Americans are known, for better of for worse, for their strong support of “capitalism” and hesitancy towards “socialism.” A recent poll by Pew Research Center confirmed this notion, although perhaps not with the intensity one would expect. When asked what their first reaction to the word “socialism” was, 59% gave a negative response and only 29% responded positively. Their reaction to the word capitalism was exactly the opposite, 52% gave a positive response, and 37% responded negatively.
Rush Limbaugh has complained today that "worker", "storefront" and "factory" are Marxist-Leninist terms.
Rush had better not use the term "capitalism" either, since according to noted Conservative Russel Kirk in 1963, Marx invented that too:
Did you know that "capitalism" is a term coined by Karl Marx? Like most Marxist terms, it is loaded and misleading to employ. So I never advocate or defend the abstraction called "capitalism."
I don't really know if Kirk is right about this, Wiki provides a more complex picture:
The initial usage of the term capitalism in its modern sense has been attributed to Louis Blanc in 1850 and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in 1861.[24] Marx and Engels referred to the capitalistic system (kapitalistisches System)[25][26] and to the capitalist mode of production (kapitalistische Produktionsform) in Das Kapital (1867).[27] The use of the word "capitalism" in reference to an economic system appears twice in Volume I of Das Kapital, p. 124 (German edition), and in Theories of Surplus Value, tome II, p. 493 (German edition). Marx did not extensively use the form capitalism, but instead those of capitalist and capitalist mode of production, which appear more than 2600 times in the trilogy Das Kapital.
So maybe it wasn't Marx, but was Blanc and Proudhon, which is no help to Rush since both of them were socialists. It's getting hard for Rush to avoid socialism. There is evidently no respite, not even in Costa Rica.
Great News! The good life will soon return to America. Auspiciously, months before the holiday shopping season began, Americans were told that after more than a year of fiscal recession, or what some have characterized as akin to an economic depression, consumers were optimistic. The confidence index and other indicators were much improved. Manufacturing executives assured the public, the engine that drives the free enterprise system was in a "sustainable recovery mode." In the very near future, products, and people's sense of need, would be fabricated again. Everything will be right with the world, economically. Few feared the threat that, long ago, Americans had come to accept. The foundation of a democratic system had eroded in favor of consumption.
As expected, there are plenty of new public opinion polls on health care and health care reform. Though some people may already be tired of the topic, it is more important now than ever that we understand where the public stands on health care, how the trends in opinion are changing, and why. Indirectly related to issues of healthcare is a new public opinion poll on capitalism, twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Health Care
Health Care: the Individual Mandate and a Public Option The October Kaiser Family Foundation Health Tracking Poll found that 66% of those surveyed report that they are in favor of requiring all Americans to have health insurance (provided there is financial help for those who need it). A majority of those surveyed (57%) also expressed support for the creation of a government-administered public health insurance option that would compete with private insurers. In addition, a majority expressed that “it is more important than ever to take on health care reform now” (55%).
Who will be better Off with Health Care Reform?
According to the above Kaiser poll, a majority asserted that the country as a whole would be better off if Congress passed health care reform (53%). A plurality (41%) expressed that individually, they or their families would be better off if Congress passed health care reform, with 27% expressing that they would be worse off.
After seeing Capitalism: A Love Story today, I thought I'd give my own review in response to the one by metamars.
Two big criticisms are made against the otherwise excellent film, only one of which stands up under scrutiny. Yes, Obama is left virtually unscathed by Moore's damning critique of Congressional acquiescence to Wall Street's fear-mongering. As we all witnessed during last year's debacle, Obama was one of the chief proponents of the Wall Street bailout in the U.S. Senate, pushing for the no-strings-attached version that ultimately passed. That Obama is as responsible as any other player in the nation's economic meltdown and the massive swindle that accompanied it cannot be ignored or denied, and Moore's acknowledgment that Wall Street contributed heavily to Obama seems like a punch undeservedly pulled.
The second big critique is that while the film's message rouses outrage, little or nothing is given in the way of what can actually be done about all of it. Having now seen the film myself, I can see all kinds of ways in which We the People can fight back - not the least of which is using the power of the vote. But there's more, much more, that can be done, and Moore illustrates them with great relish.
Factory workers denied their final paychecks when the company shut down its site took barricaded themselves inside and refused to leave until they got the money owed to them.
People whose home was foreclosed upon found aid in the form of an organization formed to keep families in their houses by way of squatting. Police were called out, only to leave without enforcing the order to vacate after it became clear that no one was leaving.
I saw a bread-making factory, a co-op, meaning that each employee owns a piece of that factory and helps run it through a democratic process. The CEO has no more or less say in how the company is run than anyone else, and surprisingly (or so Moore depicts) everyone makes at least a somewhat decent wage.
