charleslb
28th May 2011, 20:35
Recently in an exchange with someone on the moral deficiency and hazards of capitalism I was chided for being too severely critical of the capitalist class. Chided on the grounds that capitalists are the ones who turn their ingenious ideas and visionary dreams into business enterprises that produce goods and services that improve our lives, that generate the wealth and bountifulness that raises everyone’s material standard of living, and that stimulate innovation and progress.
You know what I’m talking about, the old pro-capitalist canard that without our brilliant and beautiful capitalist overlords we’d all be jobless, prospectless, backward, and barbarous creatures leading a stagnant existence. That it’s the moguls of the moneyocracy who make things, who make beneficial things happen for the rest of us; who make the economic machine that turns out all of the modern conveniences that make modernity the wonderful thing it is; who make the institutions of society; who make society as we know it in the rich and free West a viable proposition.
According to this load of pro-capitalist humbug, the common working man and woman should be grovelingly grateful to be along for the ride, and content to leave capitalists in the driver’s seat of society. Workers are de-dignified into mere drones, taking their cues from the managers, magnates, and moneyed masters of the system, without whom they’d be nothing. Capitalist owners are the stars, and the people they employ are just expendable bit players, or extras. And of course without the stars there’d be no show at all. Why what would we all do without the shining stars of capitalism, in whose reflected glory we mediocre wage slaves live our comfortable lives? What engine would keep civilization’s forward momentum into a better and brighter future going? There would be no such engine, and civilization would be stalled in a dark age.
I beg to disagree. No, it’s not capitalists and their initiative & inventiveness that makes our society affluent and flourishing, it’s the low men and women on the socioeconomic totem pole doing the actual work. It's working-class people and their energy, their strength of character, their work ethic, their ability to creatively implement the will of their employer, and their labors & toil that makes business enterprises successful and a force for society's well-being and progress. I repeat, it’s these virtues and contributions of workingpeople, not the much overrated virtues and contributions of their high-powered capitalist honchos, that makes for viable and prospering businesses and societies.
Indeed, instead of 99% of the credit going to bourgeois bosses and bloodsucking businessmen, with only 1% of the appreciation going to struggling, sweating, and striving blue-collar guys and gals, it should be quite the reverse – virtually all of the credit should go to the systematically exploited and preyed-upon proletariat, for that's where the credit is genuinely due. All credit and power to the workers!!!
As for what engine of change and growth will power and drive forth an economic system that abolishes the parasitical capitalist class, how about the above mentioned energy, character, cleverness, and creativity of ordinary working-class men and women. I would have to ask anyone who finds this difficult to believe, Are you some kind of elitist who believes that only an aristocratic elite of capitalist movers & shakers can run a successful economy, and that this therefore entitles them to the exploitative share of society's wealth they expropriate for themselves (talk about a dangerous sense of entitlement, the sense of entitlement of capitalists is incomparably more outrageous than that of welfare recipients)?
Alas though, the capitalist system is philosophically predicated precisely upon this classist assumption, that capitalists are the great paternalistic and benevolent benefactors of society, and therefore have a right to a dangerous and controlling portion of society's economic wealth and political power. This is an assumption that we're of course socio-culturally brainwashed to unquestioningly, naively, and dogmatically accept, which is why there are so many people who may not be filthy rich but who nonetheless identify and side with the economic elite and believe wholeheartedly in a socioeconomic system, i.e. capitalism, that is structurally designed to victimize the majority of those who live under it.
I'm sorry and sincerely don't wish to be ad hominem in regard to such people, but I really do have to say that boosters of the capitalist class really are just indoctrinees. Their thinking is no doubt so abysmally entrenched in the rationalizing ideology of capitalism that the above or any criticism of the "free market" (to use the popular doublespeak euphemism) will sound like absolute wrongheaded nonsense.
