“Well, it looks that way. You have to ask… How is it possible that the most dynamic, best capitalized, most high-tech economy in world history could not add a single dollar to the real wealth of the average working man over a 40 year period?”
Washington Post guest blogger Bill Bonner relates a conversation with a European diplomat wherein they discuss the long, slow decline of capitalism over the last 40 years.
One thing we can be certain of is that capitalism will end. Maybe not soon, but probably before too long; humanity has never before managed to craft an eternal social system, after all, and capitalism is a notably more precarious and volatile order than most of those that preceded it. The question, then, is what will come next. Rosa Luxemburg, reacting to the beginnings of World War I, cited a line from Engels: “Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.”
Writing in the Winter 2012 issue of Jacobin Magazine, editor Peter Frase indulges in an exercise of imagination to consider four possible successor systems to global capitalism: communism, rentierism, socialism, and exterminism. They are, by his own admission, overly simplistic and deterministic, and unlikely to come to pass in the distilled forms he describes. Nevertheless, we are at least part of the way down the road toward a rentier society in this country and will go a great deal further if someone like Newt Gingrich has anything to say about it. And, if the past is any gauge, the living hell of exterminism is merely one ecological cataclysm away.
I have seen this graph all over the place lately, but the first place I saw it was on my friend Ben’s blog, so I’ll give him the linky-love. What this graph shows you is the elasticity of income — your ability to make more money than your parents — against degrees of income inequality, with the values of a bunch of industrialized nations plotted for comparison. Income inequality is lowest in the Scandinavian countries, but economic opportunity is also the highest (ooh, those damned European socialists!). Meanwhile, as Ben says, if you live in the U.S. or U.K., you’d better hope you have rich parents.
Speaking of those damned European socialists, Claude S. Fischer at “Made In America” considers the Euro-bashing from Mittens and Newtster and takes some of the same measurements that you see in the graph above, along with a few others, to paint a different picture of just how awful life must be for those poor beknighted Swedes and Frenchmen compared to Americans.
It seems to many today that the United States’ 30-year drift from a democracy to an ostensible corporatocracy has resulted in nothing but business-interest legislation and disparities of wealth so wide among the classes that it appears impossible for them to be rectified.
Here’s a post that ran at “Prose Before Hos” back in October, at the height of the Occupy movement, from political science student Savannah Cox that illustrates what Claude Fischer’s and Ben Hyde’s graphs are trying to quantify: the on-the-ground effects of the destructiveness of income inequality in the United States, aided and abetted by compliant politicians of both parties including Barack Obama. Her “ray of hope”: that some of the billionaires themselves, such as Warren Buffet and Mark Cuban, who have been willing to speak out against the iniquities.
Lastly, also from October 2011, here is an op-ed from Sam Smith, who edits Progressive Review.com, entitled “The Party’s Over”, which begins like this:
The party’s over. The national delusion that began 30 years ago with the inauguration of Ronald Reagan has run its course. Free trade, competition, innovation, entrepreneurship, market driven, bottom line, laissez faire, deregulation, privatization, mission statements, strategic plans, value added and all the other gibberish that was meant to save us has brought us to where we are today.
Three decades of sweet buzzwords and brutal economics fostered by a media that thought “free markets” were required by the Bill of Rights have left America broken, busted, and bitter.
No, it didn’t have to happen. After all, as John Maynard Keynes noted, “Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.” We might have noticed. But our teachers in government, academia and the press largely went along with the most wickedest of men, girding their cause with false arguments and misleading logic. The rest didn’t have much time to think about it all; they were too busy taking tests or finding ways to make enough money to buy all the things they were told they had to have.
