Here we go again -- "Capitalism": another one of those many, many words with multiple definitions, resulting in arguments by people using the word in different ways.
capitalism, entry in The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition.An economic system in which the means of production and distribution are privately or corporately owned and development is proportionate to the accumulation and reinvestment of profits gained in a free market.
The term "capitalism" is commonly used to mean:- "Free trade", "free exchange", "free market", "laissez-faire"
- Production characterized by the investment and concentration of capital, resulting in increasing plutocracy, and (frequently) in practice, reduction in human rights and democracy for non-plutocrats (aka "ordinary people" or "everybody else").
"... the term "capitalism" means more than just a body of social practices easily applied across geographical and historical distances, it is also a "way of thinking," and as a way of thinking does not necessarily apply to earlier European origins of capitalism or to capitalism as practiced in other cultures.Links are mine -- ed.
The earliest forms of capitalism -- which we call "mercantilism" -- originate in Rome, the Middle East, and the early Middle Ages. Mercantilism might be roughly defined as the distribution of goods in order to realize a profit. Goods are bought at one site for a certain price and moved to another site and sold at a higher price."
"Capitalism is the social system which now exists in all countries of the world. Under this system, the means for producing and distributing goods (the land, factories, technology, transport system etc) are owned by a small minority of people. We refer to this group of people as the capitalist class. The majority of people must sell their ability to work in return for a wage or salary (who we refer to as the working class.)
The working class are paid to produce goods and services which are then sold for a profit. The profit is gained by the capitalist class because they can make more money selling what we have produced than we cost to buy on the labour market. In this sense, the working class are exploited by the capitalist class. The capitalists live off the profits they obtain from exploiting the working class whilst reinvesting some of their profits for the further accumulation of wealth.
This is what we mean when we say there are two classes in society. It is a claim based upon simple facts about the society we live in today. This class division is the essential feature of capitalism. It may be popular to talk (usually vaguely) about various other 'classes' existing such as the 'middle class', but it is the two classes defined here that are the key to understanding capitalism. ...
In capitalism, the motive for producing goods and services is to sell them for a profit, not to satisfy people's needs. ...
As you will see, we hold that it is the class division and profit motive of capitalism that is at the root of most of the world's problems today, from starvation to war, to alienation and crime. Every aspect of our lives is subordinated to the worst excesses of the drive to make profit. In capitalist society, our real needs will only ever come a poor second to the requirements of profit. (This I think rather overstates the case. I think that "selfishness" is more the cause, and that focussing on te "profit" aspect of this muddles understanding.) ...
... it is possible to have capitalism without a free market. The systems that existed in the U.S.S.R and exist in China and Cuba demonstrate this. These class-divided societies are widely called 'socialist'. A cursory glance at what in fact existed there reveals that these countries were simply 'state capitalist'."
" 'The global capitalist system… is coming apart at the seams'. So declared capitalist and arch-speculator George Soros before a US congressional enquiry on 19 September 1998. He has since expanded on this in a book entitled The Crisis of Global Capitalism. What has he in mind?
By "global capitalist system" Soros doesn't mean what we would understand by the term, i.e. capitalism as a world-wide system of production for profit, but the more restricted sense of present world financial arrangements which allow the more or less free movement of capital throughout the world: ...
... Soros is no free marketeer. In fact part of his book is a devastating attack on those he calls the "market fundamentalists", the followers of Von Mises, Von Hayek and others, who advocate that market forces be given complete free rein (cf / Neoliberalism / ) and who came into intellectual prominence in the time of Reagan and Thatcher.
Soros levels two charges at them. First, that they think that markets have an in-built tendency towards creating a stable situation through supply and demand being in balance, while this is not the case. Second, that they preach that the market is the best way to regulate all human activities. ...
Throughout the 19th century British governments pursued a policy of laissez-faire yet slumps still occurred on a regular basis. ...
Soros sees himself as continuing the political philosophy of Karl Popper (who) argued against the idea of trying to establish a "perfect" society, in favour of accepting an "open" society -- one subject to permanent improvement by piecemeal social engineering, by which he understood capitalism with a political structure involving elected institutions, the rule of law and pluralism, i.e. more or less what the West has had for years.
