By Michael Faulkner - January 29, 2012
Something rather curious has been happening recently.
Leading politicians, Tory, Lib Dem and Labour, have started talking about
capitalism. It has happened
before, but not for some time and then, referring to some particularly
egregious example of corporate malfeasance, terms such as the “unacceptable
face of capitalism” were used. Tory prime minister Edward Heath coined the
phrase in 1973 to describe the activities of Lonrho chief executive Tiny
Rowlands who had broken sanctions against the white racist Smith government of
Rhodesia. Later, in 2004, Jim O’Donnell, managing director of BMW applied it to
five directors of Phoenix Venture Holdings, the parent company of GM Rover, who
had pocketed more than £16 million, even though the company had lost £89
million. The chairman and vice chairman were accused by Martin O’Neill,
chairman of the Commons Trade and Industry Select Committee, of using
“financial sleight of hand” to line their own pockets and of failing to
exercise good corporate governance.
Such cases, when they occurred, were regarded as aberrant,
involving corrupt or avaricious individuals. They were the occasional rotten
apples in a barrel that was generally good and healthy. For the most part
mainstream politicians, like the mainstream media, have hardly mentioned
capitalism by name. Their preferred terminology has tended to refer to the
“free market”. It is worth noting that terms such as “free market” and “free
world” carry a heavy ideological baggage and emotive power. Since 1945 the
implication in the use of these terms is that the “western world” is free and
that the freedom we enjoy is inextricable from the “free market”. Until the
collapse of the communist-ruled states in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe,
the alternative to the “free world/market” was said to be loss of freedom and
totalitarian tyranny. This was the constant theme of the mainstream media. It
was also the theme of authoritative philosophers and economists such as Isaiah
Berlin (“Four Essays on Liberty”) and Milton Friedman (Capitalism and Freedom).
So powerful was this ideological contention that its influence is still
pervasive today. But things could be changing.
The current talk about capitalism is different. Now the
capitalist system in Europe (including Britain) and throughout much of the
western world is in the most acute crisis since the 1930s. It is no longer
possible for the ruling classes of the countries most severely affected to deny
its severity. When the first phase of the present crisis broke in 2007/8, some
of the more perceptive Keynesians, such as Will Hutton in Britain, realized
that this time it was not just another “manageable” recession like those of the
early 80s and 90s, but a crisis of global proportions and potentially
catastrophic dimensions which could lead to a systemic crash. Hutton is fully
aware of the social implications of the crisis, as is clear from his column in
the Observer on December 4. 2011: “Be sure that British civil society will not
accept its grim fate as if nothing is happening. There will be organized and
angry responses – and rightly. We are about to experience economic, social and political tectonic
plates on the move.” It is worth quoting a little more from this article as in
it he expresses a view which has recurred frequently in what he has written
since 2008. “This”, he says, “is a crisis of bad capitalism….The only way
forward is a good capitalism.” He
concludes that “socialism, certainly as conceived and practiced over the past
100 years, is no plausible answer.” Note the qualification, which is
significant -“as conceived and practiced over the past 100 years.” We will
return to that later.
What has occasioned this latest discourse about capitalism?
Some, like Hutton, Krugman and Stieglitz have offered serious observations
about the nature and causes of the crisis and have, since its onset in 2008,
argued that there would be no way out of it through imposing severe austerity
measures. But others such as prime minister Cameron are simply responding to
the growing public anger about the multi-millions in pay and bonuses that the
bosses of an already bloated financial sector continue to award themselves as
the rest of society is obliged to pay for their profligacy.
Cameron is also discomfited by Ed Miliband’s claim to the
high ground in opposing “predatory” and “irresponsible” capitalism. Actually,
both Cameron’s and Miliband’s rhetoric is reactive. It is the global financial
crisis, the crisis in the Eurozone, the Occupation movement worldwide and not
least the extraordinary upsurge of revolutionary fervour throughout the Arab
world that have thrust questions about the nature of capitalism to the
forefront of public concern. In particular attention has become focused on the
role of finance capitalism. But the growing ranks of its critics who are trying
to understand what caused the crisis and searching for ways of overcoming the
social depredations following in its wake, will find little to enlighten or
reassure them in anything that Miliband and Cameron have to say.
In talking about predatory and irresponsible capitalism,
Miliband challenges Cameron to do something about exorbitant rail fares and
bank charges; to end the “surcharge culture” and the “rigged energy market.”
These are all matters of acute public concern and it is essential to confront
and face down the banks, the railway companies and the energy suppliers. But
they go nowhere near getting to grips with what even its staunchest defenders
are forced to admit is a crisis of capitalism.
