I Am Not A Capitalist

And you probably aren’t either, yet a huge proportion of our society believe themselves to be.

The Cambridge English dictionary has several definitions of capitalism. It splits the noun in two based on context, and this distinction says a lot more than its words.

In politics, reads the definition, a capitalist is “a person who supports capitalism.”

In economics, continues the definition, a capitalist is “a person who invests large amounts of money in a business or businesses.”

Capitalism, for its, part, is defined in the same dictionary as “an economic system based on private ownership of property and business, with the goal of making the greatest possible profits for the owners.”

And there is the trouble. Making a profit is not, on its own, the problem. The “greatest possible profits” is. The idea that every worker, every client, every provider has to be pushed to the breaking point, to externalise expenses onto society at large, to squeeze out a few more dollars for the owner class that wants another yacht, is neither a necessary aspect of a free market economy nor even an original feature of capitalism.

Extremist right-wing economist Milton Friedman is often blamed for this current situation. His 1970 New York Times op-ed “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits” was so defining in capitalist philosophy that the article remains available without, I note with a hint of irony, being paywalled some 56 years after its publication.

Friedman’s ideas are horrific but they are easy to understand and hard to refute. They were bought wholesale by the capitalist class, eager to accept moral justification for their greed. The whole basis of his op ed is that business has no social responsibility, that corporations are not participating members of society but rather their only purpose is to extract wealth from the economy and funnel it to those who run them.

After half a century, these ideas have resulted in inequality, social destruction, and environmental destruction on levels the pre-revolutionary French would not be able to grasp.

Billionaire capitalist Nick Hanauer gave a Ted talk in 2014 in which he warned the capitalist class to get control of themselves, and that doing so would be to their own benefit. That the only two possible outcomes from where we are headed — 12 years ago — is toward either revolution or a police state.

The western capitalist experiment has been so successful, its propaganda so effective, that revolution remains remarkably unlikely. But it does not take much looking to find strong evidence of the United States being a police state, with Canada and other western democracies only being more tame in our defence of Friedman’s underlying philosophy. We are not on a different path, we are only years behind.

When I look at what capitalism means, I have no trouble with the idea that we can have a free market economy, but I cannot accept that profit without responsibility can be its only function.

We may be surrounded and governed by capitalism — but that does not make us capitalists.