Читать книгу S.O.S. Alternatives to Capitalism - Richard Swift - Страница 11
ОглавлениеCapitalism: a system of reckless resilience
How capitalism developed – and why it depends upon ‘creative destruction’. The rise of neoliberalism as a political philosophy and the transformation of old enemies such as Russia and China into authoritarian free marketeers. And why capitalism is beyond the control even of the captains of finance.
‘The most convincing and enduring foe of the global financial economy ultimately is the global financial economy itself.’
Ulrich Beck1
What is the problem with capitalism anyway? Hasn’t it delivered modernity and prosperity over the centuries? Has a better economic system ever emerged, offering a more efficient way for allocating resources? Isn’t the invisible hand of the market the only way for billions of people to interact economically without falling under stultifying bureaucratic control?
Those who make the case for capitalism vary from its most sophisticated economic thinkers (such as Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman) to the thousands of graduates of business schools who all sing from the same songbook of market perfection. Even the best-known liberal critics of capitalism such as John Maynard Keynes and John Kenneth Galbraith saw no real alternative to it as the most efficient form of economic organization, although they were committed to finding ways to iron out its instabilities and disequilibria through the intervention of the public power of the state. But such reforms have fallen out of fashion given the ascendancy of neoliberal orthodoxy since the 1980s. Today, government after government still suffers from frozen policy imaginations in the face of the speculative bubbles that destabilize everything from public finance to the plans and dreams of ordinary people. The panicked ad hoc bail-out of banks and corporations ‘too big to fail’ and the imposition of austerity packages on the masses to pay for it now appear to be the only recipes in the public policy cookbook. By and large, government policies, despite bold words about re-establishing a coherent regime of regulation, have failed to gain much more leverage over these corporate actors than did the previous regime of speculative ‘market freedom’. It was this neoliberal dispensation, obsessed with removing the regulatory shackles on the ‘free’ movement of capital, that allowed the creation and sale of an avalanche of unstable paper assets – secondary mortgage markets, derivatives, credit default swaps, and so on. According to the economic historian Jeff Madrick, most of these difficulties remain to be addressed:
‘These included the lack of transparency in the derivatives markets, where prices were set in obscurity on trillions of dollars of transactions. Market theory calls for clear and open pricing information. It includes the conflicts of interest of the credit ratings agencies, which were paid by the issuers seeking high ratings. This is bound to lead to market failure. There are also the absurd compensation practices of Wall Street, which largely protected the traders and other decision-makers from the longer-term risks the stockholders were taking.’ 2
Even in the face of the obvious failures of the current phase of finance-dominated capitalism, the political class seems to have no ability (or even willingness) to regulate the destructive behavior of those wielding economic power – let alone the imagination to conceive of an alternative to capitalism. Reform of regulatory agencies such as the US Federal Reserve or the Bank of Settlements in Switzerland has largely left them toothless or subject to bad conflicts of interest. The market conditions that allowed the collapse of 2008 to occur remain a Sword of Damocles hanging over the global economy.
Historical roots
There was a time when capitalism was seen as simply one of a number of competing philosophies of political economy. It grew up in opposition to the traditionalist conservatism of big feudal landowners. It was associated from its inception with a politics that embraced the negative freedoms of non-interference with individual enterprise and conscience. Its proponents were quite skeptical of the more positive freedoms associated with a wider democracy. They feared (not without reason) that a broader majoritarian self-rule would endanger the rights to the enjoyment of property of those who by ‘dint of their own efforts’ had been successful in obtaining it. For theorists such as John Locke, who influenced the English Revolution, or many of the Founding Fathers who shaped the limits of the American Revolution, there was a profound distrust of mob rule. By this they meant that those without property (and perhaps even slaves) might come together to assert their interests and rights. The vision of the most radical of these theorists of the revolutions that cleared the way for capitalism to flourish was that of ‘a republic of smallholders’. Men like Thomas Jefferson of Virginia or Jean-Jacques Rousseau in France might well have been horrified by the way in which today’s one-per-cent corporate super-rich and their acolytes dominate economic and political decision-making. Their vision was a distinctly rural one of a sturdy and independent yeomanry and craftspeople that would form the backbone of a healthy society. Nonetheless, their emphasis on market freedom and the unrestricted right to accumulate property and riches helped to pave the way for the current pre-eminence of wealth and power. The smallholder (although still around) proved far too vulnerable to the market forces that concentrated resources in the hands of a few. A very few smallholders became successful entrepreneurs while the great majority were forced into a precarious position at the edge of the capitalist economy.
