Capitalism

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Sex, Class, and Occupy Wall Street

Crossposted from Sasha Said

I’ve been following the Occupy movement with mixed feelings. On the one hand, it’s the first thing in a very long time that’s given me any hope for this country. It’s high time that we start focusing on economic injustice and the damage done by the greed of the mega rich and the corruption of those who do their bidding. The system is badly broken, as evidenced by the fact that politicians of both major parties are talking austerity and cuts to safety net programs at a time of record unemployment, growing poverty, and economic inequality comparable to the developing world. Clearly there’s a desperate need for a movement that raises awareness of the class war the wealthy have been waging on the rest of us.

Which brings me to my first issue with Occupy Wall Street. Who exactly are “the rest of us”? From a branding perspective, the 99% versus the 1% is very appealing. But is it accurate? Clearly not. If your household income is half a million a year, I’d say the system has been working very well for you. You may even be part of the problem if you outsource jobs or pay workers less than a living wage. But you’re still part of the 99%.

At the same time, “the 99%” has become synonymous with the downtrodden, debt-ridden, and dispossessed. I remember a Tumblr entry written from the perspective of a small child who’d witnessed her mom cry because she was unable to buy her kid a birthday present. It ended with the words, “My mom doesn’t know that I know we’re part of the 99%.” Huh? The mom doesn’t realize her kid knows she makes less than $590,000 a year? No wonder people are confused. I’ve seen numerous blog posts and comments by individuals with low six-figure incomes stating that they “stand with the 99%.” No, actually, if you have a low six-figure income, you are the 99%. In fact, if your household income totals $190,000, it could triple and you would still be part of the 99%.

So. Not very useful, is it? The bottom 90%, on the other hand, have an average household income of $31,244, which is probably more like what people have in mind when discussing the economic difficulties experienced by “the 99%.”

Okay, so maybe the focus is on the top 1% because they’ve been gobbling up a disproportionate share of income and productivity gains and wield a toxic amount of political influence. But then, why stop at the 1% mark (average annual income $1,137,684)? The top 0.1% (average annual income $3,238,386) are even more culpable and the top 0.01% (average annual income $27,342,212) are the most culpable of all.

Ultimately the 99% is more about branding than reality. Which, I suppose, is okay, as long as we don’t forget that there are HUGE differences among the 99% and that we are NOT all in the same boat. Even if we ignore the 99 percenters with household incomes topping $200k, there’s an enormous difference between a family making $160,000 and a family making $60,000 a year. And there’s an even bigger difference between a $60,000 household and a $16,000 household.

If the power elites had half a brain, they would have been content with exploiting and oppressing the people at the bottom, while continuing to provide economic opportunities for those in the middle. Most 99 percenters were just fine with a system in which the disproportionately black, brown, and female folks at the bottom of the income pyramid were paid so little for their labor that an entire lifetime of hard work was insufficient to escape poverty. And even the ones who saw the injustice and had a problem with it weren’t about to take to the streets to protest the exploitation of the working poor.

Alas, the greed of the power elites knows no bounds and they began outsourcing middle class jobs and cutting middle class pay and benefits. So here we are. We’ve now got the beginnings of an economic justice movement. People are starting to wake up to what those of us at the bottom of the pile have known for a long time: The system is rigged. Hard work and skill are not enough. The rules that apply to most of us don’t apply to the people at the top. And these people have been waging war on workers for over three decades. Their greed commodifies and destroys everything in its path.

So, yeah, I realize that this newfound solidarity with workers came about only because those who grew up expecting to live a middle class life with decent pay, home ownership, vacation time, health care access, and savings accounts are seeing their prospects evaporate. But you know what? I’ll take it.

As for the much-discussed demographics of the Occupy movement, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that white dudes with middle class upbringings are disproportionately represented among the “full-time” occupiers. With the exception of those currently unemployed, the working poor are typically too busy working two or three jobs to keep a roof over their head to occupy stuff. If we don’t show up for work, we don’t get paid, and if we don’t get paid, we can’t make the rent. The Occupy movement doesn’t just protest the economic realities in this country, it also reflects them.

Women are not only more likely to be poor and underpaid (roughly two-thirds of all minimum wage workers are women), but with all the unpaid domestic work and caretaking we are saddled with, we’re going to have far less time to join protests. On top of that, the ever-present threat of rape serves as a powerful deterrent against overnight stays in tents surrounded by dudes.

It’s absolutely critical that the white male protesters who are in the majority at every “occupation” understand *why* they outnumber female activists. I’ve seen some pretty disturbing statements from dudes who clearly don’t. Suggesting that those present 24/7 at Occupied sites are more committed to the movement’s goals than those who are able to stay only a short time demonstrates a stunning lack of awareness of male, white, ableist, and class privilege.

Unfortunately there seems to be quite a bit of that going around. There have been reports of general sexism (lots of it), sexual harassment, and even a couple of sexual assaults. While that’s no different than what happens outside of the Occupy movement’s encampments every minute of every day (don’t get me started on the hypocrisy of right-wing blogs who have seized on these incidents as supposed evidence that OWS represents the end of Western civilization), male OWS protesters are supposedly trying to fight injustice and inequality. That, my brothers, will require tearing down patriarchy, male privilege, as well as porn and rape culture.