Cameron, like Miliband, says he wants a “responsible
capitalism”. He talks of a “moral capitalism”, claiming that open markets and
free enterprise are “the best imaginable force for improving human wealth and
happiness”….”They are an engine for progress, generating enterprise and
innovation that lifts people out of poverty and gives people opportunity.” “I
would go further”, he says, “Where they work properly, open markets and free
enterprise can actually promote morality.”
The point of all the rhetoric about the need for
“responsible capitalism” is to counter the growing sense amongst those involved
in protests and occupations across Europe, the USA and elsewhere, that (in the
words of the banner raised over the London occupation at St. Paul’s),
“Capitalism IS Crisis.” The ongoing and deepening sovereign debt crisis in the
Eurozone is as far as ever from resolution. As the UK falls into the double dip
recession we were confidently assured by the government would not happen, the
flimsy veil of credibility covering the “necessary” deep cuts of the austerity
measures, is in shreds. A minority – but a growing minority – is
beginning to question the nature of a system that is so obviously dysfunctional. On the same day (January
19.) that the City of London Corporation was given the legal right to evict the
Occupy London protesters from St. Paul’s churchyard, Goldman Sachs announced
that they had set aside £8bn to pay its staff an average of £238,000 each. Of
course, such grotesquerie causes some embarrassment, even among the
millionaires of Cameron’s cabinet. This is not, they tell us, the way
capitalism should be working. We are left to infer that the ever-expanding gulf
between rich and poor – a gulf that is growing greater by the month as
the government’s cuts drive thousands more into hopeless poverty – is
either not really happening or is something that should not trouble us. When
working properly, Cameron assures us, the “free market” will lift people out of
poverty. When might that be? How
long should the one million unemployed young people in Britain be prepared to
wait?
The protesters of the Occupy movement have got it right. In
effect, they – and increasingly the re-energized trade union movement and
the plethora of new activists – are saying that they have had enough.
They have had enough of waiting for a lugubrious bunch of professional
politicians to act on their behalf. The new activism must, and likely will be
informed by a far greater awareness of the true nature of capitalism. They will
be aware that it is not just a matter of excesses and the behaviour of
“irresponsible” capitalists and greedy bankers. There is a growing
understanding that the problem with capitalism is systemic. The system as a
global socio-economic formation is in crisis. Boom and bust are in the nature
of capitalism; they always have been and always will be. In its latest stage
– finance monopoly capitalism – the cycles of boom and bust have
become ever more frequent and ever more severe. The rise to dominance of
finance capital in the western world since the 1970s has been in inverse
proportion to the decline of the so-called “real economy”. As the economies
based on manufacturing have stagnated, the real incomes of the working
populations have declined. The illusion of continued prosperity in countries
like Britain and the USA has been sustained by accumulated debt fuelled by
unsustainable property bubbles. Now the bubbles are bursting with greater
frequency and the European countries that were most heavily dependent on
banking and the construction industry, such as Ireland, are hardest hit.
In conclusion it is worth returning to Will Hutton’s claim
that the crisis is with “bad capitalism” and that the only way forward is to
exchange it for “good capitalism.” He argued that socialism offeres no
plausible alternative but added the qualification “certainly as conceived and
practiced over the past 100 years.” It is not clear if Hutton intended this to
be understood as a rejection of any imaginable form of socialism as an
alternative to “bad capitalism”, but it is worth taking up this argument.
It needs to be said unequivocally that Hutton is right when
he says that what has been practiced as socialism over the past 100 years does
not deserve the name. (There are one or two possible exceptions that space
prevents us from dealing with here). The countries of “actually existing
socialism” in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were, despite state control
of their economies, for the most part bureaucratic dictatorships in which the
working class and peasantry held no actual power and in which, for the most
part, the people were denied the elementary rights of freedom of speech and
assembly. However one characterizes such societies, they were not socialist in
anything but name.
Britain under the Labour government 0f 1945 -1951 is often
described as socialist. It wasn’t. The nationalization of the “commanding
heights” of the economy and the establishment of a “mixed economy” was a social
democratic experiment which, in the harsh economic circumstances of the time,
made considerable concession to a working population determined to redress the
gross inequalities of the pre-war depression years. But it didn’t radically
change the power structure. It was an example of social-democratic management
of a capitalist economy. It wasn’t socialism.
If it is assumed that capitalism is incapable of resolving
the contradictions with which it is so obviously riddled, the question of what
is to replace it cannot be avoided. Will Hutton is right to reject what has
passed for socialism over the past century. But, whatever we call it, there has
to be an alternative to the present system. It is no exaggeration to say that
the future of human society and the natural environment depends upon it.
Consideration of what such a society might look like must be deferred to the
next Letter from the UK.