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Notes From
the Editors
The Renewing of
Socialism: An Introduction
by John Bellamy
Foster
What is Socialist Feminism?
by Barbara
Ehrenreich
The Utopian
Vision of the Future (Then and Now): A Marxist Critique
Bertell Ollman
What Is the Soul of Socialism?
by Andrew Blackman
The Soul of Socialism: Connecting with the
People’s Values
by Stephen J. Fortunato
Jr.
Harry Magdoff
is an editor of Monthly Review.
Fred Magdoff is
professor of plant and soil science at the University of Vermont in Burlington.
He is author of numerous scientific articles; coauthor, with Harold van Es, of
Building Soils for Better Crops (Sustainable Agricultural Network,
2000); and coeditor, with John Bellamy Foster and Frederick H. Buttel, of
Hungry for Profit: The Agribusiness Threat to Farmers,
Food, and the Environment (Monthly Review Press, 2000).
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1. Can ‘Human Nature’ Change?
Among the arguments against socialism is that it goes against human nature.
“You can’t change human nature” is the frequently heard refrain.
That may be true of basic human instincts such as the urge to obtain food to
eat, reproduce, seek shelter, make and wear protective clothing. However, what
has usually been referred to as “human nature” has changed a great
deal during the long history of humankind. As social systems changed, many
habits and behavioral traits also changed as people adapted to new social
structures. Anatomically modern humans emerged some 150,000 to 200,000 years
ago. Over the tens of thousands of years since, many different kinds of social
organizations and societies have developed. Initially, most were based on
hunting and gathering, while for about the last 7,000 years many have been
based on agriculture. These societies were organized as clans, villages,
tribes, city-states, nations, and/or empires.
Anthropologists who studied “primitive” societies found very
different human relations and human nature than the highly competitive,
dog-eat-dog, selfish characteristics that have dominated during the capitalist
period. The economics of these early precapitalist societies often took the
form of reciprocity and redistribution. Trade existed, of course, but trade
between tribes was not for personal gain. Agricultural land was neither
privately owned nor could it be bought and sold, instead, it was generally
allocated and reallocated by village chiefs. Much of the food collected by the
chiefs was redistributed at village ceremonial feasts. There were wars and
domination by local tyrants—these were not perfect societies by any
means—but they had different values, social mores, and “human
natures.” As Karl Polanyi explained in 1944: “The outstanding
discovery of recent historical and anthropological research is that man’s
economy, as a rule, is submerged in his social relationships. He does not act
so as to safeguard his individual interest in the possession of material goods;
he acts so as to safeguard his social standing, his social claims, his social
assets.” In such societies the economy was a function of the social
relations and people were not allowed to profit from trading transactions.
The variety of structure and organization of past civilizations is truly
striking. It was not so long ago—in the span of human existence—that
the native peoples in North and South America had a very different
consciousness than that imposed by the invasions and conquests of the European
armies and settlers. Thus Christopher Columbus wrote after his first voyage to
the West: “Nor have I been able to learn whether they held personal
property, for it seemed to me that whatever one had, they all took shares
of....They are so ingenuous and free with all they have that no one would
believe it who has not seen it; of anything they possess, if it be asked of
them, they never say no; on the contrary, they invite you to share it and show
as much love as if their hearts went with it.”
According to William Brandon, a prominent historian of American Indians:
“Many travelers in the heart of America, the Indian world real before
their eyes, echoed such sentiments year after year, generation after
generation. These include observers of the most responsible sort, the
missionary Du Tertre for a random example, writing from the Caribbean in the
1650s: ‘...they are all equal, without anyone recognizing any sort of
superiority or any sort of servitude....Neither is richer or poorer than his
companion and all unanimously limit their desires to that which is useful and
precisely necessary, and are contemptuous of all other things, superfluous
things, as not being worthy to be possessed....’” And Montaigne wrote
of three Indians who were in France in the late sixteenth century. They
explained to him about the common Indian custom of dividing the people into
halves, groups with special and separate duties for ritual or administrative
reasons, such as the Summer and Winter people of the various North American
tribes. The Indians were struck by the two opposing groups in France.
“They had perceived there were men amongst us full gorged with all sorts
of commodities and others which hunger-starved, and bare with need and povertie
begged at their gates: and found it strange these moieties so needy could
endure such an injustice, and they tooke not the others by the throte, or set
fire on their house....”1
The European settlers in the thirteen colonies in what became the United
States had no doubts about their superiority in every way over the “wild
savage” Indians. But let us take a look at the Iroquois Nations. They had
democracy involving not political parties but people’s participation in
decision-making and in removing unsatisfactory officials. Women voted with the
men and had special responsibilities in certain areas. At the same time the
“civilized” settlers relied on white indentured servants and black
slaves and severely constrained women’s rights. It took three and a half
centuries after the pilgrims landed to free the slaves and four centuries for
women to get the right to vote!
