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open, colorful, diverse marketplace. I think that human creativity in making things and trading things is a human need. And I don't inherently oppose capitalism, which is just a system for people to pool their resources to accomplishment something--say, a group of people have expertise as potters, need a bigger pottery oven to develop better pots and expand production, but have no money; another group, who have accumulated some money and can pay for the bricks and mortar and engineer and workers to build the bigger oven, pays for it and gets a percentage on each pot that is sold. There is nothing inherently wrong with this, in and of itself. One group of people prosper at what they do, put some money aside, and are able to help out another group of people, who have skills and a plan but no money.
The problems arise on matters of scale. As the investors get richer, they maybe gain too much power over the potters--they may start dictating wages, designs, poor materials, forcing these skilled people to make cheap junk that easily breaks or isn't beautiful and unique; or maybe the pottery has a down period, sales fall off and the investors take advantage of this to renegotiate the investment greatly to the disadvantage of the potters; or maybe the potters get successful and collude with the investors to buy up every pottery in town, put the others out of business, and start jacking up the price of pots to unfair levels because they have a monopoly. They hire "security" who break any "foreign" pots they see for sale and bully little street potters who make a few hand-thrown pots and sell them on their front stoop to feed their starving children. The potters in the next big city are angered that their pots can't be sold in city no. 1 any more, so they and their investors go to the local baron or king and demand justice, and that personage sends an army to city no. 1, etc.
Or, to take a simpler example: A tribe of fishermen pool their skills, materials and tools to build a canoe for everyone's use. Everybody is suppose to get use of this canoe to fish in the ocean; the canoe is just big enough for one fisherman and one or two sons or daughters who are in training. The fish are the return on their investment. But, say, one fisherman feels that he contributed more skill and time to building the canoe than anyone else, and every time the others go to use the canoe, they find it gone. The fisherman who feels that he "owns" more of it than them is always using it, and bringing back big catches which he requires them to pay for, with other goods or labor. Clearly, it's time for a tribal council--the way such disputes are handled by indigenous tribes, in relatively small-scale communities. But we can see that the "capitalist" problem here is that this one fisherman's behavior could result in the starvation of his tribesmen if they do not agree to his terms. He has control of the canoe and he can go elsewhere to find markets for his big fish catches.
Government control--of, by, for the people--and socialist principles--are needed to temper human enterprise, so that it produces the essential needs of the tribe, city or nation, produces a pleasing variety of high quality goods at reasonable prices, and to help insure fairness, enforcement of agreements and contracts, and so on. While capitalism is just a system for people to pool their resources to accomplishment something--generally infrastructure that will yield profit--socialism is sharing (workers sharing the work and the profits and jointly owning the enterprise; or workers and owners sharing responsibilities and benefits equitably; everyone paying taxes for the common good; everyone focused on the greater good). Socialism has more of the values of the family than does capitalism. Capitalism can be useful or ruthless, depending on how it is tempered by these other forces. Socialism can be tyrannical if based on the all-powerful-father (i.e., Stalinism--brutal enforcement of the "common good" which doesn't produce good because it is based on the individual ego of the tyrant)), but if based on a more equitable family model, is a civilizing force with values of altruism, self-sacrifice and generosity. In a well-ordered family, everyone works for the common good of the family, and the young, the weak, the elderly are all taken care of, even if they are not "productive" because, well, they love each other. That's what socialism comes down to: do you "love your brother" or not? do you see your fellow and sister citizens as kin? is it "dog eat dog" or "we're all in this together"?
The capitalist potters might instigate a war, to get control of the entire market. The capitalist fisherman might abandon tribal values for profit. Enter government.
Government--which oversees these economic/financial systems--can be good or bad, productive or counter-productive--with democracy as the best system thus far devised for producing a government that tends to the "common good" and fairly balances different interests. Human beings have often resorted to some form of Kingship, in the past, to be the repository of the society's values (starting with the sacredness of the land) and the regulator of different interests. Democracy--specifically the American Revolution--replaced the sovereignty of the king with the sovereignty of the people. The People--as a collective entity--are supposed to be The Ruler. This concept invests individual citizens with rights, dignity and power--in theory. The People in turn empower the government to balance capitalist enterprise and creativity with socialist policies that hold society together and foster the higher values of altruism and love, and to settle disputes and keep things orderly, safe, livable and useful for the "common good" --for instance, building roads, schools and hospitals, providing emergency services, creating a court system, instituting fair taxation, regulating land use and environmental impacts, keeping lead out of the pots of the potters, curtailing their monopoly, sending diplomats back and forth to avoid a war, helping the other fisherman build a second canoe, maybe commissioning the greedy fisherman to find new markets for the tribe and dickering with him over his cut--like that, an objective force, empowered by the people of a community, city or nation, to act in their best interest.
