Democracy and Capitalism – Part 3

                Capitalism is not only a threat to the way we conceptualize and act toward the biosphere and information, it is also a threat to our social and community organization.  Capitalism is built around the idea of competition – around winners and losers.  As Maturana frequently warns in his writings, competition is destructive to the cooperative nature of human society and interaction.  The excess is easy to see.  We’ve created unfathomable wealth, but only at the cost of crushing poverty for many.  We have advanced technology for some and created dead zones for the poor.  Our health care is either spectacular or unavailable.  The competitive focus of capitalism creates inequality and alienation instead of a cooperative and fair social order, in short a democratic social order.  It is becoming increasingly clear that democracy is impossible with the radical distribution of wealth we have now.  If you add in a political party and a president that believes that an electoral victory justifies treating the other side as at best irrelevant and at worst malignant, the picture is even darker.

                We have been raised to believe that competition is not only a good thing but the only way to achieve value and excellence.  That is simply not true.  If competition is constrained by a social nexus of collaboration and shared values, it can at least be mostly benign.  But we are a long way from competition that has any sense of fairness or honor to it.  There is almost no social mobility left in this country, and the idea that decisions are merit based went up in flames as we watch parents buy access for their children.  Even the idea that the ‘best and brightest’ exist is just a social convention developed by those self-proclaimed elites to justify their status.  The fact is that competition is only helpful as part of a larger collaboration.  I’m not looking for a fake utopia of participation trophy kids, but rarely is there on answer or one idea that is so good that it wouldn’t be improved by collaboration.  In fact, I don’t think there are any great ideas that aren’t a product of collaboration in the first place.

                Capitalism is inherently exclusive.  Democracy is inherently inclusive.  If we want to rebuild our democracy we have to curb our addiction to competition.  We can’t build a democracy around the idea that there is one winner and everyone else sucks.  That doesn’t mean that we all have the same intelligence, the same physical abilities or attributes, or that we’re all as good at everything as everybody else.  The problem with capitalism is that it makes those differences the basis for exclusion.  A democratic society should want to bring out the best and most unique talents of its members, but not by making some of them obscenely powerful and rich while the others barely have a life.  We are, as Maturana says, a species that is collaborative in our biology.  Our necessary reliance and language and social order to survive is testament to that fact.

                In our formalistic and oligarchic democracy we have always believed that capitalism was essential to democratic life.  We are now at a point where it should be obvious that it isn’t.  If we are going to have a future democracy, it has to be a more fundamental and radical form of democracy.  We can’t just patch up the institutions and practices that got us here and expect a different outcome.  We can’t just offer a collectivist rearrangement of our economic system in the form of socialism and expect the inequality to go away.  The problems of capitalism are hard wired into our system and are responsible for our decline.  They are there in Locke’s writing about ‘providence,’ and they are still with us today. 

                Democracy has always been hard.  Radical democracy is going to be even harder.  Our democratic experiment failed for a lot of reasons.  It’s easy to identify the most egregious and corrupt players and blame them for everything.  It’s true that Trump is an existential threat to democratic government, but it’s also true that a real or healthy democracy never would have produced a Trump in the first place.  If we are to build our way to a future democracy, we have to look at the fundamental mistakes made the last time we tried.  Capitalism is at the top of the list.