It probably won’t come as a shock that many lefty men have no intention of abandoning male supremacy. That became, once again, abundantly clear during the Occupy Wall Street Perv Project fiasco (otherwise known as “Hot Chicks of Occupy Wall Street”). Women can be objectified, dehumanized, and used as perv bait without their knowledge or consent, and, judging from blog comments, about half the pro-Occupy dudes think that’s a-okay. Oh, and feminists are overreacting, of course. Perv project creator Steven Greenstreet is actually helping the movement by getting more people dudes to show up at the protest, so it’s all good! Who cares that he’s creating an unsafe and oppressive environment for women in the process.

The absolute lowest point, however, came when Occupy London Stock Exchange invited probable rapist and definite sexist sleazoid Julian Assange to speak at the LSX protest. While there were some boos and a few people left, the vast majority of the crowd cheered for this piece of shit. I felt like I’d been kicked in the stomach. LSX sent a clear message that day to women and rape survivors that we’re not part of their “justice” movement.

So I understand why most radfem blogs have concluded that Occupy Wall Street is a men’s movement in which dudes set the agenda and women clean, cook, and look pretty. Same as it ever was.

And yet. Linking to right-wing blogs that claim to be outraged about sexual assaults occurring at OWS encampments while they support candidates and policies that make women even more vulnerable to sexual assault and harassment? If you must link to them, it would be nice to at least call out their breathtaking hypocrisy. But then, just like left-wing dude politics have a blind spot where women’s oppression is concerned, feminism can be amazingly oblivious to class-based (and race-based) oppression.

While pointing out that “we” are not the 99%, that the 99% are made up of predominantly women and children, all women are presumed to be in the same boat. In fact, I’ve even seen statements to the effect that low income women have more in common with women in the 1% than with low income men. There are indeed experiences women share across class or race. But there are also important differences, and in some instances, poor women and women of color are going to have more in common with men of their class or race than with rich white women. The point is, we shouldn’t have to choose. We shouldn’t have to ignore one form of oppression to focus on another.

Some of the most troubling comments I’ve seen on radfem blogs question the Occupy movement’s legitimacy because “worldwide, the 99% are the 1%.” Apart from the fact that this statement is untrue (Western industrialized nations are home to substantially more than 1% of the world’s population, and not everyone in the so-called developing world is poor), it comes perilously close to the right-wing talking point that poor people in the US have nothing to complain about because we have it so much better than poor people in the developing world. Sort of like feminists have no business complaining about sexism and misogyny in the US, because, hey, women here are so much better off than women in Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan.

Let me be clear. Being poor in the US of A is not just about not being able to “buy stuff.” Being poor frequently means going to bed hungry. It means watching your partner collapse after a day of hard physical labor in 100+ degree heat for which he was paid $5 an hour. It means walking home seven miles in icy cold wind and rain because you can’t afford a car and public transportation is extremely limited. It means cops automatically regarding you with suspicion, and courts locking you up for minor offenses. Most of all, being poor in the US means suffering, and possibly dying, because you can’t afford medical, dental, or psychiatric care–and being forced to stand by helplessly as your friends and loved ones suffer.

For women, being poor also means that you are more likely to be raped and less likely to see your rapist brought to justice. It means you are more likely to be sexually harassed on the street and at work, and less likely to have recourse against employment-based harassment and exploitation because you really need that job. It means you’re more likely to become a victim of domestic violence and less likely to be able to escape because you’re not paid enough to live alone. And yes, being a poor woman also means that you’re more likely to turn to prostitution or other sex work–either as a “career choice” because that’s the one form of employment open to you that pays enough to possibly escape poverty, or as something you do occasionally to make ends meet.

This is why, despite all the problems, I support the Occupy movement. No, it’s not a radical movement (at this point), and yes, it’s far from perfect, but it’s still the best thing that has happened in this country in a long time. Unfettered capitalism is killing us and the planet. Hell, it may already be too late. But maybe, just maybe, we can still turn this thing around. People are finally waking up and figuring out that something has gone very, very wrong. Our elected representatives don’t represent us; they’re on the payroll of massive corporations intent on devouring everything they can turn into profits–human beings, animals, natural resources, social programs. I’m not going to turn my back on the first (and possibly the last) inkling of a chance to change course because some of the dudes involved are fauxgressive douchenozzles.

Get involved in the Occupy movement and point out how unbridled capitalism, environmental destruction, and patriarchy are inextricably linked? I’m all for it. But not support the movement at all? I don’t have that luxury. I need this movement to succeed. And, really, so do you.

January 21, 2012 Tags: Capitalism, Class Warfare, Julian Assange, Occupy Wall Street, OWS
Category: Culture, Politics No Comments

Seriously, Capitalism Is Evil

Earlier I suggested that Michael Moore was right when he declared Capitalism “evil,” and I said it wasn’t a controversial conclusion. I discussed four book-length authorities devoted to the subject. My concern was that if we were unable to identify, or unwilling to denounce, Capitalism’s intrinsic evils, we would have a difficult time setting things right. If we don’t understand the problem, we can’t find a solution.