Last, and by no means least, is the power of the ballot. Moore calls for a democratic revolution in Capitalism: A Love Story, the kind expressed at the ballot box. Yes, We the people do have the power of the vote, and therefore wield far more power collectively than the top one percent of Americans. Why else do you think there is such massive effort expended to disenfranchise us at the polling station? Why else do you think we are encouraged to self-segregate ourselves along racial, religious, and class lines? Why else do you think we are discouraged from even mentioning forming and using third political parties as a means of reshaping the two major ones? It's because the powerful know that if We the People were to truly rise up at election time and vote in genuine representatives to replace the corporate whores, their days of power would be over. Sure, they have the military and gobs of money, but if they were to drop the pretense of democracy by going all-out in their war against us, the rich would lose their only real weapon: our compliance.
Resistance through noncompliance worked for India. It can work for us - if we have the will to use it.
I saw it Friday night. I considered it important to see it on the first weekend rather than wait until it came to the $2.00 movie house. It is important to show our solidarity with him.
And then I had all the mixed feelings afterwards. Not feeling sorry for people who used long time family homes as an ATM machine. Particularly when one family had pictures of Bush on the wall. People suffering need to know that their vote has consequences.
The pay of pilots under $20,000 astonished me. And just barely in the $20,0000 was not less so. I knew about the juvenile detention center before and was relieved to see it included. And the Wisconsin coops were a wonder.
For anyone who missed the death of American capitalism (and who didn't?), I'm posting Monte Python's sketch about the dead parrot, to illustrate the meaning of "death."
For "pragmatic" Democrats and other especially challenged individuals, it may also be helpful to remember how death is typically defined in practice.
A doctor hears nothing through his stethoscope. The brachial and carotid arteries do not throb. Blood does not circulate, and the patient is pronounced dead!
This is exactly what happened to American capitalism after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008. Credit disappeared. Circulation of money ceased. Henry Paulson appeared on TV screaming "Code Blue!" A 23.7 trillion volt defibrillator was applied to the patient and it twitched. It's still twitching.
Although this feeble after-life of American capitalism is still bleeding 467,000 jobs every month, at least one of its organs is bigger and better than ever, and no one who follows the news about multi-billion-dollar bonuses for Wall Street bankers and radically reduced wages and benefits for the rest of us would deny that American zombie-capitalism is still sporting a magnificent erection to fuck the working class.
Editor's note: This outrageously sexualized portrait of the American economy should probably be supplemented by the observation that military expenditures have remained strong...
...and a more realistic image of American capitalism in 2009 would probably be...
A zombie with a gun in one hand and a hard-on in the other.
There's a thought provoking article in the new Vanity Fair by Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize winning economist, which evaluates what the current financial situation >throughout the world means to America's position in it.
It is worth reading and thinking about, since it lays most of the responsibility on a "free-market economy" as foisted on the world by a greedy and thoughtless Wall Street, which set very different standards for other countries than it adopted for the U.S. This from the article:
Earlier today, in an attempt to develop a thumbnail metric for how socialist and capitalist a national economy is, I examined where 26 counties fell in a public-private mixed economy continuum. While much of the discussion on the story involved whether this was the proper use of the term "socialism" (some people can get really sensitive over which broad, vague signifiers should be applied to abstract concepts), the lead item of the story remains powerful. Namely, over the last two years, public expenditures as a percentage of GDP has risen dramatically in the United States, from 35.5% in FY 2007 to a projected 44.7% in FY 2009. Outside of World War Two, this is the largest the public sector has been in the US relative to the nation's GDP. The two-year increase of 9.2% is also great than any experienced outside of World War Two. Here is a graphical illustration of trends from 1900 through 2009:
There have been similarly rapid increases in the past, though perhaps not a single, 7.7%, jump that was not directly related to war, which we experienced from 2008-2009.. From 1929 to 1933, public spending rose from 11.3% to 22.4% of GDP. From 1948 to 1954, public spending rose from 20.5% of GDP to 29.3%. On a slightly smaller scale, we went from 30.2% to 34.0% from 1974 to 1976. The sharp, upward climbs punctuating long eras of stability are shown on the graph by the black line and the red arrows.
The two previous, sharp upward gains, from 1929 to 1933 and from 1948 to 1954, were never reversed. The pre-1930 status quo of 11-12% was erased permanently by post-1929 spending. The pre-1948 status quo of around 20% was erased permanently by the 1949-1954 spending increase. The upward movement in the mid-1970's was also never reversed, as we stayed in the mid-30% range for the next 30 years. As such, one of the main question for our times is whether the recent upward shot into the mid-40% range will ever be reversed.
