[Published in the Morning Call, November 5, 2018: https://www.mcall.com/opinion/national/mc-opi-democratic-socialism-capitalism-20181105-story.html ]
My former Lehigh University
colleague, Anthony Patrick O’Brien, recently traced the evolution of the
iPhone back to Adam Smith and the origins of capitalism in The
Morning Call. There’s some truth in that.
However, along the way, his argument
reinforced two oft-repeated ideological myths that have long crippled the
American polity’s ability to deal with the profound problems we face.
In O’Brien’s account, the Industrial
Revolution in England produced “economic growth capable of improving the life
of the average person … . Capitalism had arrived!”
Yet what improved the lives of average
people? According to this free-market mythology, rising productivity meant that
“for the first time in human history, the average family was well clothed, well
fed, and well housed.” In other words, left to its own devices, the market
takes care of average people.
The reality is radically different.
Anyone who has read Smith knows he made no such claim, but instead maintained
that state intervention was necessary to level the playing field for a market
system to work. Left to its own devices, industrial capitalism produced — and
continues to produce — massive inequality and the horrific exploitation of
working people, all reinforced by violent repression by the state and private
goons. The unfettered market also produces a tendency toward giant monopolies.
So, what did improve the lives of
average people?
Against the resistance of
capitalists, laborers organized and became a political force via their ability
to strike and demand concessions. In part, worried about the danger of mass
uprising, the state intervened in the economy and produced a wide range of
social reforms — minimum wage and overtime protection, collective bargaining
guarantees, a graduated income tax, efforts to equalize educational
opportunity, and a public safety net for the elderly.
Later interventions began to
safeguard us all from the ravages of industrial capitalism, protecting both our
rights as consumers and the environment we all share.
Of course, the state has also
consistently intervened to protect capitalism from its own built-in
destructiveness — through anti-trust laws, subsidies, insurance against bank
failures, and bailouts, among many other actions. Government in the modern
state is inextricably involved in the market economy, one reason the free
market is itself a mythical concept.
The idea of government being used to
help the average person be “well clothed, well fed, and well housed” (and well
educated) is precisely what has been under attack for decades, going back to
the rise of neoliberalism under Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and we
have been paying a deep price for that attack for a long time.
Along with deregulation,
privatization, a campaign to destroy organized labor, and attacks on public
education and social welfare policies, tax “reforms” have produced obscene
wealth in the hands of relatively few.
Because of the significance of money
in politics, neoliberalism means that the average person is increasingly at
risk while the state is dominated by the interests of capital.
How can this be sustained where
there is supposed to be one person, one vote (although that, too, is under
attack)? One thread running through our entire history has been the use of race
to create a threatening “other” that allegedly endangers our well-being. Not
surprisingly, the Trump administration has hyped up the alleged threat to our
way of life of Muslim and brown-skinned immigrants. Divide and rule goes back a
long way.
But the other ideological device
echoed in O’Brien’s piece, to say nothing of the leaders of both political
parties, is the alleged threat to our freedom of something called socialism. In
conventional usage, socialism now means any effort to use government to address
the needs of average people or to protect our commons.
Yet lurking in that distortion is
the implied connection with the long-discredited state socialist model we used
to call communism. As O’Brien puts it, socialism would bring a “stagnation in
living standards and the loss of freedom.” Sounds like the old USSR, doesn’t
it?
It’s certainly radically different
from the poorly understood idea of democratic socialism — a democratic ideal,
really, in which we, an aware, civically educated and engaged people, work
together to figure out the constraints that need to be put on how markets
operate so as to ensure the well-being of all, including future generations.
In other words, markets subservient
to democratically generated aims of the people, not the aims of
the people
subservient to imperatives of capitalism.
Average people have endured a
stagnation in living standards for some time now; democratic socialism would
obviously begin to redress that. If there is to be some loss of freedom, it is
most likely to revolve around the ability of the very wealthy to expropriate
and horde wealth and the ability of private enterprise to endanger the
prospects for human survival.