There were, of course, those who railed against the limitations of the capitalist revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries with their narrow notions of freedom. Most famous, perhaps, were the Levellers during the English Civil War, who foresaw the inequalities of wealth and power that were to plague capitalism throughout the coming centuries. They were given short shrift by Oliver Cromwell, who first argued with and then executed them. In the 13 colonies, Thomas Paine found the American Revolution lacking in democratic substance. The radical priest Jacques Roux and his Enragés championed the economic rights of the poor during the French Revolution, demanding an end to private property and a classless society. Roux so alarmed Robespierre and the Jacobins that they brought trumped-up charges against him and caused him to commit suicide in his jail cell in 1794. There has always been a sense among its critics that capitalism has never really delivered on its promise of a thoroughgoing political democracy, a persistent sense that inequality and the rule of property consistently work to undermine the self-rule of the majority.
One of the features of capitalism that has enabled it to survive is its ability both to create and to take advantage of economic crises. This phenomenon was investigated and systematized by the political economist Joseph Schumpeter, who referred to it as a tendency for ‘creative destruction’. Schumpeter saw this underlying attribute as a kind of positive resilience that keeps capitalism from collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. For centuries, its opponents have looked to such crises as a source of hope, believing that the beast had finally overstepped the mark and could be brought to ground. These booms and busts are not new but have supplied the rhythm of the deployment of capital from the 16th century onwards, destabilizing people’s lives through the enclosure of the commons, the expansion of empires, and the shift of industry from less profitable to more profitable regions. This destabilizing effect has always been a major source of the dissatisfaction with capitalism. It has inspired people to search for alternatives that provide a more balanced and stable form of existence, where they can count on regular access to the fundamentals of their survival – food and shelter, peace and community. Capitalism constantly puts these things at risk in its restless search for new avenues of profitable growth. Oddly, this has aroused dissatisfaction from both conservative and radical sources: conservative, in the sense that people struggle to preserve whatever well-being they have managed to achieve but find it constantly threatened; radical, in the sense that the search for security calls forth the need to imagine and fight for a new order of things in which people control capital rather than the other way around.
Those who, for moral, economic or political reasons, are opposed to the insecurity, inequality and egoism that seem inevitable consequences of the capitalist way of operating do, however, face a significant uphill challenge. Not only has capitalism shown great resilience in overcoming the periodic crises it has faced but it has also even been embraced by its onetime ideological opponents: state socialism in China and the countries of the former Soviet bloc. These societies have now embraced the market as the most effective economic driver of future development. Today, most of the public economies of such countries have come under the sway of private capital – much of it foreign. China, in particular, has become ‘the workshop of the world’, with its labor force working under extremely exploitative conditions within a political system that still proclaims itself communist. Here, opportunities for resistance by workers are much more limited than they were in the early days of industrialization in the Western world. With few exceptions, trade unions are imposed from above and work with management to help discipline the workforce. Any worker resistance is met with staunch measures by police or private security forces. While some local worker complaints are allowed if sent through official channels, overall co-ordination of worker resistance, direct action or critiques of ‘communist’ capitalism that joins up all the analytic dots are all vigorously suppressed. Yet these dissenting activities still go on. ‘Mass incidents’ of labor unrest in China rose from 70,000 in 2004 to 180,000 in 2010 with virtually every economic sector affected.3 This has led some to identify contemporary China as ‘the epicenter of global labor unrest’.4 It is certainly one of the ironies of the modern world that what remains of this failed experiment in communism is being used to undermine the struggles of workers for a better life.
