Capitalism - How it Affects our Way of Thinking - Report Example

Capitalism - how it effects our way of thinking Introduction America is a nation that proudly waves the banner of Capitalism to all and sundry. Celebration of this economic system and the advantages it has brought about by raising the standard of living of ordinary Americans is being parodied by the politicians and their accommodating print and electronic media. However, Capitalism had made Americans pay a heavy price from its very inception in the country. To begin with, whole nations of Amerindians had to forego their homelands with the accompanying genocidal reduction of their populations (Gallman and Wallis). The mass of enslaved workers increased from around 700,000 in 1790 to a whopping 3,953,760 by 1860 (Weinberg). It goes without saying that these enslaved workers labored under progressively more exploitative conditions. Black workers who happened to be free were subjected to increasingly more harsh regulations and were denied diverse civic freedoms, including the right to vote. These were merely a few of the limitations that many Americans were subjected to. Yet, economic historians prefer to close their eyes to these facts or fail to discuss any of them while engaged in the topic of American standards of living. Instead they constantly dwell on factors such as per capita output, productivity, real wages as well as income and wealth, to the exclusion of everything else (Ibid). Two significant contributions are rather heavily made use of in this dissertation to throw light on the topic in question. They are Herbert J. Schiller’s Living in the Number One Country that depicts the disadvantage s of working and living under Capitalism in the capitalistic state of them all: USA. The other work is to do with the noted in Indian sociologist Partha Chatterjie who relates the life of Indians during the colonial and post-colonial days. While the U.S is a developed, prosperous country, India is diametrically opposite of the number one nation. However, when it comes to the drawbacks of Capitalism, both nations share many common traits as denoted by both Schiller and Chatterjie. Herbert J.Schiller and his work “Living in The Number One Country” The Great Depression and II World War years In his masterly work Living in The Number One Country, the eminent American Sociologist Herbert.J.Schiller narrates his life in New York City, the hub of the capitalistic system. The sores of his rather eventful life illustrate the narrow confines within which people living under a capitalistic economy have to exist. It began right from his childhood during the days of The Great Depression. In the fall of 1929, with the onset of the depression years, Schiller’s father, a craftsman jeweler lost his job and he had to live on relief till another calamity the II World War occurred. In words tinged with bitter irony he Schiller said thus in his work: “Ten years of human wastage through unemployment finally was overcome by a still vaster and more impersonal human wastage, the oncoming world war. This was the not-so-secret stimulus to production and employment in the privately organized U.S.economy” (Schiller). These words are pregnant with meaning since they denote the fact the both the Great Depression and the II World War were direct consequences of capitalistic avariciousness. African prelude Schiller served in the U.S.Army for some years and was stationed in North Africa for some time which was another occasion when the face of Western capitalism reared its ugly head in the Dark Continent too. He says that his African prelude potently prodded his consciousness. These regions came to be called by pretty euphemisms such as the Third World, “Emerging Markets” – meaning markets to dump Western manufactured goods. Soon it dawned on him that these were countries “where great numbers of people live and die in under frightfully depraved conditions.” Then he realized to his great dismay that the tragic destinies of these unfortunate people were ordered by foreign owners as well as investors in collusion with the local oligarchs with the sole aim of uninterrupted profit taking. According to Schiller this was the yoke that the so-called “advanced west”, particularly America imposed and persists in imposing on the weakest as well as most impecunious peoples all over the word for more than half a century. National Deformations: USA The 20th Century suffered many deformations as far as America was concerned and these were rooted in a mammoth endeavor of sham that was percolated into every nook and corner of the prevailing social order. A combination of imaginary threats of internal as well as external aggression has been the core of an expertly designed scenario, the creation and staging of which have been put into effect through the active collaboration of the leaders of nation’s key institutions. These were developed out of the assumptions and the resultant drives of a neo-corporate order that happened to maintain an exceptional position in the field of a global power. Schiller laments over an array of events that could have culminated in different results. He could not either remain passive or accommodate in the face of harebrained or calculated assaults on the lives and well-being of the common man. To cite an example, in the year 1998, a government report reckoned that America had expended a whopping five trillion dollars on nuclear armaments alone since the Second World War. He could not help but think