So...I recently had a leftist make a dogmatic statement about capitalism, which led to a spark of inspiration for this post as I sought to rebut it. And it really explains the core of my ideology, and why I can still be so utopian, while...also being so capitalist. Essentially, this person argues that capitalism is unsustainable because it relies on infinite growth, on a finite planet, and that the demand for resources will always lead to environmental destruction, and how we need a new system to save the planet.
But, I have to wonder, is this really true? Leftists...they love to make these broad statements proclaiming reasons why capitalism cannot be saved, but really, here's why I argue that it not only can be saved, but that it is the best path to salvation. It's not 1848 any more, it's 2022, and things are quite frankly, utopian, but dystopian in our time frame. While capitalism has its fair share of blames for our plight, it also offers the solutions to that issue.
First of all, let's express what I mean by capitalism. By capitalism, I mean free enterprise, markets. Mutually beneficial advantageous trades between parties. Stuff like that. Leftists love to throw out weird arguments about the banking and finance sector in making these arguments, and I have to admit I'm a bit out of my depth in discussing that stuff, but they always get weird when I try to point out what capitalism actually is when I use it. They love to claim you cant be capitalist unless you own capital, and that capitalism is defined by the concept of capital. Not necessarily true. To me, market socialism is still capitalism for all intents and purposes.
But let's cede an aspect of the point. We can't grow forever. We DO have a finite planet with finite resources, and while technology and population growth can grow the economy, allowing us to do more with the same finite amount of stuff. To quote David Graeber, in one of his last articles before his passing, "to save the world, we are going to have to stop working." But, let's be honest, does this necessarily mean the end of capitalism? No. I mean markets can and have worked without growth in the past. And some have argued it would be more stable without growth, since growth and businesses modifying their projections based around growth often is what leads to economic crises, like, say, 2008.
If anything, my support for capitalism is based on the idea that I recognize that at some point, it would be advantageous, if not inevitable, for us to stop growing. In his essay, "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren", which was written in 1930, he argued that by 2030 we would probably be working 15 hour weeks. But...instead we're at 2022, 8 years away, and we're working the same 40 hours a week that we worked back in 1938, just 8 years AFTER he wrote this. What happened? Growth happened. We became obsessed with growing GDP. At first it was so we could have an economy to go to war with our enemies, but honestly? While GDP has some importance and some use, it is grossly overestimated. Bobby Kennedy once stated that GDP "measures everything except that which is worthwhile", stating that:
Even if we act to erase material poverty, there is another greater task, it is to confront the poverty of satisfaction - purpose and dignity - that afflicts us all.
Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product - if we judge the United States of America by that - that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage.
It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl.
It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.
Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials.
It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.
And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.
If this is true here at home, so it is true elsewhere in world.
Our economy, accounting for inflation, is six times what it was in 1930 per capita. If we all wanted to live like we did in 1930, we could all be working 7 hour weeks. Half of what Keynes pointed out. Heck, given much of the improvements is done via technological improvements, perhaps it wouldn't even scale linearly with hours.
I'm not saying all growth is bad. Growth is what raises our living standards to a large degree. And a lot of technological improvement we've experienced through the decades and centuries is a sign of growth. And that's what capitalism does right. it encourages innovation, and allows us to live in ways that seem like science fiction compared to the past. Meanwhile many communist countries still seem like they're time warps of the 1950s, outside of China, which has essentially embraced a form of authoritarian capitalism which is communist in name only. I'm not saying that we should live in the era that we currently live in for all time. by all means, advance society technologically. BUT, there is a limit to what growth can do. Is growth worth it in a society where we still work the same 40 hour weeks we did over 80 years ago? Is it worth it when we still spend 30%+ of our income on rent? have houses gotten that much better in 100 years? yes and no. But while technological advancements happen, that isn't what's driving up the price. Supply and demand is. And we still struggle with the same issues Henry George talked about in the 19th century. We are paying more than ever for healthcare and education, with those things becoming increasingly unaffordable to many. And while we can afford more TVs and smartphones, for as much as we've grown, people still struggle to afford the necessities, and people still face the same struggles they did in the 19th century. That's why people are turning on capitalism, because capitalism, without the proper interventions, ensures those outcomes.