Primitive accumulation
One reading of economic history restricts the idea of ‘primitive accumulation’ to the early stages of capitalist development. This refers, for example, to the enclosures that established private property and forced rural people into the satanic mills in early industrial England, and to the high-seas privateering (piracy, really) that contributed to capital formation and helped to establish the Canadian banking industry. According to this view, the features of primitive accumulation that included brutal working conditions, slavery and child labor are identified with a bad old capitalism that has long since passed. Today, it is claimed, we have a sophisticated corporate version, a regulated and civilized capitalism that eschews bad behavior and operates in the interests of society as a whole. But while features such as child labor and piracy may have been modified – or at least displaced to countries such as Bangladesh and Somalia – new forms of primitive accumulation have taken their place. These stretch from the speculative derivatives market to privatizing the water we drink and the spaces we inhabit. The very notion of a public sphere has come into question, with the restless search for profit rendering the notion of public services and places an anachronism. A destabilizing market rationality is now in the process of penetrating every corner of our lives.
The features may have changed but the fundamentals of a recurrent primitive accumulation are still very much with us. As previously noted, capitalism still depends on the constant ‘creative destruction’ identified by Schumpeter during the Second World War when he wrote his classic Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. Market enthusiasts are not apologetic about this destruction; rather the opposite – they identify it with the whole adventure of human progress. Without it, they believe, stagnation would ensue. One business school (the Rotman School at the University of Toronto) has even set up a Creative Destruction Lab to push the process along.5 Creative destruction and its twin of heavy-handed primitive accumulation strategies tend to surface particularly when old avenues for extracting economic surplus begin to stagnate. A recent example was the situation when the post-World War Two consensus between workers, capital and government began to unravel in the 1980s. A period of relative prosperous stability based on decent wages and welfare provision for the sick, old and poor came under increasing pressure from corporations dissatisfied with their share of the economic pie. They advocated and funded a political program based on cutbacks, privatization, deregulation and other means of transferring wealth from labor to capital. This ran its course and these days the restless search for profit has shifted to the rather arcane region of the economy known as ‘financialization’. The production of real goods and services now takes second place to speculative activity involving paper values and the rise and fall of stock and bond markets. Today, the value of the global derivatives market (bets on the future value of almost anything you can think of) is estimated at $1,200 trillion, which, it is generally agreed, is some 20 times the value of world economy.6 This has been a fantastic source of profit for the small group of banks and related investment industries that dominate the global finance sector.
Needless to say, this can and does have a destabilizing effect on the overall economy. The speculative paper economy is in effect ‘creatively destroying’ people’s livelihoods, forcing them to adapt to the brave new world of casino capitalism. The immediate losers here may be from the financial sector – although many of the top executives have a range of ‘nest egg’ strategies (tax shelters, niche real estate) that are available to all those with wealth. But the most profound impact is on the jobs and livelihoods of those who have no such means of protecting themselves. Even in the real economy, strategies of primitive accumulation can be destabilizing. Under globalization, for example, which is characterized by its proponents in the most glowing modernist language, economies previously based on industrial employment are being hollowed out as such work shifts to countries with cheaper labor. Youth unemployment and underemployment are soaring in the industrial world while wages and working conditions in the new industrial periphery resemble those in the early industrial revolution. Current primitive accumulation strategies have provoked a demand crisis, where stagnating incomes, combined with tight credit, are leading to long-term stagnation.