We have briefly referred above to societies in which economics was
subservient to social relations. That changed dramatically in the evolution of
capitalism as private property, money, and trade for gain came to the
forefront. Social relations became but reflections of the dominating force of
society’s capitalist economics instead of the reverse. Aristotle foresaw
the dangers ahead because some aspects of what would become capitalism were
present in the ancient world:
There are two sorts of wealth-getting, as I have said; one is a
part of household management, the other is retail trade: the former necessary
and honorable, while that which consists in exchange is justly censured; for it
is unnatural, and a mode by which men gain from one another. The most hated
sort, and with the greatest reason, is usury, which makes a gain out of money
itself, and not from the natural object of it. For money was intended to be
used in exchange, but not to increase at interest. And this term interest,
which means the birth of money from money, is applied to the breeding of money
because the offspring resembles the parent. (Politics)
Although Aristotle supported slavery, which he apparently found natural, he
thought selling and charging interest to make a gain unnatural. The situation
is now reversed. Most people nowadays see slavery as unnatural, while selling
to make a profit and charging interest seem like the most natural of human
activities.
It is, of course, doubtful whether the concept of a “human nature”
means anything at all because the consciousness, behavior, habits, and values
of humans can be so variable and are influenced by the history and culture that
develops in a given society. Not only has so-called human nature changed, but
the ideology surrounding the components of human nature has also changed
dramatically. The glorification of making money, the sanctioning of all the
actions necessary to do so, and the promotion of the needed human
traits—“unnatural” and repugnant to Aristotle—is now the
norm of capitalist societies.
During capitalist development, including the recent past, what many have
considered obvious characteristics of human nature have been shown to be
nonsense. For example, it was once considered a part of human nature that women
were not able to perform certain tasks competently. It was extremely unusual
for women to be physicians, partially because of the belief that they were not
capable of learning and using the needed skills. Now women doctors are common,
and women are frequently more than half of the students in medical school. The
recent harebrained remarks by Harvard University’s president that perhaps
it is part of human nature that women can’t do quality work in math and
science indicates that a strong ideological view of human nature still exists.
This sentiment is now supposedly made more scientific by presumed genetic
differences, even in areas where none have been demonstrated. It is clear what
many consider human nature is actually a set of viewpoints and prejudices that
flow out of the culture of a particular society.
Capitalism has existed for about 500 years—mercantile (or merchant)
capitalism for about 250 followed by industrial capitalism for the last
250—less than 0.4 percent of the entire period of human existence. (In
large parts of the world, capitalism arrived later as the system expanded and
has held sway for an even smaller portion of time.) During this small slice of
human history the cooperative, caring, and sharing nature within the human
character has been downplayed while aggressive competitiveness has been brought
to prominence for the purpose of fostering, and surviving within, a system
based on the accumulation of capital. A culture has developed along with
capitalism—epitomized by greed, individualism (everyone for themselves),
exploitation of men and women by others, and competition. The competition
occurs among departments in companies and, of course, among companies and
countries, and workers seeking jobs, and it permeates people’s thinking.
Another aspect of the culture of capitalism is the development of
consumerism—the compulsion to purchase more and more, unrelated to basic
human needs or happiness. As Joseph Schumpeter described it decades ago
“...the great majority of changes in commodities consumed has been forced
by producers on consumers who, more often than not, have resisted the change
and have had to be educated by elaborate psychotechnics of advertising”
(Business Cycles, vol. 2 [McGraw-Hill, 1936], 73).
If human nature, values, and relations have changed before, it hardly needs
pointing out that they may change again. Indeed, the notion that human nature
is frozen into place is simply another way that those supporting the present
system attempt to argue that society is frozen in place. As John Dewey wrote in
an article on “Human Nature” for The Encyclopeia of the Social
Sciences in 1932,
The present controversies between those who assert the essential
fixity of human nature and those who believe in a great measure of
modifiability center chiefly around the future of war and the future of a
competitive economic system motivated by private profit. It is justifiable to
say without dogmatism that both anthropology and history give support to those
who wish to change these institutions. It is demonstrable that many of the
obstacles to change which have been attributed to human nature are in fact due
to the inertia of institutions and to the voluntary desire of powerful classes
to maintain the existing status.
2. Why Not Capitalism?
The case against capitalism contains a number of facets. First, capitalism
is a system that must expand—leading to colonial and imperial wars and
economic domination of poorer countries. The basic working of the system
creates great wealth and poverty simultaneously at national and international
levels. A consequence of this is that a large part of humanity is doomed to a
subservient position, with many living precarious and wretched lives.
Capitalism also tends to wreak ecological havoc as it develops and grows
because there is no other systemic goal than the pursuit of capital
accumulation—its prime moving force. It tends to use up natural resources,
both renewable and nonrenewable, without regard to their limited nature. And
while the worst effects of capitalism can sometimes be mitigated, reforms can
be undone when capitalists view them as barriers to capital accumulation and
have the power to legislate the return to more unfettered conditions.
