Haymarket Books

Another parallel campaign could stress the social benefits of giving citizens genuine freedom of choice between work within a traditional, hierarchical capitalist enterprise or within a workers’ self-directed enterprise. That choice doesn’t currently exist. This campaign would advocate extending government programs that assist small businesses and minority-owned businesses to include a major program for workers’ self-directed enterprises. I

In short, private property and markets do not provide us with a clear demarcation between capitalism and, for example, slavery and feudalism as economic systems.

commonly held view is that slaves lacked freedom because they were property and serfs lacked freedom because they were tied to their feudal manors, but workers in capitalism suffer neither of those forms of coercion. Among the problems with this definition is the fact that, under capitalism, wage workers are not free (other than formally, legalistically) because to live even minimally, they must work for others. They must sell their labor power to those who own the means of production in order to survive.

Criticism of particular capitalist enterprises or their particular practices did sometimes surface over the last half-century. It was possible to target capitalist enterprises’ monopolistic activities, racial and gender discrimination, and environmental degradations—even their corruption of political institutions. However, critics learned to focus only on specific misbehaviors—not on the economic system that induced, rewarded, and reproduced them

Big business subordinated smaller capitalists when it did not overtake them. Laws protecting labor and labor unions were weakened, repealed, or simply not enforced. Freedom came to be redefined as first and foremost the freedom of businesses to decide what, where, and how to produce without interference from other parts of society. The results of so long-lasting a bar on serious criticism and debate of the capitalist system are many and sobering.

Yet since capitalism’s instability and unevenness are continually reproduced across every variation of external natural, political, and cultural conditions, some of those who defend the system have felt compelled to find better arguments that don’t rely on external causes. These thinkers have sought to justify capitalism by insisting that its negative dimensions, such as cyclical downturns and inherent inequality, are simply the necessary price to be paid for economic and social progress. They claim that the gains of capitalism’s winners are greater than the losses inevitably suffered by economic losers in the system, and therefore that instability and unevenness are ultimately—in terms of their net social effects—progressive.

Elaborate calculations of costs and benefits suitably dressed in charts and graphs have been key props in the efficiency theater that has provided ideological cover for the endless struggles attending capitalism’s uneven development.

post-1970 change in the conditions and lives of American women changed their families and households in ways that also altered US capitalism. Briefly, the mass movement of adult women, mostly married and with children, into paid, mostly full-time labor transformed households and families. Wives and mothers had long held disproportionate responsibility for maintaining the emotional integrity of the traditional nuclear family and the physical integrity of the traditional household

Whether consciously or not, such a focus on misbehavior by the state or by criminals serves to avoid blaming the system and its rules and regulations, its structure of rewards and penalties. Pinpointing “the bad guys” perpetuates the ancient art of scapegoating, deflecting blame on convenient targets when in fact the system is the problem.

For centuries, in every capitalist country, individual economic actors have been charged, convicted, and imprisoned for violating some law, and businesses have been shut down or sanctioned for similar reasons. But the individuals and businesses that follow sooner or later replicate their behavior.