This is the tired refrain we often hear from the apologists and advocates of capitalism: ?It?s unfair to lambaste capitalism with the flaws of our economic system, because our economic system isn?t at all true to the core and classic principles of capitalism. If we only had a system that was fastidiously faithful to the philosophy of capitalism then everyone would see what a brilliant and splendorous system capitalism really is.?
Translation: ?I just want to think and talk about what a lovely, lofty system the ?free market? is in theory, I don?t wish to confront the hard-to-defend reality of the socioeconomic injustice and human wretchedness that masses of working-poor and unemployed people are forced to routinely endure as they struggle to survive under capitalism.?
The harsh and dehumanizing reality of capitalism, for the information of any free-marketarian ideologue who hasn?t been down from his ivory tower lately, is as follows. Firstly, a morally unjustifiable asymmetry in the distribution of wealth, with the result that a predatory and plutocratic few enjoy extreme and opulent affluence while the plebian bulk of humanity suffers moderate to extreme poverty and privation (some literally scrounging in garbage dumps for barely edible foodstuffs to sustain their malnourished bodies).
Secondly, capitalism is an inherently dehumanizing system not merely because it degrades men and women with insulting and infra dig indigence, but because it objectifies them into mere factory robots, and supermarket checker robots, and office worker robots, etc., performing menial and servile tasks that generate revenue for owners. That is, under capitalism human individuals are no longer treated as such, instead they?re constrained by the system to accept an existential state of affairs in which they?re stereotyped as, related to as, and valued (or disvalued) as their commercial function, their role in the commerce of the market, i.e. their cog-like job in the economic machine . An economic machine that?s geared to use people, to turn them into means to the ends, to the profits of their employers.
From a humanistic point of view then, the fundamental and enormous sin of capitalism is that it de-dignifies us into things, things that serve someone else?s selfish purposes. And spiritually, this endemic capitalistic thingification and exploitation of working people does us the ultimate injury by alienating us from our own inner creative nature. That is, instead of our economic productivity being experienced as an expression of our indwelling quantum of divine creativity and ingenuity, it?s reduced to an exploitable resource that belongs to a boss or corporation ? we?re effectively estranged from our ultimate nature and immanent godlikeness. It?s not at all a rhetorical exaggeration to say that capitalism?s commodification of ordinary Joes and Janes into wage-earning chattel excommunicates them from the beatitude of their own personal portion of cosmic creativity, that it condemns us to a spiritually forlorn state of living without a keen conscious sense of Transcendence actualizing itself through our daily constructive activities.
Doesn?t this pretty much cover the existential and ethical badness of capitalism? What more can really be said against our system of predaceous and parasitic ?private enterprise?? Well, there is the underlying primitive alpha dog mentality that capitalism in both theory and practice is predicated upon and promotes. Since I?m engaged in critically slicing through capitalism?s bourgeois and Babbittish baloney I?d be quite remiss if I neglected to mention that modern capitalism is just the same old sour and foul-tasting wine of to the strong go all the spoils in new ideological wineskins.
In the grandiose guise of the ?free market?, capitalism gives the ole heave-ho to the last 2,500 years of man?s ethical growth and returns us to a system of society in which the only socioeconomic law in operation is the law of the jungle ? dominate or be dominated. A system in which individuals are shamelessly unfettered from acting upon their animalistic aspiration to achieve and exercise social dominance over their neighbor. A system in which the brutelike striving for social dominance takes the crass form of economic dominance, and in which economic dominance is reached by ruthlessly and rapaciously reaping the fruits of other people?s labors and losses so as to become ?rich?. The modern ?rich man? is just a Neanderthaloid alpha male (or female) dressed up in a business suit and Rolex watch. The vaunted freedom of the ?free market? boils down to little more than society granting people the licentious and amoral permission to conduct themselves in an atavistically self-assertive and avaricious fashion.
In other words, social Darwinism decked out as the doctrine of the ?free market? is the order of the day. Say what?! Well, let me quote the better part of a paragraph here from the Encyclop?dia Britannica?s article on social Darwinism, ?The theory was used to support laissez-faire capitalism and political conservatism. Class stratification was justified on the basis of ?natural? inequalities among individuals, for the control of property was said to be a correlate of superior and inherent moral attributes such as industriousness, temperance, and frugality. Attempts to reform society through state intervention or other means would, therefore, interfere with natural processes; unrestricted competition and defense of the status quo were in accord with biological selection. The poor were the ?unfit? and should not be aided; in the struggle for existence, wealth was a sign of success.?
You might have noted how the article uses the past tense, as if social Darwinism is a dated worldview that no longer informs the thinking of folks who are pro-capitalist. But in actuality just about all of the backward thinking described above is still very much with us, deeply ensconced in the body of ideas espoused by right-of-center politicos, commentators, and businessmen ? by disciples of Reganomics and ?libertarianism? and all the in-vogue schools of economic thought. For example, believers in laissez-faire capitalism still tend to think in terms of the strong, i.e. of people who enjoy affluence, being superiorly endowed with morally excellent traits such as a stronger work ethic, enterprisingness, thriftiness, etc., which supposedly entitle them to the higher quality of life they enjoy. While the weak, i.e. the poor, the unemployed, and the homeless allegedly lack these good traits and therefore should disappear from our communities into the mendicant margins of society ? the next best thing to them literally dying off.
