They ask, “Will authoritarian capitalism take over? Or will democratic capitalism win in the end?”
Well, authoritarian capitalism doesn’t have a great track record. The Nazis and fascists collapsed. China’s middle class is complacent now because they’re glutted; but no country can sustain the pace of development the PRC has been on, not even with their gigantic population—as soon as a correction hits, disaffectation will be widespread. Economic prosperity is all they have.
But democratic capitalism? In an age of Goldman-Sachs, it’s hard to sell people on the idea that the politico-economic system isn’t manipulated by large power players. Even in the age of Obama I see a growing lack of trust in the system.
Politicos who agree on principle to provide A will then descend into terminal squabbling about the proper form of the institutions to provide A, always couched in ideological language though it’s largely a matter of setting up opportunities for certain interests to benefit at the expense of others.
Personally, I see no problem with institutions that are fundamentally market-based coexisting with those which are more socialized. The key questions concern which form (and not just which of these two, but of many others besides) is superior in efficiency to providing A; which is more just; which is more feasible; which is more politically expedient. Not, “which exalts individual rights more,” &c, which is asinine, because the only thing that definitively guarantees individual rights within a polity is a persistent demand among the populace for the respect of their rights.
It is, in fact, content over form. A constitution is useless if there is no longer consensus behind it. Rights themselves are vacuous—they are a construct embodying a more primal human desire to be free to do what e wants (in the present widespread understanding, although privilege-conception vestiges remain, such as the monopolies of copyright).
There is a mismatch between rights as in fundamental rights—our guarantees of freedom of speech, conscience, assembly, and so forth—and rights which bestow a privilege and become marketable. It was perhaps prescient of early rights scholars to propose that, in the interest of broader freedom, the freedom to relinquish certain rights be forbidden. This view can be rationalized by some as denoting that certain rights inhere in a person, and are inalienable structurally rather than legally, but I think this is overzealous dedication to freedom sensu stricto.
The anarchist utopia is an appealing idea but there is broad consensus it is untenable. The anarchist world pragmatically becomes one full of nasty, brutish, and short lives. Or rather, rapidly containing a paucity of them. One or another conception of peaceable anarchy often relies on a limiting assumption of the nature of men. If only they all just respected one another’s right to freedom from coercion, they submit, this could all work. And the corpus is one vast appendix to that thesis, in the schools of anarcho-capitalism, anarcho-syndicalism, green anarchism, anarcho-feminism, and anarcho-N for all N such that it is a member of the set P of radical politics.
Against this balance the tragedy of the commons, and in a more mundane but analogous fashion, the love we have of public outdoor spaces so long as they are insufficiently enjoyed as to have a degree of solitude, dualled by the disgust we have of such places once they are stuffed by οἱ πολλοί. People do take better care of things they have an ownership stake in. And modern estrangement has guaranteed all but a few aggregations of people are unable to build a sufficient sense of community to take a collective and empowering ownership stake in any project—or also the freedom of movement being a destablizing force, allowing dissatisfaction to lead to simple abandonment rather than consensus-building or compromise.
Ultimately what people want to protect is the proceeds of their time. It is the one thing we are virtually guaranteed a scarcity of. For though our minds are expansive and continually progressive, our time is circumscribed. How we spend it is thus invaluable. Money is a proxy for time. Riches, jewels, power, are proxies for time.
Humans have an innate sense of the inevitability of death and the reality of its permanence. This supposition is based on an analogy of the linguistic “paucity of the stimulus” argument, which holds especially true in modern, more peaceable times. How many dead will a young adult have seen or known in modern America, and yet know the permanence of death enough to have fear of it? (Even if, under the influence of powerful evolutionary intoxicants, the males disregard it in search of mating opportunities?) This drives our valuation of time.
The listlessness of severe depression, when one wishes merely to sleep away the day, can be seen in this light as a subaltern of suicide per se.
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