Nothing wrong with capitalism, the capitalists are the problem

In March 1964, a group including Linus Pauling, Gunnar Myrdal, Tom Hayden, Ben B. Seligmanm and computer pioneer Louis Fein sent a letter to President Lyndon Johnson covering their report on “The Triple Revolution.” The letter began: “We enclose a memorandum... prepared out of a feeling of foreboding about the nation's future. The men and women whose names are signed to it think that neither Americans nor their leaders are aware of the magnitude and acceleration of the changes going on around them. These changes, economic, military, and social, comprise The Triple Revolution. We believe that these changes will compel, in the very near future and whether we like it or not, public measures that move radically beyond any steps now proposed or contemplated.” They were right about the changes but underestimated our ability to drift towards the iceberg most would not see until much later.

The three revolutions were in cybernation, weaponry and human rights. The nuclear and other new weapon systems threatened peace. The African American struggle for equal rights in the US was part of the rising demand around the globe for full human rights. But the report focused on the affects of the cybernation revolution (their term). The combination of the computer and automation was issuing in a new mode of production as different from the industrial as that was from the agricultural. It would result in “almost unlimited productive capacity which requires progressively less human labor.” Yet the current economic model awarded access to this production, to the wealth it created, unequally to those with capital and those who earned their keep through labor. The cybernation of production would mean increasingly less of good paying industrial jobs. The US was experiencing this process first but it would spread throughout the world we dominated.

The report argued that having access to the collectively produced wealth of society could not any longer be tied to labor. Maintaining and improving individual wellbeing across society – through making maximum use of the potential of automated production – would have to transition from depending on good paying jobs. Income would have to be separated from work. This would require some form of guaranteed individual income and vast investment in public goods. Left to itself, the market would not move in this direction, it would require government action.

As it turned out, capital figured out a way to exploit the new cybernetic economy by shifting production to automation (and now AI) and to areas of cheap labor. Some developing countries – like China – followed suit using their cheap labor to industrialize. This form of globalization produced cheaper goods and did lift many from poverty, worldwide. But it mostly benefited capital rather than labor.

The Western democracies did little to ensure the political sustainability of free trade globalism. This would have required providing those reduced to un- and under-employment or low-paying service sector jobs with the decent income and public goods (including improved education, free healthcare and jobs created through spending on updating infrastructure) that we could have begun 60 years ago. The Western European democracies did a bit better than the US with their social welfare programs but still found themselves in this 21st Century facing the political drift to the right fueled by those left out of the wealth creation.

In the US, we got Trump and his MAGA movement. This virulent form of the anti-globalism reaction has plunged the world into Trump’s tariff war on the very foundations of the world capitalist order.

Nothing wrong with capitalism, indeed there seems to be no good alternative to markets coordinating supply and demand. Free trade to maximize market functioning is part of this (with some measures perhaps needed to ensure fair trade). The World Trade Organization could expand its trade liberalization agenda to include mandates to improve local living standards alongside fair labor standards. Rather than make war on the system of rule-based trade that we have benefited from, the US government would encourage foreign investment in our productive sector as part of a rational approach to whatever re-industrialization makes sense. (This could include China.)

The monopoly capitalists at the top of our cybernetic economy are the problem. They need to be taxed at levels considerably greater than their workers. Their ability to wield political power through money needs to be ended. Government must be empowered to ensure that everyone benefits from market functioning even if this means a form of guaranteed minimum individual income. The Democrats need to do more than wait for Trump to fail. Railing against the billionaires must be accompanied by explaining the need for change and advocating the policies laid out in that report to Johnson.

Three Things

Thing One: As noted before, we now have front row seats to Trump’s attack on governing, the Constitution, his enemies, migrants, and the government protections built up over decades to protect us from the ravages of unrestrained capitalism, climate change, and globalized disease. The pundits have recognized that Trump’s aggressive efforts to see what he can get away with – the courts being the only potential obstacle – is an intentional effort to enlarge his power not by flaunting law and order but by bending it to his will.

