The Red Next Door
26th September 2010, 20:36
There Are No Just Alternatives to Capitalism
Social Justice, 2005
There Are No Just Alternatives to Capitalism
John Isbister, Capitalism and Justice: Envisioning Social and Economic Fairness. Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press, 2001. Copyright © 2001 by Kumarian Press, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.
John Isbister is a professor of economics at the University of California at Santa Cruz and the author of several books, including Capitalism and Justice, from which the following viewpoint is excerpted. Isbister begins by conceding that capitalism lacks many attributes of social justice, including equal treatment and freedom. However, Isbister goes on to argue that alternatives to capitalism, such as socialism and communism, have been tried and have been found even more wanting in social justice than capitalism. There is no choice but to work within the capitalist system to achieve social justice, Isbister concludes.
As you read, consider the following questions:
How does Isbister describe the world before the advent of capitalism in the sixteenth century?
Why does the author characterize communism as a "dream"?
In what ways have Communist societies failed, according to Isbister?
Capitalism left to its own devices fails to produce social justice. It does not give us equality, freedom, or efficiency. It produces inequalities of both opportunities and outcomes. It expands the freedom of some people at the expense of others. It produces economic growth, but erratically....
Many who have arrived at roughly this position have concluded, reasonably enough, that if capitalism can guarantee neither freedom nor equal treatment, it should be replaced. This is no longer a viable position, however. There is no point seeking alternatives to capitalism, for two separate reasons.
The first reason is that noncapitalist systems have been tried and for the most part have been found to be even less just than capitalism. In view of the bloody and tumultuous history of the twentieth century, we have no excuse for thinking that the world could be made more just by abandoning capitalism.
The second reason is that capitalism is all we have. Precapitalist social formations—tribes, isolated villages, feudal arrangements, and the rest—are almost gone, destroyed by capitalist imperialism, trade, investment, and technology. Socialism and communism were once thought to be the natural successors of capitalism, but as forms of social and economic organization they too have almost disappeared. Capitalist relationships characterize most local communities, almost all states, and certainly the international relationships between states. The next two sections advance this argument in more detail.
Precapitalism: The Organic Community
Capitalism arose in Europe in the sixteenth century and spread by means of commerce and imperialism (often the two were indistinguishable) to the rest of the world. Everywhere it expanded it destroyed what had come before: manorial, feudal systems of different sorts in Europe and a variety of tribal, communal, and imperial systems in the rest of the world. The old systems did not disappear easily; their going was attended by conflict and bloodshed....
In most parts of the precapitalist world, at most times, people were members of an integrated, organic community in which they had both rights and responsibilities, guaranteed by the fact of being born. These were typically spiritual as well as secular communities, in which the gods were thought to be present and active in all aspects of life. In many precapitalist communities, people's principal tasks were to emulate their ancestors and to please the spirits.
Was it a just world, just in a sense that might have meaning for us today? Can we turn to the precapitalist world to give us a vision of how to live our lives? For the most part, no. Few precapitalist societies had ideas of justice that are congenial to us today. The caste or class system was generally rigid; one's fate in life was largely determined by the accident of birth. People enjoyed virtually none of the freedoms associated with, say, the Bill of Rights. Rulers ruled and subjects obeyed. Wars were endemic and punishments often cruel. The European feudal world was an organic community in which people belonged and were not abandoned, but it was a world of exploitation and harshness for most of its members. Few of us would want to live in the Aztec culture, to take another example, or in most of the precapitalist societies of which we have some knowledge....
Some in the capitalist world try to retain or re-create the best parts of precapitalism. Some Amish and Mennonite communities are based on precapitalist values, as are some other faith-based groups. The 1960s and 1970s saw the creation of secular alternative rural communes, communities whose members tried to eliminate all marks of distinction between them, to be self-sufficient, and to live simply. The communes had some successes, but most eventually collapsed. Communities such as these have attempted to embody precapitalist values, but none has succeeded in cutting itself off from capitalist influences: from the market, from the media, from the legal system, and from other influences of the modern world. While we can learn from our antecedent societies, we cannot return to them. That door has been closed.
Postcapitalism: The Transcendent Dream
The most serious challenges to capitalism have come not from those who wanted to return to a simpler world but from people with an alternate—socialist or communist—vision of an economically advanced society. [Karl] Marx and the early socialist thinkers accepted what they understood as the virtue of capitalism—that it had produced unprecedented economic growth and thereby had created the potential for a high standard of living for everyone. Capitalism had, however, brought with it exploitation, alienation, and injustice, all of which they believed could be overcome in the new socialist world that would replace capitalism. For a later generation, communism was not the successor to capitalism but its substitute, a more humane and efficient system for transforming nonindustrial societies like Russia and China.