That's what woke me up to the problems of the system as it exists. I looked at 2008, saw this massive society of excesses and plenty, and I was just like...the only problem here is one of distribution. We have enough to go around, but we've distributed it poorly. And while socialists and anarchists will want to completely reinvent the wheel, I think simply solving these problems within capitalism is possible.
This led me to support things like UBI, and medicare for all, and free college. It caused me to abandon the idea of work and jobs as the way to solve societal ills. I mean, this is going to sound weird and counter intuitive, but we cannot WORK our way to prosperity. The system is as such where there will never be enough jobs for all, and these jobs will never pay enough to ensure our basic needs. We need to focus less on jobs, and more on redistribution.
This led me to support a version of Andrew Yang's human centered capitalism years before it was invented. people might think I'm taking Yang's idea, but Yang is in essence taking mine. Yang gets his inspiration from Scott Santens and UBI advocates like him. And...so do I. As a matter of fact, I've discussed stuff with people like Santens on reddit about stuff that sounds a lot like human centered capitalism before it was intended. I'm not trying to be jealous or claiming he stole my idea. He can take my ideas all he wants. If anything, I WANT politicians to adopt and expand on my ideas and sell them to the masses. And I will shout on the rooftops in advocating for them when they do, just like I'm currently doing in promoting the Forward party on here. But here I will be putting my own spin on them.
Yang defines human centered capitalism with the following tenets:
- Humans are more important than money
- The unit of a Human Capitalism economy is each person, not each dollar
- Markets exist to serve our common goals and values
The focus of our economy should be to maximize human welfare. Sometimes this aligns with a purely capitalist approach, where different entities compete for the best ideas. But there are plenty of times when a capitalist system leads to suboptimal outcomes. Think of an airline refusing to honor your ticket because they can get more money from a customer who purchases last-minute, or a pharmaceutical company charging extortionate rates for a life-saving drug because the customers are desperate.
Back in say, 2014 I would say things, like, the economy exists for man, not man for the economy, or, we can just say people because some people might not like gender specific language. I would, as a relatively new atheist, understand that our social structures exist for us. We do not exist for them. We should not be slaves to them. A system that enslaves us, that forces us to work for it, rather than it working for us, is an unjust system that doesn't deserve to exist. This grew out of my secular humanism at the time. I would agree with all of yang's tenets here. Humans ARE more important than money. Money exists for people, not the other way around. The unit of the human capitalism economy is people, not dollars. Yes. This guy gets it. Markets exist to serve our common goals and values, yes. This is literally am embodiment of my own ideology.
But let me expand on this a bit, because I didn't stop there. I had quite a lot to say about the nature of work, based on the above. Work exists to serve human goals. Humans do not exist to work. Work exists to fulfill our needs. It is not an inherent good. It's a means to an end, not an end to itself. This is something I don't think Yang adopted, in thinking about these things. Because as we've laid out before, he's still somewhat pro work, and in his version of human centered capitalism, while he does a lot of things i would support like stop measuring all success via GDP, as it's an awful measurement, he still sees stuff like community engagement as an inherent good, and even supports that national service program, which I would consider a form of forced labor.
I'm not for forced labor. If anything, I'm the opposite. I believe that we should free people from HAVING to labor. People should be free to do whatever they want. If that includes laboring for a goal, go for it. Not all labor is bad. But remember, labor is a means to an end, not an end to itself. Labor to improve your living standards, if you desire money. Labor to improve humanity, if you want to invent something or present some idea to the masses. Even right now, this blog is somewhat of a labor of love, even if people do not necessarily see value in it. Not all work is bad. Work to serve specific purposes can be good, but we are well past the point where people should have to labor just to live.
