitalism as one of more or less continuous crisis. they'd rather apologize for it.

and still less take on the correlate of that, which is that, far from being broken as a system, things in crisis are entirely ordinary in a dysfunctional capitalist-dominated socio-economic order---because crisis is what capitalism produces as a system historically. concentration of wealth as its internal outcome, crisis as its effect.

 

well, it'd be useful for you, whom i will take as repeating aspects of the dominant wordview let's call it, to
(a) stop assuming neo-liberal style capitalism is the only form it's ever had,
(b) abandon the myth of some inner self-regulating mechanism (magickal markets) that allows the idea of equilibrium on the part of capitalist activity, which is then somehow fucked up by attempts to shape how that system operates
(c) stop conflating capitalism with all forms of commercial activity so that
(d) it'd become easier to see reality---look at indices like the current distribution of wealth for example and how markety market horseshit has enabled not the "floating of all boats" but the largest transfer of wealth away from ordinary people and into the financial oligarchy (top 1%) ever seen and
(e) easier to imagine actions.

if you assume that capitalism is some monolith that's always been as it is now and encompasses all forms of production and trade, then you're lead to paralyzing either/or choices
like this form of capitalism is all of capitalism and it has to be like this or its---well what?---stalinism or something else equally ridiculous.


usually what follows here is that i get thrown out of the country again. well, the line goes, this is the amurican way and if you don't like it why don't you go somewhere else.

which is yet another way of defending the ridiculous idea that this form of capitalism is necessary and inevitable and all-american just like the highest incarceration rates on the planet are, just like the neo-colonial american empire is, just like the "war on terror" is and the national-security state are...

 

ouch.

 

Generally, when people ask for solutions as a response to criticism, it isn't because they actually want to hear about solutions it is because they want to sidetrack the criticism. I'm not entirely sure that a solution to the problems of Contemporary American Capitalism (who doesn't love the CAC?) are amenable to the internet forum format. It's really the type of thing that demands a manifesto, and those are much better suited to poorly-indexed websites that look like they haven't changed since 1994.