The mostly unqualified sycophants with which he is seeking to stuff his cabinet will pass or not through the Senate – Hegseth squeaking by J.D. – and thus fully legally. As Jon Stewart recently noted, this is not fascism but entirely consistent with the 18th Century founding document – allowing a presidential monarchy – we seem to be stuck with. We will have to do something about that someday if we are to ever grow up. This bring me to ….

Thing Two: In the face of Trump flooding the field to keep everyone else off balance, the Democrats are either hiding, lost in a forest of self-analysis, or just plain waiting for the Trump chickens to come home to roost on all of those deluded people who voted for him. That is not much of a political party, more a herd of well-fed sheep. The Democrats need to find a way to address the issues that drove so many to place hope for a better life in Trump and the oligarch-loving Republicans amassed under the MAGA banner. This brings me to ….

Thing Three: The Democrats need, the country needs, to find a way to deal with the forces driving so many to feeling relatively deprived. All too many Americans feel that they and their children cannot reach, or maintain, the lifestyle of their own parents or grandparents. They are right to so believe.

The post-WWII economy of the Boomers peaked by the early ‘80s. Since then, inequality has been increasing while the Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats have favored capital over labor. Good paying union jobs gave way to low paying service sector work. Big capital fought off unions. The 21st Century has added further automation, now powered by AI, to further diminish the good paying working class jobs of the past. Health costs have risen, public schools struggle, drug use moved well beyond inner cities. Folks wonder what happened? So they look for those to blame – migrants, Jews, anyone different – and those to save them.

We need to face up to a few basics. We will never be a country full of high-paying work again. Tariffs won’t do it and build-it-here won’t do it. Most remaining (or recaptured) industry and many so called white-collar jobs will be done by machines and computers. For a while we may still need some skilled craftspeople like plumbers and electricians. But picking our crops, slaughtering our animals and rebuilding our outdated infrastructure will be done by machines and those migrants we say we don’t need. (No high paying jobs there.)

What is to be done? The Democrats will need to bite the bullet and revisit that approach long made anathema by the rich and their Republican servants: socialism. By which I mean, collecting substantial taxes from the obscenely rich and from big business, perhaps nationalizing fundamental platforms of the 21st Century economy such as Amazon and providing a guaranteed minimum income to everyone. This last would not be means tested or require looking for work and should be at least a few multiples of the basic poverty line. (Free healthcare, life-long education and varied public goods would supplement this.) We should, in other words, separate making and providing the goods we sell to ourselves and the world from the necessity to make them through human labor.

From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.

COVID-19: The Great Equalizer

By now, the human species has been altering the natural order for some 11000 years. It started with the advent of agriculture and went through urbanization and industrialization which transformed the surface of the earth and began changing a host of natural systems including the climate, animal life, forests and oceans. We humans have known about this for a while. But most of us – especially those of us in the advanced economies and not living too close to the rising waters – could see the impact of our disruption of natural systems as something that would affect other people – future generations, the poor, those living in low-lying island nations – and not so much us in the here and now. COVID-19 has altered that by bringing to all of us the results of our changes to the earth. It has equalized the impact of the destruction of natural environments (which stresses what lives in them thereby making them more prone to diseases that can jump to us), the way we use animals (including how close we live with them and the antibiotics we use to fatten them) and the close quarters (in large numbers) in which we live. Add to this the way we use hydrocarbons to travel and transport, the interconnectedness of our ways of life and economies and the varying shortcomings of our political systems. We should not have been surprised by the current bio-crisis. It’s not that any one of these caused the virus but that the total impact of what we have wrought was largely hidden until now though very much operative.

So COVID-19 shows us that the bill won’t wait to be delivered and that everyone must pay. The rich may be able to retreat to their enclaves and private transport. But their world will change as ours does. The species as a whole will survive. But this is the wake up call. The future disrupted world is upon us now. Returning to “normal” – whenever and whatever that turns out to be – may well be just a breather before the next episode. We need to take the next step in our evolution – remake our economies and politics, restoring nature even if gradually and treating each other more equally – and start now or the humanity that makes it to the 22^nd Century may be unrecognizable.

