A wise friend reviewed an earlier draft of the following essay, and among other things he said:
“You start with a word that turns off about 70% of readers from the get go – Socialism.”
What I wrote back to him was this:
“You’re right, socialism is not a good hook for most readers. But, if you ask yourself, what mistake did we make—as a people, as a civilization—that led to this horror of Trump with the nuclear codes…..then one plausible answer is that we wrote socialism off too soon. And we did, I believe, partly because we didn’t appreciate how dangerous capitalism is. We thought capitalism was workable, that it could be restrained by liberal democracy, and we were wrong.
It’s clear that the future belongs to the writers and leaders who can discuss the ‘we were wrong’ aspect of our current situation in an informative way, with a minimum of scapegoating. Because confidence in our institutions is down the tubes. It won’t come back until we get a reasonable explanation for what went wrong.
And I am talking about a different kind of socialism….
And I don’t need that many readers, a few dozen, maybe. Once people start thinking about our situation in different terms, it will spread and then we’ll see change. Simple liberalism or “progressive” policies won’t work anymore, and we need to understand why. Part of it is identity politics, and part of it is an absolute lack of any positive and unifying vision. We’re just supposed to beat back fascism and then return to watching “Girls” on our smart phones? That won’t work. There’s got to be a vision, preferably an inspiring one. Identity politics isn’t working, it’s just become an extension of our narcissism. (It *could* be something better, but it isn’t.) We’re a highly individualistic culture, but the individualism is empty.
When FDR was pushing his program, the vision was to permanently contain the destructive aspects of capitalism, which would allow the emergence of an educated and progressive middle class, along with a reduction in poverty. And that worked, except for the ‘permanently’ part. Today, we don’t have a similar vision, or any vision at all, really.
Thanks for reading this and getting back to me. I know the subject isn’t interesting, but that’s a symptom of our problem—that we don’t understand the need to make basic changes in our civilization, so discussions of the nature of capitalism and alternatives just seem arcane. But if you’re in prison, a discussion of cutting torches and hacksaws should be fascinating.
Just beating the Republicans in the next election or two (and that’s important) won’t be enough. The Republicans do have a vision, and that’s a strength for them. It’s a vision that most people wouldn’t like if they understood it, but Republicans like it: it’s a vision of constantly increasing the share of GDP that goes to the 1%, and simultaneously destroying all the institutions that might prevent that, like democracy and freedom of the press, secular education, science—indeed the entire culture of the American middle class. Of course the Democratic Party must be co-opted and ultimately eliminated, and moderate Republicans must be suppressed as well.
I will let the foregoing serve to set the context for the following essay, “An Aversion to Capitalism.” We are like someone clinging to a cliff with the ocean crashing hundreds of feet beneath him, who cannot remember or understand how he came to this awful moment.
An Aversion to Capitalism
There are three basic questions about socialism that we have to answer. First, we need to explain socialism’s past—in particular, why has socialism (so far) failed to transform Western civilization? Second, we must ask about socialism’s future—what is our vision of an effective socialism in the twenty-first century? This second question assumes we have broad latitude to re-conceive and re-invent socialism—and we do. We have the power to create a new socialism.
Third, given that socialism is born out of an aversion to capitalism, what is the source of that aversion? This is a key issue: what is it that we don’t like about capitalism? The answer to this question is highly relevant to the first two questions, and so we will take up this question first.
In Marx’s writing, there is a lack of precision on what is objectionable about capitalism. Marx speaks of exploitation, of the alienation of labor, but it all sounds unconvincingly abstract, or as if he were avoiding something. Why launch a destructive revolution in response to problems with soft edges, problems that might be solved by democratic reforms? And this was ultimately a question that communism could not answer.
However, when we turn to Civilization and Capitalism by Fernand Braudel, it’s clear that Marx overlooked the importance of pre-industrial capitalism. For Marx, capitalist oppression did not truly begin until the means of production had been wrested from the guilds and village craftsmen of Europe. But what happened to European workers was a result of trends that began earlier and elsewhere.