Is this over the top of me? Alas no, according to contemporary conservatives, the weak and inferior, you know, the folks in the lower economic classes, aren?t ?entitled? to anything from society. The very concept of ?entitlements? is every bit as abhorrent to them as to a classic 19th century social Darwinist. And our latter-day social Darwinists, the conservatives, certainly have no trouble with the class stratification of society ? to the conservative mind-set a form of hierarchical society divided into disproportionately empowered socioeconomic classes is quite natural and acceptable. Indeed, rationalizing such an unequal status quo, and unrestricted competition and greed are the hallmarks of conservatism and free-marketarianism. So how exactly has our capitalist society moved beyond the unprogressive social Darwinism of the benighted 1800s?!
It seems that we?re just less blunt and boorish about our regressively, cavemanly social-Darwinian attitudes nowadays, but they still fairly distinctly lurk beneath both the economic realities and ideals of our ostensively ?civilized? world order. This makes for a world order that?s hardly kind & gentle, and that in many instances is egregiously cruel and brutal.
Capitalism, it?s plain to see, is certainly no utopia at all, though the staunch proponents of its theory tend to be quixotically utopian as far as their temperamental unwillingness and intellectual inability to confront the obvious negativity of capitalism?s facts on the ground goes. That capitalism is a socially, morally, and spiritually dismal system in which the majority of mankind is locked into chronic lack and pauperism; is dehumanized and alienated from spiritual and personal authenticity; and has reverted to an uncompassionately Darwinian, downright troglodytic take on economics and society; that all of this is empirically the case, and conspicuously so, doesn?t penetrate the clanky, clunky cognitive armor of free-market fanatics and capitalist cultists one bit.
How so?! The intellectually dishonest and facile defense of the conservative booster of a ?free economy? is to simply reject disconfirming real-world data in favor of the elegance of laissez-faireism, to inanely cling to the psychological safety blanket of ideology in the face of so much human pain. This works well enough to keep Republicans and rich folk cozy in their pro-capitalist creed, but unfortunately it means no measurable change of heart in these dogmatic elitists at the top of the socioeconomic food chain, and no foreseeable altruistically-inspired amelioration of the lot of the average workingperson. Nope, workingpeople can no longer wait for business and political leaders who are invested in keeping the faith in capitalism to give us real change from the top down, we need to begin kicking the system and philosophy of capitalism to the curb of history ourselves, or keep getting our rear ends kicked by it.
Translation: ?I just want to think and talk about what a lovely, lofty system the ?free market? is in theory, I don?t wish to confront the hard-to-defend reality of the socioeconomic injustice and human wretchedness that masses of working-poor and unemployed people are forced to routinely endure as they struggle to survive under capitalism.?
The harsh and dehumanizing reality of capitalism, for the information of any free-marketarian ideologue who hasn?t been down from his ivory tower lately, is as follows. Firstly, a morally unjustifiable asymmetry in the distribution of wealth, with the result that a predatory and plutocratic few enjoy extreme and opulent affluence while the plebian bulk of humanity suffers moderate to extreme poverty and privation (some literally scrounging in garbage dumps for barely edible foodstuffs to sustain their malnourished bodies).
Secondly, capitalism is an inherently dehumanizing system not merely because it degrades men and women with insulting and infra dig indigence, but because it objectifies them into mere factory robots, and supermarket checker robots, and office worker robots, etc., performing menial and servile tasks that generate revenue for owners. That is, under capitalism human individuals are no longer treated as such, instead they?re constrained by the system to accept an existential state of affairs in which they?re stereotyped as, related to as, and valued (or disvalued) as their commercial function, their role in the commerce of the market, i.e. their cog-like job in the economic machine . An economic machine that?s geared to use people, to turn them into means to the ends, to the profits of their employers.
From a humanistic point of view then, the fundamental and enormous sin of capitalism is that it de-dignifies us into things, things that serve someone else?s selfish purposes. And spiritually, this endemic capitalistic thingification and exploitation of working people does us the ultimate injury by alienating us from our own inner creative nature. That is, instead of our economic productivity being experienced as an expression of our indwelling quantum of divine creativity and ingenuity, it?s reduced to an exploitable resource that belongs to a boss or corporation ? we?re effectively estranged from our ultimate nature and immanent godlikeness. It?s not at all a rhetorical exaggeration to say that capitalism?s commodification of ordinary Joes and Janes into wage-earning chattel excommunicates them from the beatitude of their own personal portion of cosmic creativity, that it condemns us to a spiritually forlorn state of living without a keen conscious sense of Transcendence actualizing itself through our daily constructive activities.
