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El nuevo anticapitalismo

Nov 6, 2019 Harold James

PRINCETON – Actualmente estamos atravesando la transformación tecnológica y económica más dramática en la historia de la humanidad. También somos testigos del menor respaldo con el que cuenta el capitalismo en todo el mundo. ¿Estas dos tendencias están conectadas y, de ser así, de qué manera?

Es tentador decir que la creciente impopularidad del capitalismo no es más que un síntoma de ludismo –el impulso que llevó a los trabajadores artesanos a comienzos de la Revolución Industrial a romper la maquinaria que amenazaba sus empleos-. Pero esa explicación no capta la complejidad del movimiento actual en contra del capitalismo, que está siendo liderado no tanto por trabajadores angustiados como por intelectuales y políticos.

La actual ola anticapitalista se produce en un momento en el que el neoliberalismo de libre mercado y la globalización son fustigados casi universalmente. La oposición al neoliberalismo surgió originariamente de la izquierda, pero ha sido adoptada –quizás hasta de manera más vigorosa y rencorosa- por la derecha populista.

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Harold James

Writing for PS since 2001
187 Commentaries

Harold James is Professor of History and International Affairs at Princeton University. A specialist on German economic history and on globalization, he is a co-author of The Euro and The Battle of Ideas, and the author of The Creation and Destruction of Value: The Globalization Cycle, Krupp: A History of the Legendary German Firm, Making the European Monetary Union, and the forthcoming The War of Words.

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0 Comments on this paragraph, 11 Comments on this article

Jean-Pierre Dumas Dec 13, 2019

most useful???
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I Obi Nov 22, 2019

"...But that explanation doesn’t capture the complexity of today’s movement against capitalism, which is being led not so much by distressed workers as by intellectuals and politicians."

Sentences such as these make clear that capitalists simply do not understand the situation we're in today. The intellectuals and politicians ARE distressed workers. We are at an unprecedented time as the article suggests. Millennials are simply the most educated generation in US history. They're migrating to politics because their pay is NOT proportional to their labor and the wage gap (male to female, minority to the majority, and working/middle class to ultra-rich) is massive.

The sooner authors such as this one gets his head out of the sand, the better for us all.
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Andrés Galia Nov 11, 2019

I believe that the author misses one important point. A lot of people are reacting against capitalism because they are realizing that it is based in a Society where individualism and not solidarity is important and where the needs of human beings are not as important as the needs of the Economy.
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Cary Fraser Nov 11, 2019

"...the defenders of capitalism need to figure out how to make the system more inclusive, so that it can claim the public’s support once again."

Capitalism has been shaped by the imperative of sustaining profitability - at the expense, when necessary, of the sustainability of communities in the short term.

With climate change, profitability and the sustainability of communities will have to be central to the reform and transformation of the capitalist ethos.

The Great Depression was exemplary of the folly and recklessness that underpinned the capitalist excesses that led to the New Deal - imposed by an assertive central state - which was key to economic recovery and the restructuring of the economy and the "rules of the game."

Climate change will require a similar effort to balance the imperatives of profit and the sustainability of the human community writ large.
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Joe Ryan Nov 10, 2019

This essay makes some good points, but it is hampered by not being clear about what is meant by the term "capitalism." The assumption that everyone agrees what that term means is surely unwarranted, and the leading candidate for its meaning (which Prof. James may agree with) is arguably not accurate and is actually a propaganda device.

Most commonly, capitalism is identified as free markets. (This is inherent in the term, "neoliberalism," for example.)

For capitalists, however, "free markets" (and "laissez faire") isn't about perfectly competitive markets, which capitalists hate. It's about delegitimizing any interference in capitalists' control of firms. Nonetheless, capitalists promote their interests politically by identifying capitalism with freedom (while obfuscating whose freedom they're talking about).

So, if "capitalism" isn't "free markets," then what is it?

Capitalism is an industrial economy dominated by firms that are the properties of a small minority of the population, "capitalists." As owners, shareholders, and senior managers, capitalists direct the firms' transactions to maximize their incomes. Other persons are used ("employed") by the firms: they have no legitimate rights in directing the firms, and the payments they receive are costs to be minimized by the firms' management.

Capitalism is also an ideology: the fundamentalist laissez faire theory that the public does not and should not, for the general welfare, have any rights to constrain capitalists or interfere in the direction of firms.

If we use the terms in these ways, then (for example) the idea expressed in Prof. James's essay, that capitalism can be defended by making it more inclusive, is a contradiction in terms. Inclusivity, as President Reagan so rightly said about Medicare, is socialism, or in other words an attack on capitalism.

