You can’t escape the questions these days: “Is capitalism dead?” Twisted around: “Can we save capitalism?”
Benjamin Barber has a different question: “What kind of capitalism?”
The issue is not the death of capitalism but what kind of capitalism–standing in which relationship to culture, to democracy and to life?
Barber’s worry is that, given President Obama’s centrist “Rubinite” economic team, reforms won’t do much to affect the issues at the core of the economic mess.
But it is hard to discern any movement toward a wholesale rethinking of the dominant role of the market in our society. No one is questioning the impulse to rehabilitate the consumer market as the driver of American commerce. Or to keep commerce as the foundation of American public and private life, even at the cost of rendering other cherished American values–like pluralism, the life of the spirit and the pursuit of (nonmaterial) happiness–subordinate to it.
The fix: a revolution in spirit.
The crisis in global capitalism demands a revolution in spirit–fundamental change in attitudes and behavior. Reform cannot merely rush parents and kids back into the mall; it must encourage them to shop less, to save rather than spend. If there’s to be a federal lottery, the Obama administration should use it as an incentive for saving, a free ticket, say, for every ten bucks banked. Penalize carbon use by taxing gas so that it’s $4 a gallon regardless of market price, curbing gas guzzlers and promoting efficient public transportation. And how about policies that give producers incentives to target real needs, even where the needy are short of cash, rather than to manufacture faux needs for the wealthy just because they’ve got the cash?
Easier said than done, in my opinion.
