Surviving Capitalism: How We Learned to Live with the Market and Remained Almost Human (Anthem Political Economy And Globalization) - Softcover

Ringmar, Erik

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1843311763 ISBN 13: 9781843311768

Verlag: Anthem Press, 2005

Inhaltsangabe

A fresh, funny and imaginative discourse on the nature of capitalism and how society has learned to cope with it.

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Erik Ringmar

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'Surviving Capitalism presents a highly literate cost-benefit analysis of the history of capitalism...fresh, fascinating, relevant, and, yes, humane.'
"Jeff Madrick, Editor, Challenge Magazine"
Human life cannot be reduced to market transactions and human beings cannot only be treated as economic actors. When the power of the market increases, human beings will always try to protect themselves. Given the differences that exist in social and cultural traditions, these protective responses are likely to differ from one society to the other. This is why, even in a global market, diversity is always likely to persist.
This book investigates the question of economic globalization - whether it is likely to lead to full convergence between political models and ways of life, or whether, even in a completely globalized world economy, there is likely to be scope for alternative solutions.

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Surviving Capitalism

How We Learned to Live with the Market and Remained Almost Human

By Erik Ringmar

Wimbledon Publishing Company

Copyright © 2005 Erik Ringmar
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-84331-176-8

Contents

Acknowledgements, vii, 
Theoretical Preliminaries, 
1. The Inevitability and Inhumanity of Capitalism, 1, 
2. How Society Protects Itself, 17, 
In the Bosom of the Family, 
3. The European Idea of the Home, 31, 
4. The Chinese Family, 43, 
Among Brothers, Friends and Colleagues, 
5. European Sects, Guilds and Trade Unions, 57, 
6. Japanese Business Corporations, 71, 
7. Personal Thais, and How They Survived the Boom, 83, 
The State, 
8. Versions of the European State, 95, 
9. The State in China and Japan, 109, 
Conclusions, 
10. How We Survived Capitalism, 123, 
11. The Coming Crisis, 135, 
Notes, 147, 
Bibliography and Websites, 167, 
Index, 189, 

CHAPTER 1

The Inevitability and Inhumanity of Capitalism

During the last ten years or so there has been a lot of talk about the coming of a 'new economy'. Different authors define this amorphous entity in slightly different ways; some focus on new technologies, others on new styles of corporate management and ways of working; or perhaps it is rather a product of a scaling-back of the state or perhaps a consequence of an ever more globalized world. Although the items on this list, or on some longer list like it, may appear quite disparate, what they have in common is an emphasis on the logic of the marketplace, on the interplay between supply and demand. What is new about the new economy, in short, is an emphasis on market forces. Economic markets, we are today constantly told, must be given freer reign – we must 'get prices right' and stop pampering and mollycoddling the inefficient, the unproductive and the merely lazy. Only in this way will we survive in the new and vastly more competitive world in which we live; only in this way can we achieve economic growth and lasting happiness.

We are in this way invited to participate in a gigantic social experiment. According to the engineers who have drawn up the plans, our societies are to be reorganized ever more closely in the image of a market. Efficiency, rationality and productivity are to characterize ever more of what we do, and what cannot be justified in such terms should disappear, or at least receive less of our time and attention. This is the future, after all – we do what everyone else is doing, and if we fail to conform, we are doomed. And even though the benefits of the experiment may be slow in coming, and it sometimes seems as though we are becoming poorer both in material and in social terms, we are assured that the day eventually will arrive when all the sacrifices of the present will be justified. Just as once Communism, capitalism will bear its greatest fruits in the future. Meanwhile we should take pride in the fact that we have history on our side and that we live according to its fundamental principles. The new economy is thus above all an idea – it is an idea that requires boundless idealism and commitment. Fiat capitalism et pereat mundus.

We have of course been here before. The proponents of the new economy sometimes talk as though they are the ones responsible for inventing economic markets and as if no one previously has understood their benefits. But markets have been around for thousands of years. In China there were thriving markets in both consumer goods and factors of production even before the establishment of the first imperial dynasty in the third century BCE, and in Europe markets have existed continuously since money was reintroduced sometime in the eleventh century. And as far as a committed defence of market forces is concerned, our contemporary social engineers are merely the bleak shadows of the real revolutionaries of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: economists like Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Nassau Senior. It was on their recommendations that market forces were unleashed from the fetters of mercantilism and traditional privilege. Markets, after all, are not natural beasts but created ones; the free markets of the nineteenth century were products above all of actions undertaken by the state.

This historical context holds a lesson for us. The nineteenth-century combination of industrial production and laissez faire policies led to unprecedented levels of economic growth but also to unprecedented levels of human misery. The problem, to put it briefly, was that subsistence farmers were deprived of their land and forced to sell their labour in markets that were completely glutted. Once the value of a human life is determined by market forces and once that value sinks sufficiently low, a situation is created which is highly unstable. As a victim of the market you need to do something in order to save your dignity and improve your conditions. Some people protested and put political pressure on governments to institute pro-labour legislation and social reforms. Others decided that markets had to be abolished, and others again turned to fascism. In fact, most of the politics of the twentieth century was taken up with attempts to deal with the direct and indirect consequences of nineteenth-century industrialism and laissez faire. Hence the social strife, the revolutions and many of the conflicts and wars.

And now we are thus invited to do it all over again. We should liberate markets, we are told, and see what happens. Of course the situation is not the same as one hundred years ago – we are richer now, better educated and prepared – yet the parallels are there and the prospects are troubling. Once again the economy is likely to grow rapidly in the aggregate while the market becomes the arbiter of our lives. There will be new victims, and while we are likely to be better off economically, we are also likely to be more humiliated and debased. Capitalism, in short, is inevitable, but it is also inhuman. It is inevitable since there is no other system that produces comparable levels of prosperity, but it is inhuman for what it does to human beings and to the societies in which we live.

The question is thus not how capitalism can be replaced with something else – there is nothing else that can replace it – the question is rather how its negative consequences can be avoided. In fact, ever since markets were first introduced at the very beginning of recorded history, people have tried to come up with various ways of coping. Although capitalism is very good at breaking down social structures, human beings are very good at rebuilding them. This book is about this interplay of destruction and recreation. The aim is to briefly go over the history of capitalism and to look at some of the ways in which people have sought to deal with its destabilizing effects. What we want to know is what capitalism does to individuals and societies, but also what individuals and societies do in order to protect themselves. This book is a work in historical sociology, but it is written with a certain sense of urgency. Before the new economy comes down on us in full force we need to know more both about capitalism and about how to survive it with our humanity intact.

The Power of Markets

Capitalism has always had a way of shaking things up. Capitalism has undermined traditions, eroded the power of well-established authorities and made, in Karl Marx's famous phrase, 'all that is solid melt...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Anthem Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2005
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1843311763
• ISBN 13: 9781843311768
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 208
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland