A Gentler Capitalism

[Thom Little]

On the field of ideology, 2005 was a lousy year for the American right. Twice -- in the president's proposal to privatize Social Security and in the government's failure to save New Orleans -- it confronted the public with the prospect of a radically reduced government. Twice, the public recoiled at the sight. In retrospect the year's biggest mystery is how George W. Bush thought he could privatize Social Security. Essentially Bush assumed the role of the national CEO who tells his workers he's dumping their defined-benefit pensions for some ill-defined 401(k) investment schemes. And essentially the American people responded with the same anger and anxiety that airline and auto employees have shown when their bosses reneged on their commitments of a secure retirement. The difference, of course, is that the American people have a lot more power as voters than they do as workers.

.......

For the pervasive insecurity that is inextricably part of today's capitalism has become the dominant fact of modern life. "The fragmenting of big institutions has left many people's lives in a fragmented state: the places they work more resembling train stations than villages," writes sociologist Richard Sennett in "The Culture of the New Capitalism," a newly published collection of lectures he gave at Yale University in 2004. Throughout most of the 20th century, the insecurity endemic to capitalism was mitigated by business institutions organized, as Sennett's great predecessor Max Weber first noted, along military lines. The corporation gave the employee a place and a ladder, and in such a lifelong institution, Sennett notes, "it became possible to define what the stages of a career ought to be like, to correlate longtime service in a firm to specific steps of increased wealth."

.......

From his interviews with a wide range of workers, Sennett turns up a widespread resignation to these immense changes in economic life. That doesn't mean, though, that the American people aren't reacting to this profound shift in their lives, and their sense of their lives. The increased prominence of religion in American life over the past several decades, I'd surmise, is in part a reaction to this embattled sense of self. And if most Americans take globalization as a given, many are increasingly enraged at our relatively open borders and the immigrants who cross them. These are two responses to the new insecurity that the right has exploited, though neither does anything to reestablish a more benign economy.

For the left, what 2005 has demonstrated is that while Americans have no great love for government, they do expect it to provide a baseline of security -- the more so since the employer-provided benefits of the past 60 years are going the way of the dodo. That means that government-supported universal health insurance will soon be back on the nation's agenda. But that's the easy part. Rebuilding the kind of security that defined private-sector economic life for most of the past century, and that helped individuals define themselves, is a conundrum that's daunting even to contemplate.


http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=10799

[Double T]

1. Does this mean we will soon have Compassionate Credit Card Divisions....

of behemoth banks?...... I don't think so either!!!