This post is exactly what the title suggests, along with my own personal take which - after reading some wildly varying yet opposing viewpoints - I feel it would be helpful to point out to my readers. It seems that my view of capitalism is significantly more benign and optimistic than some I've recently come across: especially compared to some who see capitalism as a battlefield for ultimate control. One singularity site sounded as though its primary goal was to crush anarchic capitalists - ouch! I came across that in search of a publication (article?) I was unable to find, on Google. If anyone has a link to the ghastly titled "Capitalism Creates Scarcity", I'd greatly appreciate it. Unfortunately a lot of economic theory has focused too much on scarcity (both real and imagined), instead of focusing on coordination to encourage abundance, and now that "dog" is definitely coming back to bite.
Just the same there are plenty of defenses for capitalism available, even if I never read the above mentioned cite for the specific arguments I might want to counter. Plus, I had already begun this post before stumbling onto that Twitter mention on a blog sidebar (If I start using Twitter I'll never get anything done). Thus the scarcity reference simply provided extra incentive, as my original focus was on a more limited aspect of the subject: "Whatever Happened to Starting Over?" was to be the original blog post title. Only after starting this post did I realize it would be the 100th - and so I am quite glad to have a perfect subject for this little "landmark".
Indeed, one of the greater aspects of capitalism in my lifetime has been the fact that - in spite of one's circumstance or situation, and however hard it might be to escape personal limitations, the ability to gain work and economic access was always the saving grace. From my earliest college days in the seventies, right through the nineties, people would say in regards to difficulty, "You can always start over and create your life anew." And most everyone around me, young and old, really believed that. That's what capitalism meant for me and even others I knew who may not have considered themselves "defenders" in any direct sense. For most of my lifetime, until the recent change of century, many people I knew were basically positive in outlook, and believed in second chances. To me, that really was the embodiment of capitalism: dynamic potential and possibility, even after setbacks and personal defeats.
More needs to be said about the (seemingly dormant) regenerative capacity of capitalism - however, the above scarcity reference is important. Capitalism is not what is responsible for creating needless scarcities through wealth formation structures: people willingly choose to exacerbate such situations, as well as governments. It's up to the public to catch them in the act and call them on it, rather than trying to get our governments to make up for the fact afterwards with impossible forms of redistribution. The same would be true regardless of any other economic system that might exist, even if we could imagine one that worked better.
Compared to the ways people have apportioned power and wealth for hundreds of years, the last century held economic options beyond belief, for those of us not born to wealth, even though much of the primary access is out of our reach now. Governments have inadvertently backed themselves into a corner, in that they have preferred the (supposed) simplicity of wealth creation strategies at larger levels. Those definitions of wealth capture have, over time, made economic inclusion ever more difficult to achieve: a problem that today's redistribution patterns now contribute to rather than diminishing.
While some resources will always be relatively scarce; for much of the middle class in developed countries, that has long since been the actual problem, except for those scarce resources currently over allocated into housing and construction. As for other product or commodity production, much of it can now be accessed through technology in what has become a fairly efficient global commons. What's missing, however, is the local commons we need to create through the use of our own skill potential, and then reposition into greater wealth creation from that vantage point.
The fact that we have not yet addressed the missing link of our own direct participation, means we are mistakenly trying to pull back from the global commons of finite resources, in the belief that something "outside of ourselves" is somehow the real problem. That is a big part of why capitalism is so very fragile in the present, in spite of what some of it's most ardent supporters and enemies might think. People have mistaken extremely costly inefficiencies still happening at local levels for the progress of technology. However, that very real progress actually occurred much earlier in time.
Even though our time is quite limited in an individual sense, it tends toward infinite in a collective sense (for actual needed services), and this is the capacity that capitalism especially needs in the present. To say that we have knowledge in abundance, is not adequate for instance, to tap into such abundance, at all. As long as no property rights exist for knowledge use, we are serfs in our own institutions. However, this very real problem was not created by capitalism, for in the past, capitalism grew by treating knowledge as an open commons by and for all individuals to utilize. Again, the artificial scarcity constraints were ultimately created by private institutions with help from governments. Over time the impulse towards knowledge enclosure became too tempting; because people saw how easy it was to do so, in that governments already jealously guarded knowledge definitions in those institutions not remedied by the free market.
Sometimes I'm still shocked at the degree to which the more benign characteristics of capitalism continue to be threatened. These three responses: taking for granted, taking advantage of, reacting against, all of these work against capitalism's vitality - which can readily be seen by ever declining monetary velocity over time. Capitalism was originally about escaping the economic limitations of place and creating greater access for all, beyond the earlier limitations. In other words, people who continue to believe in it sometimes see it as a means to keep others down, and those who don't believe in it either want to overthrow it, or otherwise hope that it will go away. Anyone who simply takes capitalism for granted (as governments tend to do) also endangers capitalism by similar means in their neglect of the economic freedoms it once made possible.
Capitalism still has far more potential flexibility and dynamism than anyone in power is willing to give it credit for. We have been stymied by our own propensity to bankrupt or blame one another, each time we expect one another to take on far more risk than is really necessary to live a respectable and decent life. We need to begin the process of spreading risk in more sustainable ways. There is tremendous capacity that could be utilized in terms of knowledge use and skills, but it really depends on whether people choose to hold and define wealth beyond the limitations of the present. There is nothing wrong with the basic structures that capitalism has already been able to harness - they simply need to be envisioned in more fluid and widely held terms, so that economic stability does not mean forcing definitions of product that have outlived their usefulness and purpose. Before anyone looks to revolution as a "way out", what they really need to ask is, how can we revitalize capitalism and make it the vehicle for economic access, that it once was.
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