Neoliberalism
This current phase of capitalism is most frequently referred to as ‘neoliberal’. This term has a wide variety of definitions and is used less frequently by its proponents (who prefer to speak of its component parts, such as free trade, privatization, deregulation and investors’ rights) than by its critics on the Left, who see it as a package of inter-related policies. If ‘neoliberalism’ is to mean something beyond a mere political swearword (reminding us of George Orwell’s accusation that the epithet ‘Fascist’ was used too loosely back in the 1930s), it needs some more precise thinking. The notion of neoliberalism implies a return to the fundamental principles and philosophies that underpinned emergent capitalism. It implies rolling back the state, which is believed to be smothering initiative through a culture of dependence, and refocusing all policy initiatives according to market logic. But it involves far more than reducing state interference in the market to the levels of the pre-welfare-state 1920s. Embedded in it is a dangerously limited notion of the human that reduces us to mere calculators of individual economic costs and benefits. As one perceptive critic sees it:
‘Neoliberalism... constructs individuals as entrepreneurial actors in every sphere of life. It figures individuals as rational, calculating creatures whose moral autonomy is measured by their capacity for “self-care”– the ability to provide for their own needs and service their own ambitions. In making the individual fully responsible for her- or himself, neoliberalism equates moral responsibility with rational action; it erases the discrepancy between economic and moral behavior by configuring morality entirely as a matter of rational deliberation about costs, benefits, and consequences. But, in so doing, it carries responsibility for the self to new heights: the rationally calculating individual bears full responsibility for the consequences of his or her action, no matter how severe the constraints on this action – for example, lack of skills, education and child care in a period of high unemployment and limited welfare benefits.’ 7
Neoliberalism in this reading, then, is about far more than just re-installing the market at the center of the economy. It is a project that reduces all human activities to ‘homo economicus’ and takes in almost every sphere of life from criminal justice to immigration. Social policy is shaped to condition prudent behavior: workfare, pension reform to keep old people in the workforce, punishment of single-parent families, minimum sentences and other harsh criminal-justice measures. If you succeed, it is entirely down to your own efforts and your rewards should be bountiful and minimally taxed. You are a high-achieving ‘rugged individualist’ and don’t owe anything to anybody. It is easy to see the appeal of this to CEOs with eight-figure pay cheques and the rest of the one per cent. If you fail, the responsibility also lies entirely on your shoulders for having ‘mismanaged’ your own life by making bad choices. You pathetic creature. No bailout for you. Government may help keep you alive if it doesn’t cost too much but don’t come crying for more than the bare minimum. You’re lucky to get that. The underlying myth here is that all of us as citizens have an equal opportunity on a level playing field – so those that don’t make it (an increasing number) must live with the consequences of their failures. Forget about class differences, inherited wealth, unequal educational opportunities, health handicaps and a profusion of other social factors.
Neoliberalism has become a sort of moral-rearmament political doctrine to accompany the market fundamentalism of economic policy. In these highly individualized economic circumstances, it is not surprising that the slogan that has become most popular with panicky voters during repeated election cycles is: ‘It’s the economy, stupid’. This captures the limits of government possibility as seen through neoliberal eyes – no room for compassion, intergenerational consideration, concern about the planet, international responsibility or democracy beyond the narrow confines of elections. There is simply no meaning outside the cold calculus of the market. This is also starting to undermine the institutions with which the establishment has traditionally been identified – the legal system, the police, parliament, local government. Under earlier forms of liberal democracy these could be counted on to play a moderately autonomous role in tempering capitalism. Under neoliberalism they are increasingly shaped so that they will not be obstacles to market priorities. Neoliberalism redefines democracy as market rationality – and the only criterion by which its political class can be judged is not principle but expediency.
Politically agnostic capitalism
The champions of the rule of capital (which they present as the rule of the market) hold forth that it is only capitalism that can deliver freedom. Market freedom is a precondition for all other kinds of freedom. Yet capitalism, with its market made up of a few winners and many losers, exists under all kinds of political arrangements – classical fascism (the Germany and Italy of the 1930s and 1940s), military dictatorship (the Latin American regimes of the 1970s and 1980s, along with so many others), feudal monarchy (Saudi Arabia), and now the state communism of China and Vietnam. The proponents of the ‘capitalism equals freedom’ point of view will hold that ‘in the long run’ the market will corrode such authoritarianism and freedom will flower. But, as John Maynard Keynes liked to say, ‘in the long run we are all dead’, and for the Saudi democrat the relationship between the House of Saud monarchy and petro-capitalism is all they can remember or even imagine. In Latin America, the overthrow of dictatorship led not to a capitalist renaissance but ultimately to various forms of populist socialism that are deeply suspicious of market forces.