Nearly half of the polled Kossacks thought Capitalism might not be evil.

I promised in the comments to the DailyKos cross-post to take on the opposing arguments in conscientious detail. With this diary I fulfill that promise. If you think Capitalism might be OK, follow me below the fold…

Just to summarize the arguments, in case you do not want to go back to the beginning, the four commentators asserted roughly as follows:

Michael Albert: Capitalism’s methods and outcomes are intrinsically destructive of people and institutions.

Joel Kovel: Capitalism inevitably will result in the destruction of our environment, nature generally, and eventually much of the life on the planet.

Bowles & Gintis: Capitalism undermines Democracy and makes people incapable of governing themselves.

Michael Moore: Capitalism exacts an intolerable and unnecessary toll on people’s lives, and is inconsistent with our most basic values.

Those unwilling to denounce Capitalism made these arguments (which I paraphrase for brevity):

1. Calling Things Evil is ITSELF Evil.

2. Systems Can’t Be Evil; Only People Can Be Evil.

3. Without Capitalism we wouldn’t have the Internet, so stop complaining.

4. Michael Moore got rich off his movie, so how can he complain about Capitalism?

5. Capitalism Can’t Be “Evil” If All the Alternatives Are Worse.

6. Rejecting Capitalism Means Embracing Tyranny.

7. Arguments for Alternative Systems Have Been Debunked.

8. Why Should We Discuss This Without Knowing What the Alternatives Are?

9. You Haven’t Defined “Capitalism” or “Evil” So How Can We Say?

This is a lot to discuss, so I would encourage you to skim down to whichever challenges you think might hit their mark.

1. Calling Things Evil is ITSELF Evil. The Bush administration misused and overused the word “evil,” draining the word of both meaning and force. Although we should reserve the most harsh moral epithet for people and institutions that intentionally, knowingly, willfully cause harm that is severe and unnecessary, make no mistake that this does occur in the real world, and we need to call it what it is when it happens, so that we may summon all our strength in the case of torture, genocide, and other monstrosities. Let’s argue about whether Capitalism meets the definition, but let’s not be moral relativists and stand idly in the face of unspeakable horrors, unwilling even to judge.

2. Systems Can’t Be Evil; Only People Can Be Evil. At a superficial level, this argument is wrong for the same reasons that we deride the NRA’s lame defense, “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” Totalitarianism and Apartheid are examples of systems that cannot be justly administered, even by people of good will. But at a deeper level, the great insight in Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase “The Banality of Evil,” which considered Eichmann’s Nuremberg defense that he was “just following orders,” was that we do not properly think of “evil” as occurring only when it is effected by a nefarious villain. Instead, we should understand the more complex sociology of people and their roles in organizations. The holocaust was executed not by fanatics, but by ordinary people who accepted the premises of their state, and therefore participated with the view that their actions were normal. If Capitalism drives or arranges for people to do evil, then let Capitalism share the blame.

3. Without Capitalism we wouldn’t have the Internet, so stop complaining. Capitalism’s publicists claim that Capitalism is the greatest driver of innovation. The evidence is otherwise. The fact that the Soviet Union launched the first satellite could just end that discussion. But deeper still, if you look at the great innovations of Western Civilization, you’ll see an explosion of extraordinary developments in ancient Greece and Rome without any help from Capitalism, and within the United States, Capitalism gets a breathtaking amount of help from government research and government-funded research (including the development of the Internet, ironically), as well as from inventors in large corporations and universities who do not get to keep the profits. So whatever mixed motives great inventors have — paychecks, glory, or just to solve an interesting or important problem — in most cases, it is not Capitalism that is in fact driving most innovation, and it certainly does not HAVE to be capitalism. Similar funding for R&D could be achieved through communist, socialist, public, or non-profit structures.

4. Michael Moore got rich off his movie, so how can he complain about Capitalism? This is fundamentally an ad hominem argument — whether Michael Moore is a hypocrite does not answer his argument. But Michael Moore is not a hypocrite. Participants in a system are often best situated to provide a convincing critique. When a corporate executive (like me) says that Capitalism is evil, that might actually carry more weight than when uttered by a dirty fucking hippie, because I am fully versed in how it’s supposed to work, and how it does in fact work. But most of all, Michael Moore is IN a capitalist system, and we all have to eat. He has every right to use Capitalism to spread a message that we would all be better off — including Michael Moore himself — with a different system. If we require require our great thinkers to impoverish themselves and leave the United States in order to speak out for a better system, we will be worse off, and we’ll be less likely to ever realize that better system.