Well, I say to them, to Mr. or Mrs. Pro-Capitalist, No doubt, like so many doctrinaire defenders of capitalism, you can cite to me off-the-cuff statistics galore about how the "free market" is improving everyone's life, but I defy you to go to some of the horrendously poor communities in the Third World, or even here at home, and tell the suffering human beings there that capitalism is a hunky-dory system doing lovely things for their lives. If they don't stone you to death with righteous indignation, or laugh you to scorn, they might just break down crying that anyone would have the ignorance and lack of human decency to suggest such a thing, to smugly apologize for an inherently callous and predaceous system like capitalism.
Mm-hmm, although the capitalist elite has been quite successful at programming our worldview in such a way as to cast themselves in a highly positive light, and to make us buy into a ridiculously rosy picture of self-regulating capitalism (i.e. the-fox-guarding-the-henhouse capitalism), the norm for large corporate entities, and many other employers in our system, is to behave toward the rank and file of the labor force, toward you and me and the communities we call home, in a somewhat less than philanthropic and civic-minded fashion. Rather than being a blessing to the little guy, big business is often his bane and bitter adversary. No, companies that treat the workfolk who are their lifeblood with all the respect accorded to menials and peons, that deny them their benefits and fair pay, that cheat longtime employees out of their pensions, that outsource their positions and leave them in the lurch of joblessness, that pollute the air and water of their communities with industrial waste, etc., such companies and the unwonderful capitalist wizes who run them certainly do not deserve the lionizing they often receive from their free-marketeer fans.
Most emphatically no, then, the working poor, the unemployed, and the underclass don’t blissfully “surf” the creative “wake” of the capitalist elite, as someone once tried to tell me. Rather, the wake left by capitalist greed is often a wake of wrongs done to, want suffered by, and woe visited upon the economy’s average Joes and Janes, a wake they drown in on a daily basis.
And yet, by dint of their own strengths and excellences, they survive and sometimes manage to thrive. Have no doubt about it, it’s workers who better their own lot in this world, by being productive despite being exploited and abused by the corporate power structure, despite being thrust into recessions by the major players on Wall Street, despite the undermining of their unions by the clout of the companies they toil for, despite being systematically deprived of equality and justice in nations ruled by the plutocratic powers that be. It’s workers who are the protagonists of the story of humanity’s ever broadening horizons, workers who have a right to pride themselves on the accomplishments and abundance of their society, workers who have a right to be their own heroes.
(Please forgive the lengthy length of this post)
:)
You know what I’m talking about, the old pro-capitalist canard that without our brilliant and beautiful capitalist overlords we’d all be jobless, prospectless, backward, and barbarous creatures leading a stagnant existence. That it’s the moguls of the moneyocracy who make things, who make beneficial things happen for the rest of us; who make the economic machine that turns out all of the modern conveniences that make modernity the wonderful thing it is; who make the institutions of society; who make society as we know it in the rich and free West a viable proposition.
According to this load of pro-capitalist humbug, the common working man and woman should be grovelingly grateful to be along for the ride, and content to leave capitalists in the driver’s seat of society. Workers are de-dignified into mere drones, taking their cues from the managers, magnates, and moneyed masters of the system, without whom they’d be nothing. Capitalist owners are the stars, and the people they employ are just expendable bit players, or extras. And of course without the stars there’d be no show at all. Why what would we all do without the shining stars of capitalism, in whose reflected glory we mediocre wage slaves live our comfortable lives? What engine would keep civilization’s forward momentum into a better and brighter future going? There would be no such engine, and civilization would be stalled in a dark age.
I beg to disagree. No, it’s not capitalists and their initiative & inventiveness that makes our society affluent and flourishing, it’s the low men and women on the socioeconomic totem pole doing the actual work. It's working-class people and their energy, their strength of character, their work ethic, their ability to creatively implement the will of their employer, and their labors & toil that makes business enterprises successful and a force for society's well-being and progress. I repeat, it’s these virtues and contributions of workingpeople, not the much overrated virtues and contributions of their high-powered capitalist honchos, that makes for viable and prospering businesses and societies.
Indeed, instead of 99% of the credit going to bourgeois bosses and bloodsucking businessmen, with only 1% of the appreciation going to struggling, sweating, and striving blue-collar guys and gals, it should be quite the reverse – virtually all of the credit should go to the systematically exploited and preyed-upon proletariat, for that's where the credit is genuinely due. All credit and power to the workers!!!
