me: >> A far-sighted capitalist aims to maximize his or her wealth. As a CEO, >> this would involve maximizing salary, benefits, and the shareholder's >> value.
raghu wrote: > No. A far-sighted capitalist will sacrifice some wealth maximization > in order to make sure his children and grand-children will continue to > live off of other people's toils. That requires that (a) healthy, > well-trained workers continue to be available to toil for his kids and > grand kids and (b) a decent economy and infrastructure is maintained > to support a high standard of living for said grand kids. I don't get this, even though raghu is getting very repetitive here. It's quite possible for a far-sighted capitalist to do all sorts of illegal, immoral, or downright disgusting activities (such as Joseph Kennedy's booze-smuggling) and _then_ diversify out of crime -- indeed to launder all of the illegally- or immorally-gotten assets into a nice, diversified, legal, and safe portfolio. That would do as much for his or her children and grandchildren to live the life they've become accustomed to, along with all the prestige and power (cf. the Kennedy sons). This kind of rip-and-run strategy has been applied again and again. Capitalist wealth involves fungibility: it's often easy to sell your stock in "Poison Third World Children Enterprises" and then buy "Blue Chip Respectability Corp.," along with respectability itself. Or make a lot of profits in a decent economy with decent infrastructure and educated workers and then invest those winnings in a low-wage country with no environmental standards (complete with help from the US government in building necessary infrastructure and from the ILO in helping public relations). I can't see how capitalism could exist without that fungibility. To assume that capital funds don't flow to the most profitable locales (holding risk, etc., constant) is referring to a capitalism that does not exist. Even where fungilbility is limited by law or "natural" limits, capitalists use their wealth to push for its emergence. (If "information wants to be free," we can say that "capital wants to be fungible.") > Consider this example of a private equity deal gone wrong: > http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/05/business/economy/05simmons.html > > The guy who founded this company and ran it profitably for decades is > a far-sighted capitalist. The private equity guys who drove it into > bankruptcy are dumb capitalists. Here, raghu is talking about a family enterprise (Simmons mattress), not a Sorosian far-sighted capitalist. The era of this kind of capitalist enterprise has gone the way of all flesh. It's not simply the doing of nefarious private equity guys (who were very far-sighted as far as feathering their own nests is concerned), but due to the neoliberal policy revolution, the new globalization, and the dominance of financial capital (which emphasizes fungability über alles). That is, the "far-sighted capitalist" of raghu's sort was possible in a very specific political-economic environment, in which the US had military-economic-financial hegemony, where most products were for the domestic market, where capital mobility was limited, and most of finance was highly regulated. This kind of soft social democracy (New Dealism) seems to have come and gone. I have a hard time seeing how it can come back without massive struggles from the outside of the capitalist class. We can't rely on a few "far-sighted capitalists" to be our guardian angels and suddenly transform the US economy to go back to that "golden age," especially since the current political-economic set-up is extremely profitable (or perceived to be extremely profitable) to a large number of extremely powerful interest groups. It's also utopian to think that we can preach to the capitalists to become "far-sighted" and restore the "good old days" of the 1950s and 1960s. Too many profit mightily from the _status quo_ and expect to do so for the forseeable future. Maybe if the crisis deepens and widens, that will shake up the capitalists to push them to try for a new New Deal. But they could just as well intensify repression of opposition forces. This reminds me of a major point that I forgot to put in my previous missive in this thread: it's a big conceptual mistake to focus on a small elite of allegedly far-sighted and benevolent capitalists (or the possibility of convincing the current crop to change their ideology). Instead, we have to focus on the socio-economic _context_ which allows and encourages certain kinds of behaviors and ideologies among the capitalists. Ripping a very small number of enlighted capitalists (who seem non-existent at this point in history) out of context simply produces ideology. -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