A. Inherent Expansionism of Capitalism
Trade for monetary gain and the extraction of precious metals became the
dominant motive forces at the center of society in the emerging mercantile
capitalism, resulting in wealth accumulation by merchants and bankers in the
powerful countries. This led to struggles between social groups and wars
between nations searching for more power, property, and wealth. However, the
oceans set limits on European trade with other parts of the world because it
was essentially confined to land routes until the late fifteenth century. The
exploration of the oceans by European nations that began at this time was made
possible by the development of powerful artillery, new navigational
instruments, and large sailing ships that could hold significant numbers of
both soldiers and cannon. “The Europeans rapidly improved upon [military
technology, naval artillery, and sailing ships] before the non-Europeans were
able to absorb [them]. The disequilibrium grew, therefore, progressively
larger” (C. M. Cippola, Guns and Sails in the Early Phase of European
Expansion 1400–1700 [Collins, 1965]).
The initial motivation for the European explorations and conquests abroad
was usually mercantile trade for high value products such as spices and
precious minerals. It took only a few decades for the European nations to
become the predominant masters of the oceans and gain entry or access to many
nations around the world. They began to establish small enclaves, some of which
they were able greatly to expand because of the decimation of native
populations following the introduction of Eurasian germs to which there was
little resistance among the people of the conquered lands. Although the push
abroad started in the late fifteenth century, for the sake of convenience, 1500
is generally used to mark the start of the era of merchant capitalism. Merchant
capitalism created a world market, a massive concentration of wealth (largely
based on general trade as well as gold and silver stolen from the Americas),
and the beginning of colonization that affected huge segments of the overseas
world. Indigenous people were wiped out by war, enslavement, and disease or
were otherwise marginalized. European markets with Africa concentrated for
centuries on the slave trade, which predominantly benefited Britain.
Merchant capitalism created the beginnings of a world market and helped
provide the accumulated wealth that gave birth to the industrial revolution of
mid-eighteenth century. Thus, about two and a half centuries ago a new type of
society developed in Europe—industrial capitalism—and has since
spread to essentially all corners of the world. Built into the very fabric of
modern, or industrial, capitalism is the need to expand control and influence
to foreign shores—imperialism. There are a number of significant forces
that led to the drive to expand and during various periods one or another may
have been predominant. However, they are generally inseparable, because they
are all derived from the workings of capitalism.
Control over foreign natural resources (in competition with other
capitalists and/or other nations) is needed to obtain secure sources of
essential materials for production—from cotton to bauxite to oil to copper
and so on. The U.S. war on Iraq and the attempt to influence the politics and
economy of that country and region are incomprehensible without viewing it as
part of a strategy to control Middle Eastern oil, which amounts to 65 percent
of the world’s known reserves. The United States currently imports over
half its oil needs, 100 percent of its needs for seventeen minerals, and relies
heavily on imports for many more.
The push continually to invest profits in order to accumulate more and more
capital—the driving force of industrial capitalism—and production
stimulated by competition among firms for market share led capitalists to
develop new products and expand their markets internally. Once internal markets
are saturated or close to saturation capitalists search abroad for profitable
opportunities to overcome the stagnation that begins to develop. The persistent
excess of investment and production relative to effective demand, the cause of
capitalism’s tendency toward stagnation, was identified by Marx as a
characteristic of the system.
If this new accumulation meets with difficulties in its employment,
through a lack of spheres of investment, i.e. due to a surplus in the branches
of production and an oversupply of loan capital, this plethora of loanable
money capital merely shows the limitations of capitalist production...an
obstacle is indeed immanent in its laws of expansion, i.e., in the limits in
which capital can realize itself as capital. (Karl Marx, Capital, vol.
3, 507)
Investing abroad also offers opportunities to take advantage of lower-cost
labor and fewer environmental restrictions, allowing more profitable production
for the foreign and/or home markets. Having many operations abroad offers the
opportunity for firms to allocate costs and income to various international
subsidiaries in ways that minimize tax obligations.
In the monopolistic stage of capitalism that arose in the twentieth century,
the struggle between giant corporations for bigger shares of the markets at
home and abroad was another factor contributing to the drive for expansion.
Corporations frequently need external funding to feed this. Much of the surplus
generated by corporations is dissipated in nonproductive ways, such as for
advertising and promotion or outrageously high compensation for senior
corporate officers. For example, the amount that the CEO of Wal-mart earns
every two weeks is equivalent to what an average worker in that company earns
in an entire lifetime (Paul Krugman, New York Times, May 13, 2005).
Hence, although corporations can still generate profits for investment
internally, they frequently require access to capital for expansion of
production or acquisitions of other companies. In order to attract the bankers
and stock market investors they need to show significant or potential growth.
Lastly, the invasion of the periphery by banks from the core capitalist
countries assists foreign investment and helps foreign investors and their
allies in the local ruling class transfer profits back to the core countries.
Banks from the center also find it profitable to peddle loans to private and
public agencies in the periphery, enhancing the development of debt peonage.
Interest (plus some of the principal) equivalent to the original loan is
rapidly transferred back to the center, leaving behind a long-term obligation
to pay.