As [Harvard historian] Michael Ignatieff argues, many communists understood their movement as embodying the science of history, but communism was really the opposite; it was a dream. It was a dream held by nineteenth- and twentieth-century people who were intensely aware of the injustices of the capitalist system in which they lived. They were revolted by the crassness of capitalism, by the huge gap between the rich and the poor, by the way in which the system used up and discarded millions of people, by the replacement of human values with the values of money and accumulation, and by the warfare that they understood as a direct consequence of capitalist competition. Against the inhuman face of capitalism, they posited the image of "the new man," the socialist man (not until its later years was socialism at all infused with feminism), the man whose values were focused on a concern for his community and for his fellows, not distorted and narrowed by competition and accumulation. In the socialist dream, the community's resources and assets were to be owned collectively by the people and used to fulfill the people's real needs. The new economic principle was to be, in the words of Marx and [Friedrich] Engels, "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." The state was a pure democracy, or in some versions there was no state at all. With the end of capitalism would come the end of nationalism, and with the end of nationalism the end of war.
It was an extraordinary dream, a dream so powerful that for many people it persisted long after the evidence showed that it was failing. In the middle years of the twentieth century, some communists abandoned the dream as the government of the Soviet Union committed one atrocity after another—but others stayed faithful, presumably because the dream had such meaning for them and also because the alternative, the continuation of the advanced capitalist system, seemed so ghastly.
Nevertheless, the dream failed. In many ways, the communist regimes of the twentieth century brought the opposite of justice. [Vladimir] Lenin and [Joseph] Stalin in the Soviet Union, Mao Zedong in China, Kim Il Sung in North Korea, Pol Pot in Cambodia, and many of their subordinates and imitators were responsible for far more deaths among their innocent countrymen than even [Adolf] Hitler. While the Nazis can be held accountable for about 25 million deaths, the latest scholarship attributes between 85 and 100 million deaths to eighty years of communist rule. Millions were consigned to labor camps without the niceties of a fair trial. Democracy was abandoned, as a vestige of corrupt and bourgeois capitalism.
Many of the communist regimes produced remarkable economic growth, but in the end even this could not save them from collapse. The major communist revolutions occurred in precapitalist societies. The economic function of the Soviet state, to take the leading communist example, was to create a modern industrial system. In just two generations, despite the terrible burdens of two world wars, it succeeded in turning a backward, rural society into an urbanized, industrial society with a relatively healthy, literate, and productive population, with substantial social services and with world-class scientific and cultural establishments. But it was not enough. The human costs were monstrous, and in the end the Soviet economic system could produce neither the food nor the consumer goods demanded by an urbanized population. Marxist orthodoxy was that capitalism was the engine of economic growth and that once capitalism had done its work of raising productive capacity it would be replaced by a socialist system concerned with the needs not of the capitalists but of the people. The actual history of twentieth-century Russia looks much the opposite: communism was the engine of industrial growth, but it could not meet people's needs for consumer goods, for freedom, and for human rights, so once it had done its work of economic growth it was replaced by a version of capitalism. Whether Russian capitalism will be more respectful of the people's needs is yet to be seen....
Democratic Socialists and Social Democrats
Some who remained true to the dream in the face of the actual performance of many of the communist regimes argued that those regimes did not represent true communism, that Stalin, Mao, and the others had betrayed communist and socialist principles. The "democratic socialists" in the West, a group of people on the whole honorable, visionary, and compassionate, held that if it was to be responsible to the real needs of the people, socialism had to answer to the people. This principle informed most of the Western socialist parties, including the British Labor Party and the New Democratic Party and its antecedents in Canada. They accepted the constraints of democratic, electoral systems. To gain power in a genuinely democratic system, however, the democratic socialists had to give up most of their socialist principles, including state ownership of the means of production. The Labor government in Britain after the Second World War brought about some real transformations, including the nationalization of a number of the country's most important industries. In subsequent years, however, Conservative governments reversed the nationalizations, and Labor found that it could return to power only if it explicitly rejected its former principles. The story is common to most Western capitalist countries; the socialist parties converted themselves into somewhat left-of-center capitalist parties, arguing for a more generous welfare program, but nothing more radical. One way of understanding the change is to say that the democratic socialists became social democrats. None of the Western socialist parties currently challenges the system of private enterprise. Some academics still make proposals for what they hope might be a humane version of socialism, but these ideas garner little public support.
