America Beyond Capitalism: Reclaiming Our Wealth, Our Liberty, & Our Democracy

  • Thread starter Thread starter StudentMI
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
S

StudentMI

Guest
Has anyone read this book by Gar Alperovitz? I’m currently working my way through it and I must say I’m astounded by his proposals as well as by how closely it complements Catholic social doctrine.

Though the title might suggest a socialist solution to our problems, he is explicit that socialism itself was a failure and indeed produces “power systems within a power system.” However, he minces no words on the current state of corporate capitalism, a model that is supposed to operate by “purely efficient free market operations” but is instead marked by so much political involvement as to render the system more of a state capitalism model than one of laissez faire, including a telling quote by a Nixon aide on how much corporations rely on government help.

His proposals to solve the problems of our system are wide ranging, yet they don’t ring of socialism. Instead they focus on devolving and decentralizing power and decision making to local communities and individuals (pure subsidiarity it would seem), what he calls the Pluralist Commonwealth. Pluralist not simply meaning multiculturalism, but pluralist in organization and autonomy.

I’m also astounded by his erudition. Citing both then current (2003) studies and classic conservative and capitalist philosophers and economists, he references works by James Buchanan, Friedrich von Hayek, Robert Nisbet among others, never disparagingly but always to show recognition of the problems we face. It’s not simply left vs right wing. I find his analysis still pertinent today.

Anyway, I just wondered if anyone has read it and wanted to discuss it. As I said I haven’t read the entire thing, but I’m enjoying it so far. Do I agree with everything he says? No. But I’m glad I picked it up.
 
Last edited:
Sounds like this would be a book worth reading. I’d never heard of him, but I’ll have to check this out. If it’s some 500-page tome, I’m not going to have the time to read something like that right now, but a summary or précis might be available (kind of what I provided here a few days ago for Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals — the main ideas, distilled into a page or two).
 
StudentMI said:
40.png
HomeschoolDad:
it’s some 500-page tome,
Click to expand...
It’s luckily only about 250 pages.
Click to expand...
Good to know. Sounds like his thinking might be somewhat similar to that of communitarian Amitai Etzioni. (Incidentally, that’s an adopted name, he was born Werner Falk, sounds Italian, but it’s actually Hebrew-derived.)
 
Ignatius said:
Yes, Saul Alinsky would be proud of this subterfuge.
Click to expand...
Unfortunately you’d also have to lump in such stalwarts as Leo XIII, Pius XI, Pius XII, John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Pope Francis.
 
HomeschoolDad said:
Sounds like his thinking might be somewhat similar to that of communitarian Amitai Etzioni.
Click to expand...
I’ll have to look him up. If you’re interested check out Ralph Borsodi. Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day were fond of his work.
 
I don’t think so the pontiff’s you mentioned were solidly opposed to Communism and subterfuge.
 
The inability to distinguish between Communism and what the OP is talking about has struck early, I see.
 
What? The popes have been completely opposed to communism since its inception.

There are ways other than capitalism and communism to organize an economy. That the OP is talking about an author who proposes a different ordering does not ipso facto mean he is talking about communism.

As to subterfuge… maybe that is a prudential matter 😉 ?
 
“And while the State in the nineteenth century, through excessive exaltation of liberty, considered as its exclusive scope the safe-guarding of liberty by the law, Leo XIII admonished it that it had also the duty to interest itself in social welfare, taking care of the entire people and of all its members, especially the weak and the dispossessed, through a generous social programme and the creation of a labor code.” — Pope Pius XII
 
Annie said:
There are ways other than capitalism and communism to organize an economy
Click to expand...
No! There is either unbridled, unregulated, step-on-the-worker-and-destroy-the-environment-to-make-a-profit American-style capitalism, or Communism! Any attempt at an in-between is subterfuge!

Sarcasm, obviously.
 
Last edited:
StudentMI said:
Unfortunately you’d also have to lump in such stalwarts as Leo XIII, Pius XI, Pius XII, John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Pope Francis.
Click to expand...
I think if some Catholics actually read Rerum Novarum, Quadragesimo anno, Mater et Magistra, Laborem Exercens, Centesimus Annus, etc, etc they would be quite surprised about what The Church actually teaches on economic matters.
 
This is my first time when I am hearing about Gar Alperovitz, but I had started to read quite a lot similar literature years ago (when I was old-school social democrat or even democratic socialist) and I always quitted it.

It is very appealing to talk about redistribution, about industry with human face, about different forms of ownership, about green deals and so on. Many talk in such manner - including Sanders, Corbyn, AOC and democratic socialists. It can seem very human talk, but from my point of view such views are unwise, inhuman and out-dated.