Of course, to some degree it depends what you mean by freedom. The capitalist notion of freedom is all about opportunity. For the most part this means the opportunity (indeed the right, or even the obligation) of the individual to enrich themselves. This rather backward notion that you have the right to lord it over others because you are cleverer – or, more likely, better positioned due to the accident of birth – is another source of discontent with capitalism. Thoughtful people simply have the stubborn belief that we can do better than this. They have an underlying belief in the fellowship and solidarity of women and men and their capacity to co-operate with each other for the common good. Whether it is drawn from religious belief or secular conviction, or the experience of something better in their communities, families or memories, they just can’t seem to get in sync with the rightwing US writer Ayn Rand’s idea of selfishness as a virtue. They quickly come to realize that the opportunistic freedom of the derivative trader, real-estate speculator or arms dealer results in bankruptcies, evictions and corpses.
The second line of argument buttressing the case for capitalism as freedom of opportunity is that ‘a rising tide lifts all boats’. This holds that the success of a few leads to the prosperity of the many through the creation of jobs and the famous ‘trickle down’ of wealth. You need look no further than the present state of the world, where inequality and the concentration of wealth are increasing virtually everywhere, to wonder at the sheer gall of those who hold this view. Around 0.1% of the world’s population currently hold 50% of world income8 and 51 of the world’s 100 largest economies are now corporations.9 In the meantime, rates of unemployment (particularly youth unemployment) are continuing to rise, imperiling the future of a generation.
All the same, opponents of capitalism have no right to be smug. The system has proved it has staying power. It has won at least the passive adherence of hundreds of millions of people who really have no significant stake in it. It has convinced them that there is no alternative but to play by the rules of capital’s game. It has used crisis after crisis as a way of reinventing itself and opening up new avenues of profit. It has diverted scientific and technological progress to serve its own narrow ends. It has shown a flashy dynamism that still draws in the greedy and the gullible. It has undermined the alternatives that have been set up to oppose it, either through guile or force. It has appealed to what is worst in our natures, blinding us with celebrity and consumption (or at least dreams of future consumption). It has proved itself a worthy opponent and it is far from clear that capital can ever be brought to serve the purposes of humanity rather than the other way around.
For in the end it is not capitalists that control capital. They encourage it. Benefit from it. Obey it – or not, at their peril. But the history of business is dotted with ways in which capital has turned on them, driving them into bankruptcy, crisis, war or some other disaster. Many captains of industry and finance dwell under the illusion of their mastery of capital but it remains just that: an illusion. They have made a Faustian pact or devil’s bargain and given capital its freedom to roam wherever it wishes, regardless of consequence. This is perhaps the most profound danger of capital on the loose in the current age: in its increasingly desperate quest for profit, capital is driving us over the ecological edge, endangering the very possibility of sustainable human life on the planet.
1 Daniel Cohn-Bendit, ‘Enough with the European leaps of faith’, opendemocracy. net 21 Mar 2013.
2 Jeff Madrick, ‘US financial regulations; Plugging holes in a faulty dam’, triplecrisis.com
3 Bob McGuire, ‘Widening labour and peasant revolts threaten Chinese rulers’, newsandletters.org Jan/Feb 2012.
4 Eli Friedman, ‘China in Revolt’, Jacobin, nin.tl/1fZpIyj
7 Wendy Brown, ‘Neo-liberalism and the end of liberal Democracy’, Theory and Event, 7.1, 2003.
8 Capgemini and Merrill Lynch Wealth Management, 2009.
