This has got to stop!
Is it time to finally come out and say it?
After all, don’t we live in the postmodern age? Haven’t we moved beyond the blind acceptance of the archaic manifestations of our social, cultural, economic and other great institutions as some kind of self-evident truths that we must accept and fall into line with?
What of capitalism? Despite its egalitarian claims isn’t this really a system that evolved from an aristocratic past? More social Darwinism than emancipation, didn’t capitalism evolve from a history where the strong, from their place of power, wealth and prestige, have always ruled over the weak? Isn’t the capitalist system a reflection of pre-civilized barbarity and the alchemy of the master-slave societies that followed?
What of this capitalism and who does it really serve anymore? Are the working people of the world ready to hear the truth and learn from it and actually do something about it? Capitalism formed and was created or molded through time. It has a basis in nature only as barbarity does. Capitalism was made to serve the strong and the dominant – those with wealth, power, ambition, intelligence and the moral shortcomings necessary to push others aside and take for themself – to “succeed” in the material world.
So much of the history of the capitalistic system was a walk down a proverbial tight-rope – a delicate balance between the elite and their dependents. Call this the welfare state if you will, but what happens when this balance is thrown off and the welfare state is gutted?
The lessons of the 2008 western banking crisis are still being sifted through, but one of the most telling lessons seems to demonstrate that deregulation and loss of controls opens a pathway to runaway greed. Certainly, these are lessons we’ve failed to grasp over and over again. Come on people, capitalism doesn’t just invite greed it glorifies it and gives it justification. The capitalistic system rewards the takers and punishes those who leave behind.
How did we get there? The people of the western world truly believed that the Second World War against the Axis powers was just and righteous and this crystallized the perception of a black and white world. What followed were the ideologies that would lay the groundwork for a virulent Red Scare, the Cold War and the strengthening of the belief that “what was good for General Motors was good for the country”.
Revolution was followed by a counter-revolution that relied on the cold conformity of “a silent majority” and the personification of corporations. Milton Friedman was the economic prophet of this counter movement that lauded the “freedom” of corporate collectives over those of the working consumers. By the 1980s a sort of global hegemony was starting to take form under the figureheads of the leading disciples of the Chicago school of economics – Thatcher and Reagan. In the US, Reagan democrats would became “new democrats” and by 1992 Keynesian economics had become hijacked by a more purified capitalism that was to prevail during the following decades and up to this day.
“Corporate stewardship” by the time of the “Reagan Revolution” and the years that followed had become almost completely focused on quarterly profitability and shareholder returns. Leaders squeezed every bit of money out of their enterprises and were only too happy to lay off thousands and outsource production and labor for the sake of good quarterly returns. What were formerly called employers became international or global brands. Indeed, employees had become seen as a liability and workers weighed heavily on profits and losses, better to outsource and not have to deal with the uncertainty, risks and the rising costs of human resource.
Eventually, these leaders devolved into what we saw so starkly in 2008. All the money flowing in the C-suites with their stock options, bonuses and platinum parachutes set the table for personal greed to become among the greatest forces working within our corporations and indeed in western capitalistic societies. Why not? After all, the system glorified and rewarded their behavior and atavistic baseness.
To say that we have a self-serving economy doesn’t seem far from the mark. Are we to expect some sort of altruistic utopia to come from this mix? Capitalism is Consumerism. Indeed, there seems to be a denial that this Consumer-based system depends on working class affluence or what we call a strong middle-class. Put more directly capitalism relies on a consumer with money in his/her pocket. The truth really is simple – working people are the consumers in this system.
So the system depends on a major class of consumers of the very products and services that are being provided by industry. When this class becomes impoverished, industry must necessarily suffer and suffer greatly, but in the narrower and narrower perspectives of individual corporate leaders this hardly seems to be of any concern. After all, this system of affluence does foster a culture that is steeped in Epicureanism and self-interest, so macro systems are barely understood or outright ignored for the sake of the straight-forward micro-economics of the individual immersed in wealth accumulation.
So in the end it is not so surprising what we see. A system created and propagated to serve the strongest ultimately devolves into a sort of self-pillaging feeding frenzy without thought for others, without thought for the community and society itself, and that is ultimately forced to rely on a bloated financial industry to maintain this precarious house of cards through a sort of shell-game of usury that becomes to rely more and more on the politics of force and of deception.
Step back from history and see how it got us here. We’ve evolved. Our greatest strengths lie in better ways to exploit, to take, to kill and to harm. Our greatest strengths are in how we subjugate – one another and the planet. We must either stop this or we must face the consequences of our most base impulses and desires. It’s time to stop and…well…grow up people.
Originally appeared on the Reveille website on December 2, 2016.