Notes on "A History of Political Theory" -- Episode 29

For episode 28, see here

To start at the beginning, see here

The Theory of the Nation State: The Moderns

XXIX. Liberalism: Philosophical Radicalism 

"The history [of philosophy of natural rights] was an example of the paradox of which Hegel was so fond, that a philosophy is fully developed in its details and

applications only when its main principles have come to be taken for granted

and to that extent have become retarded in their speculative development." 669

 A. Liberalism of the 19th Century was reaction against the excesses of the

      Revolution and on reliance on "self-evident" axioms.

 B. Defined classical liberalism, in essence a program of legal, economic and

      political reforms connected, as they supposed, by the fact of being all

      derived from the principle of the greatest happiness of the greatest

      number.

 C. Chief ideas that actuated the Philosophical Radicals:

       1. Greatest happiness principle as a measure of value.

       2. Legal sovereignty as an assumption necessary for reform through

           the legislative process.

       3. A jurisprudence devoted to the analysis and censure of the law in

           light of its contribution to the greatest happiness.

 D. Four dimensions of pleasure or pain (for calculation):

       1. Intensity.

       2. Duration.

       3. Certainty it will follow given kind of action.

       4. Remoteness from the time it will occur.

 E. Greatest happiness principle useful in stripping away 'fictions' and 

      recalling that real individuals are affected by law and government

      actions. 

 F. Allocation of pains and pleasures by good legislation brings about most 

     desirable results.

       1. Utility only reasonable grounds for such legistation and obligation

           to obey.

       2. Property rights justified by the need for security and certainty of the

           results of our actions.

 G. Jeremy Bentham's liberal humanist feeling caused him to temper the

      greatest happiness principle (efficiency) by holding equality of men in

      calculating happiness.

 H. Classical economics grew alongside Bentham's social philosophy 

      from the same roots in Adam Smith, via David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus 

      and the French successors to François Quesnay and the Physiocrats. 

       1. Laissez faire theory

       2. Economics and politics mutually interdependent with 'law-like'

           economic behavior.

       3. Embraced two diverse points of view:

           i. natural order as inherently simple, harmonious and beneficent

           ii. belief this order is devoid of ethical attributes and its laws have 

               no relation to justice, reason or human welfare

           iii. the first assumption corresponds to a static social free-market

                that will produce most cheap harmony of interests 

           iv. the second corresponds to the social dynamics of distribution 

                of the total product of that market through economic classes 

                where what one gets depends on which class one is in

       4. At odds with utilitarian principle which requires a harmony of

           interests which is not natural but must be produced by legislation.

 I. Malthus proposed two laws:

       1. In general, population increases faster than production of food.

       2. Law of rent -- food is the product of land and land is peculiar in

           that it is limited in amount and differs in productivity. Rent is the

           difference between productivity of any given piece of land and that

           of land which at prevailing food prices would just fail to pay the

           cost of use.

        3. Rent therefore contributes nothing to production and landlords

           are economic parasites. (Ricardo), and;

           i. increase in food prices brings less fertile lands under cultivation,

              increases rent and increases population which increases prices

           ii. implies law of wages -- except for temporarily, wages cannot

              rise above or fall below subsistence level 

           iii. total product of industry in general distributed as rent, wages

               or profit with profits falling as rent increases

           iv. does not mesh on theoretical level with a neutral free market

               but on practical level led to policy of free trade

           v. Marx had ready made picture of exploitation of labor (profit was

               economic rent paid to the holders of the means of production

 J. Bentham saw that Liberal government need not be defended by accepting

     its inefficiency.

 K. James Mill

       1. Shared Hobbesian view of men driven by desire for power which

           institutional limitations cannot check.

       2. With Bentham rejected any conception of balancing of powers.

       3. Saw middle class as "wisest part of the community" which lower

           classes would follow. 