That said, my version of human centered capitalism is inherently anti work, and serves to accomplish anti work goals. I want to reduce the amount of necessary labor. If work is a means to an end, and we can outsource human drudgery to machines and technology, we absolutely should. Because then we can spend that time...doing other things. Pursuing other interests. Some may be productive, some may not be. To me what matters is whether people want to be doing what they're doing. if they don't, and are simply coerced to by an unjust system that enslaves them for their survival, then that isn't a good thing, is it?
For me, human centered capitalism and my anti work goals are aligned. Yang still believes, in some level, in the religion of work. However, this might be a necessary evil, given how indoctrinated the masses are on this subject. People who don't at least nominally believe in the religion are shunned, as we saw with Doreen Ford's fox news interview, so I can tolerate some deviation from my own vision of human centered capitalism for the sake of achieving political goals.
Still, I think the point is this. Capitalism does not necessarily have to rely on endless growth. Some growth, like that from technological improvement is good. Some growth, such as making a bunch of disposable junk to keep people employed and keep certain businesses in business, is bad. Some growth means we can do more with less, some growth means that we're just polluting our environment. Some growth means we keep working like sisyphus rolling that stupid rock up a hill, and some means we can build automatic rock rollers so we can sit back while machines roll the rocks for us.
If we, to some extent, used smart, positive growth, as a way to work less, isn't that a good thing? GDP isn't all it's cracked up to be when you still have homelessness, poverty, wage slavery, environmental destruction, and still have to work 40+ hours a week to survive. That isnt to say GDP is useless, but there is a middle ground. If we decided to, for example, instead of "growing" the economy, and instead focused on working less, wouldn't that be a good thing for humanity? I deconverted from Christianity and became an atheist, which set me on this political journey 10 years ago now. Back then, GDP per capita was $52,149 a year, or $63,859 a year accounting for inflation. Now it's $72,183. I mean, we are that appeciably better off than 10 years ago? Not really. Tech has advanced somewhat, but I dont think living standards have really improved. It's just numbers on a spreadsheet. But what if, instead of increasing GDP that much, we all cut our hours to 35? We could accomplish the same overall living standard per capita we had 10 years ago...and work 5 fewer hours. Imagine if we did that over the decades. Yeah, a 15 hour work week could've been a thing if only we pursued leisure rather than infinite growth. It's a shame, isn't it? We are so rich, but between our distribution, and our obsession with preserving the 40 hour work week, we keep ourselves in the same cycle of poverty that has existed since the early days of capitalism. It never gets better unless we make it better. But that involves pursuing alternative policy choices. And no, leftists, we don't need to abolish this system to accomplish this. We just implement the changes I keep calling for. UBI, Medicare for all, free college, reduction of work hours. Honestly, for most of our lives, and most of the lives for most people who are still alive, America has always been a system of plenty. FDR ensured that through his legislation back in the 1930s, and post war America could rightfully claim having the highest living standards on earth while still claiming work life balance. The problem is, we haven't advanced much since then. Our institutions haven't fundamentally changed. And we need a new new deal, to make human centered capitalism a reality. That's how we advance humanity. But modernizing our institutions and social contract. We can all work less, and live better, without abolishing capitalism or risking the negative effects of revolution. That's the point I'm trying to make, when leftists make arguments about infinite growth.
And that's the final point, I want to make to leftists, we can accomplish these things, without abolishing "capitalism". You can still have markets. you can still have free enterprise, voluntary trade, etc. If anything my changes work out the negative kinks in capitalism the left often points out. I want to end poverty. I want to end wage slavery. I ain't big on the infinite growth paradigm either. But we can have all of that, without getting rid of capitalism. I don't believe capitalism is so broken it cannot be saved, and that a new system is necessary to replace it. Every time someone has tried that, it has ended in failure, and as I investigate why, it seems like it's because they tried to abolish such a system and replace it with something else that just didn't work as well. So no, let's stick with what we have, but improve it as we see fit. We can definitely do this. We know what the problems are, and what policies will fix them. We just need to implement them.
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