As for what engine of change and growth will power and drive forth an economic system that abolishes the parasitical capitalist class, how about the above mentioned energy, character, cleverness, and creativity of ordinary working-class men and women. I would have to ask anyone who finds this difficult to believe, Are you some kind of elitist who believes that only an aristocratic elite of capitalist movers & shakers can run a successful economy, and that this therefore entitles them to the exploitative share of society's wealth they expropriate for themselves (talk about a dangerous sense of entitlement, the sense of entitlement of capitalists is incomparably more outrageous than that of welfare recipients)?
Alas though, the capitalist system is philosophically predicated precisely upon this classist assumption, that capitalists are the great paternalistic and benevolent benefactors of society, and therefore have a right to a dangerous and controlling portion of society's economic wealth and political power. This is an assumption that we're of course socio-culturally brainwashed to unquestioningly, naively, and dogmatically accept, which is why there are so many people who may not be filthy rich but who nonetheless identify and side with the economic elite and believe wholeheartedly in a socioeconomic system, i.e. capitalism, that is structurally designed to victimize the majority of those who live under it.
I'm sorry and sincerely don't wish to be ad hominem in regard to such people, but I really do have to say that boosters of the capitalist class really are just indoctrinees. Their thinking is no doubt so abysmally entrenched in the rationalizing ideology of capitalism that the above or any criticism of the "free market" (to use the popular doublespeak euphemism) will sound like absolute wrongheaded nonsense.
Well, I say to them, to Mr. or Mrs. Pro-Capitalist, No doubt, like so many doctrinaire defenders of capitalism, you can cite to me off-the-cuff statistics galore about how the "free market" is improving everyone's life, but I defy you to go to some of the horrendously poor communities in the Third World, or even here at home, and tell the suffering human beings there that capitalism is a hunky-dory system doing lovely things for their lives. If they don't stone you to death with righteous indignation, or laugh you to scorn, they might just break down crying that anyone would have the ignorance and lack of human decency to suggest such a thing, to smugly apologize for an inherently callous and predaceous system like capitalism.
Mm-hmm, although the capitalist elite has been quite successful at programming our worldview in such a way as to cast themselves in a highly positive light, and to make us buy into a ridiculously rosy picture of self-regulating capitalism (i.e. the-fox-guarding-the-henhouse capitalism), the norm for large corporate entities, and many other employers in our system, is to behave toward the rank and file of the labor force, toward you and me and the communities we call home, in a somewhat less than philanthropic and civic-minded fashion. Rather than being a blessing to the little guy, big business is often his bane and bitter adversary. No, companies that treat the workfolk who are their lifeblood with all the respect accorded to menials and peons, that deny them their benefits and fair pay, that cheat longtime employees out of their pensions, that outsource their positions and leave them in the lurch of joblessness, that pollute the air and water of their communities with industrial waste, etc., such companies and the unwonderful capitalist wizes who run them certainly do not deserve the lionizing they often receive from their free-marketeer fans.
Most emphatically no, then, the working poor, the unemployed, and the underclass don’t blissfully “surf” the creative “wake” of the capitalist elite, as someone once tried to tell me. Rather, the wake left by capitalist greed is often a wake of wrongs done to, want suffered by, and woe visited upon the economy’s average Joes and Janes, a wake they drown in on a daily basis.
And yet, by dint of their own strengths and excellences, they survive and sometimes manage to thrive. Have no doubt about it, it’s workers who better their own lot in this world, by being productive despite being exploited and abused by the corporate power structure, despite being thrust into recessions by the major players on Wall Street, despite the undermining of their unions by the clout of the companies they toil for, despite being systematically deprived of equality and justice in nations ruled by the plutocratic powers that be. It’s workers who are the protagonists of the story of humanity’s ever broadening horizons, workers who have a right to pride themselves on the accomplishments and abundance of their society, workers who have a right to be their own heroes.
(Please forgive the lengthy length of this post)
:)