دموکراسی سرمایه داری در مقابل اقتصاد صفر و یک

Capitalism needs democracy as a counterweight because the capitalist system by itself shows no tendency toward equilibrium. … Financial markets are inherently unstable … George Soros, 1998 Soros’ arguments in support of this thesis are compelling.1 They are an urgent reminder that maintenance of civilization requires vigilance and concerted effort. Soros fears that “political developments triggered by the financial crisis may eventually sweep away the global capitalist system itself. It has happened before.” Marx and Engels gave a very good analysis of the capitalist system 150 years ago, says Soros—“better in some ways than the equilibrium theory of classical economics.” We believe that the financial innovation created by Louis Kelso and expounded with Mortimer Adler in The Capitalist Manifesto2 (with details in The New Capitalists) may be the best available instrument for preserving the open society that is essential to a stable and democratic capitalism.

This may appear to be not an immediate likelihood, given publicly touted record low unemployment rates and burgeoning consumerism (on credit).7 However, there exists a disturbing set of observations with regard to the coincidence of increasing wealth concentration and economic depression. [Batra, Galbraith] Should economic recession occur in the context of record household debt levels, the issue may attain more immediacy with the public. Although now unfashionable, Marx also has poignant observations on the genesis of decline in capitalist society. As consolidation and concentration proceed, the next thing to be expropriated is the capitalist who is exploiting many laborers. “One capitalist kills many.” The process is described succinctly by Weldon: The enforced competition among capitalists is revealed by success or failure in reducing costs. For those who fail there is bankruptcy or forced sale, and the transfer of assets to those who succeed. Capitalism grows as measured by output, by productivity, by the number of employed workers, by the size of the reserve army, but it contains all the same a ‘constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital’ and a working class ‘disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself.’ In brief, within the boundaries of a capitalistic nation-state the ranks of the capitalists are thinned by virtue of market forces, and the coherence of workers is steadily increased. ‘Bourgeois economy’ becomes a system that is capitalistic only in name, for competition has virtually disappeared and the organization of a socialist state is already in place.8 This recent analysis by a political economist is remarkably similar in tone to a warning in 1958 that America was headed toward complete socialism, that is, to State capitalism. Though it is fashionable today to believe that we are advancing toward a sound capitalism, an understanding of the principles of capitalism will reveal that we are retreating from it and, instead, advancing toward a socialist state. Never before has society marched more joyously into ambush by the very forces it implacably opposes but does not recognize. We are faced with the spectacle of a nation sincerely seeking democracy and economic justice through means which it fails to recognize as destructive of both.

These awkward features aside, we believe that the emphasis on property is much needed in political economic discourse and that failure to pay attention to it has been responsible for much social mischief. An illustration of the potential improvement to economic analysis which is implied by acting on the Kelso/Ashford policy prescription (in contrast to following their economics) will be left to a subsequent paper. As to the issue implied by our title, we are comfortable with democratic capitalism as a generic concept which carries meaning for most people. Binary economics, on the other hand, seems needlessly esoteric. We spent our youth, respectively, in Alberta and British Columbia, the only two jurisdictions in North America we are aware of to have been governed by parties identified by the equally esoteric label of Social Credit. Although we have interviewed prominent standard bearers of the party, none of them was ever able to give a very clear explanation of what it meant as a theory of political economy—which it very definitely is.27 A danger in promoting an idea like this without first having satisfactory explanations in terms of concepts already familiar is that it will suffer a similar fate to Social Credit, winning an instant reputation among business and political-economic journalists as “the new funny money party.” That would be doubly unfortunate, by making the concept too easy to dismiss as discredited before it is even investigated, and as justifying its exclusion from academic conferences on the ground that it is a political rather than a scientific or professional activity.