For Popper the main enemies of his "open society" were the totalitarian ideologies of fascism and "Marxism" (which, for him, was not just Marx's own views but those mixed up with Lenin's and Stalin's).
Soros adds a third which he says has come into prominence since the collapse of "communism": uncontrolled capitalism. Hence the subtitle of his book "Open Society Endangered", though he had already expressed this view in a famous article "The Capitalist Threat" that first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in February 1997 and which was widely reproduced. ...
Soros sees the danger coming from the penetration of market values into all aspects of life, leading to social disintegration. 'Monetary values', he writes, 'have usurped the role of intrinsic values and markets have come to dominate areas of society where they do not properly belong' (p. 206). He is in fact quite forceful in his criticism of this aspect of global capitalism: ...
Soros's mistake is to think that you can have capitalism and somehow keep its money-commodity relations ("commodification": everything tends to become something which is bought and sold -- let's look for example at water, spirituality, and books) from spreading everywhere. The history of capitalism is the history of the continuous spread of such transactional relationships-i.e., the market -- into more and more fields of human activity. It is a process that cannot be stopped within capitalism, as growing marketisation is just as much a feature of capitalism as capital accumulation; indeed the two go together.
Soros, however, is a supporter of capitalism: "
"The “Protestant ethos” of hard work and deferred gratification has been replaced by an infantilist ethos of easy credit and impulsive consumption that puts democracy and the market system at risk.Links are mine -- ed.
Capitalism’s core virtue is that it marries altruism and self-interest. In producing goods and services that answer real consumer needs, it secures a profit for producers. Doing good for others turns out to entail doing well for yourself.
Capitalism’s success, however, has meant that core wants in the developed world are now mostly met and that too many goods are chasing too few needs. Yet capitalism requires us to “need” all that it produces in order to survive. So it busies itself manufacturing needs for the wealthy while ignoring the wants of the truly needy. Global inequality means that while the wealthy have too few needs, the needy have too little wealth.
Capitalism is stymied, courting long-term disaster. We still work hard, but only so that we can pay and play. In order to turn reluctant consumers with few unsatisfied core needs into permanent shoppers, producers must dumb down consumers, shape their wants, take over their life worlds, encourage impulse buying, cultivate shopoholism and invent new needs. ...
Consumerism needs this infantilist ethos because it favors laxity and leisure over discipline and denial, values childish impetuosity and juvenile narcissism over adult order and enlightened self-interest, and prefers consumption-directed play to spontaneous recreation. The ethos feeds a private-market logic (I don't know what this means. Seems to mean ïndividualistic" or "atomized" worldview) and combats the public logic fashioned by democracy. ...
Compare a traditional town square with a modern suburban mall. In the square, you’ll likely find a school, town hall, library, general store, park, movie house, church, art gallery and homes -- a true neighborhood exhibiting our human diversity as beings who do more than simply consume. But our new town malls are all shopping, all the time.
When we see politics permeate every sector of life, we call it totalitarianism. When religion rules all, we call it theocracy. But when commerce dominates everything, we call it liberty. (We??) Can we redirect capitalism to its proper end: the satisfaction of real human needs? Well, why not? ...
To serve such needs, however, capitalism must once again learn to defer profits and empower the needy as customers. With microcredit, villagers can construct hand pumps and water filters from the clay under their feet. Pharmaceutical companies ought to be thinking about how to sell inexpensive retrovirals to Africans with HIV instead of pushing Botox to the “forever young” customers they are trying to manufacture here. And parents can refuse to relinquish their gatekeeping roles and let marketers know they won’t allow their kids to be targeted anymore.
To do this, we will require the assistance of democratic institutions and an adult ethos. Public citizens must be restored to their proper place as masters of their private choices. (Citizens must restore themselves to their position as masters of their private choices. Nobody is currently forcing people to buy unhealthy fast food, dumb clothes, or idiotic music -- they're just too lazy, hedonistic, and ignorant to do otherwise. There also do need to be more Green choices readily available and reasonably priced.)