5. Capitalism Can’t Be “Evil” If All the Alternatives Are Worse. There are two parts to this challenge — first, an assumption that all the alternatives are worse, and second, an illogical suggestion that if all your options are evil, then the least-evil choice is not evil. The assumption that there are no alternatives bears some attention. It came up repeatedly in the comments in a misquote or “paraphrase” of Winston Churchill. What Churchill said was, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except all the other forms that have been tried.” Even Churchill in this quote conceded the possibility of alternatives. However, the much deeper flaw is that Churchill wasn’t talking about Capitalism. The implicit error — that Capitalism and Democracy are synonymous, or that Capitalism is an expression of Democracy in the economic realm, or that at least Capitalism and Democracy are mutually reinforcing in some respect — is one of the most dangerous in this entire discussion. In fact, I argue that Capitalism does not express democracy, but is directly opposed to democracy in the economic sphere, and undermines democracy in the political sphere. In sum, it is a fair question to ask what the alternatives are, but whether Capitalism is evil does not hang on the answer, and the assumption that there are no viable or superior alternatives warrants close examination. At the very least, we cannot glibly commit ourselves to administering a system that might be evil by misquoting Winston Churchill.

6. Rejecting Capitalism Means Embracing Tyranny. In grade school I was taught that there were three forms of government — Capitalism, Socialism, and Communism, corresponding directly to government involvement in the economy: low, medium, and high. In reality, economic and political systems are much more complex than this one-dimensional formulation suggests. Modern corporations, for example, are essentially hierarchically structured centrally controlled bureaucracies — mini-authoritarian regimes. A contrasting structure — the worker-owned cooperative can compete within the same economy. Thus, declaring a system “Capitalist” or “Socialist” does not answer the question of Tyranny either way. Similarly, a Socialist economy might accommodate democratic political or economic structures — or not. And a Capitalist economy might support tyrannical fascist political structures. In sum, it is simply not true that rejecting capitalism means embracing tyranny, nor that embracing capitalism means rejecting tyranny. Instead, we need to evaluate each proposed structure for the amount of political freedom and economic liberty provided, and whether the system provides enough internal controls on concentrations of power to ensure that it does not eventually become dominated by non-democratic forces.

7. Arguments for Alternative Systems Have Been Debunked. The failure of any particular instance of economic democracy does not disprove the possibility of a successful implementation. But I think this criticism ignores the thriving ecosystem of collectives and cooperatives, as well as government and non-profit organizations that achieve important missions effectively and efficiently, around the world. Also, it is worth noting that Capitalism doesn’t much care for successful alternatives, and frequently takes steps to crush or purchase emerging structures, or even entire countries, that might demonstrate an attractive alternative. In other words, the failure of other options to flourish might prove that nothing else is viable, but might just as easily evidence additional evil effects of Capitalism. But the best critique would be to consider whether there is anything intrinsic to human nature that prevents us from coming together into stable, mutually beneficial associations without the profit motive. The many demonstrations of this fact now and through history, and around the world, as well as the fact that most laborers today are not Capitalists, and do good work for a fair wage and occasional glory, and not for profit, show that Capitalism is not the only way to successfully motivate people or organize production.

8. Why Should We Discuss This Without Knowing What the Alternatives Are? I do think it is important to consider the alternatives to Capitalism, or else the expose would be purely academic, not to mention depressing. I think that properly understanding Capitalism will inspire a serious search for and consideration of alternatives. It might be equally true that people would be more willing to consider face-on the evils of Capitalism if they first saw the viability of a better system. But it is a logical error to require that either inquiry be prior to the other.

9. You Haven’t Defined “Capitalism” or “Evil” So How Can We Say? This criticism was lodged in a thoughtful comment over at Pfuggee Camp. The general thrust, I take it, is that not all negative side-effects should be characterized as evil, and some elements of capitalism might be legitimate, even if some implementations of capitalism result in evil. A specific example proposed was small-scale entrepreneurship, such as at Farmers’ Markets.

Because I am challenging Capitalism with a very broad brush, my conclusion does not hinge on any fine distinctions in the words. I assert that Capitalism is Evil for any standard definition of Capitalism, and any standard definition of Evil. In fact, I would challenge any commenter to propose a definition of “evil” that Capitalism does not satisfy, given the arguments I summarized in the original essay.

However, I am not trying to dodge the question, so I will repeat here my own definitions of “Evil” and “Capitalism,” the first of which I also included in the comments to the original essay. I think that “Evil” is “intentionally, knowingly, and unnecessarily causing grievious harm to others, repeatedly, for personal benefit, or no net benefit at all.” Capitalism does that. As for what IS Capitalism, I would describe it as “an economic system in which the means of production are privately owned, and the profits from economic enterprise are distributed to the owners.”

The nexus between these two definitions is that if a propertied group gets to determine the economic conditions of an unpropertied group for the benefit of the propertied group, the stated harm to others will inevitably occur — does, in fact, always occur. It is not just an empirical fact — the whole point of vesting power in one group over another group is to create unaccountable social power. Because “production” in this example means the economic livelihood of people and communities, it is by definition social decision-making without social accountability, and that is the essence of Capitalism. To allow communities to determine their own economic arrangements would be economic democracy (community determines investment), which is the opposite of capitalism (private propertied owners determine investment).