Creating colonial control was the way emerging capitalist centers assured
power over foreign resources and markets. The expansion of the more advanced
industrial and military powers led to outright control of most of the globe. By
1914, colonies of the rich and industrialized countries covered approximately
85 percent of the earth’s land surface. (And people talk nowadays about
“globalization” as if it were a completely new phenomenon rather than
a renewed imperialist thrust!) The World Wars of the twentieth century were
fought primarily over the question of the division of the world among the great
powers. Bitter struggles and wars after the Second World War forced the
colonial powers to decolonize. However, after decolonization, the rich nations
of the center of the capitalist world economy continued to dominate the much
larger underdeveloped world. A common feature of the years of colonialism and
those after the former colonies gained political independence was the economic
subordination of the poor nations to the needs and wishes of capital from the
center. This history of colonial and imperialist domination has distorted the
economies of the periphery in ways that have inhibited self-development. The
main feature of this dependency of the poorer nations—the extraction of
wealth to support capital accumulation by the dominant powers—continues to
this day. Following decolonization, new means were needed to oversee and
continue to reproduce the dependence of the poor countries of the periphery.
The IMF and World Bank now perform much of the enforcement role once played by
colonial occupation and military force, but armed forces are still used to
enforce imperial will.
The importance of the global penetration of capital to the success of the
system as a whole has been simply stated by Joan Robinson: “few would deny
that the expansion of capitalism into new territories was the mainspring
of...‘the vast secular boom’ of the last two hundred
years.”2 However, this expansion
inherent to capitalism creates nearly perpetual warfare and subjugates the
economies of the periphery to the needs of the corporations based in the
system’s center. It also works to maintain a large portion of the
world’s people under very harsh conditions (see below).
B. Capitalism and the Human Condition
Capitalism, with a number of political variations, has produced more goods,
inventions, new ideas, and technological advances than in all of previous
history. During the approximately two and a half centuries of industrial
capitalism there has been—with the important exceptions of severe
recessions, depressions, and wars—nearly continuous expansion of the
leading capitalist countries. But what has this enormous progress and
development of productive capacities created as far as the living conditions
and relations of the people on this earth? On the one hand, there is a
significant portion of the world’s population, perhaps 20 percent, that
lives in comfort with many opportunities for education, housing, and purchasing
a variety of goods almost at will. But within this generally well-off group
there is a very uneven distribution of riches, with the wealthiest controlling
huge amounts of wealth. The wealthiest 691 people on earth have a net worth of
$2.2 trillion, equivalent to the combined annual GDP of 145 countries—more
than all of Latin America and Africa combined! The richest 7.7 million people
(about 0.1 percent of world’s population), with net financial worth of
more than $1 million, control approximately $28.8 trillion—equivalent to
80 percent of the annual gross domestic product of all the countries of the
world. This is more than the combined annual GDP of all countries of the world
minus the United States. (It actually also encompasses about 40 percent of the
U.S. GDP as well.)
Despite the huge quantity of wealth produced and accumulated in a few hands,
the details of how so much of humanity actually lives—the numbers and
conditions of the wretched of the earth—are outrageous.
Of the approximately 6.3 billion people in the world:
- About half of humanity (three billion people) are malnourished and are
chronically short of calories, proteins, vitamins, and/or minerals.3 Many more
are “food insecure,” not knowing where their next meal is coming
from. The UN estimates that “only” 840 million (including ten million
in the wealthy core industrialized countries) are undernourished, but this is
greatly below most other estimates.
- One billion live in slums (about one-third of the approximately three
billion people living in cities).
- About half of humanity lives on less than what two dollars a day can
purchase in the United States.
- One billion have no access to clean water.
- Two billion have no electricity.
- Two and a half billion have no sanitary facilities.
- One billion children, half of the world’s total, suffer extreme
deprivation because of poverty, war, and disease (including AIDS).
- Even in wealthy core capitalist countries, a significant portion of the
population lives insecure lives. For example, in the United States twelve
million families are considered food insecure and in four million families
(with nine million people) someone regularly skips a meal so there will be
enough food for other family members.4
Another part of the human condition over the past two and a half centuries
of industrial capitalism has been the almost continuous warfare with hundreds
of millions of people killed. Occupation, slavery, genocide, wars, and
exploitation are part of the continuing history of capitalism. Wars have
resulted from capitalist countries fighting among themselves for dominance and
access to global markets, from attempts to subjugate colonies or neocolonies,
and ethnic or religious differences among people—many of which have been
exacerbated by colonial occupation and/or imperial interference. The basic
driving force of capitalism, to accumulate capital, compels capitalist
countries to penetrate foreign markets and expand their market share. However,
it is impossible to separate the leading imperialist countries’ economic
drive to invest and sell abroad from their political and military
policies—all interests are intertwined in a very dangerous combination.
Warfare is continuing in the post-Cold War era—with the United States
eager to display its military power—and there is potential for even more
misery. The estimate that 100,000 Iraqis have died as a result of the U.S.
invasion gives some idea of the magnitude of the disaster that has fallen on
that nation.
C. The Connection Between Wealth and Poverty
There is a logical connection between capitalism’s achievements and its
failures. The poverty and misery of a large mass of the world’s people is
not an accident, some inadvertent byproduct of the system, one that can be
eliminated with a little tinkering here or there. The fabulous accumulation of
wealth—as a direct consequence of the way capitalism works nationally and
internationally—has simultaneously produced persistent hunger,
malnutrition, health problems, lack of water, lack of sanitation, and general
misery for a large portion of the people of the world.