The communist societies have almost completely disappeared. Not the communist political parties or in some cases the communist totalitarian states—plenty of them still exist, in Vietnam, China, and many other countries. With a few exceptions, however, the communist system of economic and social organization has gone. In Russia, state control of the economy was replaced by a kind of anarchic and unpredictable banditry. The former satellite states of eastern Europe moved in varying degrees toward capitalist markets. The Chinese Communist Party relaxed its control of the economy, encouraging private ownership, entrepreneurship, and foreign investment. In Vietnam, as in China, the party maintained control over the political system, but the economy was increasingly based on capitalist principles. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, only two national societies are still organized on communist principles, North Korea and Cuba. The former is perhaps the world's most disastrous state, its people on or even past the verge of starvation while its regime develops advanced weaponry. The small island nation of Cuba is the one remaining apparently sustainable communist society. In spite of enormous difficulties—including a counterproductive embargo by the United States and abandonment by its former patron, Russia—it has retained a reasonably egalitarian society and has provided for the basic needs of its people. The Cuban political regime has not, however, permitted democracy, so we do not know whether it retains the support of its people and whether it can survive the transition to a new leader.
Not much is left of the dream, therefore. The dream embodied a great deal of what is best about human aspirations—but it failed. While they lasted, most communist societies thoroughly violated human rights and the norms of justice. Moreover, they did not last. Capitalism is not a transitional phase to a utopian world order. The utopian world order has come and gone.
The Future of Capitalism
The future is unknowable, and we will surely be surprised by what it deals us. Virtually no one in the mid-1950s expected the European empires to disappear within a few years. Virtually no one in the mid-1980s foresaw the collapse of communism and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Perhaps the world capitalist system will be gone within a few years as well. Such a change is unlikely, however. Capitalism is growing in power, scope, and achievements. It is hard to see any force on the horizon strong enough even to threaten capitalism, let alone overthrow it. The chances are good that we, our children, and our grandchildren will live in a capitalist system. Moreover—and this is a more controversial statement in view of the evident injustices of capitalism—capitalism should not be overthrown. On the whole, our experiences with the dream—and they have been extensive—have been nightmares. There is no exit; we have to learn to manage what we have.
How do I counter this argument?
Social Justice, 2005
There Are No Just Alternatives to Capitalism
John Isbister, Capitalism and Justice: Envisioning Social and Economic Fairness. Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press, 2001. Copyright © 2001 by Kumarian Press, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.
John Isbister is a professor of economics at the University of California at Santa Cruz and the author of several books, including Capitalism and Justice, from which the following viewpoint is excerpted. Isbister begins by conceding that capitalism lacks many attributes of social justice, including equal treatment and freedom. However, Isbister goes on to argue that alternatives to capitalism, such as socialism and communism, have been tried and have been found even more wanting in social justice than capitalism. There is no choice but to work within the capitalist system to achieve social justice, Isbister concludes.
As you read, consider the following questions:
How does Isbister describe the world before the advent of capitalism in the sixteenth century?
Why does the author characterize communism as a "dream"?
In what ways have Communist societies failed, according to Isbister?
Capitalism left to its own devices fails to produce social justice. It does not give us equality, freedom, or efficiency. It produces inequalities of both opportunities and outcomes. It expands the freedom of some people at the expense of others. It produces economic growth, but erratically....
Many who have arrived at roughly this position have concluded, reasonably enough, that if capitalism can guarantee neither freedom nor equal treatment, it should be replaced. This is no longer a viable position, however. There is no point seeking alternatives to capitalism, for two separate reasons.
The first reason is that noncapitalist systems have been tried and for the most part have been found to be even less just than capitalism. In view of the bloody and tumultuous history of the twentieth century, we have no excuse for thinking that the world could be made more just by abandoning capitalism.
The second reason is that capitalism is all we have. Precapitalist social formations—tribes, isolated villages, feudal arrangements, and the rest—are almost gone, destroyed by capitalist imperialism, trade, investment, and technology. Socialism and communism were once thought to be the natural successors of capitalism, but as forms of social and economic organization they too have almost disappeared. Capitalist relationships characterize most local communities, almost all states, and certainly the international relationships between states. The next two sections advance this argument in more detail.
Precapitalism: The Organic Community
Capitalism arose in Europe in the sixteenth century and spread by means of commerce and imperialism (often the two were indistinguishable) to the rest of the world. Everywhere it expanded it destroyed what had come before: manorial, feudal systems of different sorts in Europe and a variety of tribal, communal, and imperial systems in the rest of the world. The old systems did not disappear easily; their going was attended by conflict and bloodshed....