Capitalism and socialism are just concepts of economic organization. Government (of, by and for the people) is the mediator.
What I see in the U.S. is extremely predatory capitalism seeking to destroy all socialist values and programs and seeking to loot all "common good" projects. The predatory capitalist potters and the greedy fisherman have seized control of the government. They have commandeered the canoe and the oceans. They have hijacked the country's military to create monopolies for themselves in every market. They handpick the kings, presidents, tribal chiefs and councils to do their bidding. They terrorize the people with fear of outsiders and fear of poverty--yet they themselves induce poverty, and they themselves are the "outsiders" who use violence as a means toward more profit. The social system has gone wacko. It is totally out of balance.
I DON'T think America was created to be this way. In fact, there is overwhelming evidence that the founders of the country--for all their flaws--feared and hated corporate tyranny. Their main enemy was the British East India Company! They tried to build into the Constitution every kind of blockade they could think of against any form of tyranny that might arise. U.S. business corporations at that time were not a threat. They thought that the best way to handle any potential threat on that front was to have the states--the government closest to the people--charter corporations, and that system worked for a long time to keep corporations limited and short-lived. They believed in people power as a check on tyranny. They focused on BALANCING the powers of government so that they could never be taken over by one person, or one party, or any one elite group. They were narrowed-minded on voting citizenship, limiting it at first to white men with property, but they, at the same time, laid the ground work, in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, for future expansion of the franchise, and that is exactly what happened. They really believed in the People, as a collective Sovereign, and in the "will of the people" as the ruling power in the land. They thought that, with freedom of speech, freedom from enforced religion, civil protections like habeas corpus, and other freedoms, the best ideas would "rise to the top" and the best people would be selected as leaders. They also opposed a standing army--as inherently oppressive--and were wary of war profiteers and war. They placed war powers exclusively in the hands of the most democratic national body--Congress.
It took a couple of centuries--and a lot of blood, sweat, tears and struggle--to fulfill that vision, but it did happen--an expanded franchise, the freeing of the slaves, the empowerment of workers, the steady progress of new and more enlightened ideas.
I think what they perhaps could not grasp was the magnitude of the natural resources that this young country--the world's beacon of democracy--would proceed to exploit, from its coast to coast forests, farmlands, mineral deposits, waterways and two vast oceans. With democracy, with great immigrations and multi-cultural richness, and all these resources, the U.S. would build the wealthiest nation on earth, and therein lay its tragic flaw: its vast wealth created vast greed. Fabulously rich elites and monopolies and "robber barons" began to emerge. These conscienceless forces--the forces of predatory capitalism--eventually crashed the U.S. and world economy, and the U.S. had then to learn the critical importance of socialist values--with the Great Depression and the New Deal. The U.S. had never known widespread poverty like this. It was shocking and it spurred a fervent program of socialist remedies organized by the government.
To this point, socialism in the U.S. had been more a private matter. There were many socialist activities--potluck suppers were routine especially in isolated farming communities (of which there were many). Schools were often a communal undertaking. Churches and all kinds of other societies organized charities. Ladies groups often did communal sewing, knitting, quilt-making, baking. And entertainment was often communal--and often quite literate--with brilliant visiting lecturers and Shakespearean performances, attended by the whole community, even in the wilds of the far west. The kind of gross, visible poverty and horrid neglect that was prevalent in England, especially in London, during this same period--late 19th century--did not occur in America. There were instances of sweatshops, certainly; some instances of wretched living conditions, and a constant struggle for labor rights and the rights of the poor to decent housing, good sanitation and other services. But there was always more land to migrate to, to the west. Poor immigrant populations soon integrated into the "land of opportunity." Various communities, and various kinds of communities, took care of their own. Even the most wretched of poor populations--the former African-American slaves in the south--had socialist ways of helping each other, in lieu of government's utter neglect.
It was a great shock to the people of "the land of opportunity" to suddenly have millions of homeless, millions of unemployed, millions starving, and the horrors of 19th century London visited upon this privileged and fervently democratic country. And with the energy that Americans brought to everything in those days, they set about solving it, definitively, with government action. The solution was socialism. There were screams from the rightwing and the remaining rich, of course, but they went unheard. The country overwhelmingly supported FDR and the "New Deal" in devising socialist solutions to vast poverty and joblessness, and lost homes and farms. Labor unions made great leaps forward. A whole new "commons" was conceived--libraries, schools, hospitals, roads, bridges--were built by government workers. There was new regulation of banking and finance. Even some long standing problems of bigotry began to be addressed--against African-Americans, for instance--in this great new progressive era. The "New Deal" also resulted in much better U.S. policy in Latin America--rare in our history.