In Braudel’s work we see what Marx missed. Pre-industrial capitalism, starting in the 1400s, laid the foundation for modern capitalism, and nowhere is this more obvious than in the New World.
Pre-industrial capitalism’s most dynamic sector was long-distance trade, the spice and silk trades in particular. As Braudel points out, a key problem was how Europe was to pay for these luxuries? Although prosperous, Europe did not produce much that Asia needed. Early on, when the trade was overland and Moslem merchants were the middlemen, Europe was able to pay partly in fine woolens manufactured in the Low Countries from English wool. But further east neither India nor China needed much that Europe produced, particularly given the cost of transport.
There was no single answer to this problem, but precious metals from the New World played a major role, particularly in trade with China. The silver of Potosi and Taxco enabled a thriving trans-Pacific trade in silk, porcelain and other finished goods that effectively brought China into the world economy. If Europe itself produced little that the Chinese wanted, the same was not true of the mines of Bolivia and Peru. Silver always had a place in Chinese markets.
Westerners appeared in China with something valuable that was derived from their administrative and technological expertise—silver. Taking silver to market in Shanghai meant building and sailing ships, casting cannons and developing the math to fire them accurately, making gunpowder and storing it safely, making sextants and training naval officers to use them, drilling soldiers endlessly, kidnapping sailors, making hundreds of miles of hawsers by hand, weaving and sewing countless sails, developing mining and smelting techniques (and supplying the mercury which was critical to smelting), and developing a brutally efficient colonial administration to provide the miners and keep them working. And food was needed everywhere—as well as paper and clerks to record everything.
Silver served as a shorthand or a symbol almost of European efficiencies which were otherwise hard to export.
The Chinese in turn offered high-value and labor-intensive goods in exchange for this silver: silk, porcelain, and lacquer.
Without the silver of Potosi, the effort to create a global trade network would have failed—China would have been included in only a minor way, as indeed was the case with Japan.
But the key point here is that this pre-industrial trade between Europe and China involved immense human suffering. The silver used to open Chinese markets was produced at a staggering human cost. At Cerro Potosi, “the mountain that eats men,” millions died—by one estimate, eight million. The lethalness of the colonial mine can be judged by the fact that even modern miners at Potosi have a life expectancy of about 40 years. One Spanish priest estimated that about half of the new miners were crippled within the first week.
The labor used at Potosi was more-or-less unfree. That is, some people “volunteered” but the Spanish tribute requirements left most with little choice. The tribute was deliberately set at a level that forced most subjects to work in the mines, leaving their villages. Often complete families made the trek, which was often arduous, given the altitude and the lack of food. Crowded into mining camps where food and shelter were expensive, exposed to European diseases and often injured or sickened by the work itself, the mortality rate was tremendous. The mining at Potosi led to a dramatic depopulation throughout what is now Bolivia and Peru. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerro_Rico and http://www.cesam.umu.se/digitalAssets/136/136019_seminarium-gil-monteroirsh_140108.pdf
And that impact was just from the largest mine in Bolivia. Potosi was the worst case by far—in the mining sector. But there were smaller silver and gold mines throughout the New World, just as lethal on a smaller scale—in Peru, Mexico, and Brazil.
And this is just mining, never mind the extreme death toll on sugar cane plantations (likely worse than mining overall), in tobacco processing in North America, in the wars fought to control the fur trade, among the Native Americans everywhere, and among sailors, soldiers, slaves and prostitutes. The death toll on the Middle Passage alone probably rivaled Potosi.
And these were not frontier anomalies, due to disorganization or unexpected challenges from the environment. The high death rates are everywhere evidence of intensive economic activity and a high level of integration with the global trade network. Silver, gold, fur, sugar, tobacco and slaves were all destined for the world market, and areas that did not produce these commodities were forced to play supporting roles. The farmers of Pennsylvania and New York grew wheat for the slaves in the West Indies, and New Englanders built and sailed the ships that carried that wheat south.