In most parts of the precapitalist world, at most times, people were members of an integrated, organic community in which they had both rights and responsibilities, guaranteed by the fact of being born. These were typically spiritual as well as secular communities, in which the gods were thought to be present and active in all aspects of life. In many precapitalist communities, people's principal tasks were to emulate their ancestors and to please the spirits.
Was it a just world, just in a sense that might have meaning for us today? Can we turn to the precapitalist world to give us a vision of how to live our lives? For the most part, no. Few precapitalist societies had ideas of justice that are congenial to us today. The caste or class system was generally rigid; one's fate in life was largely determined by the accident of birth. People enjoyed virtually none of the freedoms associated with, say, the Bill of Rights. Rulers ruled and subjects obeyed. Wars were endemic and punishments often cruel. The European feudal world was an organic community in which people belonged and were not abandoned, but it was a world of exploitation and harshness for most of its members. Few of us would want to live in the Aztec culture, to take another example, or in most of the precapitalist societies of which we have some knowledge....
Some in the capitalist world try to retain or re-create the best parts of precapitalism. Some Amish and Mennonite communities are based on precapitalist values, as are some other faith-based groups. The 1960s and 1970s saw the creation of secular alternative rural communes, communities whose members tried to eliminate all marks of distinction between them, to be self-sufficient, and to live simply. The communes had some successes, but most eventually collapsed. Communities such as these have attempted to embody precapitalist values, but none has succeeded in cutting itself off from capitalist influences: from the market, from the media, from the legal system, and from other influences of the modern world. While we can learn from our antecedent societies, we cannot return to them. That door has been closed.
Postcapitalism: The Transcendent Dream
The most serious challenges to capitalism have come not from those who wanted to return to a simpler world but from people with an alternate—socialist or communist—vision of an economically advanced society. [Karl] Marx and the early socialist thinkers accepted what they understood as the virtue of capitalism—that it had produced unprecedented economic growth and thereby had created the potential for a high standard of living for everyone. Capitalism had, however, brought with it exploitation, alienation, and injustice, all of which they believed could be overcome in the new socialist world that would replace capitalism. For a later generation, communism was not the successor to capitalism but its substitute, a more humane and efficient system for transforming nonindustrial societies like Russia and China.
As [Harvard historian] Michael Ignatieff argues, many communists understood their movement as embodying the science of history, but communism was really the opposite; it was a dream. It was a dream held by nineteenth- and twentieth-century people who were intensely aware of the injustices of the capitalist system in which they lived. They were revolted by the crassness of capitalism, by the huge gap between the rich and the poor, by the way in which the system used up and discarded millions of people, by the replacement of human values with the values of money and accumulation, and by the warfare that they understood as a direct consequence of capitalist competition. Against the inhuman face of capitalism, they posited the image of "the new man," the socialist man (not until its later years was socialism at all infused with feminism), the man whose values were focused on a concern for his community and for his fellows, not distorted and narrowed by competition and accumulation. In the socialist dream, the community's resources and assets were to be owned collectively by the people and used to fulfill the people's real needs. The new economic principle was to be, in the words of Marx and [Friedrich] Engels, "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." The state was a pure democracy, or in some versions there was no state at all. With the end of capitalism would come the end of nationalism, and with the end of nationalism the end of war.
It was an extraordinary dream, a dream so powerful that for many people it persisted long after the evidence showed that it was failing. In the middle years of the twentieth century, some communists abandoned the dream as the government of the Soviet Union committed one atrocity after another—but others stayed faithful, presumably because the dream had such meaning for them and also because the alternative, the continuation of the advanced capitalist system, seemed so ghastly.
Nevertheless, the dream failed. In many ways, the communist regimes of the twentieth century brought the opposite of justice. [Vladimir] Lenin and [Joseph] Stalin in the Soviet Union, Mao Zedong in China, Kim Il Sung in North Korea, Pol Pot in Cambodia, and many of their subordinates and imitators were responsible for far more deaths among their innocent countrymen than even [Adolf] Hitler. While the Nazis can be held accountable for about 25 million deaths, the latest scholarship attributes between 85 and 100 million deaths to eighty years of communist rule. Millions were consigned to labor camps without the niceties of a fair trial. Democracy was abandoned, as a vestige of corrupt and bourgeois capitalism.