The difficult situation of so much of humanity partly occurs because the
economic system does not produce full employment. Instead, capitalism develops
and maintains what Marx called the reserve army of labor—a large sector of
the population that lives precariously, sometimes working, sometimes not. These
workers might be needed seasonally, at irregular times, when there is a
temporary economic boom, for the military, or not at all. In the wealthy
countries, members of the reserve army of the unemployed and underemployed are
generally the poorest, living under difficult conditions including
homelessness. Their very existence maintains a downward pressure on wages for
the lower echelons of workers. (For a full discussion, see Fred Magdoff &
Harry Magdoff, “Disposable Workers,”
Monthly Review, April 2004.)
In the countries of capitalism’s periphery there are several factors at
work that maintain such large numbers of people in miserable circumstances.
Part of the story is the wealth extracted from the countries of the periphery
when repatriated profits exceed new investments and natural resources are
exploited for the wealthy core countries. Also, banks push loans on countries
resulting in even more extraction of wealth from the periphery through a system
of debt peonage. More and more, the people of the periphery serve as
participants in the reserve army of labor for capital from abroad as well as
for their own capitalists. The labor forces of many former colonies were
created purposefully by breaking up their societies and their way of living.
One way this was accomplished was to require that a tax be paid, compelling
people to join the money economy. The change from traditional land tenure
patterns to one based on private ownership was another way colonial powers
undermined the conditions of peasant communities. And as many people are pushed
from the land and into urban slums in the periphery, there are not sufficient
jobs to absorb the workers, creating a huge humanitarian crisis.5 Additionally, the power that goes along with
wealth allows the manipulation of the political and legal system to benefit
continued accumulation at the expense of the sharing or redistribution that
might have occurred in more “primitive” societies.
The wealth of the rich countries at the center of the capitalist system
depends heavily to this day on the extraction of resources and riches from the
periphery. The leading global capitalist investors are in the wealthy
industrial countries, but their accumulation is based on the exploitation of
the entire world: Accumulation on a World Scale is the way Samir Amin
described this in the title of his famous book. Instead of allowing the
countries of the periphery to use their economic surplus to advance their own
internal interests, the center countries invest part of this surplus to
penetrate the rest of the world, actively assisted in this process by the home
country’s political establishment and U.S. (or NATO) military force. This
means that poor countries are not able to use their potential economic surplus
to meet their societal needs; instead it flows into the coffers of the ruling
classes in the rich countries and partly into luxury goods for their own small,
wealthy comprador elites that are complicit with the interests of foreign
capital.
In the early years of industrial capitalism, accumulation of capital from
the periphery mainly took the form of outright robbery of precious metals,
followed by agricultural products produced by slave labor, the supply of which
was itself a profitable business. Later, loans and investments resulted in the
extraction of profits in the form of hard currency—creating a perpetual
debt crisis for many countries—while natural resources such as oil and
bauxite were also extracted. In the early phase of capitalism the “mother
countries” of the center did everything possible to destroy businesses in
the periphery that might compete with those at home. Thus, the forcible British
destruction of India’s textile industry so that Indians would be compelled
to purchase goods produced in England.
During the early years of capitalism the core countries worked energetically
to protect their industries and other businesses from competition from abroad.
Now, the great strength of these mature businesses and their need to penetrate
the periphery more efficiently has resulted in capital in the center states,
their governments, and the “international” organizations working in
their interests all jointly promoting “free trade”—while
hypocritically still supporting many advantages for “home” industries
both internally and in their dealings around the world. In the current wave of
global capitalist expansion, with capital having gained a great degree of
mobility, goods once produced in the countries of the center are more and more
produced in countries with low wages. This serves two purposes: In addition to
making it possible to undersell competitors still producing in the core, it
provides an opening to new markets in the country and region in which the
products are now produced, as a class with significant purchasing power
develops in the countries of the periphery. Importation of low-cost
manufactured goods from abroad, produced with exploited and underpaid labor,
provides another way that the wealth of the core is reinforced and reproduced.
Capitalism, through a variety of mechanisms—from outright robbery and
colonial domination in the early years to the imperialist relations in its more
mature version—continues to reproduce the wealth of the core and the
underdevelopment of the periphery. It also continues to produce and reproduce a
class structure in each country—including a servile ruling class in the
periphery with their foreign bank accounts and faith in U.S. military force.
The production and continual reproduction of a class structure, with an
always present reserve army of labor means that there will always be
significant inequality under capitalism. Hierarchy and classes mean that
differences prevail at every level and with a large overwhelming number of
people with little to no effective power. The distribution of wealth in the
United States indicates the extent of inequality. The bottom 80 percent of the
people own less than half the wealth that is owned by the top 1 percent, and
the bottom 40 percent of households own 0.3 percent of the total wealth (table 1).
