http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/9139-capitalism-is-taboo-in-america
Capitalism Is Taboo in America
Tuesday, 15 May 2012 10:45
By David Barsamian and Richard D Wolff, City Lights Publishers | Book Excerpt
For the last half-century, capitalism has been a taboo subject in the
United States. Among politicians, journalists, and academics—and in
public conversation generally—the word has been avoided or else
exclusively praised in over-the-top prose. Professional economists
have used words like "perfect competition" and "optimal allocation of
resources" and "efficiency" to teach their students and assure one
another how absolutely wonderful capitalism was for everyone.
Politicians repeated, robot-style, that the "U.S. is the greatest
country in the world" and that "capitalism is the greatest economic
system in the world." Those few who have dared to raise questions or
criticisms about capitalism have been either ignored or told to go
live in North Korea, China or Cuba as if that were the only
alternative to pro-capitalism cheerleading.
Americans have criticized and debated their educational, medical,
welfare, transportation, mass media, political, and many other
institutions and systems. They have questioned and at least partly
transformed such traditional institutions as racism, sexism, the
heterosexual family and the state. They have even sometimes challenged
this or that aspect of the economy such as prices, Federal Reserve
actions, and so on, but almost never the particular economic system.
Questioning and criticizing capitalism have been taboo, treated by
federal authorities, immigration officials, police and most of the
public alike as akin to treason. Fear-driven silence has substituted
for the necessary, healthy criticism without which all institutions,
systems, and traditions harden into dogmas, deteriorate into social
rigidities, or worse. Protected from criticism and debate, capitalism
in the United States could and has indulged all its darker impulses
and tendencies. No public exposure, criticism and movement for change
could arise or stand in its way as the system and its effects became
ever more unequal, unjust, inefficient and oppressive. Long before the
Occupy movement arose to reveal and oppose what U.S. capitalism had
become, that capitalism had divided the 1 percent from the 99 percent.
The importance of the Occupy movement was and is positioning its
challenge to capitalism front and center among its concerns and
passions. No oppositional mass movement of the last fifty years—one
drawing broadly inclusive participation—has been similarly daring in
going beyond single-issue focus to make economic injustice for the 99
percent and the ruling economic system central, defining issues.
Despite the power of pro-capitalism ideology, Occupy has been able to
contest it in amazingly profound ways in an amazingly short time and
for an amazing number of Americans.
Of course Occupy is a first step. Nothing of comparably broad scope
and with such transformative social objectives has ever moved forward
in a straight line. It's rather two steps forward, one step backward.
However a major barrier has been broken, a major line crossed, and a
new stage of U.S. politics has begun. The issue of our economic system
and whether it is adequate to our needs as a people has now been
returned to the center of national discussion, criticism, and debate.
The political, mass media, and academic establishments react
predictably. They can not acknowledge the historic significance of
what Occupy says and does; that would require admitting the need to
debate precisely those issues they had effectively banned from
acceptable public discourse. So the politicians repress. New York's
Mayor Bloomberg claimed that he forcibly removed Occupy from Zuccotti
Park for reasons of cleanliness. Bloomberg, it should be remembered,
has presided for many years over one of the filthiest subway systems
in the industrial world, one of the dirtiest public garbage systems,
and a snow removal system that inspires only our leading comics. The
mass media did their usual bit: ignoring Occupy as long as possible,
massively misreporting when Occupy was hot news, largely cheering or
glossing the removal of Occupy encampments, and then resuming the
basic practice of ignoring the ongoing developments of Occupy and
related events and activities.
The academic economics profession ought to have been most intimately
involved in analyzing and debating a broken capitalist system whose
deep crisis had confounded all its confident expectations. It has done
nothing of the sort. Instead it proceeds as if—and indeed mostly still
insists that nothing has happened to disturb its fifty-year
celebration of capitalism's efficiency and growth. A few professors of
economics (e.g., Paul Krugman) and business (e.g., Nouriel Roubini)
have commented on the absurdity of that insistence. But most of them
could get no further than to recycle Keynes' 1930s critiques of a
depressed capitalism and his recommendations for deficit spending and
monetary stimuli by the government. And, of course, the few right-wing
economists who have taken the crisis seriously, utilized it to push
yet again for less government economic intervention as the panacea.
Questioning the system and debating basic system change has
remained—for government, mainstream media and most
professors—something beyond the pale. They see no need to end their
50-year repression or marginalization of such questions and debates.
For them, the basic organizations of production and distribution of
commodities, like the property and power structures that sustain them,
do not deserve criticism. Yet the pressure and mass constituency for a
real challenge to that repression had been building across the crisis
and emerged with public power in the Occupy movement in late 2011.
The interviews gathered in this book further contest that repression
and further develop that challenge. As a broad array of questions are
raised and discussed, one theme becomes ever clearer. The failure of
government regulation, the growing inequalities of income and wealth,
the roll-back on New Deal reforms, the parallel impositions of mass
austerity programs by European and U.S. governments: these and many
more aspects of the crisis that hit in 2007 are shown to result from
how the capitalist system works and not only from this or that
particular historical event or economic actor.
Across the pages that follow, what emerges is the central importance
of how capitalism very particularly organizes production: masses of
working people generate corporate profits that others take and use.
Tiny boards of directors, selected by and responsible to tiny groups
of major shareholders, gather and control corporate profits, thereby
shaping and dominating society. That tiny minority (boards and major
shareholders) of those associated with and dependent upon corporations
make all the basic decisions—how, what, and where to produce and what
to do with the profits. The vast majority of workers within and
residents surrounding those capitalist corporations must live with the
results of corporate decisions. Yet they are systematically excluded
from participating in making those decisions. Nothing more glaringly
contradicts democracy than how capitalism organizes the corporate
enterprises where working people produce the goods and services
without which modern life for everyone would be impossible.
On the one hand, criticism and debate around the adequacy of
capitalism in relation to real alternatives have been repressed in the
United States and beyond. On the other hand, the evidence this book
considers shows that we need that criticism and debate now more than
ever. The interviews therefore do not shy away from posing the logical
and reasonable questions flowing from the topics covered: Does
capitalism serve the interests of most people? Can we do better than
capitalism?
Nor do the interviews hesitate to suggest some logical answers to
questions such as: It is possible to democratize the economy? And is
it possible to advance society beyond capitalism?
Key steps in building a social movement in that direction are the
psychological as well as ideological breakthroughs to activism being
achieved by the Occupy movement. A next step entails working through
the ideas, concepts, principles, and values needed to empower,
mobilize, grow, and unify the emerging activist generation. This book
seeks to contribute to that next step.
© Copyright 2012 by Richard Wolff © Copyright 2012 by David Barsamian
All Rights Reserved
City Lights Publishers - Open Media Series
ISBN 978-0-87286-567-9