that if these astounding expenditures were invested in a manner that was socially productive, how so very different would have been the USA. The colluding pundits Recently, the pundits have come up with a theory that with the advent of the new era of electronic communication great historical ramifications are in the offing that can rewrite history, thereby recreating history. This savior-theory is the brainchild of the electronic crowd who were vociferous in pointing out that the whole world along with the people it houses is going to be benefited positively as it has never had in the annals of mankind. Schiller finds it ironic and anachronistic to find that even the academics from the pantheons of high-tech universities were joining the political elite to sing paeans to this theory. He writes that Alan Toffler was one of the gurus who tinged with high excitement for this “third wave” that can displace the industrial era that in turn did away with the agricultural age. The Wired magazine took off where Toffler had stopped, by announcing that mankind is on the brink, if not already in, of a wonderful new world. Monopoly of electronic information Such a transcendental world transcends the quandaries that mankind has experienced since the industrial era in the shapes of poverty, unemployment, insecurity, exploitation etc. which will vanish both from sight as well as consideration. In short, the class struggle is reduced to those who are for and against the internet. It was during the Clinton administration that communication has achieved high pitch and even the inimitable Al Gore joined the fray in rhapsodizing potential of these brand new information technologies to renovate our day-to-day lives to surmount the all-encompassing social as well as economic maladies that plague contemporary existence. However, the core of all these persuasive arguments is to imply that since America remains the leader of this electronic information and communication, it is in a position of being the guarantor of the world economy in the new century. The ability to pay and inequality Schiller is afraid that when the economic activities of the state are transferred to corporate ownership, there arises nonmaterial inequality; this reduction in the field of public involvement as result of which a condition is created in which commercialism and commodity relationships become all-encompassing. This signifies that commercial criteria as well as practices pervade the social order. When every transaction is determined by the regulations of the market place, the most important criteria is an individual’s ability to pay. And when all things are for sale and a man’s capability to pay for any purchase is the major factor, inequality is really guaranteed. Partha Chatterjie and her work on The Politics of The Governed. Passing from Schiller’s experiences in the Numero Uno country in the whole wide world, to colonial India, one has to take an extra big step. However, taking this step was somewhat facilitated by the fact that both India and the United States are two consistent democracies on the face of the earth. By penning the work “The Politics of the Governed”, Partha Chatterjie did not have much difficulty in taking that significant step. According to Chatterjie, civil society is a closed alliance of modern privileged groups tucked away from those communities of the common man and segregated within enclaves of rational law as well as civic freedom. Here citizenships are of two types: the formal as also the real. Governance according to which governments are run is essentially a system of knowledge and techniques made use of by/on behalf of the people who govern. Lincoln’s definition of democracy is no longer valid these days as the same was replaced by “politics of the governed.” Civil and political society Chatterjie makes India stand for what he called “most of the world.” By doing so his work makes significant strides in putting to right the hub of elite discourses. He challenges in a most radical manner our perception of the phrase “civil society” by stressing the way the politics of civil society trivializes the politics of the poor people as well as offering an substitute term, “political society” as an outline for comprehending the popular politics of the groups thus marginalized. Here he borrows from the Foucaldian notion of governmentality to aver that there is a breach “between the lofty political imaginary of popular sovereignty and the mundane administrative reality of governmentality” (pp 36). The core of Chatterjie’s argument is the difference between “populations” and “citizens.” Populations remain the aim of the welfare state, but Chatterjie finds one more crucial distinction between the separate history of the welfare state in the post-colonial as well as the developed world. As he puts it aptly about the state of the post-colonial world “…caste and religion in India, ethnic groups in Southeast Asia, and tribes in Africa remained the dominant criteria for identifying communities among the populations as objects of policy” (pp 37). These populations are not treated in the same manner as “citizens” for the simple reason that it is unfeasible to generalize their requirements to that of the population in toto. This is because of two factors. The first one is their standing as mere minority populations, while the second is the result of the restrictions imposed by inadequate state resources. The first argument has connotations to those queries posed in Karl