This is mostly lifted from something I posted in another member's blog.
A capitalist economic system could only avoid an effectively oppressive concentration of wealth and power when divorced from the real world context of preexisting inequities. Even then, it would require trusts to be very aggressively broken - when Adam Smith wrote Wealth of Nations, the idea that a monopoly could arise except by the exercise of state power was nearly unthinkable, but as communications, transportation, and financial links improved, the consolidation of wealth through purely private means was considerably facilitated. Moreover, wealth is easily parleyed into political power, which in turn can be parleyed into more wealth. This is where crony capitalism and, at a greater extreme, kleptocracies come into being. These systems aren't really perversions of capitalism anymore than Stalinism is a perversion of Bolshevism. Rather, they're pretty much the inevitable end results of predictable human behavior within the context of specific structures of authority.
Ultimately, no system really works. We've had over fifty thousand years of trying, and that's more than enough time to have figured it out - if it were a question of figuring anything out. Hell, anarchy actually has the best track record of any form of government when you take the long view. It was all preliterate, but still.
What the essential political and economic tension of all organized societies has ever been, though, is between the need to distribute authority to those who are most qualified to exercise it, and the way in which authority is actually distributed, which is overwhelmingly by heredity. The nomenklatura of the Soviet Union was a good example of that, actually.
To resolve that tension, we create belief systems (whether capitalist, communist, feudal, theocratic, or educational) that justify the position of the ruling class on the basis of their superior virtues, and in turn denigrate the already poor and downtrodden by ascribing to them all manner of vices.
This makes all human political organizations founded on a hypocrisy - there is an eternal and universal ideal that authority ought to be assigned by worth, and an eternal and universal reality that it's actually assigned by merit-neutral social connections (and, insofar as the justifying ideology of the ruling class can be stretched to exculpate a plethora of incompetencies and oppressions, "merit-neutral" is in practice often a misnomer).
But what this really means is not that there's no point to striving for social justice, that cynicism and apathy are synonyms for wisdom, but the opposite - that the struggle must remain ongoing for the duration of humanity's existence. Egregious oppressions generate radical responses - inevitably. It is by answering lesser oppressions that the tumults of violent reform might be forestalled.
Anyway. Thoughts for the day.
A capitalist economic system could only avoid an effectively oppressive concentration of wealth and power when divorced from the real world context of preexisting inequities. Even then, it would require trusts to be very aggressively broken - when Adam Smith wrote Wealth of Nations, the idea that a monopoly could arise except by the exercise of state power was nearly unthinkable, but as communications, transportation, and financial links improved, the consolidation of wealth through purely private means was considerably facilitated. Moreover, wealth is easily parleyed into political power, which in turn can be parleyed into more wealth. This is where crony capitalism and, at a greater extreme, kleptocracies come into being. These systems aren't really perversions of capitalism anymore than Stalinism is a perversion of Bolshevism. Rather, they're pretty much the inevitable end results of predictable human behavior within the context of specific structures of authority.
Ultimately, no system really works. We've had over fifty thousand years of trying, and that's more than enough time to have figured it out - if it were a question of figuring anything out. Hell, anarchy actually has the best track record of any form of government when you take the long view. It was all preliterate, but still.
What the essential political and economic tension of all organized societies has ever been, though, is between the need to distribute authority to those who are most qualified to exercise it, and the way in which authority is actually distributed, which is overwhelmingly by heredity. The nomenklatura of the Soviet Union was a good example of that, actually.
To resolve that tension, we create belief systems (whether capitalist, communist, feudal, theocratic, or educational) that justify the position of the ruling class on the basis of their superior virtues, and in turn denigrate the already poor and downtrodden by ascribing to them all manner of vices.
This makes all human political organizations founded on a hypocrisy - there is an eternal and universal ideal that authority ought to be assigned by worth, and an eternal and universal reality that it's actually assigned by merit-neutral social connections (and, insofar as the justifying ideology of the ruling class can be stretched to exculpate a plethora of incompetencies and oppressions, "merit-neutral" is in practice often a misnomer).
But what this really means is not that there's no point to striving for social justice, that cynicism and apathy are synonyms for wisdom, but the opposite - that the struggle must remain ongoing for the duration of humanity's existence. Egregious oppressions generate radical responses - inevitably. It is by answering lesser oppressions that the tumults of violent reform might be forestalled.
Anyway. Thoughts for the day.
VIEW 24 of 24 COMMENTS
marginwalker2002:
Oh dear lord, I feel like a complete sclhlubb after reading that. My understanding of the financial / sociopolitical system is at such an elementary level its pathetic.
violetred:
awww...thanks! 
