Ed Weick wrote:
I would suggest that there is only one kind of capitalism - the kind
that is. It is self-serving, highly rational, exploitative, and, where
permitted, brutal. Its concerns are to cut costs, maximize returns,
and grow.
I'm not the first to say that this is the ideology of carcinoma.
That's bad enough when capitalists (so characterized) are human
beings. The worst of folks may be persuaded or coerced to better
their ways and in any case will eventually die. "I may
die. The King may die. And who knows? The horse may learn to sing."
But when the capitalists are corporate entities, potentially immortal,
legally constituted as persons and mandated by law and charter to
embody the personality of a psychopath, this sounds to me like the
perfect embodiment of evil.
It was a poorly kept secret (where it was a secret at all) that in the
years around WW II, many non-German industrialists and financiers (inter
alia) thought the Third Reich was coming of the golden age. Stamp out
communism? Splendid! Alles in Ordnung? Efficiency the first
priority? Great! Put the inferior types to work, forcibly if
neccessary? Of course! Only Adolph had to go and get off on this
inefficient, kinky side issue about Jews and death camps and lose
track of the Main Chance for capital and Progress. And screw up the
birth of the golden age for fifty years.
Given the Holocaust, of course it's a hard job to find anybody who'll
admit to such a view. But Ed's formulation of capitalism pretty well
approximates Hitler and Moussolini without antisemitism or deathcamps.
Ed But what I have found even more disturbing is that freely-elected,
Ed democratic governments have bought into many of the ethics and values
Ed of capitalism.
That is, into the ethics and values of self-serving, rationality,
exploitation and brutality. Indeed. That disturbs me as well. No,
it gives me the screaming willies. Part of the problem is that
capitalism, as Ed remarked, is a kind of machine that hit on an
accidental win. In an earlier post I compared this kind of success to
white sugar or heroin. Both grab a small critical regulatory element
of a larger process and evince a huge "success" by coopting the
regulatory mechanism. Capitalism has been this kind of success and
influential people in government love success. They want in.
Ed I have suggested that this is a dangerous confusion of roles in
Ed previous postings. It represents a serious, perhaps fatal, erosion of
Ed countervailing power.
I agree. I suggest that much of the explicit anti-capitalist rhetoric
on FW, however, reflects a notion that goes beyond countervailing
power. If we're on shipboard -- spaceship earth -- and we give all
the money, charts and navigation gear, the keys to the arms locker,
stores and galley and exclusive access to the engine room -- if we
give all this to a little gaggle of psychopaths, they may well try to
run the ship efficiently. But we aren't going to enjoy the voyage.
And what can we expect if we politely ask the officers on the bridge
to exert some countervailing power? Hey, you with the Uzi, knock it
off? Hah! I take Eva's remarks (and others') to say that turning the
operation of the infrastructure of society to psychopaths bent on
greed, exploitation and brutality and then trying to regulate them is
just plain moronic. If capitalism is the ideology of cancer, we need
to rethink what we're going to advocate and support as apredominant
ideology before it's too late.
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I shouldn't have to add this but to avoid the charge that I'm calling
individual people psychopaths -- whether CEOs or investing widows -- I
emphasize that the psychopathic personalities to which I refer are
those of the juridicial persons constituted as corporations. Read any
business page to find bald declarations that corporations have no
responsibilities but the bottom line or, more generally shareholder
value. That CEOs (or investing widows or any corporate employee or
stockholder) are typically under constant pressure to accept and, where
relevant, support or act on behalf of the psychopathic corporate
persona is a related ethical issue but not for this post.
- Mike
--
Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
URL: http://www.mit.edu:8001/people/mspencer/home.html
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