Farmers’ Markets are good, but they don’t prove the efficacy of Capitalism; they prove the efficacy of local markets. Farming exists in all kinds of economic systems, and markets do, too. The tendency to confuse and interchange concepts like Capitalism, Banking, Markets, Democracy, and Freedom is a big problem. We are basically taught in a very fuzzy way that these are synonymous, when in fact they may be mutually reinforcing or mutually exclusive. In subsequent essays we will examine each component of the political economy of the United States to to more clearly understand whether Capitalism creates Markets or undermines them, and whether Banking creates Freedom, or is more dangerous than a standing army, as Thomas Jefferson suggested.

If we correctly understand that Capitalism is Evil, then we will have both a yardstick to measure the incremental improvements achieved by alternate systems, and a fierce determination to effect real change.

January 31, 2010 Tags: Capitalism
Category: Uncategorized No Comments

Why Capitalism Is Evil

I was surprised by people’s reaction to the conclusion Michael Moore drew in, Capitalism: A Love Story, that Capitalism Is Evil. I thought people mostly knew that, or at least strongly suspected it, so the idea wouldn’t be startling.

Of course capitalists don’t think Capitalism is evil. But many progressives, too, were taken aback by Moore’s blunt conclusion — either disturbed by the potential implications, or, more often, apparently not having thought about it deeply enough to have a clear opinion.

But many more people than just Michael Moore have thought deeply about whether Capitalism is Evil, and the arguments and evidence, when laid out (as I will shortly do), demonstrate that Capitalism is indeed evil, by any reasonable definition “evil.” In other words, Capitalism is not just evil, it is VERY evil — or, we might say, Capitalism can be proved Evil beyond a reasonable doubt.

Moore attempted to reveal Capitalism’s dark side by showing how Capitalism systematically causes serious, unnecessary harm, inconsistent with our basic moral commitments. Perhaps more important, Moore attempted to break the taboo around criticizing Capitalism and to say the words aloud — “Capitalism Is Evil.”

But breaking down the layers of capitalist-apologist propaganda that have accumulated in our brains, and challenging our preconceptions about Capitalism, is no small job. People’s reactions to the movie revealed many of the false meme’s lurking in our subconscious, like, “Capitalism may be bad, but the alternatives are worse,” and “Capitalism has some negative effects, but the overall benefits of Capitalism would be positive if we protected against its harsher aspects,” and “Replacing Capitalism would surely eliminate freedoms, so we might not be better off, and we could be much worse off.”

I will confront these memes not with my own arguments, but instead with the much deeper thinking of several subject matter experts: Michael Albert, Joel Kovel, Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, and Michael Moore.

Michael Albert’s book, Parecon; Joel Kovel’s book, The Enemy of Nature, Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis’ book, Capitalism and Democracy, as well as Moore’s documentary, Capitalism: A Love Story, thoroughly consider the question of whether Capitalism is Evil, and their combined arguments carry more force than any one argument alone.

Albert approaches Capitalism from the standpoint of economic justice, and argues forcefully that Capitalism’s methods and outcomes are intrinsically destructive of people and institutions. Kovel presses an environmental critique, showing that regardless of the negative social implications (which he nonetheless details impressively), Capitalism necessarily will result in the destruction of our environment, nature generally, and eventually the planet — so Capitalism is inexorably opposed to humanity, and indeed all life. Bowles and Gintis consider the conditions necessary for Democracy, and the extent to which Capitalism not only undermines the institutions of Democracy, but also makes people less capable of governing themselves. Finally, Moore approaches the question from an ethic of caring, attempting to illustrate that Capitalism exacts an intolerable and unnecessary toll on people’s lives, and is inconsistent with our most basic values.

I will first lay out the four arguments in greater depth, and then consider whether the most popular defenses of Capitalism can survive the heat of these critiques. We will see that they do not, which in turn begs the question of possible alternatives to Capitalism that might create for us a better world, or at least a sustainable and less-bad world. That question I will answer, too, but separately, as part of my Economic Power series.

Michael Albert
Parecon: Life After Capitalism
Michael Albert sums it up like this:

Capitalist globalization produces poverty, ill-health, shortened life-spans, reduced quality of life, and ecological collapse…Humanity’s well-being does not guide the process, but is instead sacrificed on behalf of private profit.

That’s why it’s bad. The cause of this badness, according to Albert, is that:

“Capitalism revolves around private ownership of the means of production, market allocation, and corporate divisions of labor. It remunerates property, power, and to a limited extent contribution to output. Class divisions arise from differences in property ownership, and differential access to empowered work versus subservient work. Class divisions induce huge differences in decision-making influence and quality of life.”

Albert argues for an alternate vision, which he calls Participatory Economics (or Parecon“), that reverses each of these paradigms. So, for example, instead of private ownership of the means of production, each workplace would be owned in equal part by all citizens. Top-down hierarchical decision-making structures would be replaced with bottom-up democratic institutions. Instead of remunerating property, power, and output, Parecon would reward effort and sacrifice. Instead of creating differential access to empowered work and decision-making influence, people would have balanced job-complexes that allow everyone to engage in some empowering work, and require everyone to engage in some grunt work.