To sustain itself, capitalism once again will have to respond to real needs instead of trying to fabricate synthetic ones -- or risk consuming itself."
"Our critical human needs are not being met by our capitalist economy that is now pervasive throughout the planet. We humans do not have adequate medical care. A very large percentage of us humans cannot get enough food at a price we can afford, so that millions are dying and millions of others are malnourished. We are spending billions on foreign wars, while billions of people are hungry. It seems obvious that so long as our economic engine is fueled by greed for short term profit, and that the profiteers from this economic engine control our government, we shall never deal with Global Warming or planetary ecological damage. We face the three coinciding crises: Peak Oil, Fragile Economy, and Global Warming. We still have much freedom, but our effective democratic voting power is thwarted. What has gone wrong?Links and emphasis are mine - ed.
The basic question of political economy has always been: How shall we human beings organize our productive and creative abilities so as to work together to meet our needs?
We seek, insofar as is possible, to meet the reasonable needs of all humans. No person should have more than he needs when others are needy. We seek caring, sharing and cooperation. We seek a sustainable civilized free existence for all humans on this planet. Only this sort of a Political Economy will be sustainable, consistent with our values, and consistent with the wisest values of our spiritual traditions. We are radical in the first dictionary definition of that term: “one who seeks roots or root causes.” ...
The National Government is now a critical component of capitalism and to an ever increasing degree, capitalism and capitalists control the government. Capitalism and the government are “one.” We now have corporate state capitalism. ...
Capitalism as it existed in the days of Adam Smith no longer exists in the Twenty First Century. Capitalism has mutated so as to cause the merger of corporate power with state power so that we now have corporate state capitalism whose powers are exercised solely to benefit of the global elite at the expense and starvation of the rest of us. ...
Both capitalism and a government of, by, and for the people no longer exist. We now have corporate state capitalism with its military, intelligence agencies, and media, all controlled by the elite.
There are now three economies in the US each dominated and controlled by the elite:- The economy of the very rich, for the support of which the Elite uses their control of media, academia, government, Federal Reserve Bank, and our taxes.We have lost our ballot box control of the government. We have no means to control the ecological destruction of capitalism. Al Gore may be living in a fool’s paradise in his efforts to control Global Warming unless he deals with the dynamics of capitalism. We have no direct means of curbing, controlling or regulating corporate state capitalism. We can no longer study “economics” as a subject distinct from “political science” if we are to have any hope of enlightenment.
- The Stock Markets that we should think of as simply a gambling casino, with hidden government financial support and manipulation to aid the rich in the fleecing of little stock holders. (Do you know of the “Plunge Protection Team,” who controls it, whose money it uses, and under what circumstances? None of us do and we invest in the stock market at our peril.)
- The Real economy (sic; I think that I'd be happier with a different term for this myself) where the rest of us live in immense insecurity, with many unmet needs and we struggle to survive.
Because we do not have a visible dictator, because we still have substantial freedom to speak, write, communicate, and organize, and because the forms of ballot box democracy still remain in place (although not the substance), it is not yet accurate to call our global corporate state “fascism,” such as existed in Italy under Benito Mussolini. (See a page on this site on / "Fascism Lite" /) ...
It is now probable that the ruling elite with its vast economic, military, media, and governmental powers, can avoid another Great Depression for them. There may be another great depression for the rest of us, although the mainstream elite media, using falsified statistics, may never acknowledge or publicize that fact. Runaway inflation where our wage dollars buy less and less would itself be a Great Depression for us. If a Great Depression really threatens the elite, it is probable that the elite would turn to a popular general like General Petraeus as military dictator and impose martial law. (I think that this process is more likely to occur [actually, of course, "continue"] over a period of years rather than months, barring some apparent emergency.) The elite would engage our “support” of this dictator by “false flag” operations, and by a media PR campaign, manipulating our own fear, and playing on our national honor, nationalism, consumerism, racism, religious differences, patriotism, “evil enemies at home and abroad,” and “the dogs of war.” In this, the elite will be successful unless we learn to be intellectually and emotionally immune to these false manipulations."