Jack Burns Lives!

Capitalism

There are things I thought I liked about capitalism. My Apple laptop. DVD’s and being able to download music. My digital camera and the Internet.

But all of these things come at a heavy price. A cost that most folks don’t consider since they see capitalism as not only benign, but enormously beneficial. For example, capitalism has produced some miracle drugs that make diseases like Rheumatoid Arthritis manageable. In this country, it’s made it possible for people from all walks of life to achieve standards of living most in the world can only dream of.

So, why am I so sour on capitalism? Why am I starting to sound like a pinko-commie bastard? What’s the problem, Jack?

The problem is the undeniable, ugly underbelly of capitalism. The stuff that happens behind the curtain and sometimes right in plain sight of everyone in the theatre. What has to happen to open markets, to fuel expansion and deliver big screen teevees to millions of American mortgage holders. What has to happen for Wall Street to continue to deliver those gaudy returns and for bankers to collect those fat bonuses.

For example, the duplicitous behavior of wealthy people that puts thousands of out of work. All an executive has to do is hit the “send” button on an e-mail for hundreds of hopeful workers to suddenly find themselves out of work, so he’ll cut expenses, make “plan” and therefore his bonus. I’m sick of hearing about single mothers having their utilities turned off while fat cats in big banks gamble with taxpayer dollars and reap multi-million dollar windfalls. I’m sick of extreme economic disparity and don’t buy for a minute that it’s “how you were raised,” or “you didn’t work hard enough.”

For people to make that kind of money, an awful lot of horrible shit goes down. It often requires wars to open markets, degradation of natural resources and treating other humans like piles of horseshit.

I know what goes on, because I spent years in the belly of the beast, working for large corporations. I’ve been in country club locker rooms and private bars and listened to the banter of the privileged. Was I one? No. I was a pitiful, stressed out lieutenant most of my career in the big leagues, until I finally had the good sense and good fortune to get out and attempt to create a small, democratic workplace that is in fact the antithesis of every place I’d been before.

As it stands today, people that worked hard their entire lives, saved and did their best can lose everything and find themselves in dire straits in a nano-second.

Capitalism is a never-ending game of survival. Everyday brings new challenges and competitors. There’s a cursory amount of cooperation here and there, but it’s mostly dog eat dog competition, where a constantly changing list of interlopers works diligently to put you out of business. Altruism has nothing to do with it.

They don’t care if you can’t pay for your house. You should have been better.
They don’t care if you die from lack of healthcare. Should have planned better.
They don’t care if you lose your car. Public transportation was built for losers like you.
They don’t care if you don’t eat. It’s eat or be eaten.

Anyone that dares to point out the absurdity of such a system is quickly branded and marginalized. Cast downward to a pit that’s even worse than the one designed for failed capitalists.

Why do you hate America, you commie bastard?

Like the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood, it attempts to cloak itself and its real nature though any number of advertising campaigns and “initiatives” ostensibly designed to help the poor, save Bangladesh, the whales and the bears, protect us from global warming, blah, blah, blah. But in the end, the only thing it’s really working to save is itself and expand its profit-making sphere.

Those wonderful profits. Our raison d’être, and the reason the biosphere is under siege.

As the poet Lew Welch once said, “…the profit motive means very simply: you give less than you take. If you give less than you take, you grow mean and stingy….Greed, then, and Usury (the most pernicious form of greed, the selling of money) have always been the carbuncles on the neck of America. We have never been free.”

Of course, it wasn’t always this way. We even have examples of human societies right here on this continent that demonstrate other economic systems are possible. The Manitos of Northern New Mexico, Hispanic villagers that had a pastoral, subsistence economy that functioned well for many, many years before the advent of the cash economy. There was a time when their villages were self-contained and nearly self-sufficient. There were no fences, and “the most important civic virtue for a man to have was verguenza, a self-effacing probity that restrained him from advancing himself at the expense of others.” (deBuys, Enchantment and Exploitation, The Life and Hard Times of a New Mexico Mountain Range)

The Nez Perce lived in collections of democratic villages bound by kinship and economic well-being for all. At least until we showed up.

But I reckon the horse is out of the barn. There’s no going back to pastoral, steady-state, village life any time soon.

So, what can we do now? Part Two tomorrow….