All life is an effort at
self-replication. Species that succeed survive and evolve. Those
that don't enter the fossil record. All higher forms of life are
driven by two elemental instincts, sex
and self-preservation. (The former may often overcome the later but
that's another issue.)
In human beings, these two
drives are experienced as lust – and its “higher” form, love –
and the chase after the means of survival – in modern life, money. Capitalism feeds
off both of these – indeed combines them – and provides a wide
range of products and services in return. (Look at how many
combinations of human desire are served by social media such as
Facebook and Twitter.) The struggle for the legal tender takes two
gross forms in modern capitalist economies: the selling of labor and
the reaping of profits by those who control any particular means of
production. Capitalism requires both (at least as long as some
people are needed to produce and run the machines that increasingly
have taken over production).
We all seek more money than we
currently have, in part from necessity but as much to provide us with
a sense of security. We want to survive today and also tomorrow and
the day after. We never know when enough might not be enough so we keep
wanting more. Seeking riches is simply the highest manifestation of
the drive for self-preservation. No other economic system so deeply
satisfies this need than capitalism.
Capitalism is a complete economic
system. It directly serves the human hunger for more and more
and provides the means to satisfy that hunger. It does this through
utilizing the division of labor that arises from the various forms of inequality –
those which exist by nature, those that derive from human
prejudices and vagaries and those that result from the workings of the capitalist system itself. Put
simply, some people work to survive and some reap profit from the
work (often including their own).
There seems no real alternative to
capitalism because it works directly off of our two most basic
drives. Many – most of the world's religions as well as Marx,
Luddites, socialists, romantics, nihilists etc – have bemoaned this
or looked for alternatives. But there seems no other way to organize
an efficient, growing economy than through private ownership and a
free market. State control and social ownership have no instinctual basis in human nature and don't work in practice.
The problem arises because capitalism
is amoral and by itself produces unfair and unjust
outcomes. The belief in some invisible hand that somehow
makes it all come out right is an outdated religious notion that
flies in the face of our actual experience.
The issue of morality and justice comes
into it because humans do not live as monads but as members of
society. We cannot survive as individuals outside society. The
stability of society, any society, depends on a degree of social
cohesion sufficient to keep it from breaking down into an Hobbesian state
of nature. Government alone – however much a Leviathan – cannot
provide sufficient efficient cohesion. Political dictatorship is
incompatible with long-term economic prosperity, it dams the flow of
individual freedom that drives the innovation that a capitalist
economy requires to avoid stagnation. A widespread experience of the
fairness and justice of how the economy functions is the only sound
basis for social cohesion in a capitalist society. In other words, capitalism must be tempered sufficiently to provide a common sense of
“ownership” or it becomes disruptive.
Capitalism must therefore be regulated
for its – and our – own good. Such regulation must somehow
represent everyone the system serves. It must therefore be
democratic. Only through the functioning of democratic governance
can the necessary element of fairness and justice be introduced in a
way that serves everyone's efforts at self-preservation. Regulating
a capitalist economy – placing limits and requirements on private
ownership and market activities – by collective decisions taken
through democratic means is the only alternative to capitalism.
There seems no other.