So, to the extent that America had developed into a greedy, predatory capitalist, "robber baron" country, it now veered way far in the other direction--toward socialism and altruism. It could do this--it was able to change course--because it was a democracy. The mechanisms for change were built in and improved on over the years. The payoff was the "New Deal"--a great advance over the non-ethic of pure profit.
Predatory capitalism had grown too entrenched by this time, however; it had not gone away, it had just gone into the background, during the "New Deal" era, and it re-emerged after WW II with vulture talons poised to take advantage of what the G.I.'s of WW II had won: a world in which the U.S. was the supreme power, its land unravaged by the war and its people never more prosperous.
These predatory capitalists then proceeded to disguise their greed with the mask of democracy while yet conniving to dismantle the very democracy that had permitted them to become rich, and in particular to dismantle the "New Deal"--the government power and the socialist policies that were needed to temper the excesses of capitalism. The next fifty years was the story of their triumph. They have just about dismantled the Constitution and the system of democracy and progressive government that it had created. They hijacked the U.S. military for a corporate resource war; they control the news media so thoroughly that most Americans rarely think of the million innocent people who were slaughtered to steal their oil and to use their country as a "lily pad" to further aggression. They ripped up "New Deal" regulation of the banking industry; they thoroughly looted the federal coffers in every way possible--from tax cuts for the rich in time of war, to trillions of dollars in private contracts, many of them non-productive, and some of them downright evil (creating mercenary armies and domestic spying systems). They are Thomas Jefferson's and James Madison's worst nightmare.
FDR and Truman curtailed war profiteering. Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld reveled in it. In between, the people of the U.S. had gradually lost any democratic control whatsoever over the "military-industrial complex." There is a qualitative difference between that era and this. The sorts of contract practices that the Bushwhacks pulled would have been unthinkable in those days. And there is also a world of difference between WW II and every war that has followed it, to this day. Despite all the theories about it (I know that Aldous Huxley thought that it could have been prevented), WW II, by the time it was upon us, was unavoidable. The mistakes had been made--decades before. Whatever chance there had been, to prevent Hitler's rise, had been botched. And once Hitler and his mighty army started marching across Europe, there was no other honorable course but to help the people there fight back. That is orders of magnitude different than smashing a tiny country, Vietnam, that mainly wanted its independence--and slaughtering 2 million Southeast Asians and over 55,000 U.S. soldiers as a war profiteering venture, as it mostly was--or slaughtering a million people to grab their oil for purposes of world domination.
There are people who have profited from war going back to forever. My own ancestors were blacksmiths, way back in the 15th century, and, after destroying all the forests in Belgium, to create iron works and weapons for that lot, migrated to Upsala to forge weapons for the king of Sweden. And there have been corporate profiteers in every era--"organized money," as FDR called it. The leaders of the U.S. have often been guilty of grabbing land that wasn't theirs, often by bloody means, and inflicting exploitative rule on others on behalf of the rich and the corporate. But it has also, from time to time, been remarkably inclusive and progressive. And it has, without question, been an inspiration to others in the world--the first to overthrow colonial rule, the first to establish the "sovereignty of the people" and the place where you could go to start over and achieve dignity, equality and prosperity, after whatever horrors you may have escaped in the land of your birth. The two trends have sometimes stood side b side. The "New Deal" era was probably the best of America, when socialism gained a beachhead as the necessary balance to prevent creative capitalism from becoming predatory capitalism.
The latter has won. And it is a very great tragedy, in my view. It is not quite the right perspective to say that America has always been predatory, fascist, brutal, militaristic. We had long periods with no standing army. We had a long period when corporations were short-lived, handy entities, not monsters. We've had many a populist era, many an anti-war movement, several awesome civil rights movements, a strong democratic tradition that it has been hard for the corporate rulers to break, strong socialist and labor movements and traditions, and a people who, on the whole, live peacefully in a multi-cultural society and long to be at peace with world.
I don't know if we can recover our democracy. But I can say this: It is well worth recovering--and building anew--despite whatever horrors our leaders have got up to. We shouldn't blind ourselves to any of it, but we should be proud of our democratic and progressive traditions, and all those who went before us who fought for a better country and a better future for us.
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