Differences also persist between regions of countries and among different
ethnic groups. For example, in 2002 the average family net worth of whites
($88,000) was eleven times greater than for Hispanics and fourteen times that
of blacks (“Wealth gap among races widens in recession,” Associated
Press, October 18, 2004). While only 13 percent of white families had zero or
negative net worth, close to one-third of black and Hispanic families had no
net wealth. Average family incomes of blacks and Hispanics in 2000 were
approximately half that of whites. And significantly fewer black males are in
the labor force than their white counterparts—67 versus 74 percent
participation rates, respectively (2005 Economic Report of the President,
http://www.gpoaccess.gov/eop/).
Little needs to be said about the huge difference in national wealth between
the highly developed capitalist countries and those in the periphery. While the
average developed country’s per capita GDP is approximately $30,000, it is
around $6,000 in Latin America and the Caribbean, $4,000 in North Africa, and
$2,000 in sub-Saharan Africa. But these numbers hide the worst of the problems,
because per capita GDP in Haiti is $1,600, in Ethiopia it is $700, and in six
countries in sub-Saharan Africa average per capita income is $600 or less. The
wealthy countries with 15 percent of the world’s population produce 80
percent of its GDP. On the other hand, the poorest countries with close to 40
percent of the world’s population produce only 3 percent of its wealth.
D. Ecological Degradation
Ecological degradation occurred in numerous precapitalist societies. But
with capitalism there is a new dimension to the problem, even as we have better
understood the ecological harm that human activity can create. The drive for
profits and capital accumulation as the overriding objective of economic
activity, the control that economic interests exert over political life, and
the many technologies developed in capitalist societies that allow humans
rapidly to change their environment—near and wide, intentionally or
not—mean that adverse effects on the environment are inevitable. Pollution
of water, air, and soil are natural byproducts of production systems organized
for the single goal of making profits.
Under the logic of capitalist production and exchange there is no inherent
mechanism to encourage or force industry to find methods that have minimal
impact on the environment. For example, new chemicals that are found useful to
produce manufactured goods are routinely introduced into the
environment—without the adequate assessment of whether or not they cause
harm to humans or other species. The mercury given off into the air by
coal-burning power plants pollutes lakes hundreds of miles away as well as the
ocean. The routine misuse of antibiotics, added to feeds of animals that are
being maintained in the overcrowded and unhealthy conditions of factory farms,
has caused the development of antibiotic resistant strains of disease
organisms. It is a technique that is inconsistent with any sound ecological
approach to raising animals, but it is important to capital because profits are
enhanced. In addition, the development of an automobile-centered society in the
United States has had huge environmental consequences. Vast areas of suburbs,
sometimes merging into a “megatropolis,” partially erase the
boundaries between communities. The waste of fuel by commuting to work by car
is only part of the story of suburbanization, as some people work in the city
while others work in different suburbs. Shopping in malls reachable only by
cars and taking children to school and play require transportation over
significant distances.
Climate change resulting from global warming, not completely predictable,
but with mostly negative consequences, is another repercussion of unfettered
capitalist exploitation of resources. As fossil fuels are burned in large
quantities by factories, electrical generation plants, and automobiles and
trucks, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have increased. There is some
concern that the gradual warming could actually lead to a fairly rapid change,
with such factors as the melting of polar ice, changes in precipitation and
river flow, and a cessation of the thermohaline conveyor (of which the Gulf
Stream is a part) that brings warm water to the north Atlantic and helps keep
North America and Europe warm (see “The Pentagon
and Climate Change,” Monthly Review, May 2004).
An added dimension of capitalism’s threat to the environment is the
deep thread in western thought that God gave the earth to humans to exploit.
This notion is derived from the Bible, where the book of Genesis (1:28)
contains the following:
And God blessed them [Adam and Eve], and God said unto them, Be
fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have
dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every
living thing that moveth upon the earth.
A relatively recent virulent strain of anti-environmentalism exists among
evangelical Protestants in the United States, maintaining that the end of the
world is near. Thus, it makes no real difference what happens to our natural
resources and the earth’s life support systems (see Bill Moyers,
“Welcome to Doomsday” New York Review of Books 52, no. 5
[March 24, 2005]).
E. Resource Limits
A system that by its very nature must grow and expand will eventually come
up against the reality of finite global natural resources. The water, air, and
soil can continue to function well for the living creatures on the planet only
if pollution doesn’t exceed their capacity to assimilate and render the
pollutants harmless. Additionally, natural resources are used in the process of
production—fuel (oil and gas), water (in industry and agriculture), trees
for lumber and paper, a variety of mineral deposits such as iron ore and
bauxite, and so on. Some resources such as forests and fisheries are of a
finite size, but can be renewed by natural processes if used in a planned
system that is flexible enough to change as conditions warrant. Future use of
other resources—oil and gas, minerals, aquifers in some desert areas
(prehistorically deposited water)—are limited forever to the supply that
currently exists.