Whether capitalism has, as this essay says, the "genius ... to produce organic answers to most problems of scarcity and resource allocation," is an empirical question, although the question appears to be tailored to correspond to economists' normative theory of general equilibrium, or in other words to the erroneous concept of capitalism as perfectly competitive markets.

Empirically, however, there is evidence that capitalism in its industrial form, even though not a perfectly competitive market economy, drives to create monopolies around the successful variants of new products (the Model T Ford, the iPhone, etc.), as well as to achieve economies of scale. Both these enhancers of profits also generated increases in real income for society.

On the other hand, in the finance-capitalism variant, capitalists are mainly rentiers who mine value from existing industry by skimming income and securitizing and stripping assets out of successful firms, abusing the weaknesses of corporate governance rules in the spirit of laissez faire.

Efforts to identify benefits from finance capitalism, in terms of increases in real income for society, have not come up with much. But, judging by the rising share of the financial sector in U.S. national income over the past generation, this may be the dominant variant of U.S. capitalism at present.

So, Prof. James's essay makes a sound point when it identifies financial market dysfunction as a source of popular dissatisfaction with capitalism. How we understand that point, however, and the implications we draw from it, depend on how we understand the terms.
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Reginald Von Tickleschtik Nov 7, 2019

Tucker Carlson has channeled the pathos of the Trumpian right through lengthy rants against capitalism, complaining about “mercenaries who feel no long-term obligation to the people they rule” and “don’t even bother to understand our problems.” I would point out that Carlson has NEVER engaged in a lengthy rant "against capitalism". His rants have to do with elitist politicians, (and "journalists" as far as that goes"). No one who watches Mr. Carlson will be mislead by this particular effort at "fake news." You ought to be ashamed but I don't suppose that's even possible any longer.
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donald quixote Nov 7, 2019

Can’t quite figure out whether this is a piece of control-opposition release to say as evil as it gets Capitalism v3 [version-1 was the 19th century Gilded Age, version-2 the pre-WW2 New Deal, version-3 the post-Nixon Petro-dollar] is all we’ve got as long as they can solve the greenhouse emission bob’s-your-uncle it’s hunky-dory.

Or is this an intellectual precis that counter-intuitively concludes despite the impoverishment woes experienced around the world over our capitalist extraction is superior because it’s conducive to inter-governmental cooperation?

Both seems palpable – why, it’s not because of the broad-based solutions it claim to provide, but the systemic wide-spread corruption by lobbying [big INCs paying off politicians] turn-a-blind-eye to the system itself, when the world is addicted to debt-opioid causing super-inflation that erodes all monetary savings, all value of human labour, it is heading for a melt-down that is more horrifying than the 1929 Depression and 2008 GFC combined.

But all this is still "curated" by paid Main stream media slanting the problems are politicians like Trump, Bolsonaro or Johnson… all of whom are actors, symptoms and frustration to the system. The crony-capitalist catabolic extractive system controlled media still claims free-market [free of all domestic regulation; international regulation for globalization] “liberal democracy” is faltering but it should still work when we have another election.

What we do need urgently is to get rid of the US Federal Reserve, dissolve all the Central Banks cartel, stop the monetization of financing, peg all currency back to Gold or Silver, tax the top 20% on all their assets (including the trusts and charity tools) 75%, let sovereign governments do the minting and governing, with persistence the world should recover within a decade.
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Ariel Tejera Nov 6, 2019

Removed duplicate message.
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Ariel Tejera Nov 6, 2019

The author summarizes the condition of the peoples, disenfranchised by the capitalism of the last decade, and puts the 2007 financial crisis as the social trigger of the current unrest. Also mentions the complexity and diversity of global adverse circumstances making matters worse. I will just comment that China was not yet a heavyweight in the 80s, when the financialization of corporations (mergers, etc) began, oil prices exploded, women entered to compete in the work force, NAFTA was signed, and in general the crisis of 2007 was cooked up.
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Prashant Kotak Nov 6, 2019

A real danger exists of the following: that automation leads to large scale technological unemployment in the free world, causing economic chaos and political roil. And in that situation, China will be ready with the tacit offer of a technologically advanced, socially engineered, high surveillance, but orderly, dystopia. There is a long tradition in Europe of being pulled towards communistic egalitarian models espoused in the east. I can see the possibility of an entire new generation of the intellectual left across Europe being very attracted to such a Chinese offer. In the UK, the Labour old guard currently heading the party long ago surrendered their heart, to a colder dominatrix further to the north, but I don't get the impression the younger generation in Europe is as much pulled towards that any more; But I suspect they are much more susceptible to the seduction of this mystic new far-eastern dominatrix though.
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