If an economic system may be said to have goals (or primary areas of focus), the goal of Western capitalism from 1419 (when the Portuguese occupied Cueta) until the Industrial Revolution was to create a global trade network encompassing India, China, Southeast Asia, Africa, Japan, and the New World. Gold from Ghana was used to purchase spices in India, silver from Potosi was used to purchase silks and porcelain from China, and opium from India was used later for the same purpose by the British, who did not have a Potosi of their own. Not all of these activities involved great suffering, at least at first. The Akan people panned for gold and traded it to the Portuguese for beads and cloth, but later the gold required more labor, and the price expanded to muskets, swords and brandy. And with Western weapons, local warfare became more destructive—and more slaves were captured.
But what has that to do with today’s capitalism? Yes, pre-industrial trade resulted in suffering that rivals the death toll of the World Wars—not just in relative terms, but in absolute numbers. You might argue that the economic compulsion to ruthlessly exploit labor was softened by the Industrial Revolution and automation—at least after the initial disruptions. Certainly, wages and living standards rose with the greater productivity brought by machines—eventually.
But that is incorrect. Perhaps—just perhaps—the scale of suffering has been reduced somewhat by machine productivity, but the pattern of sacrificing human lives for economic success is still with us. Although the lives sacrificed are now as likely those of customers rather than workers; in the bad old days, the workers were more at risk.
For example:
https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/6/28/15881720/deaths-senate-health-care-bcra
We are willing to sacrifice the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans, and the health of millions more, for insurance companies and the bonuses of their CEOs. You might say this isn’t on the scale of Cerro Potosi, but it took centuries for those millions of miners to die, and if the current American health system lasts the 300 years or so it took to mine out Potosi, then the death toll (at 25,000 per year) is 7.5 million, roughly the same as Cerro Potosi. In other words, the annual death rate from the Republican repeal-and-replace of Obamacare would be roughly the same as that hell on earth, Cerro Potosi, “the mountain that eats men.”
Forget “exploitation,” which is too abstract. Capitalism kills and it will inevitably kill unless restrained, because for capitalism to work large numbers of people, investors and workers alike, must see every situation in terms of profit and loss, of money earned or money lost. They are socialized by capitalism to ignore suffering and if lives are lost then the monetary loss associated with those lives (tools lost, insurance payments, expense to train replacements) must be calculated and recorded and the actual loss of human lives forgotten as soon as possible—or attributed to fate. In other words, the monetary loss is real, the actual loss is not.
Capitalism is so good at replacing life that we even accept capitalism’s version of death.
Consider the modern instances of tobacco companies killing six million per year globally, of the mesothelioma epidemic, of the death toll from oxycontin, trans-fats (up to 100,000 deaths annually in the US), sodium nitrite, benzo-diazepines, high-fructose corn syrup and plain old sugar—not to mention pesticides and herbicides, automobiles, motorcycles, farm equipment and firearms. Mining and oil drilling casualties shouldn’t be forgotten, either. And we should also count the death toll from the sheer stress of being a worker under this system.
https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/fast_facts/index.htm
Another example is the sugar industry. In the early sixties evidence was accumulating that there was a link between sugar consumption and heart disease, and the sugar industry launched a clandestine effort to suppress studies that indicated any such relationship, and to shift the entire blame to fats. Their own internal research showed differently. This effort succeeded and we still mostly see heart disease in terms of cholesterol—not just the general public but doctors and scientists as well.
How many lives were lost to this man-made illusion? That’s 55 years that we’ve misdiagnosed a major public health issue, and that is entirely due to capitalism.
A few weeks ago, I heard on the radio an interview of someone from the ACU (American Conservative Union). He said that the rights of the individual are the basis of the conservative movement. And while I believe individual rights are important, in a society that routinely kills hundreds of thousands of individuals every year, and blights the lives of millions of others with ill-health, addiction and ignorance, what is the point of individual rights? Isn’t the most basic right the right to live? Every other right we have is conditioned on life, because the dead have no individual rights—they can’t crowd-source a startup or join Mensa or vote Libertarian.
The people at the ACU may know this at some level, but maybe they figure the people who die are not people like them. Or perhaps they are in denial.
So, capitalism kills just as it did in Peru in the 1500s. Capitalism kills exactly as many people as it needs to, five hundred years ago as well as today, and many modern reforms are an effort to compensate for that fact. The FDA exists to prevent capitalism from poisoning us via food or medicine; the EPA exists to prevent capitalism from poisoning us via water and air. OHSA exists to keep capitalism from killing us while we work.
You might say, wait—wouldn’t any civilization this large necessarily cause death every time it made a change of any sort? That might be true, but it’s a question of scale and context. We didn’t just use asbestos until we discovered the harm it does to those who work with it—this had been demonstrated irrefutably by 1924, and there was some evidence as early as 1899. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asbestos.
But even in 1991 asbestos was still being used in the US:
“The use of asbestos in new construction projects has been banned for health and safety reasons in many developed countries or regions, including the European Union, Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, and New Zealand. A notable exception is the United States, where asbestos continues to be used in construction such as cement asbestos pipes. The 5th Circuit Court prevented the EPA from banning asbestos in 1991 because EPA research showed the ban would cost between $450 and 800 million while only saving around 200 lives in a 13-year timeframe, and that the EPA did not provide adequate evidence for the safety of alternative products.[59]”
Here the tradeoff between lives and profit was made explicit by a federal court. If $2.25 to $4 million can be saved by sacrificing a human life, then that’s a life well spent. One can imagine exactly the same calculation being made at Cerro Potosi. Naturally we realize that this tradeoff does not apply to the wealthy—no one would think of sacrificing a billionaire’s life for $4,000,000. Or for that matter, the life of a federal judge.
You might say, but weren’t more lives saved from fire than were sacrificed to asbestos? But if this had been an altruistic trade-off, capitalism would have done everything possible to minimize the deaths from asbestos, by using filters and face masks for the workers. In fact these masks were not always used even in the ‘70s. But the link between asbestos and asbestosis was conclusively demonstrated in 1924 by an inquest into a worker’s death in the UK, and the link between asbestos and mesothelioma was proven in 1960 in Australia.
And in any case, the prolonged use of asbestos had the effect of delaying the introduction of substitutes that were better at preventing fires. For example, see http://www.nfpa.org/news-and-research/fire-statistics-and-reports/fire-statistics/fires-in-the-us/overall-fire-problem/overview-of-the-us-fire-problem, for detailed statistics on fire casualties in the US. As awareness of the hazards of asbestos increased in the late ‘70s, and substitutes were introduced, the number of civilian fire deaths started to decline around 1980, and they have declined to the present day, with various fiberglass-based products and other substitutes taking the place of asbestos. In other words, as asbestos was being phased out, fire deaths fell significantly.
The widespread use of asbestos—the near-monopoly it held among flame-retardant materials—prevented the development of safer and more effective alternatives.
And then we have the case of oxycontin, where the company almost certainly understood the addictive nature of their product, and set out to obscure that risk from the very beginning.
[Note that Dr. Mercola’s health recommendations at the end of this article are not relevant to this discussion.]
I have not included the deaths due to unchecked climate change, which could amount to hundreds of millions in the next few decades. It is quite possible that capitalism’s destruction of human life might extend to agriculture itself, the basis for human life. If farming becomes impossible in some areas (and we already see this in parts of Texas), then the population that is dependent on those farms must decline or migrate.
Now—we ordinarily do not see this problem as a systemic problem with capitalism, but as a problem with unscrupulous capitalists, which is a natural mistake. Many of the CEOs of our corporations have been socialized to behave as sociopaths—they lie, they are unspeakably grasping, and they display a profound indifference to the suffering that results from their actions. They seem to feel no sense of responsibility or remorse, and if called to account they often act as if they are victims of injustice.