Doesn?t this pretty much cover the existential and ethical badness of capitalism? What more can really be said against our system of predaceous and parasitic ?private enterprise?? Well, there is the underlying primitive alpha dog mentality that capitalism in both theory and practice is predicated upon and promotes. Since I?m engaged in critically slicing through capitalism?s bourgeois and Babbittish baloney I?d be quite remiss if I neglected to mention that modern capitalism is just the same old sour and foul-tasting wine of to the strong go all the spoils in new ideological wineskins.
In the grandiose guise of the ?free market?, capitalism gives the ole heave-ho to the last 2,500 years of man?s ethical growth and returns us to a system of society in which the only socioeconomic law in operation is the law of the jungle ? dominate or be dominated. A system in which individuals are shamelessly unfettered from acting upon their animalistic aspiration to achieve and exercise social dominance over their neighbor. A system in which the brutelike striving for social dominance takes the crass form of economic dominance, and in which economic dominance is reached by ruthlessly and rapaciously reaping the fruits of other people?s labors and losses so as to become ?rich?. The modern ?rich man? is just a Neanderthaloid alpha male (or female) dressed up in a business suit and Rolex watch. The vaunted freedom of the ?free market? boils down to little more than society granting people the licentious and amoral permission to conduct themselves in an atavistically self-assertive and avaricious fashion.
In other words, social Darwinism decked out as the doctrine of the ?free market? is the order of the day. Say what?! Well, let me quote the better part of a paragraph here from the Encyclop?dia Britannica?s article on social Darwinism, ?The theory was used to support laissez-faire capitalism and political conservatism. Class stratification was justified on the basis of ?natural? inequalities among individuals, for the control of property was said to be a correlate of superior and inherent moral attributes such as industriousness, temperance, and frugality. Attempts to reform society through state intervention or other means would, therefore, interfere with natural processes; unrestricted competition and defense of the status quo were in accord with biological selection. The poor were the ?unfit? and should not be aided; in the struggle for existence, wealth was a sign of success.?
You might have noted how the article uses the past tense, as if social Darwinism is a dated worldview that no longer informs the thinking of folks who are pro-capitalist. But in actuality just about all of the backward thinking described above is still very much with us, deeply ensconced in the body of ideas espoused by right-of-center politicos, commentators, and businessmen ? by disciples of Reganomics and ?libertarianism? and all the in-vogue schools of economic thought. For example, believers in laissez-faire capitalism still tend to think in terms of the strong, i.e. of people who enjoy affluence, being superiorly endowed with morally excellent traits such as a stronger work ethic, enterprisingness, thriftiness, etc., which supposedly entitle them to the higher quality of life they enjoy. While the weak, i.e. the poor, the unemployed, and the homeless allegedly lack these good traits and therefore should disappear from our communities into the mendicant margins of society ? the next best thing to them literally dying off.
Is this over the top of me? Alas no, according to contemporary conservatives, the weak and inferior, you know, the folks in the lower economic classes, aren?t ?entitled? to anything from society. The very concept of ?entitlements? is every bit as abhorrent to them as to a classic 19th century social Darwinist. And our latter-day social Darwinists, the conservatives, certainly have no trouble with the class stratification of society ? to the conservative mind-set a form of hierarchical society divided into disproportionately empowered socioeconomic classes is quite natural and acceptable. Indeed, rationalizing such an unequal status quo, and unrestricted competition and greed are the hallmarks of conservatism and free-marketarianism. So how exactly has our capitalist society moved beyond the unprogressive social Darwinism of the benighted 1800s?!
It seems that we?re just less blunt and boorish about our regressively, cavemanly social-Darwinian attitudes nowadays, but they still fairly distinctly lurk beneath both the economic realities and ideals of our ostensively ?civilized? world order. This makes for a world order that?s hardly kind & gentle, and that in many instances is egregiously cruel and brutal.
Capitalism, it?s plain to see, is certainly no utopia at all, though the staunch proponents of its theory tend to be quixotically utopian as far as their temperamental unwillingness and intellectual inability to confront the obvious negativity of capitalism?s facts on the ground goes. That capitalism is a socially, morally, and spiritually dismal system in which the majority of mankind is locked into chronic lack and pauperism; is dehumanized and alienated from spiritual and personal authenticity; and has reverted to an uncompassionately Darwinian, downright troglodytic take on economics and society; that all of this is empirically the case, and conspicuously so, doesn?t penetrate the clanky, clunky cognitive armor of free-market fanatics and capitalist cultists one bit.
How so?! The intellectually dishonest and facile defense of the conservative booster of a ?free economy? is to simply reject disconfirming real-world data in favor of the elegance of laissez-faireism, to inanely cling to the psychological safety blanket of ideology in the face of so much human pain. This works well enough to keep Republicans and rich folk cozy in their pro-capitalist creed, but unfortunately it means no measurable change of heart in these dogmatic elitists at the top of the socioeconomic food chain, and no foreseeable altruistically-inspired amelioration of the lot of the average workingperson. Nope, workingpeople can no longer wait for business and political leaders who are invested in keeping the faith in capitalism to give us real change from the top down, we need to begin kicking the system and philosophy of capitalism to the curb of history ourselves, or keep getting our rear ends kicked by it.