Marx’s treatise “On the Jewish Question,” concerning the means in which his “universal” values of the contemporary state assume the cultural values of a nation’s dominant population. In an Indian scenario, Chatterjie reshapes this problem in terms of the part played by untouchability in the establishment of modern India. The problem of the “untouchables” The British colonial government, in spite of its sermons on the necessity of uplifting all those who were subjugated by the religious domination of customary Hinduism, could do nothing but look after these untouchables as its subjects, and refrain from according citizenship to them. Ambedkar, the well-known champion of the untouchables believed that an independent national constitution alone could grant them citizenship. However, here we come across an anomaly: Indian independence signified the rule by the upper castes; in such a situation, how could they hope for equal citizenship and an end to social tyranny that they were subjected to for so many centuries? Ambedkar’s position on the issue was clear: the untouchables should sustain national independence, knowing very well that it would only lead to the political as well as cultural dominance of the upper casts; still, the untouchables should prod on with the fight for equality and that too within the structure of the new Indian constitution. The case of marginalized populations Another problem that loomed ahead was treating the rights of “populations” in the same way as the rights of “citizens” as this would only help to stretch India’s ability to “deliver those benefits to the entire population” and would “only invite further violation of public property and civic laws” (pp 40). Consequently a catch-22 situation is set forth in which marginalized populations might find it necessary to involve in illegal activities so that they could secure their livelihood. This possibility augments the state’s incapacity to legitimate such illegal activities, thus making certain that the relationship of the marginal groups to the nation is only instrumental. It is exactly within such a space, there emerges Chatterjie’s “political society.” According to Ambedkar, it remains a space in which “…the demands of electoral mobilization, on the one hand, and the logic of welfare distribution, on the other, overlapped and came together” (pp 135). Other disadvantages of Capitalism Critics of capitalism associate it the following shortcomings: Social inequality, unfair distribution of wealth as also power Tendency toward market monopoly Diverse forms of economic as well as cultural exploitation Repression of trade unionists and workers Social alienation, unemployment, economic inequality as well as instability Apart from these, the anti-globalization movement is basically against corporate capitalism while environmentalists aver that as capitalism requires sustained economic growth, it will lead to the ultimate depletion of Earth’s finite natural resources (McMurty). Religions such as traditional Christianity, Judaism and Islam have opposed certain factors capitalism like lending money for interest. Some Christians oppose capitalism because of its purely materialist connotations as well as it is inconsiderate of the wellbeing of people in general. In fact some of Jesus’ parables mention real economic concerns even and have implications for wealth as well as power distribution (Gittins). Capitalism also brings unpredictability into people lives. Economists like Hohn Stuart Mill had indicated that man’s behavior while at the marketplace is predictable but not calculable (Mill). Stores closed down for various, due to often overlapping causes including factors like problems in marketing, competition, shifting demand, excessive overhead and even inadequate parking. Conclusion Involving the poor in the politics of the electorate is exactly one of the vicinities that really set India apart from USA. Here it is only fair to pose the question, how pertinent is the notion of “political society” to the “West.” Chatterjie himself answers this question by arguing that the record of Governmentality in the universal “South” is wholly distinct as a direct consequence of the essential colonial encounter. In the Western scenario the history of citizenship moves along from the establishment of civic rights in any civil society to political rights in the wholly developed nation-state. Only then it is possible to develop the techniques of governmentality as put forward by Foucault. However, this Foucaltian order underwent reversion in the colonies, where “technologies of governmentality often predate the nation-state” (pp 36), for instance anthropometry in India. Works Cited Chatterjie, Partha. The Politics of The Governed. NY: Columbia University Press, 2004. Print. Gallman, Robert E, and John Joseph Wallis. American Economic Growth and Standards of Living Before the Civil War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Print. Gittins, Ross. “What Jesus said about capitalism.” Sydney Morning Herald. 9 Apr 2012: n. page. Web. 9 Jun. 2012. . McMurtry, John. The Cancer Stage of Capitalism. London: Pluto Press, 1999. Print. Mill, John Stuart. Principles of Political Economy with some of their Applications to Social Philosophy. 7. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1909. Print. Schiller, Herbert J. Living in The Number One Country. NY: The Seven Seas Press, 2000. Print. Weinberg , Meyer. A short history of American capitalism. New History Press, 2003. Read More