However, this is most definitely not the result of bad people corrupting an otherwise good or morally neutral system. The system selects and trains the people, and the CEOs are often the unwitting victims of this process. Tobacco company executives were often heavy smokers and died of lung cancer at the usual tragic rate. This is not to say that executives of destructive companies should escape punishment; society needs all the defenses it can muster against capitalism. But the moral bankruptcy of many CEOs is a result of capitalism’s destructive power, not its cause. Yes, they are outstandingly bad people—but they didn’t get that bad by accident.
You may object and say, look at all the money Bill Gates has given away, the work he’s done to limit malaria and other diseases, and likewise Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett and the money they gave for education and the environment. Aren’t they good men? Weren’t those good actions? And they were indeed. But software and electronics do not require killing millions, at least so far. So Gates, Packard and Hewlett were never faced with that necessity. Not all capitalist enterprises are necessarily lethal, but the potential is always there.
A simple thought experiment may shed light on this problem. Let’s say that all the Fortune 500 companies were given a simple choice—double your revenue and profits but at the cost of killing 100,000 people. However, no one would ever know about the deaths—they would be untraceable. How many of these companies would choose the higher revenue and profits? I submit that most of them would. Not necessarily all, because simple human decency is gratifyingly hard to eradicate. Let’s say fifty of these five hundred CEOs would shrink from corporate murder.
What happens to that fifty? Isn’t virtue its own reward? But when the next annual financial results are reported, our good CEOs will clearly have been left behind by their peers in terms of performance. Some of those fifty will lose their jobs immediately, others will lose their bonuses and eventually—one way or another—those fifty companies will end up with CEOs who know how to seize new opportunities, or (much less likely) the companies will go out of business. The righteous fifty will either lose their jobs or learn better.
Therefore, personal morality can never compensate for capitalism’s lethal potential. Anyone ethical enough to resist (and resistance is extremely difficult) will simply be replaced.
So, capitalism kills. Not every single capitalist enterprise is a threat to life and public health, but the entire system is always a threat. In the time it takes you to read this essay, about 25 people will have died from tobacco in the US alone.
And I do not mean that killing necessarily completely defines capitalism. Fire also kills and it’s always a threat to burn out of control—but it’s a tool which we could not live without. And likewise for electricity, lye, chlorine bleach, etc. Capitalism is useful, but it’s dangerous.
If the comparison to fire or bleach is unconvincing, then consider our legal system. Both the law and capitalism are social constructs that have evolved slowly over centuries, even millennia. We cannot live without the law, and yet how much misery it has caused! How many people have been unjustly executed or imprisoned in the name of the law, even in modern times. And how often has the law been used as an instrument of oppression by the powerful? In modern times, from Stalin to Erdogan, dictators have suborned the legal system to punish their opponents, real and imagined.
And we are aware (or half-aware) that the law, even in a democratic country with finely honed safeguards, can become monstrous. False accusations are made—and sometimes believed.
But when it comes to capitalism, we’re blind to that. People who wouldn’t think of using lye without rubber gloves honestly believe that market forces are always benign. We do not have the caution with capitalism that we have with fire or with capital punishment, and yet capitalism is unquestionably more dangerous than either. At its worst, the law may execute a few dozen people unjustly, but capitalism kills millions globally every year without a murmur from the people.
We need the same safeguards around capitalism that we have for any other destructive (but useful) force in our lives.
And this starts with the awareness that capitalism kills on a large scale, unless it is prevented from doing so by a greater power.
So, this is the source of our aversion to capitalism. It kills, and it may kill us or our loved ones. And it is not evil CEOs that are the ultimate cause of this continuing massacre.
It is instead capitalism. This realization should shock us into self-recognition, into understanding something we have been denying for a century and a half: socialism is founded on a deep reverence for human life, the same as many religions. And yet because of the Zeitgeist of the 19th century, and because we couldn’t endure capitalism’s seemingly irrational destructiveness, we assumed socialism would be more rational, hence scientific. But although socialism encompasses a scientific perspective, it did not spring from science.
Socialism is not just a political and social program, derived from economic analysis. Instead, it originates in the life of the spirit.
We object to capitalism because we believe that life is sacred.
The Socialist Investor 