Saving Capitalism and Democracy

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But I felt deeply frustrated by my inability to get him and congressional leaders to take the kind of action I felt they needed to, given the gravity of the problem—the problem being of course that wages were stagnating and had been for years, that inequality was growing, and that inequality was undermining our democracy.

It was a tough slog. At the time, I thought I risked being marginalized. And I had two young boys who I was seeing very little of and who I missed terribly. I did the best I could. In retrospect, you always wonder if you could have done more. I might have been able to. I think he is not just the worst president in my lifetime, but I think he poses a grave danger to this country, to our cohesion and our place in the world.

I want them to see the connections between economics and politics. I want the wealthy and privileged in America to understand that they have got to accept, if not actually advocate for, fundamental changes that will get big money out of politics and restore our democracy.

Trump is just the latest manifestation. We are at a crisis point in our political-economic system. Career Connections Berkeley Network Webinars. Upgrade your Grad Pack to Life Membership. Your generosity makes a difference. Giving Notes Fall Fall at Pinecrest Chalet. Lair Open House Jan. By Melissa Batchelor Warnke. UC Berkeley Public Policy. Now, it all makes sense.

Whether democracy can be re-established or not is going to depend on an absolutely radical President who will have the gumption and support to re-address this massive imbalance. The upbeat note on which Saving Capitalism ended on was extremely heartening and rousing, the future does indeed lie in the hands of young people and them becoming politically active.

It would appear that this seems to be happening in the UK in so far that Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, is very popular with the young voter. It helps you see that Trump is just a side show in a much bigger drama that is playing out in U. They seem to be focused too much on tactics and not enough on strategy. Are they even addressing the right problem? Thank you for your dedication Prof. More information about text formats. Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.

Lines and paragraphs break automatically. Government doesn't "intrude" on the "free market. It is people, not the "free market," who have decided that corporations can use bankruptcy law as a means to cut workers' pensions, while homeowners can't use it to reduce their mortgage payments. But not all people--only a select few have a real say over those kind of questions.

Reich shows that the same is true about capitalism as a whole. Even a concept as seemingly self-explanatory as private property is actually the result of a series of laws and rules. Ownership, Reich explains, might seem as obvious as "I bought this" or "I created that," but most societies have decided that you can't own a nuclear bomb, a human being or a cooking recipe.

We could make a similar decision about life-saving drugs. But instead, the U. Just as Bernie Sanders has inspired millions by railing against inequality and putting forward substantial policy proposals to reduce it, Reich is animated by the optimism that "we need not be victims of impersonal 'market forces' over which we have no control. The last section of Saving Capitalism is filled with proposals to make capitalism more equal, from raising the minimum wage and making it easier for workers to form unions, to forcing corporations to pay higher taxes if their ratio of CEO-to-worker pay is higher than others.

Reich's final proposal is something that many people would call socialist: Reich takes on the standard right-wing objection that this would lead to widespread laziness, insisting instead that it would enable people to pursue socially valuable work, and much more besides. It's great to see a prominent economist putting forward hopeful and radical ideas. But there's a problem in Reich's guaranteed income plan: If all of us started out with enough money to meet our basic necessities, why would any of us subject ourselves to going to work for a boss?

This may seem at first like a quibble with Reich's final utopian vision and one that shouldn't affect the arguments in the rest of the book, but it's actually a loose thread that unravels much of Saving Capitalism once you pull on it. Profit is the result of exploitation--of workers overall producing more wealth than they are paid overall. Workers only enter this arrangement because they have to.

They don't have the resources to control the product of their own labor and sell it to obtain other necessities. Thus, economic systems have two spheres: Reich offers many insights into how capitalism distributes wealth under the rules of the "free market. In a chapter about contracts, for example, Reich explains the bogus "consent" given by Apple users when they click "I Accept" and sign away privacy rights in order to use the iCloud. But there is no similar chapter in Saving Capitalism about how the workers who make Apple products--like blue- and white-collar workers for other companies the world over--have little choice about accepting unfair pay and working conditions, and none at all about what is done with the product of their work.