Capitalists generally only consider the short term in their
operations—perhaps three to five years at best. This is the way they must
function because of unpredictable business conditions (phases of the business
cycle, competition from other corporations, prices of needed inputs, etc.) and
demands from speculators looking for short-term returns. Capitalists,
therefore, act without any recognition that there are natural limits to their
activities—as if there is an unlimited supply of natural resources for
exploitation. When each individual capitalist pursues the goal of making a
profit and accumulating capital, decisions are made that collectively harm
society as a whole. For example, the well-documented decline, almost to the
point of extinction, of many ocean fish species is an example. It is in the
short-term individual interests of the owner of a fishing boat—some of
which operate at factory scale, catching, processing, and freezing fish—to
maximize their take. Although there is no natural limit to human greed, there
are limits to many resources, including the productivity of the seas.
The use of water for irrigation is an old practice, which only in the last
fifty years has started to reach its natural limits. The capacity of some
watersheds and rivers are fully exploited—so much water is withdrawn from
the Yellow River in Northern China, in most years it doesn’t reach the
sea. With the use of powerful pumps that can exploit the deeper aquifers and
pump at higher rates, water can be withdrawn faster than it is replenished by
rainfall percolating through the soil. The first people to point out that
withdrawing more water than was replenished by rainfall from the Oglala
Aquifer, which underlies the portion of the Great Plains from South Dakota to
the panhandle of Texas, could not continue for much longer and would require
deeper and deeper wells until it was impractical if not impossible to continue
its use, were accused of being communists! That’s one indication of how
uncapitalist it is to think about possible resource limits to economic
activity.
How long it will take before nonrenewable deposits are exhausted depends
upon the size of the deposit and the rate of extraction of the resource. While
depletion of some resources may be hundreds of years away (assuming that the
rate of growth of extraction remains the same) limits for some important
ones—oil and some minerals—are not that far off. For example, it is
estimated that at the rate oil is currently being used, known reserves will be
exhausted within the next fifty years—the 2003 ratio of reserves to annual
extraction is forty-one years, down from nearly forty-four years in 1989
(British Petroleum, Statistical Review of World Energy 2004, http://www.bp.com). Iron ore production—the
basic ingredient of iron and steel products used—grew by about 16 percent
from 2003 to 2004. If it grows by 7 percent annually from now on, known
deposits of iron ore will be exhausted in about sixty years. If the rapid
increase in use of copper continues, all known reserves will be exhausted in a
little over sixty years.
In the face of limited natural resources, there is no rational way to
prioritize under a capitalist system, in which the market—that is the
wealthy with their market power—decides how commodities are allocated.
When extraction begins to decline, as is projected for oil within the near
future, price increases will put increased pressure on what had been until
recently the boast of world capitalism, the supposedly middle-class workers of
the center.
F. Capitalism with a Human Face? Reform and Counter-Reform
Reforms can be enacted to soften the social and ecological effects of the
raw workings of the capitalist system. Certainly many have occurred, including
those that resulted in workers’ gains in the core capitalist countries
such as a shorter workday and week, the right to form a union, a government run
social security retirement system, higher incomes, and worker safety laws.
Concern over the environment has led to laws that have improved the sorry state
of air and water quality in most of the advanced capitalist countries. However,
as we are now seeing in the countries of the core, it is possible for capital
to reverse the gains that were won through hard-fought struggles of the working
class. During periods in the ebb and flow of the class struggle when conditions
are decidedly in favor of capital, there will be an attempt to reverse the
gains and to push towards minimal constraints and maximum flexibility for
capital.
At the end of the Second World War, capital, fearing revolution that could
destroy the system and needing the cooperation of labor to get the countries
back on their feet, promoted a welfare state in much of Europe—paid
vacations, better wages, and Germany even placed workers on corporations’
boards of directors. In the United States the welfare state began with
Roosevelt’s New Deal and new programs were added through the 1960s.
Following the Second World War as the economies were rapidly
rebuilding—spurred on by the stimulus of the automobile and
suburbanization with all their ramifications—there was plenty of money to
fund welfare programs, provide higher salaries for labor, and still make large
profits. When the economy was growing rapidly taxes also increased (without
much effort) to fund new programs. The concern for social stability in the
1960s and the desire to have the masses’ support in the Cold War,
especially in the United States, are also part of the explanation for increases
in social programs. What actually happened also depended on the militancy of
unions as well as other forms of class struggle such as the black movement for
political and economic rights. But with the growth of larger and larger
corporations, competition between countries became more intense and there were
no new forces stimulating the economy to grow rapidly, as had occurred from the
end of the Second World War through the 1960s.
When economic stagnation developed in the 1970s, capital responded in a
number of ways. Investment strategies changed in order to sustain
profits—there was a diversion from investment to produce physical
commodities toward the service sectors and the speculative world of finance
(creating and selling a variety of financial products). With stagnation,
capitalist societies, as throughout their history in depressions, also shifted
the burdens of stagnation, militarism, and wars to the working people (and the
colonial possessions). Beginning in the 1980s those at the top of society have
promoted a continuous class war aimed at reducing corporate taxes and taxes on
the wealthy. Also starting in the 1980s—and accelerating at this
time—the vested interests of capital have unleashed a campaign to
dismantle as many worker rights as possible (including those in the reserve
army): attacking welfare programs, making it harder to unionize workers and
easier to fire them, decreased pension coverage, privatizing basic services
(including schools), and attempting to privatize social security. Conservatives
in the United States never accepted government social programs and have
established the goal of rolling back those initiated during Franklin D.