       4. Unified egoistic theory of individual motivation and belief in the 

           natural harmony of human interests.

 L. Philosophical Radicalism had great practical effect in 19th Century

     England.

       1. Had no positive conception of a social good and a passive view 

           of government.

       2. Left need for some conception of social good and positive government.

Next week:  Liberalism Modernized

     

 

Notes on "A History of Political Theory" -- Episode 21

For episode 20, see here

The Theory of the Nation State

XXI. Thomas Hobbes
 A. Hobbes' political writings occasioned by civil war and were intended to
      support the King. 
 B. Sought to account on scientific grounds for all facts of nature including
      society and individuals (an approach now defined as materialism).
       1. Derived complex appearances from underlying simple motions.
       2. Used a geometry and physics to account for individual physiology
           and psychology and those to build a philosophy of the most complex
           "artificial" bodies, society and the state.
 C. That which was natural for Hobbes was not an end (e.g. natural law) but a
      cause (the psychological mechanism of the human animal).
       1. Resulting in societies made up of mutual actions and reactions of
           individuals upon each other.
       2. Not moral ideals but causes that will evoke generally cooperative
           behavior are conditions of a stable union.
 D. All emotions and desires derive from primitive attractions or retractions
      from stimulus.
 E. Rule behind all behavior is that a living body is set instinctively to preserve
      or heighten its vitality.
       1. Leads to restless pursuit of means to continue existence.
       2. Means that security is always precarious with result that there is no
           limit on the desire for security and power ("the present means of
           obtaining apparent future goods").
       3. This plus a rough equality in capabilities leads to a war of all against
           all -- with no "right" or "wrong" -- and thus making civilization
           impossible. 
 F. Reason is second principle of human nature.
       1. Makes pursuit of security more effective.
       2. Ruthless pursuit of individual advantage cannot be basis of society.
       3. Calculating selfishness brings man into society.
 G. Laws of nature state what ideally rational beings would do to achieve
      security. 
       1. This forms postulates upon which rational construction of society
           takes place.
       2. Laws amount to this:
           i. peace and economy have greater utility for self-preservation than
              violence and general competition
           ii. peace requires mutual confidence in the surrender of the "right to
               everything"
 H. Society is simply the means to an end.
       1. Based on utilitarianism and individualism.
       2. Such a notion of individualism was a clean break with customary 
           ideas about economic and social institutions.
       3. The defense of monarchy superficial next to this.
 I. To safeguard covenant by which all surrendered rights, a coercive
     power, i.e. government, was required. 
       1. Men do what they dislike on pain of suffering what they dislike even
           more.
       2. Cooperation is formed by union of individuals -- not consent from
           "citizens" -- which acts as, and through, one sovereign individual. 
 J. Law and morals are the same, simply the will of the sovereign.
 K. All necessary powers belong to the sovereign and are individual and 
      unalienable. 
       1. There is no justification for resistance.
       2. Yet if resistance is successful and the sovereign unable to govern
           (provide security), he is sovereign no longer.
       3. Monarchy not essential to the theory.
       4. Church is the only other corporation existing as an act of sovereign will.
 L. Advantages  of government are tangible and must accrue to individuals.
 M. Rests on no general or public good or will, only self-interested individuals. 

Next week: Radicals and Communists

Notes on "A History of Political Theory" -- Episode 6

For episode 5 see here.