Albert’s enterprise is primarily to show why these alternative arrangements are in fact feasible, and could be administered fairly, without making us crazy, and without the frustrating or inefficient bureaucracy that people worry would engulf us if we ever attempted to replace our Dilbert-esque workplaces with something better.

But for the purposes of this essay, we do not need to establish that Albert has a better idea. Only that Capitalism does in fact necessarily “sacrifice humanity’s well-being on behalf of private profit.” Albert’s arguments toward this conclusion are strong.

Capitalism DOES reliably remunerate property, as any trust-funder knows, but not necessarily hard work, as any good janitor, day laborer knows, or even some school teachers, bus drivers, and airline pilots.

The class awareness around accumulated property is deeply engrained in our consciousness — children’s stories frequently revolve around the contrasting fates of peasants and kings, princes and paupers. By adulthood, we are accustomed to separate-but-equal accommodations for the wealthy in nearly all public places — airplanes, sports stadiums, freeways, and airport waiting lounges. Nearly everywhere in modern society, the wealthy have created for themselves a separate shadow world of superior facilities in education, training, transportation, entertainment, athletics, information, and shopping. We are even seeing fast-tracks for the wealthy in hospitals and airport security lines.

The end result of these superior accommodations is a self-perpetuating cycle that better prepares the wealthy and their progeny to successfully assume positions of influence and leadership, and thus further expand their wealth. This cycle, of course, fatally undermines the alleged justification for the wealth disparities in the first place — that they were somehow “earned” or “deserved,” rather than received by inheritance, marriage, or appointment.

But Albert goes further, pointing out that “each of these modes of connecting actors imposes on the economy pressures that subvert solidarity, equity, diversity, and self-management.” In other words, the foundation of a just society is a culture of shared understanding that we are all in this together, that we have to depend on each other, that we have to help each other, and that we have to do these things while respecting our differences and granting each other the right to uniqueness and self-actualization, so that we can truly know freedom.

It’s no small task to credibly define such institutions, although Albert may in fact have done it; give him a read.

But it is not hard to see that Capitalism institutionally ensures outcomes that are approximately as devastating as Albert describes, and approximately as devastating as we see in the real world after a few centuries’ experiment with Capitalism. Further, the precise features that define Capitalism — private ownership of the means of production, hierarchical control of the workplace, remuneration of property and power — can be pretty clearly shown to lead to class divisions, unequal opportunity, and huge discrepancies in decision-making opportunity and quality of life.

When the benefits of the system are concentrated in a very few, and most people are left dramatically worse off, it is indeed fair to say that humanity’s well-being has been sacrificed on behalf of private profit. And the system that causes it may be called by its true name, “Evil.”

But if structural sociological analysis is not your thing, Joel Kovel takes a very different approach.

Joel Kovel
The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World?
Kovel intends quite literally the harsh dilemma posed by his book’s subtitle. He spends considerable effort showing that our society will either end Capitalism or it will end us — at least most of us, and life as we know it.

One of Kovel’s more intriguing suggestions is that the western environmental movement is misguidedly attempting to reconcile Capitalism and Environmentalism (e.g., Clean Water Act, Emissions Cap-and-Trade) is misguided and cannot succeed. Some of his best analysis focuses on the way Capitalism tends to shape the behavior of people and institutions, so that disasters like the explosion at Union Carbide’s Bhopal chemical plant, which killed 16,000 and injured perhaps 500,000 more, should be understood as inevitable, rather than aberrational. I recommend the entire book.

But I am going to extract just a piece of Kovel’s argument, which directly considers the structural elements of capitalism that (in Kovels’s view) ensure that capitalism will destroy the world, and why incremental reforms cannot adequately mitigate this dire outcome. Obviously if this argument is true, then Michael Albert’s notions of social justice hardly need be considered: we either jettison Capitalism, or we die — or at least most of us and our descendants die.

Kovel focuses on three essential elements of Capitalism:

1. Capitalism tends to degrade the conditions of its own production.
2. Capitalism must expand without end in order to exist
3. Capital leads to a chaotic world-system, increasingly polarized between rich and poor, which cannot adequately address the ecological crisis.
The combination makes an ever-growing ecological crisis an iron necessity so long as capital rules, no matter what measures are taken to tidy up one corner or another.

Kovel’s first point, that Capitalism tends to degrade the conditions of its own production, is intended to apply broadly to the intrinsic destructiveness of Capitalism. Capitalism cannot function without profit, and so the capitalist firm is pressured to maximize the gap between cost and price.

Because competitive pressures tend to limit price, cost-cutting becomes a paramount concern of capitalists. In theory, the cost-cutting is focused on efficient production of commodity inputs. But in practice, the cost-pressure is extended to three non-commodity inputs: public infrastructure, people’s labor, and nature itself.

Kovel argues that the pressure to squeeze as much as possible out of people, public infrastructure, and nature, while paying as little as possible, fouls the world by breaking people, disrupting ecosystems, and filling our society with externalized costs, such as pollution.

