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Inc.

by Doug Dowd

 In the late 1940s, as the U.S. capitalism was in the early stages of creating both the Cold War and a closely-linked new global economy (in ways once called “imperialist”), it had also begun to come under attack from the European left and, as well, by members of what came to be called the Third World.

In those same years, public relations were rapidly honing their techniques for what has now become “spin.” Some periodical, I’ve forgotten which, worried that “capitalism” was being made into a dirty word, proposed—I kid you not—a national contest for giving capitalism “a new name.” (Dontcha love it?”)

I can’t remember who or what won; I do remember a related contest. In those same years, I was a graduate student in econ at Berkeley, and a research and teaching assistant. There were about 40 of us in that status, and we shared a room about the size of a living room (Room One, South Hall—to which I dedicated my first book). We had also shared some years of the depression and, except for two or three of us, had gone through the war; and we had become lefties of one sort or another. And pals.

One of us (not I) proposed that we have our own contest, the prize to the winner to be a copy of Sweezy’s Theory of Capitalist Development. The easy winner (not my creation, alas) was MURDER, INC. By any reasonable definition, “murder” still describes the ongoing “collateral damages” of capitalist development, most especially but not only in the poorer countries (especially through avoidable malnutrition and starvation), most clearly but not most importantly in terms of military slaughters.

Were we to have such a contest today, my proposal would be that capitalism’s new name be an elongation (much as happens with the mergers and acquisitions of our day): MURDER AND OBSCENITY, INC. (And the prize? How about a lifelong sub to Z Mag and Monthly Review and Dollars & Sense—and Sweezy, still worth reading.)

Obscenity has many definitions; for present purposes it is taken to mean foul, filthy, disgusting, indecent—and ill-omened—behavior. The reference here is not to sex, but to the socioeconomic behavior and policies of the main capitalist powers and, just as important, the acquiescence/participation in them by the citizenry, made all the more obscene when one ponders what it is all for: More! More! More!—and of what? Part of that “what” is of things we have been taught and learned all too well to want, by steady and always cleverer appeals to the worst in us. In addition to the corruption and decadence ineluctably linked to those processes in our own society (discussed in my previous Z Commentary) there are the human and social and ecological consequences of such processes over the globe; part of it, also, is murder abroad, and figurative or literal murder at home—of the lives of children, the poor, those with the wrong skins, the old.

Not that there has ever been a moment in history where something filthy and murderous was not going on, from Attila the Hun up into and through our glorious modern era. But the years since World War II are not only breaking all records—yes, even those of the Nazis, if not in the same patterns—they are also giving new meanings, as the saying goes, to obscenity and to murder.

For, quite simply, until recently there has never been a moment in world history when the following two conditions have stood staring each other in the face: 1) it is a fact that the combination of today’s technology, resources, information and knowledge are sufficient to assure the health and comfort and education of everyone over the next (conservatively estimated) fifty years or less, depending upon whether we speak, say, of food, health care, education or housing (in that order of difficulty); instead, 2) it is a fact that in recent decades the number of people suffering or dying from hunger and malnutrition and easily curable or preventable disease has risen and continues to do so—most especially for children, 15,000 or more of whom die every day from such causes. (Multiply that by 365.)

But let us count some of the other ways—taken off the top of recent newspaper clippings—in which the lust for riches and power called the free market and globalization have turned the social process into a sewer, here, there and everywhere:

Item: The percentage of people living on less than $1 a day in various regions in 1998:
 

East Asia and the Pacific: 15.3
Eastern Europe and Central Asia: 5.1
Latin America and the Caribbean: 15.6
Middle East-North Africa: 1.9
South Asia: 40
Sub-Saharan Africa: 46.4

Some few of those people were worse off in 1987; most of them were better off.

Item: In the USA, only 1 of 4 poor children entitled to two free meals daily in the summer in fact now get them; there aren’t enough sites authorized to offer them (e.g., day camps, activity centers, shcools, and the like), because of the difficulties of qualifying. Federal funds are available; state governments block them or use them (illegally) for other purposes—Texas is the worst the worst offender.

Item: The Cold War now being over, the Senate approves a budget of $288 billion ($5 bill more than requested by Pentagon or White House), and right up there with the 1980s.

Item: At a time when HMO’s are making it harder for members to attain their medications as part of their “benefits,” drug prices are rising—as are sales and profits: Of the top 20 companies in the USA sales in 1999 ranged from $2–20 billion, after tax profit as percent of revenue averaged 18 percent (as compared with a median of 5 percent for the Fortune 500: pharmaceuticals were the most profitable of all industries. (“Your health is our business,” they say. Now we know how they mean that.)

Item: The federal government has a program that pays new doctors saddled with student loans a bonus to practice in poor rural and urban areas; in the past year 93 percent of the applicants were turned down. The reason: In a year when GDP is $10+ trillion and the surplus $184 billion, Congress could not find it in itself to offset the $7 million shortfall.

These are by no means the worst of a long list of horror stories—all the more horrible because they not only happen at the richest moment in world history, led by the richest country ever, but because both the incidence and the nature of such obscenties is always on the rise as, rising also, are our budget surpluses—federal, state, and local.

The best-off 15 percent in the leading countries shop 'til they drop, as most of those in the remaining 85 percent borrow insanely and drool with envy: shop for what? GM’s $100,000 faux military “Hummers”! $75,000–$150,000 watches! DVDs! Pocket computers and cell phones! Anything and everything! All of it, taken individually or in bunches, instances of Veblen’s century-old critique of “conspicous consumption, conspicuous display, conspicuous waste”—but cubed.

All of it increasingly wasteful, and destructively so—wasteful of time and energy and resources, destructive of sensible lives, of a sane social process and, not least and in the long run most important, of life on earth.

None of this has happened because of chance or bad luck; it is, instead, an outcome of design, a design of the powerful. Not that the powerful want their to be starving children (etc.); not at all. But the powerful—that is the most powerful companies and in the world do want a world in which that can and will happen. They are the TNCs, and what they want, and with their economic and political power are able to achieve, are the socioeconomic conditions in which they can function satisfactorily; that is, make profits and maintain their power to do so.

The TNCs are not so much immoral as amoral; or so their CEOs and their shareholders and their kept politicians would like to see themselves (at worst). But with power goes responsibility and accountability, like it or not. They don’t like it.

And where does that leave us? Must we not, therefore, find and use our bits of power and put them together with each others’ to offset as much and as soon as we can the irresponsibilities and power of those who now rule?

And if not now, when?

Aug 10, 2000