ARE YOU NOW OR HAVE YOU EVER BEEN A CAPITALIST?: WHY CAPITALISM IS NOW A POLITICAL IDEOLOGY
by Albert Lanier
The 2016 campaign of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has been credited with re-introducing Socialism (in Sanders case, Democratic Socialism) into the national mainstream political debate or what passes for it in the narrow-minded, rhetorical provinces of cable and network TV news.
As the 2020 election looms in the near future, another ideology is coming under a media spotlight: Capitalism.
Some individuals reading that last paragraph may not only be surprised by the statement above but wind up contesting it. After all, capitalism is known as an economic system predicated on using funds or capital to start-up constructs known mostly as companies and corporations that are joined in competitive battle against each other in order to secure profits. Capitalism by dint of its solely economic nature has nothing to do with political processes such as voting or candidates vying for electoral office.
Yet what has occurred in at least the couple of decades if not more is that Capitalism is now essentially a defacto political ideology and philosophy.
I note this because at least from the late 1940’s -1990 when the Cold War was raging, Capitalism was an appendage to American democracy in the ideological war for hearts and minds the US waged against the former Soviet Union. Capitalism and free markets were not front and center as the solution and main rhetorical and ideological weapons against communism.
After all, Ronald Reagan didnt call the Soviet Union “the evil economic empire”. Even a politician like Reagan and his far right Republican clique understood a pronounced, open battle with communism was political in nature.
The disintegration of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War in the 1990’s cooled the political war against statist Marxism in the US for a while.
However, former US Senator Barrack Obama’s success in winning 2 terms as President led to the resurrection of an overt political war within the country against the American Left. In this case, communism was replaced simply with socialism. Just as Republicans tried to paint Democrats and anyone not a conservative as a communist in the 1950’s, now the GOP spreads the broad brush of socialism of anyone who isnt a right winger.
The Right had a problem though: Simply fighting on the terrain of political scorched earth tactics wouldnt work any more in this context. No Soviet Union means no monolithic powerful communist threat.
Enter Capitalism.
As I noted in a previous piece on this blog “The Art of the Failed Deal”, the campaign waged by the American Corporate Class was spearheaded by the Lewis Powell Memo of 1971 against greater democratic and even economic attainment by popular movements such as the Civil Rights and Women’s movements as well as the longtime Union movement.
This campaign included funding think tanks, starting organizations like the Business Roundtable and increasing the number of lobbyists they hired and Political Action Committees or PACS they owned.
The expanding influence of the corporate world extended now not only to media but politics and not simply to funding candidates for office but committing to candidates who articulate a pro-business agenda.
As a result, Capitalism- not democracy or even liberty and freedom those much abused and misused code words of the right-became politicized.
The results can often be seen on Cable TV news shows. Conservative economists, writers and academics fresh from the minor league farm team of think tanks will spout rhetoric about how “ capitalism has improved the standard of living” or that it offers “freedom of choice” or that “markets foster innovation.”
All of these and more are political talking points. Thus unlike taking a dry, dispassionate, matter of fact academic and professional approach that would be with in the realm of economics, capitalism is discussed in enthusiastic, heated and fevered rhetoric.
The promoters of the ideology of capitalism thus make grandiose claims and exaggerated benefits. They reduce an economic system to the nature of a glad-handing politician.
They seem to be unaware or choose not make themselves aware of the fact that Capitalism at its very core is a system that is surprisingly honest. There are in fact no promises made to anyone. Certainly none are made to the worker. The possibilities rest only with owners and investors. If the funding is found and the company up and running, the profits may thus be made which puts money in the hands of the owners of enterprises but not in the hands of workers. Workers get wages, owners get profits and dividends.
What capitalism promises is merely the probability of profit for those who fund and run companies and firms. Even these individuals are not promised “a better world” just better profits-if they do everything right.More importantly, the system is solely about the imput of capital and output of revenues. It is not about bettering communities or even ending poverty. In fact, Capitalism is fundamentally neutral. Capitalism is a straight forward, no-nonsense, transactional system.
It is no wonder that politicians and even economic thinkers have endeavored to create a political framework out of Capitalism. Left solely to its devices as an economic system, it does its job of making the rich richer and poor poorer. This cannot remain.
Thus Capitalism is transformed into political propaganda, markets are refashioned as instruments of choice and freedom. If it were a separate party, I could call it the Economism Party. Wall Street not Washington DC would be its base.
The problem is that capitalism may very well work as an economic system and I would submit that it works very well for the 1% , Fortune 500 and top tier of this country. However, it is not suited to be a political ideology because politics is at its very basic level is suited to making promises it knows cannot be kept.
Thus, going back to our talking points earlier, How Can Capitalism claim to have improved the standard of living when wages have largely stagnated from the 70’s onwards and there are at least 40 million poor people in this country? Why hasnt their standard of living increased?
What real freedom of choice exists when college students aren’t able to pick which schools they want to attend free from the crushing debt they pay from loans and other financial obligations after they graduate? What real financial choices did they have?
How do markets foster innovation if companies are gobbled by bigger corporations (like Facebook did when buying out Instagram) and industries like publishing and media are controlled by a few powerful corporations? How innovative is consolidation?
The best example of the inadequacy of economics as a political ideology came this past spring when Presidential candidate and former Colorado Governor George Hickenlooper, a man who actually founded and owned a successful Brew Pub before becoming a politician, had to be asked 3 times by host Joe Scarborough on MSNBC’s MORNING JOE program whether he was a capitalist.
Hickenlooper finally tried to respond by noting “I dont look at myself with a label”. Purely an pathetically evasive political response at first.
He then noted that “the way capitalism is working in this country-its not doing what it once did.”
“It is not providing security and opportunity to the middle class and poor people” said Hickenlooper.
As has been shown, Capitalism is not designed to promise anything to the masses of individuals. Certainly not anything approaching job or fiscal security let alone opportunity.
On a follow up appearance on CBS’s FACE THE NATION, Hickenlooper was asked why he was “uncomfortable” stating that he was a “proud capitalist”
“The point I was making is that we define people by all these labels that have come with all these associations and baggage in that sense” he noted.
Again, this is coming from a man who on this program bragged he had started 20 businesses. For him, capitalism comes with “baggage” and “associations” which he seems not to want to get near let alone talk about.
Later he states “Back when I was a kid, business understood that their job wasn’t just to make as much profit as they could but create the community.”
This is his effort to save the ducking and weaving he has done on the subject by taking a rhetorical tactic I call the “Nostalgia tour” which posits the past as the model from which any actions politically can be taken.
Except businesses never “understood” anything but making “as much profit” as they could because that was why they were in existence in the first place. This is what the capitalist system requires. It doesn’t require community betterment or even creation as Hickenlooper states here.
Apparently, Hickenlooper lived in a political textbook and not a real community judging by his comments here.
The final tactic on the part of ideologues of capitalism is to help push socialism firmly into the spotlight. Socialism is talked about endlessly by the FMW-Free Market Warriors. Their strategy is basically to pigeonhole and stigmatize socialism by launching a waves of straw-man arguments against it.
Thus the rise of Bernie Sanders works well for the capitalist ideologues because he can be touted as a flesh and blood example of the perils of supporting socialism.
Except…the Senator did well in Democratic Party Primaries in 2016 and his planks on Medicare for All, Free College and upping the Minimum Wage have proved attractive with millions of Americans in all parts of the US. Now, Sanders remains a major contender for the 2020 Democratic nomination even as a Democratic Socialist.
And George Hickenlooper? He was booed at a gathering of California Democrats when in a speech, he said that “socialism is not the answer”.
So much for labels.
Albert Lanier wrote for numerous magazines and newspapers during his 22 year career as a journalist and freelance writer. These include Honolulu Weekly, Asian Week, Hawaii Magazine and Pacific Business News. Retired, Lanier writes a blog for medium.com and often serves as a commentator and pundit on podcasts and radio talk shows. He can be found on Twitter and Facebook.