Theory of the City-State

VI. Aristotle: Political Actualities
 A. Lays groundwork for the study of politics separate from the study of ethics
 B. Looks at the ethical basis, arrangement of offices, social classes within state,
       as well as recognizing the differences between the legal constitution and 
       the constitution in practice
 C. Analysis based upon an understanding of the political and economic
       constitution of the state
       1. Democracies differ according to inclusiveness and economic structure
          of the state
       2. Oligarchies differ on eligibility and distribution of property
 D. Three branches of government: deliberative, administrative and judiciary 
 E. Combining best of both types is the polity or constitutional government*
       1. Foundation of large middle class which is the most stable as not too
           rich or too poor
       2. Balancing of quality (aristocracy) and quantity (democracy)
 F. Defines state as community between contractual relations and paternal rule
 G. State originates from bare needs of life but continues for the sake of the good
       life -- which is the first truly civilized form. 
 H. The "nature"of a thing revealed after growth has taken place; nature redefined
       as convention. Through the growth of community comes the state.
 I. The state is natural because it contains the possibility of a fully civilized life
      but conditions must be right, thus an arena for the statesman to act.
 J. Fundamental constituents of nature: form, matter and movement
       1. Statesman must be descriptive and empirical to ascertain the possibilities
          of the actual
       2. Also must consider the ideal to give form to the possibilities

*Note:  Aristotle divides governments into six types, three ruled by the best one, few or many and their negative forms were rule is in the hand of those not guided by reason but by self-interest.

 

 Next week: The Twilight of the City-State

Globalization and Its Discontents

Globalization and Its Discontents

Just about a year ago, I wrote in this space about premature globalization, suggesting that it may have come too early in humanity's history and gone too far. Whatever the putative benefits of globalization, they appear to not be shared equally but have left many – the unprotected – behind. Well before the November election, it was already clear that Donald Trump was riding the wave of discontent with globalization and would be seen as the transformation candidate.

A fierce critic of globalization now sits in the White House right behind the new President, Steve Bannon. As David Ignatius notes, however, it would be incomplete, maybe even inaccurate, to see Bannon as simply an extreme nationalist. Rather, fusing criticisms from the left and right, Bannon sees globalization as benefiting “crony capitalists” and as a threat to working Americans. Under his guidance, Trump now seems to be undoing the global order of interconnectedness that has seemed increasingly unstoppable over the past few decades. Leaving the politics of this aside, this raises two questions: Whether globalization is indeed an evolutionary inevitability or something still subject to conscious intervention by we human beings? And, if it turns out to be an inevitability, what happens if Trump and Bannon succeed in taking the United States out of contention to continue to occupy the central role in the evolving global reality?

It may well be that the dynamics behind globalization are unstoppable. Human society has moved forward over the last 100 thousand years from small isolated groups to ever larger units that now exist as interconnected nations and organized states. Since the Industrial Revolution, the economic drivers have become mass production for consumption requiring ever-broadening networks of trade for resources and customers. Efficiencies have been gained not only through advances in technology but also through the ever more comprehensive and inclusive concentrations of wealth, organization, production, distribution and trade made possible by those advances. Even when networks extended into new areas far away, they utilized the technological and “free-trade” aspects of globalization to make distributed production more efficient than previous nationally based activities. Left to itself, globalization does not produce greater equality but it does seem to create greater wealth. Since Marx at least, it has been possible to see this ever increasing accumulation of wealth as an objectification of our existence as a species. Who can stop this? Is any effort simply doomed to fighting the logos of human history?

If globalization is inevitable, would Trump and Bannon’s effort to resist it simply take the US out of the center and leave it to some others to occupy? As it now stands, the US has in the last several decades invested mightily – in money and blood – in shaping the world as much as possible in its own image. If we close our borders, emphasize national productions over free trade, reduce our role in international affairs, do we leave it to China or Russia or even a compelled reinvigorated Europe? And if globalization is inevitable, what kind of future would that make for whatever the US becomes behind its walls?

These are questions and not answers. But it seems to me too early to simply surrender to globalization as inevitable. Logically, at least, it would seem possible to walk and chew gum at the same time. We could seek to address inequality. Perhaps some limits and standards for free trade have a role in this. It makes sense to seek to protect ourselves from sources of instability and insecurity around the world but through working multilaterally within the international system rather than unilateral armed interventions. Walls and fences may have a role too, but with careful attention more on how we let people in rather than keep them out. This may be were politics becomes most relevant.