The "free market" has determined that they'll find the basically same raw deal everywhere else--and a worse one if they're unemployed. This lack of choice for the working majority is necessary for the functioning of capitalism--which is why it can never be reformed into a system that works "for the many. Just as human societies have decided the terms of private property regarding cooking recipes and year drug patents, it's also possible for society to decide that the companies that produce and distribute wealth shouldn't be privately owned at all, but should instead be collectively run by their workers.

This is the heart of socialism: Not just that wealth should be fairly distributed, but also that those who create it should have democratic control--to start with, over what they do and how they do it.

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Workers' control is vital to socialism not just because it's a nice idea, but because workers are the only force with the potential power to bring about socialism. But the question, of course, is how human beings can go about deciding on workers' control versus capitalist control. But in fact, it was the power of unions and strikes and civil rights organizations and mass protest that pressured those leaders into the creating programs like Social Security, Medicare and the other major reforms of the 20th century that they are now credited with establishing.

For example, Tocqueville, as he wandered up and down the east coast of the United States, saw something that puzzled him a great deal at first. He saw Americans who were among the wealthiest in their communities investing in public schools and improving highways and being community leaders.

The Promise of American Life

But he could not find these motivations in the economic leaders of these various American communities. There may have been some motivation of honour, duty and patriotism, but that was not what primarily motivated them. They understood that if the people around them were more productive they themselves would do better. They understood that by investing in their communities — in the education of the children and in the transportation system and even in public parks — everyone would do better.

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This was a remarkable insight. It was undoubtedly true in the United States for a long time. Whatever happened to enlightened self-interest? They would also benefit from a society that, instead of being one overwhelmed by anger and cynicism as it is now, was a society in which people had a great deal of hope about the future and expectation that their children could live better than they do.

All they are looking at is their own bottom lines. And as a result the tide is rising, but at a very slow rate. This is the most anaemic economic recovery on record. And part of the reason is that so much income and wealth is now at the top, that the vast middle class in the United States does not have enough purchasing power to keep the economy going. People are also scared and angry. They are worried about losing their jobs, their houses, their health care, of falling backwards. Most Americans today, according to polls, believe their children will live worse than they live.

Tocqueville also made a clear connection between equality and a healthy democracy. And remember this is the s in the United States, this is long before anyone had really connected the dots and seen the danger of inequality to a robust democracy. You had a relatively small number of white men who were full participants in the incipient democracy of the s, and yet Tocqueville saw one of the threats to the future of American democracy was widening inequality.

Your final book, The Theory of the Leisure Class , which was published in , is regarded as one of the first critiques of consumerism. Please tell us more.

Q&A: Robert Reich on Saving Capitalism | California Magazine

It was a critique of consumerism, but it was particularly a critique of consumerism by the very wealthy. Veblen saw the importance of social status as a motivator in capitalism. He was the first to understand that one of the reasons that people desperately wanted to become rich was not simply to consume but to consume in such a way that they established themselves as being superior to others. He saw capitalism as a form of primitive barbarism dating back to prehistoric times.

Veblen was very much an anthropologist as well as an economist. He looked back on tribal society and saw much the same thing as he saw in the Gilded Age of the last decades of the 19th century in the United States. He saw people in early tribal society establishing their social dominance through displaying power by what they had accumulated and their ability to essentially do nothing while everyone else worked.

Veblen was a great humorist. In fact, he wrote with his tongue firmly in his cheek, pointing out the foibles of the Gilded Age. I like Veblen as a stylist. I also like the fact that he combines anthropology and sociology with economic observation. He views the accumulation of wealth as a social act, rather than as a mere personal, familial objective. Veblen writing in was, of course, a precursor to the reforms that Herbert Croly and others had called for in the early years of the 20th century. And yet America today bears a striking resemblance to the Gilded Age of the late 19th century.

Read Veblen today and you can almost see contemporary America. Five Books aims to keep its book recommendations and interviews up to date. If you are the interviewee and would like to update your choice of books or even just what you say about them please email us at editor fivebooks.

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Saving Capitalism

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