I think that it is important to consolidate our new status in the mid-40% range as, combined with a shift in public expenditures, it would allow us to enter a Western European realm of social investment. Consolidating this upward increase will require finding new sources of government revenue that are easier, from a political perspective, than cutting down the size of the public sector. There are avenues through which that can be achieved, and I will explore them tomorrow (hint: expanding Social Security revenues by eliminating the income cap is both very popular and lucrative). For now, it should suffice to note the historic shift that has occurred, and also the tremendous opportunity it presents the American left. Given that it has been about 60 years since a shift of this magnitude last occurred, it is possible that we won't get another opportunity like this again in our lifetimes. As horrible as the economic downturn has been, it really is a crisis / opportunity point for the American left.
Ever since the financial sector bailout process started seven months ago, there has been quite a lot of talk about socialism. Over the past 30 days, Google News records 8,251 matches for "socialism" or "socialist" within American media outlets along. Most of this talk has been extremely naïve and uninformed. The most frequent abusers of the term, conservatives, have lobbed the charge around as though there was a switch governments flip in order to change from "capitalist" to "socialist." The general presumption seems to be that an economic system is either socialist or capitalist, and that the two systems are mutually exclusive.
This is, of course, hogwash. Every economic system in the modern world has elements that are both capitalist (private ownership and / or administration) and socialist (public ownership and / or administration). The two co-exist alongside each other, as they have done in every economic system since the beginning of time. Unless you want to make the postal service, police and fire departments, military, and education 100% private, then you are proposing a certain level of socialism. The fundamental ideological debate over economics is not whether the economy should be socialist or capitalist, but what proportion of it should be capitalist and what proportion should be socialist.
Currently, the best available projections for 2009 are that the United States will be 44.7% socialist, and 55.3% capitalist, for the year. This is determined by the following formula:
(total projected 2009 public expenditures minus intra-governmental transfers / projected 2009 Gross Domestic Project)
Now, one area where the conservatives are not wrong is that we are witnessing an increase in socialism in America. Last year, America was only 37.0% socialist, and 63.0% capitalist. From 2002-2007, the standard range was 35.3%-35.7%. In 2000, the year before Bush took over, the USA was only 33.0% socialist. Since the mid-1970's, public expenditure a as a percentage of GDP has consistently hovered in this 33%-36% range, no matter which parties controlled Congress and the White House, and no matter if there was split or single-party government. However, with the various government bailouts, the jobs / stimulus package, and President Obama's expanded budget, the last year has seen a break with a longstanding 65%-35% capitalist / socialist split in America. Currently, we are roughly a 55%-45% capitalist-socialist country, with future numbers probably settling around 60%-40% capitalist-socialist, as our various bailouts and wars (hopefully) wind down, and (hopefully) economic growth picks up again. (Yes, socialism can also be right-wing, even if it means war spending funneled to private contractors.)
Given that we are only talking about a temporary, 10% increase in socialism in America, and a long-term 5% increase, one might wonder what all the brouhaha about socialism is these days. However, if you consider that the entire range of mainstream socialist vs. capitalist debate in all wealthy democracies on Earth is over where whether we should be 29% socialist (South Korea), 61% socialist (France), or somewhere in between, a 10% shift in one year is a pretty big deal. As I show in the extended entry, the recent shift noticeably alters the location of the United States in the socialist-capitalist continuum relative to other major nations.
I have long been enraged by the idea of for-profit corrections facilities. It is just not a good idea to make locking people up (or detaining them) profitable. In a capitalist system such as the U.S., profit becomes king - ruling over all other consideration. This is something we have seen a lot of lately. However, a case in point is the Pennsylvania corruption case that has resulted in overturning hundreds of juvenile convictions.
The whole house of cards seems to be crashing. The funny thing is, the capitalists, through their greed, did it to themselves. If they had left in place the safeguards and regulations established in New Deal welfare state capitalism, this depression - brought on by the housing bubble collapse - would not be happening. Instead we would have seen the continued slow grinding erosion of working class living standards we have had since the late 70's. Which was working out pretty well for the capitalists - inequality had reached record levels in the 90's and 2000's. But no, they had to completely tear down all the stabilizers built into their own system. They thought, hey there's no Soviet Union any more, communism and socialism are dead, so we can just go hogwild and take everything we want, let the average American citizen pay the price.
I never thought I would see these kinds of headlines. We're living in pretty bizarre times, aren't we? Now where is that old Democratic Socialists of America button I used to have?
There are many who are saying that this collapse "proves" that the US capitalist model is obsolete, or based upon false ideas.
I claim that it is just the reverse. What the US has had since the 1870's is syndicalism - a partnership between big business and government. In an earlier time people weren't afraid to call it what it is.
"The business of America is business." -- Calvin Coolidge
"...because for years I thought what was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa". -- Charles Erwin Wilson, GM president (1953)
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