From: "Kevin Carson" <kevin_carson-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: New book on anti-capitalism
Date: Tue, 22 Jun 2004 17:51:26 +0000


>From: "M.A. Johnson" <michaelj-AT-america.net>

>Capitalism Saves Us All
>by Bernard Chapin

>Di Lorenzo illustrates that even
>the poorest of the poor continue to have the
>chance to rise through our capitalist system, and
>they frequently make use of this opportunity.

This confuses the "free market" with capitalism.  And most apologists for 
capitalism are quite opportunistic in changing their position, over time, on 
the extent to which "actually existing capitalism" is a proxy for the "free 
market."  When a critic of capitalism points out the exploitive features and 
other evils of the current system, a typical apologist for capitalism will 
respond, "That can't happen because the free market works in such-and-such a 
way...."

It begs the question of how free a market we have, and of how much big 
corporations rely on state intervention in the market for their profits.  
There are all sorts of state intervention in "our capitalist system" that 
promote unequal exchange to the benefit of big business, and to the 
detriment of working people and the poor.  Capitalism as it actually exists 
is statist to the core, and based on systematic state intervention to 
underwrite the operating costs of big business, to restrain workers from 
mobilizing their own capital on the free market, and to decrease the 
bargaining power of workers in the labor market.

Free market features have been allowed to operate within the interstices of 
state capitalism only to the extent that they are compatible with the 
overall structure of state capitalism.

>"The critics suggest that there is little or no room
>for the ‘poor’ to advance, that class of people is
>essentially stuck in the bottom 20 percent. But this
>is unequivocally false. In reality, the bottom 20
>percent (like all other quintiles) is constantly
>made up of different people. A family in the
>lowest income quintile today, as recorded by the
>census data gatherers, will typically move up into
>a higher income category over the next five or ten
>years and be replaced in the lower category by a
>different family…"

This is beside the point.  You could probably observe a great deal of 
mobility within the Roman equestrian class during the late Republic or early 
Empire, and identify a fair number of latifundia-owners whose grandfathers 
had been equestrians or slaves.   The relevant question is the extent to 
which the structure of income distribution at *any given time* is dependent 
on state intervention in the market on behalf of the plutocracy.

>We find as well that those dubbed "robber barons"
>were not as they enriched far more often than they
>robbed. Men like James J. Hill, Cornelius
>Vanderbilt, and John D. Rockefeller were brilliant
>entrepreneurs who employed thousands and gave
>stability to countless American families. The
>charitable organizations and nonprofits they
>bequeathed remain viable today and many of their
>innovations benefited all Americansnot just those
>they directly employed.

Nonsense on stilts.  The robber barons' fortunes were built on the state.  
Consider the effects of government railroad subsidies, government-enforced 
patent monopolies, and government tariffs in cartelizing the economy and 
centralizing production.


>This review would not be complete if it did not
>mention the non-partisan nature of How
>Capitalism Saved America. Di Lorenzo attacks all
>interventionists regardless of their political
>orientation.

Except, apparently, for those forms of intervention that enriched 
Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, and Hill.

>There were many examples
>of governmental futility during the administration,
>such as the Railway Labor Act where he
>empowered unions over employers (which would
>become a way of life under Roosevelt).

The primary effect of the Railway Labor Act was to prevent another Pullman 
Strike (which had nearly led to a nationwide general strike), by bringing 
the free market right of workers to withold their labor under the 
supervision of the state.  Other similar legal restraints on labor unions in 
the transportation sector were intended to prevent  transportation strikes, 
which have often threatened to turn into national or regional general 
strikes, and without which a general strike is almost certain to fail.

And to say that the Wagner Act was intended to favor workers over employers 
is particularly disingenuous.  The primary backers of FDR's labor agenda 
were large, capital-intensive corporations, personified by GE's Gerard 
Swope.  Because labor costs were a comparatively minor part of the total 
costs of such corporations, and because their long-term planning process 
depended on stability and predictability, they were willing to offer higher 
wages in return for increased control by management.   The strikes the 
industrial unions had been engaged in in the early '30s had been a virtual 
revolution on the shop floor, and profoundly threatened the power of 
employers to control production.  The effect of the Wagner Act was to bring 
them under the control of union contracts and federal courts, to prevent 
wildcatting, and to use labor bosses as agents for domesticating their own 
rank and file.  Henceforth, labor relations were based on the Taylorist 
principle:  as long as the bosses pay us good, we'll let them manage 
production.

And Wagner opened the door for subsequent federal legislation, like 
Taft-Hartley, which outlawed most of the tactics that labor had used 
successfully in the early '30s.  Federal laws against sympathy and boycott 
strikes, which are perfectly legitimate ways for workers to withold their 
labor in a free market, make successful general strikes virtually 
impossible.

Chapin should take a hint from a REAL free marketer, Adam Smith, who said 
that when the state steps in to regulate relations between workmen and 
masters, it usually has the masters for its counselors.

>Hoover
>believed anti-trade tariffs actually benefited
>American workers and nowhere was this more the
>case than with his visible support of the
>Smoot-Hawley Tariff.

The "anti-trade tariffs" benefitted big business.  It was only possible to 
cartelize the economy in the late nineteenth century behind the cover of 
tariffs.  And the main backers of Smoot-Hawley were a particular faction of 
the capitalist ruling class.

Treating tariffs and labor legislation as attempts to put "progressive" 
restraints on big business ignores the centrality of big business in framing 
the policies of the Progressive and New Deal eras.  Unfortunately, this is 
the official version of history, as taught by Art Schlesinger liberals.    
The state socialists and corporate capitalists have a shared interest in 
pretending that the regulatory-welfare state was something imposed on big 
business against its will, for "idealistic" motives.  This enables the state 
capitalists to conceal the extent to which they created the "progressive" 
state to enrich themselves, and enables the state socialists to conceal the 
extent to which they themselves are servants to big business.  In reality, 
the conflict between big business and big government is about as genuine as 
the conflict between the good cop and bad cop in a police interrogation 
room--and the worker/consumer/taxpayer is the guy with the plunger handle up 
his ass.

_________________________________________________________________
MSN 9 Dial-up Internet Access fights spam and pop-ups – now 3 months FREE! 
http://join.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200361ave/direct/01/