Capitalism doesn’t work
—but don’t discuss the alternative
In a four-part documentary on RTE television shown last November, the economist and commentator David McWilliams attempted to explain the economic crisis and the direction that the world’s economies should take to get us out of it.
The analysis included many useful facts, and interviews with critics of the failed policies of capitalism. However, McWilliams failed to provide any analysis that did not assume that capitalism itself could provide the answer. Several contributors explicitly said that capitalism could not go along the same tracks, that it is a failed system, and that if we continue to go on the way we are we are doomed as our ecosystem fails.
McWilliams also showed that capitalism has given us millions of starving people, a wasteful destruction of natural resources, such as forests and oil, a dangerous depletion of water stocks through misuse and pollution, and a reduction in agricultural production while there is an increase in the world’s population. He spent a lot of time showing how the love affair of the United States with the car was gobbling up the remaining oil stocks of the world at a destructive pace and is increasingly threatening the food supply by the use of bio-fuels.
And this is where his analysis goes all wrong. He is looking at the world as a consumption society based on the needs already created by capitalism, while he also states that the future will be completely different from what we have now.
He points to China and its desire to join the consumer society, particularly its “need” for cars. Its move to high industrialisation has reduced the amount of its agricultural land, and this means that China, which was once self-sufficient in food, will need to import food very soon. He rightly points out that as the leading predator capitalist countries have had a disproportionate share of the world’s resources they are not in a position to say that China should not use energy resources, or buy its stocks of food.
He offered no solution for other Asian countries, or Africa, which shows that his analysis is done purely in terms of what the United States, Europe, Australia and Japan see as the next direction of capitalism, namely in China, which has already provided such a large proportion of loans and demand for products.
Unfortunately, the creation of a capitalist class in China will only be to the detriment of the vast majority of the Chinese people, for the benefit of the few. This move to exploitative economics and western-style consumerism in China is a tragic loss of an opportunity to advance technologically for the benefit of all their people.
This direction is creating conflict, confusion, and misery, with large-scale opposition emerging there, as, despite the distortion of socialism over many years, the people believed in a collective society. The idea that a capitalist class will raise all boats can be answered by looking around the world today at the concentration of the world’s wealth in fewer hands.
The other major issue mentioned was climate change, and the spectre of resource wars over water and food, together with population movements as a result of rising sea levels. McWilliams interviewed Peter Sutherland, former head of BP and now a wolf in sheep’s clothing, having being appointed, among other roles, a special envoy to the United Nations for migration!
We were shown K Street in Washington, where 41,000 lobbyists similar to Peter Sutherland are registered, who put pressure on the government, give vast donations and hire former government officials to guarantee the interests of corporations and financiers. McWilliams points out that these people are a threat to democracy; yet he says the United States will be the one to provide a solution to the economic crisis. We are to look to the very people who are responsible for the crisis.
In his words, “going green,” combined with electric cars, will be the solution, marrying “mean with green” and appealing to capitalism to develop greener economies. There was no serious discussion about solutions for the distribution of wealth, or of agricultural policies with sustainable national plans, nor any solutions to the conservation of water or fishing stocks, nor reduction of military spending, let alone any mention of socialism, although consequences of capitalism were raised.
How can any serious economist have an analysis of capitalism and not even refer to Marxism and the socialist organisation of society as a possible alternative, except to say it doesn’t work? And, considering the harm done by cars (according to his own analysis), no mention was made of public transport systems. There was no mention of useless consumer goods being produced, or the advertising that goes with this, in creating wants, except to berate the consumer for wanting them and looking for credit to buy them, and asserting that “we are all addicted” to consumer goods and credit.
The only mention of socialism was by an extreme right-wing financier, who said it had been tried fifty times and doesn’t work. They had just spent almost the entire series in saying capitalism doesn’t work, yet they are looking for a new model of the same failed system.
They reduced a socialist system that provided free health, education, housing and full employment to millions to showing that (according to them) it could produce only a poor design of car as, sniggering like schoolboys, they showed us the Trabant car (produced thirty years ago).
It would be stooping to their own level to go into any detail in pointing out the vast industrial expansion of the Soviet Union, or the inventions bought (or stolen) by the United States in the 1970s and 80s, or to point out that functionality was the aim in producing cars combined with a public transport system, and not the need to produce new designs to keep up the demand for more and more cars.
A system that at least has the declared aim of bringing about a sharing of the wealth of the world is surely deserving of examination in its own right, as is the Marxist analysis of the contradictions inherent in capitalism, which are now more evident than ever.
They dare not allow a real discussion of a socialist alternative. If, as they assert, socialism so far has not worked, that does not mean that as a system it cannot work in the future.
The length of time that socialism has been tried is minuscule in comparison with the length of time for which capitalism has been tried; and what has capitalism done but bring people to the brink of the destruction of the planet?
If ever there was a time for looking to a new way of organising the world’s political and economic system, surely this is it.
And of course this leaves out the existence of Cuba, and the movement towards more equal societies in Latin America, with new models emerging that—if not overthrown by capitalist interests—will lead to socialism.
David McWilliams has the reputation of being the smarter of the economists, in that he predicted the economic crisis long before other economists in this country; but his refusal to take a broader look at the world puts him firmly in an old mode of thinking and limits him to believing that new technology and continued consumer demand, such as that of China, will allow the United States to lead us out of the recession and continue to “lead” the world. Sadly, he lost an opportunity to be a leader of new ideas and to help prevent more wars and more destruction of resources and people, which leaves him with less awareness than ordinary people who come together in many groups and alliances to fight against such a system all over the world.
According to this series, 95 or even 99 per cent of economists got it wrong about the crisis. That much we can agree with.
[DUB] |