This degradation may be localized, such as in the Bhopal explosion that resulted from a blizzard of risky cost-cutting measures, or may be generalized, such as the overall global crisis resulting from global warming. However, Kovel insists, neither scenario should be characterized as industrial accidents because they are inevitable outcomes of a system that generates profit by intentionally imposing hardships and creating risk.

The standard business school rejoinder is that all would be well were capitalist institutions merely required to internalize their costs, and so these tragedies reflect only market distortions, not systemic flaws. And this brings us to Kovel’s second principle: Capitalism Must Expand In Order to Exist.

Any firm that ceases to grow becomes a relatively less attractive investment, and capital is withdrawn and moved to faster growing (i.e., higher returning) firms. CEOs who cannot increase the rate of profit are removed. Any firm that fails to grow will simply disappear, its assets purchased by another. No matter how large Microsoft or Wal-Mart become, their urge to grow further is unabated.

As a result, efforts to internalize costs are consistently defeated by firms clever enough to find a previously unnoticed opportunity to create an externality. Or if protective regulations have closed one loophole, the unquenchable thirst for profits will result in political action to open a new loophole.

The pressure to do so is extraordinary, because for capital, it is literally a matter of life or death, and that is a defining element of Capitalism. Although a natural person or a non-profit organization of any size can cover its costs and continue in business indefinitely, the objective of a capitalist organization is not the underlying work, but the extracted profit, so if the profit ceases to grow, capital is moved elsewhere, and the business begins to implode. To resist this result, capitalist firms will seek to squeeze additional profits, even if it ends up crushing the life out of what otherwise was a well-functioning business. It happens over and over.

Kovel is particularly critical of proposed capitalist-oriented solutions to the inevitable economic crisis posed by the quest for endless growth. For example, Kovel argues against the Kyoto carbon-trading scheme:

“Kyoto proceeds on a two-tiered front: to create new markets for trading credits to pollute among the industrial powers, and to create…’Clean Development Mechanisms’…in the South that would offset carbon emissions by building projects, like tree farms, whose goal is the sequestration of carbon. This immense superstructure…rests on two guiding assumptions: Give the corporate sector and the capitalist state the leading role in containing global warming; and do so by making the control of atmospheric carbon the site of new markets and new nodes of accumulation…

The defects of this mammoth blunder are myriad. The scheme is inherently incoherent, for it entails innumerable points that simply cannot be measured or compared. This is essentially because it tries to evade the point of a rational policy, which would be to leave the carbon in the ground in the first place — in other words, one that would put limits on capital. In doing so, Kyoto offers opportunities for swindling of all kinds.

Finally, and most revealing, the scheme will fail precisely insofar as it succeeds — for the money that is to be made as a bribe to get corporate cooperation will of course not be placed in anybody’s mattress. It will enter the great circuits of capital

where it will be used to make more money — perhaps by building golf courses, or expanding air travel, or going wherever the never-ending and cancerous pressure for growth leads.

In other words, Capitalism cannot be used to defeat itself, and if Capitalism is itself the cause of our most deadly problems, as Kovel demonstrates persuasively, then it will have to be replaced not reformed.

Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis
Democracy and Capitalism:
Property, Community, and the Contradictions of Modern Social Thought
Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis’ Democracy and Capitalism may be perhaps the most thorough analysis of the manner in which Capitalism opposes and even undermines Democracy, but it is a little dense for the non-academic reader. I will attempt to tease out the basic argument.

Bowles and Gintis conclude that “no capitalist society may be called democratic in the straightforward sense of securing personal liberty and rendering the exercise of power socially accountable.” A true commitment to Democracy, they argue, requires “establishing a democratic social order and eliminating the central institutions of the capitalist economy.”

The reason that Capitalism and Democracy are fatally opposed to each other is because Democracy entails the expansion of the rights of people, whereas Capitalism embodies the expansion of the rights of property, and these rights necessarily clash.

Liberal theory considered the state public, and the economy private. Therefore, the design of the liberal state balances obligations to respect both democratic rights and property rights. However, because the economy was considered a private sphere, corresponding democratic controls were not devised, and Capitalism was allowed free reign, instead of designing an economic democracy analogous to our political democracy.

Bowles and Gintis argue that this is a fundamental error in the design of our polity, because in fact economic decision-making has as much public impact as political decision-making, but Liberal theory cannot justify the lack of public input or democratic controls in the economy, given its justifications for both public input and democratic controls in the state.

Moreover, “Democracy [not only] promises the collective accountability of power,” but it also promises “the ability of people to effectively carry out their individual and common projects unencumbered by arbitrary restraint.” Capitalism, or, the failure to apply democratic principles to the economy, allows all kinds of domination to occur, including who gets privileged opportunities to win or lose within the economic sphere, as well as significant distortions of democracy in the political sphere. Or, as Bowles and Gintis put it,

“The rules of chess make it immaterial who plays with white and who with black; the rules of the game that make up society, however, generally confer systematic advantage on one group or another…The asymmetry of the games is the key to our understanding of domination.”