Many of the communist regimes produced remarkable economic growth, but in the end even this could not save them from collapse. The major communist revolutions occurred in precapitalist societies. The economic function of the Soviet state, to take the leading communist example, was to create a modern industrial system. In just two generations, despite the terrible burdens of two world wars, it succeeded in turning a backward, rural society into an urbanized, industrial society with a relatively healthy, literate, and productive population, with substantial social services and with world-class scientific and cultural establishments. But it was not enough. The human costs were monstrous, and in the end the Soviet economic system could produce neither the food nor the consumer goods demanded by an urbanized population. Marxist orthodoxy was that capitalism was the engine of economic growth and that once capitalism had done its work of raising productive capacity it would be replaced by a socialist system concerned with the needs not of the capitalists but of the people. The actual history of twentieth-century Russia looks much the opposite: communism was the engine of industrial growth, but it could not meet people's needs for consumer goods, for freedom, and for human rights, so once it had done its work of economic growth it was replaced by a version of capitalism. Whether Russian capitalism will be more respectful of the people's needs is yet to be seen....
Democratic Socialists and Social Democrats
Some who remained true to the dream in the face of the actual performance of many of the communist regimes argued that those regimes did not represent true communism, that Stalin, Mao, and the others had betrayed communist and socialist principles. The "democratic socialists" in the West, a group of people on the whole honorable, visionary, and compassionate, held that if it was to be responsible to the real needs of the people, socialism had to answer to the people. This principle informed most of the Western socialist parties, including the British Labor Party and the New Democratic Party and its antecedents in Canada. They accepted the constraints of democratic, electoral systems. To gain power in a genuinely democratic system, however, the democratic socialists had to give up most of their socialist principles, including state ownership of the means of production. The Labor government in Britain after the Second World War brought about some real transformations, including the nationalization of a number of the country's most important industries. In subsequent years, however, Conservative governments reversed the nationalizations, and Labor found that it could return to power only if it explicitly rejected its former principles. The story is common to most Western capitalist countries; the socialist parties converted themselves into somewhat left-of-center capitalist parties, arguing for a more generous welfare program, but nothing more radical. One way of understanding the change is to say that the democratic socialists became social democrats. None of the Western socialist parties currently challenges the system of private enterprise. Some academics still make proposals for what they hope might be a humane version of socialism, but these ideas garner little public support.
The communist societies have almost completely disappeared. Not the communist political parties or in some cases the communist totalitarian states—plenty of them still exist, in Vietnam, China, and many other countries. With a few exceptions, however, the communist system of economic and social organization has gone. In Russia, state control of the economy was replaced by a kind of anarchic and unpredictable banditry. The former satellite states of eastern Europe moved in varying degrees toward capitalist markets. The Chinese Communist Party relaxed its control of the economy, encouraging private ownership, entrepreneurship, and foreign investment. In Vietnam, as in China, the party maintained control over the political system, but the economy was increasingly based on capitalist principles. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, only two national societies are still organized on communist principles, North Korea and Cuba. The former is perhaps the world's most disastrous state, its people on or even past the verge of starvation while its regime develops advanced weaponry. The small island nation of Cuba is the one remaining apparently sustainable communist society. In spite of enormous difficulties—including a counterproductive embargo by the United States and abandonment by its former patron, Russia—it has retained a reasonably egalitarian society and has provided for the basic needs of its people. The Cuban political regime has not, however, permitted democracy, so we do not know whether it retains the support of its people and whether it can survive the transition to a new leader.
Not much is left of the dream, therefore. The dream embodied a great deal of what is best about human aspirations—but it failed. While they lasted, most communist societies thoroughly violated human rights and the norms of justice. Moreover, they did not last. Capitalism is not a transitional phase to a utopian world order. The utopian world order has come and gone.
The Future of Capitalism
The future is unknowable, and we will surely be surprised by what it deals us. Virtually no one in the mid-1950s expected the European empires to disappear within a few years. Virtually no one in the mid-1980s foresaw the collapse of communism and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Perhaps the world capitalist system will be gone within a few years as well. Such a change is unlikely, however. Capitalism is growing in power, scope, and achievements. It is hard to see any force on the horizon strong enough even to threaten capitalism, let alone overthrow it. The chances are good that we, our children, and our grandchildren will live in a capitalist system. Moreover—and this is a more controversial statement in view of the evident injustices of capitalism—capitalism should not be overthrown. On the whole, our experiences with the dream—and they have been extensive—have been nightmares. There is no exit; we have to learn to manage what we have.
How do I counter this argument?