All such talk boils down to the 2 issues:
  1. There are jobs in our society which are very hard and unrewarding. Harvesting, jobs in slaughterhouses, medical nursing, waste sorting and treatment, jobs on skyscrapers and so on. We can have nice talk but as long as such jobs will exist, there will be necessary some mechanism of exploitation that will press people to do such jobs. Well there can be different tastes (e. g. I don’t view the job of professional mathematician of theoretical physicist as hard one), but the reality of some jobs are very, very harsh;
  2. And then there is question about distribution of resource. Should be subsidize the work of cash register employee or should we automate such job away and invest more resources in automation.
Article “Market Socialism as a Distinct Socioeconomic Formation” from Canadian journal “New Proposals” greatly formed my view: we can not introduce socialism (or elements of socialism) in society without the development of technologies. Each stage of technological development naturally creates its own distinct socio-economic form - be it serfdom, capitalism or socialism.

Only when the technological development will provide the sufficient automation only then some elements of socialism can naturally emerge. The failure of communism was exactly because the lack of development of technologies.

Current developments in artificial intelligence, artificial general intelligence, (cognitive) robotics, automation, program synthesis, self-learning/self-evolving/self-developing systems can be the necessary technological precondition to the move to the postcapitalism.

So, I don’t believe in redistribution per se, but I believe in redistribution for the support of development of human capabilities to develop further technologies. That is why I am so fond with Andrew Yang and his idea about Universal Basic Income, about the role of technologies in the society and about the benefitting from them.

Industry 4.0 is ongoing force and it would be better if old school social democrats and socialists would see the fantastic opportunities to eradicate the poverty by the use and development of technologies and about enhancing the healthcare with automatic personalized healthcare. Andrew Yang had plan this for 2020 elections, but he failed to gain the nomination. Other contenders are far worse. In UK Corbyn managed to write 2019 GE manifesto without mentioning the Artificial Intelligence! How frequently AOC is speaking about benefits from automation? I can hardly hear such ideas from AOC and Sanders.
 
My guess is that Transhumanists have the future (US has its Transhumanist party and I am its oversees member for some years).
 
Actually Leo XIII, Pius XI, Pius XII, John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul II, Benedict XVI, etc. all recognized that Capitalism is the source of the greatest human flourishing, prosperity and raising the largest numbers of people out of poverty.
 
Last edited:
Those popes where children of their time. The historical materialism teaches that technological means determine the social-economic relationships. History proves that - capitalism exists for some centuries only, before that the primitive societies were, the slavery were, the serfdom was and only after all this the capitalism emerged. Everyone agrees that capitalism is just product of its time, it did not exist all the time. Some argue, that capitalism is the final state, some argue that there will be postcapitalism.

The histrocial materialism teaches that technological developments will lead to socialism and communism. Well - Industry 4.0, artificial intelligence, robotics is ongoing. In the history - human beings competed with human beings and the best won. Today human beings are competing with the computers and computers are starting to winning, e.g. there are increasing number of fields in which computers as acquired the superhuman level of performance.

How do you suppose to accomodate this in capitalism? What will be the role of work? People are know so little about developments in artificial intelligence, but maybe this Juergen Schmidhuber's home page - Universal Artificial Intelligence - New AI - Deep Learning - Recurrent Neural Networks - Computer Vision - Object Detection - Image segmentation - Goedel Machine - Theory of everything - Algorithmic theory of everything - Computable universe - Zuse's thesis - Universal learning algorithms - Universal search - Kolmogorov Complexity - Algorithmic information - Super Omega - Speed Prior - Independent component analysis - ICA - Financial forecasting - Evolution - Reinforcement learning - POMDPs - Reinforcement learning economy - Hierarchical learning - Metalearning - Learning to learn - Self-Improvement - Genetic programming - Attentive vision - Active exploration - Theory of beauty - Theory of creativity - Theory of Humor - Facial Attractiveness - Low-complexity Art - Lego Art will open eyes at least for some? And how capitalism is supposed to sustain the declining wage share? Wage share - Wikipedia (total share of the income is towards the income from capital, but the share of income paid to salaries is declining!).

Well, popes should become smarter. All catholics should become smarter and be ready to see and understand the signs of time and act accordingly.
 
Ignatius said:
Actually Leo XIII, Pius XI, Pius XII, John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul II, Benedict XVI, etc. all recognized that Capitalism is the source of the greatest human flourishing, prosperity and raising the largest numbers of people out of poverty.
Click to expand...
Have you actually read any of their encyclicals? Do you know what they meant by ‘liberalism’ when they condemned it?
 
Last edited:
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top