But despite their excellent analysis of the specific forms of domination that occur in an undemocratic economy, their final blow is aimed at the nature of the market itself, which Liberal theory mostly understands as a mechanism for the exchange of goods and services.

Bowles and Gintis point out, however, that “exchanges are far more than a simple transfer of ownership. They are complex social relationships”as illustrated by the kinds of exchanges that occur “between boss and worker, lender and borrower, or between buyers and sellers of different nations.” A market arena of self-interested and anonymous interaction might reduce not only the need for compassion, but also the sentiment itself. In this respect, the economy produces people as well as things, and the capitalist economy produces people that are not ideally equipped with the democratic sentiments and capacities.

In all these ways (and more, do read the book), Capitalism fatally undermines Democracy, including Democracy’s promise of the freedom to carry out our individual and common projects free from arbitrary restraint. To the extent that Democracy is just and good, Bowles and Gintis conclude, Capitalism is the opposite.

Michael Moore
Capitalism: A Love Story
The movie’s website claims that all his films revolve around just two questions: Who are we, and why do we behave the way that we do?

In film after film, Moore’s answer to the first question is that we are just normal people — friends, neighbors, people who work hard, people modestly trying to make their way in the world. When Moore looks at America, he does not see celebrities, politicians, or athletes — he just sees people. And each of his movies introduces us to a new cast and their stories.

As for the second question, why do we behave the way that we do, Moore never finds a satisfying answer. Why do we shut down local economies? In Roger and Me, he couldn’t get an answer. In Bowling for Columbine, he wondered why do we immerse ourselves in guns, violently endangering ourselves and our children — especially when other societies seem to successfully limit the prevalence of both guns and violence?

Fahrenheit 911 explored the corruption of our political system, and Sicko of our medical system. Both films concluded that we had submitted ourselves to regimes that made no sense, at least compared with the alternatives.

Finally, in Capitalism: A Love Story, Moore addressed Capitalism itself, revealing it as the moving force behind corruption of judges, foreclosures, heartless evictions, underpaid-and-overworked airline pilots, and massive, institutionalized theft. Juxtaposed against this, Moore shows that the basic principles of Capitalism are not consistent with moral and religious codes, and he presented the possibility of worker-owned enterprises as an alternative.

Essentially, Moore asked whether, given the extraordinary weight of evidence that Capitalism is harmful, and the apparent availability of alternatives, why we should tolerate it? In an interview with Naomi Klein, Moore elaborated his argument:

“Capitalism is the legalization [of] greed. Greed has been with human beings forever. We have a number of things in our species that you would call the dark side, and greed is one of them. If you don’t put certain structures in place or restrictions on those parts of our being that come from that dark place, then it gets out of control. Capitalism does the opposite of that. It not only doesn’t really put any structure or restriction on it. It encourages it, it rewards it.”

Summary

So from Albert’s standpoint, the fundamental principles of Capitalism systematically degrade the conditions of social interaction, thus dividing us from one another, impoverishing us, and eventually sacrificing our collective well-being for the benefit of the few.

For Kovel, Capitalism will inevitably consume all of nature and the ecosystems that we depend on to survive. Thus, if we were to exercise what Thomas Hobbes would have characterized as our right and our duty to survive, then destroying Capitalism before it destroys us is an imperative.

Bowles and Gintis find in Democracy and the self-actualization of people the ultimate objective of our creating a society together, and Capitalism is undermines this fundamental social obligation.

For Moore, Capitalism destroys that which we love, and is opposed to our most basic moral principles.

All conclude, explicitly, that Capitalism is harmful, destructive, unjustified, and must be replaced. Moore calls it “evil,” and the others are similarly unequivocal in their denunciation.

Objections

The objections I cited originally are not as well-developed as the critiques I then attempted to summarize. Indeed, Michael Moore mentioned in his interview that those taken aback by his conclusion frequently ask, “What’s wrong with making money? Why can’t I open a shoe store?”

This objection seems to capture well the common concern — If Capitalism is Evil, then how can we engage in economic activity? What is allowed instead? Is it okay to do honest work and be able to buy things I want in return?

These very practical questions do not express any kind of disagreement with the logic of the arguments I have summarized, nor any disagreement with the underlying premises of the argument. Compare these additional objections noted at the beginning:

“Capitalism may be bad, but the alternatives are worse,” and “Capitalism has some negative effects, but the overall benefits of capitalism would be positive if we only protected against its harsh aspects,” and “Replacing capitalism would eliminate freedoms, so we might not be better off, and we could be much worse off.”

The focus is consistently on whether better alternatives exist, and do those alternatives have unknown risks, and what is the likelihood that we could successfully transition?

These are fair questions to which we must now turn. We are lucky to have a rich literature exploring the possibilities, and enough clarity that we could begin to chart our course should we summon the courage to change. These will be the subjects of future essays.

Conclusion

Let us close this topic then, with a clear commitment not to reforming Capitalism or rationalizing Capitalism, or making Capitalism better or kinder, but instead to replacing it, and eliminating it, because the facts and the logic, and the weight of the argument demonstrate, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Capitalism is Evil.