Premature Globalization

Globalization has come too early in humanity's history and gone too far. It is unsustainable with burdens and benefits distributed too unevenly to provide a basis for global stability. Globalization of the market has concentrated wealth in some places at the cost elsewhere of erratic consumer- and export-driven growth that distorts economic development and entrenches poverty. Free trade has meant cross-border transfers of jobs that have left many struggling to make ends meet in the “new economy” while helping others in low wage markets to enter the cycle. The resultant distortions have thus both concentrated and generalized inequality. Globalized media greatly magnifies the perception of inequality by delivering clear images of what is available elsewhere thus potentiating large-scale population movements. Globalization in the 21st Century benefits only some at the cost of the many who have been encouraged to believe that they too benefit from the increased availability of cheaper goods that they can't fix but must constantly buy anew. The majority of humanity still must struggle to attain or maintain a decent living for themselves and their families and a future offering hope for their children.

Within countries, those who directly benefit from the various facets of globalization face a rising tide of political opposition. In what may turn out to be a seminal offering, Peggy Noonan in a recent WSJ piece outlines an important distinction between what she calls the "protected" and the "unprotected." Taking this concept perhaps a little further than she would, the protected are those who make public policy or have purchased the people who do. Through their decisions and predominant political power, the protected impose mechanisms, processes and conditions that provide them direct benefit. The unprotected are those who must survive in the world that the protected make for them. The protected live the good life secure in their own communities. Because they are mostly insulated from any negative effects of their policies, they feel they can inflict anything on the rest. The unprotected live with none of these advantages and all of the fallout. Populist political movements from the left and the right have arisen in may places as the unprotected have lost their patience with traditional politics and politicians. In the US that includes Trump and Bernie Sanders, in Europe populist parties from France to Poland threatening or wresting political power from the “centrists.”

The root problem could be termed premature globalization. It might seem that the tying together of the world's economies might have been the result of some inevitable natural force. But the lowering of trade barriers and opening of borders has been the result of a myriad of political decisions by the protected. They have been able to move jobs to places with lower labor costs and to “import” – through legal and “illegal” migration – cheap labor to where they need it. Free trade always means that jobs move from one place to another. All those Chinese “lifted” out of poverty through years of high growth have come directly from jobs moved from America and elsewhere. The benefit to the unprotected – including the many in the developing world not able to compete with China or the West – has been slim and often fleeting. But as a friend has noted, free trade is only Pareto-optimal if the gains are broadly shared. The gains have not been broadly shared but the costs have.

Who benefits from free trade: the owners of capital and their public servants. They reap the profits and gain extra from buying favored treatment (openly or through corruption). Also, the local political elites of developing countries who monopolize power and skim off what comparatively little wealth trickles in from the global trade channels. Some from supplying raw materials (often mined or grown in ways wasteful and injurious to the environment and local populations), some from importing those planned-obsolescence consumer goods. (I freely admit to “benefitting” from the endless series of iPhones.) In America, they use their advantage to win favorable tax rates (or move operations elsewhere) while pushing to reduce “wasteful” government expenditure on things like infrastructure, healthcare or social welfare.

The primary role of government should be to ensure that all citizens can earn a basic living while helping them provide a suitable and nurturing environment for their children. This means the economy needs to provide a range of jobs from the highly skilled to the basic to mirror the natural mix of abilities and interests. Taking just the United States, over the last decades the Democrats and Republicans both have failed to meet this test. They have pushed the “benefits” of free trade at the cost of millions of jobs lost. Their mantra has been the benefits of those cheaper consumer goods and the possibility of newer jobs in the advanced economy. Even before the 2008 financial tsunami, those newer jobs were hard to find and most were lower pay.

When I was a lad in the 1950s and 60s, my parents raised five children on the salary of a truck driver plus the occasional factory employment of my mother. Try raising five children today on a working stiff's salary, even if both parents work. (How many political hacks rail against abortion but don't care a whit about how to pay for raising those children once they are born?) The protected also benefit from cheap imported labor, often forced to work off the books or as “contractors” without benefits. They do the jobs “Americans won't do.” Translation, they do the jobs Americans won't do at wages too low to allow a decent living.