Roosevelt’s New Deal and the 1960s Great Society era, returning to the
situation before the national government had a major role in protecting the
rights of workers. There is also a similar drive by capital in Europe to
decrease worker protections and rights under the guise that it is necessary to
make their industries more competitive in the world market.
The greed, individualism, and competition fostered by capitalism makes it
relatively easy to justify elimination of programs that help workers and the
poor. Thus, capitalism can have a “human face” for only short periods
of time. Reforms that achieve modest gains can never be counted on to achieve a
truly humane society. As we now see, counter-reforms will occur as the strength
of capital increases relative to that of labor, and class war from above
becomes the norm. But more importantly, the evils of inequality, poverty and
misery, environmental degradation, using up resources faster than replacements
can be found or developed—as well as the imperialist economic, political,
and military penetration of the periphery by leading core countries—all
flow out of the very nature of the capitalism.
A new society is needed because the evils are part of the DNA of the
capitalist system. Moving away from capitalism is not really a choice—the
environmental constraints and the growth of immiseration will force a change in
the society. The future points to limited possibilities—a turn to fascism
(barbarism) or the creation of a collective society that can provide the basic
needs for all of humanity.
3. Learning from the Failures of Post-Revolutionary Societies
In view of the extent of misery and the threat of environmental disaster
endemic to capitalism, what needs to be done? A simple, direct answer was
recently given by Nora Castoneda, founder of a bank for women in Venezuela:
“We are creating an economy at the service of human beings instead of
human beings at the service of the economy.” This description can stand as
the essence of the socialist goal. It may well represent the hopes of billions
of people. However, developments of the two great socialist revolutions—in
the soviet Union and China—have left many people on the left disheartened
and discouraged about the prospects of socialism.
Unfortunately, many of us have a simplified view of history and overlook the
contradictions on the road to a new social order. The post-revolutionary
societies accomplished a great deal: full employment, mass education, medical
service for all the people, industrialization, longer life spans, sharp
declines of infant mortality, and much more. They marked advances on the road
to socialism. But after a relatively short period they each took detours to
social systems that were neither capitalist nor socialist. Eventually, both
became firmly established on the road to capitalism. But how did these
revolutions become sidetracked, and are there lessons to be learned for new
attempts to take the radical road, the socialist road? Hard answers are
difficult to come by and we don’t pretend to know all the answers. But we
would like to note lines of study and analysis that might help understand the
failures.
Most important, in our opinion, is that departures from the socialist road
were not inevitable; rather they are outgrowths of specific historical
circumstances—and to a large extent the endurance of old social groups and
old ways of thinking. Capitalist ideology persisted and served new ruling
groups, many of whom, in pursuing their self-interest, played the game of
grabbing a higher rung in the hierarchy while holding on to the morality of the
old overthrown ruling class. The professed goal of true
democracy—people’s intense involvement in determining and
participating in setting policy and practice in the new society—was more
talk than action.
Perhaps one, if not the leading, lesson of the post-revolutionary societies
is the affirmation that socialism cannot arrive overnight—the road to such
a major transformation of social structure and people’s consciousness is
indeed very long. It is also full of pitfalls. Mao put it simply and clearly:
Marxism-Leninism and the practice of the Soviet Union, China and
other socialist countries all teach us that socialist society covers a very,
very long historical stage. Throughout this stage, the class struggle between
the bourgeoisie and the proletariat goes on and the question of “who will
win” between the roads of capitalism and socialism remains, as does the
danger of restoration of capitalism. (Mao Zedong, “On Khrushchev’s
Phony Communism and Its Historical Lessons for the World: Comment on the Open
Letter of the Central Committee of the CPSU,” 1964)
The long transition to fully-developed socialism requires a truly new
culture imbued with a new ideology. A fundamental reversal of the dominant
mentality of capitalist times is crucial for the creation of a new social
order. But ideology, values, ethics, and prevailing beliefs in capitalism are
strong and cannot evolve overnight to something different. We live in a society
that promotes and often requires selfishness, greed, individualism, and a
dog-eat-dog competitive spirit. A socialist society, on the other hand, would
require and help produce a collective ideology adapted to a totally different
social practice—one focused on serving all the people, outlawing
hierarchy, overcoming differences in status, and moving toward egalitarianism.
Marx posed the difficult question about such changes in philosophical terms:
The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and
upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of changed
circumstances and upbringing, forgets that it is men who change circumstances
and that the educator must himself be educated. Hence this doctrine is bound to
divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society. The
coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or
self-change [Selbstveränderung] can be conceived and rationally understood
only as revolutionary practice. (Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach) [Note
that “man” was not the word Marx used. He wrote
“Mensch” which in German means “person” and applies
equally to men and women.]
The crucial phrase used in the above quotation is “revolutionary
practice.” That calls for a high degree of people’s involvement in
the revolutionary process of building a new society. And that, at the very
least, requires and should encourage the people’s full freedom to
criticize leaders and dispute policies.
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