Greider's central premise is that the values of the free market system are in conflict with core American values.
The problem is not the marketplace and it is not the government. The problem originates in the context of clashing values between society and capitalism and, since this human society cannot surrender its deepest values, it must try to alter capitalism's. As we look deeper for the soul of capitalism, we find that, in the terms of ordinary human existence, American capitalism doesn't appear to have one.
Let me dismiss two criticisms of Greider's book right off the bat. First, Greider is not a communist or socialist; Greider does not hate America's free market economy. Second, Greider does not believe that the solution to our economic problems will come from big government solutions.
Greider does acknowledge the role of government in our economy:
It was government, not private enterprise, that built the sewers and water systems that eradicated common illnesses and thus extended longevity; government also built the roads and schools that financed technological development. Life-enhancing changes also were wrought by social reformers, from working-class labor organizers to the martyred advocates of racial equality to upper-class humanitarians -all morally angered by obvious injustices, pointless brutalities.
Greider also recognizes the strengths of our free market economy:
This constant recycling of capital is the brilliant core that makes the capitalist process so dynamic and creative, an engine that continuously borrows old money earned from past enterprise to launch new enterprise into the future. The surplus of wealth does not sit idle in miserly piles. It finances a continual regeneration. Thus, capitalism adapts more readily to the unknown future because, in a sense, it is continuously reinventing the future.
America, that is, has solved the ancient economic problem known to all previous millennia of human toil. We have escaped the elemental struggle that has stalked human societies since the origins: hunder, scarcity, the burdens of producing enough for human survival and a general standard of well-being that is not restricted to the powerful few; the king and high priests. . . . For the fortunate minority who live in the most advanced nations, the fundamental economic threat is now, quite literally, extinguished.
So what's the problem? Greider describes one aspect of the problem as "the principles of more".
The regime of "more," individual grievances aside, also leads to an unfulfilled society, as some people are beginning to recognize. This was actually the point Samuel Gompers was trying to make back in 1893, though his remarks were maliciously caricatured. What the labor leader said in full was: "Labor wants more schoolhouses and less jails; more books and less arsenals; more learning and less vice; more constant work and less crime; more leisure and less greed; more justice and less revenge; in fact, more of the opportunities to cultivate our better natures." Gompers's list of "demands" seems uncannily relevant to our present dilemma. It suggests a social definition of "more" - a general prosperity that does not confuse and destroy life itself.
Grieder believes that America is ready for change.
The house of economics is due for major renovations, if not a complete tear down, because the economic order has lost one of its main emotional suppositions: the motivating fear of scarcity and deprivation.
But somehow the fear of scarcity lives on in spite of apparent abundance.
[W]hy does the economic order still require a permanent subcategory of the impoverished and dependent - Marx's famous "reserve army" of the unemployed? For that matter, why must society accept a capitalism that persists in generating greater inequalities, generation after generation, as the required terms for sustaining general abundance?
Those seem like fair questions. What are we missing?
The big, fundamental questions have all been answered, or so we are told. Continuing disputes among economists or business and political leaders typically involve the subsidiary issues of how best to mange things for maximum output and efficiency.
Something seems to be just a little out of kilter.
I suspect many Americans, including among the affluent, experience a vague sense of personal shame because they regularly encounter conflicts between their own values and human aspirations and the imperatives of the economic system - conflicts they are unable to resolve. They either do not earn enough to "live well" in material terms. Or they earn more and more, yet still find themselves unable to "live well" in human terms.
Ah, yes. Our old friend alienation. Grieder asks a few more questions.
Why does it have to be this way? Are Americans inevitably consigned to a series of dispiriting trade-offs between their lives and values and social obligations, on one hand, and the demands of gorgeous, beckoning abundance? Or might people, instead, actually change the nature of American capitalism? . . . My premise - that American capitalism is ripe for reinvention - is not based on fanciful supposition.
If we had any supply-siders or Milton Friedman free market utopians here, they would be chomping at the bit to see what Grieder's Big Government Solution is. Those people would be sorely disappointed.
The federal government cannot do this for people. . . .
Government's handicaps are more substantial than the conservative mood. Washington, as we explore later on, has itself become a principal barrier to reformulating the economic system, and it regularly acts as unwitting collaborator in much of the social damage. . . . [T]he arena of electoral politics is not the place to discover which ideas, which ventures and arrangements, are the most viable solutions. People on the grund have to do that for themselves.
This observation is intended to disturb the settled habits of thought, especially among left-liberal progressives, and discourage the notion that they can count on government to descend like a dues ex machina and miraculously resolve these deeper conflicts between society and the economic realm.
Greider acknowledges that government has played an important role in moderating the evils of capitalism in the past.
The great accomplishment of twentieth-century reform politics was to establish government as the counterforce to capitalism, the rival power center that confronted business and finance on behalf of society, that could brake the encroaching domination of private economic power, curb the excesses and abuses, or clean up the social wreckage that business left in its wake. . . .
Yet there is another discomforting reality to face: Government in the long run did not succeed in resolving the deeper collisions between society and capitalism. . . .
Government instead has become the battleground for ongoing political conflicts over what exactly society is allowed to want or what it can afford, within the terms of business accounting. . . . I do not say this to belittle the great political accomplishments of the past or to second guess the many significant improvements government interventions have achieved. What I do assert is that "strong government" is an insufficient response to the underlying problem of capitalism.
The problem is not the marketplace and it is not government. The problem originates in the context of clashing values between society and capitalism and, since this human society cannot surrender its deepest values, it must try to alter capitalism's. As we look deeper for the soul of capitalism, we find that, in the terms of ordinary human existence, American capitalism doesn't appear to have one.
Alert readers will have noticed that I came full circle. We are back to the question about the soul of capitalism. Where we are heading next is into the morass of those moral values thingies. I'll cut off with a quote from a 1944 Viennese economist.
The Viennese economist Karl Polanyi described in
The Great Transformation, published in 1944, how the struggle for domination between free-running capitalism and society's values led to the cataclysmic breakdown known as the Great Depression and gave rise to the violent, irrational politics of fascism. Polanyi wrote:
To allow the market mechanism to be sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment, indeed even of their purchasing power, would result in the demolition of society. For the alleged commodity "labor power" cannot be shoved about, used indiscriminately, or even left unused, without affecting also the human individual who happens to be the bearer of this peculiar commodity. In disposing of a man's labor power the system would, incidentally, dispose of the physical, psychological, and moral entity of "man" attacked to that tag. Robbed of the protective cover of cultural institutions, human beings would perish from the effects of social exposure ... Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighborhoods and landscapes defiled, rivers polluted.
Polanyi's recitation of the endangered elements resonate familiarly because it invokes many of the same injuries and grievances that society experiences today. Though the realm of prosperityis many times higher and far more inclusive, Americans encounter the same pressures tugging at the public's precious assets, from defiled landscapes and rivers to workers robbed of self.
. . . How these trade-offs might be approached and eventually realigned is our subject.
In one of my early diaries I linked to Jim Gilliam's blog where he states that the opportunity society is our idea. You don't have to take my word or Jim's word for it. Google "opportunity society" and decide for yourself who has the real claim to providing working Americans with an opportunity society.
Everything I have covered in my first five diaries should be the economic conventional wisdom in the Democratic party. It's time for Democrats and liberals to take back the economic intiative from Bush and the Republican party. It's time for proud liberal Democrats to stop allowing a vote on restricting bankruptcy protection for middle class Americans. It's time for proud liberal Democrats to start letting Americans know that we are the party of working Americans and the Republican party is the party of corporate America. Isn't that supposed to be the conventional wisdom?