Globalization would work well in a world of less pronounced inequality. But we have been pushed into it prematurely. The world of the 21st Century perhaps just does not produce enough wealth to share sufficiently for most people to have a decent life where they were born. Thus the wave of refugees – who come from the ranks of the unprotected whether because of conflict or poverty – overwhelming the gates of Europe or trying to somehow get through Mexico to the US. Maybe the only recourse is for societies that can afford to go it alone to raise the walls, close the doors and pull those jobs back to the homeland by ending free trade. Leave China to deal with its population without the benefit of those jobs imported from America. This is the appeal of the Trumps. It's hard to argue against and certainly the same old refrains from the protected – Democrats and Republicans – have lost their popular appeal. No matter who wins the American presidency or how hard Europe tries to prevent migrants from trying to cross, the unprotected are not likely to be denied forever.

Africa by 2100?

Talked recently with a young man originally from Ethiopia but now living in the US. He keeps up with his native land and was just back from a visit. I asked him how things were. He said: “It's Africa, you know what that means, corruption and conflict.” He spoke of the 2005 election and the resulting denial and repression of those he termed the “winners” and lamented the current situation in which, as he put it, the third largest ethnic group rules over the rest of the “80 tribes” that live in Ethiopia.

It is easy to see why someone might see Africa – mired in poverty, corruption and violence – as a land without much of a future. It's hard to name one functioning multi-ethnic democracy on the continent. Some countries have elections but these serve either to anoint those already in control and holding all the advantages of state power – official and otherwise – or to simply provide a patina of legitimacy for autocratic, tribally based rulers and cliques. African countries remain on the periphery of the global economy. As such they must earn their living in an environment where rapid technological change and the built-in advantages of the already developed core leave them little room for much more than the export of raw materials and the importation of finished goods. This may produce some wealth but it runs into the hands of those with the local monopoly. At best, it may feature as a form of primitive capital accumulation but even then the trickle down cannot keep up with rising populations and expectations. It would take an extraordinary amount of good governance, popular support and patience for even gradual economic development to lift these countries to the level of societal well-being basic to sustaining democratic norms, procedures and results.

History dealt Africa two cruel blows. The first was the slave traffic. Slavery certainly existed before the outsiders – European and Arab – brought it to the continent. But the tremendous demand created especially by the traffic to the New World magnified the level of violence already existing among the many native groupings. Slavery also was the entry point of European expansion into Africa, followed by the exploitation of natural resources and colonization. This was the second blow, the carving up of Africa into territorial units that took no regard of existing tribal patterns and political arrangements. There had been empires and nascent states before colonization but these were based on local realities with their own ebb and flow. Once this was super-ceded by the state boundaries drawn up by the Europeans, disparate peoples found themselves lumped together inside arbitrarily chosen fences. After independence – with almost no experience of political participation or democracy – they were left in the hands of those willing and able to use identity politics and violence to seize and hold power. Corruption, poverty and repression within the framework of tribally-based competition for space – economic and political – became the norm.

Some see democracy as the way to move forward. But democracy requires a level of economic development and political maturity (especially a willingness to see someone not like yourself win power). In a context of scarce resources, winner-take-all, tribal politics democracy is likely either to fail or simply produce further conflict between winners and losers. It would be nice if some model of power-sharing might work within federal or confederal arrangements. But such mechanisms also require an extraordinary degree of tolerance and political experience to function in a sustained fashion, especially in the context of economic underdevelopment.

In the history of Europe, stable states grew from heterogeneous tribes only through the growth of centralized states imposing a “national” culture and language. For the future of Africa, it may be necessary for the West to temper efforts to export “democracy” with an understanding of its own history. Acting against genocide or gross human rights abuse is an international responsibility. But it will also be necessary to recognize that over the next decades that African states will have to find their own way of constructing nations within the confines of the colonial fences left them.

No Alternative to Capitalism Except Democratic Captitalism

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.