A new group of business executives supporting President Obama's economic policies, called Business Forward, will officially announce its formation today. Founding members include executives from AT&T, Facebook, Hilton, IBM, Microsoft, Pfizer and Time Warner. "When it comes to health care, education, and other critical issues, business leaders are among America's strongest advocates for reform," said executive director Jim Doyle.It's one sign that this isn't 1992--these are some really big companies that, at least in theory, are supporting Obama's health care plan. And it also outlines one of the central problems, historically, of the left.
Historically, the left has been fundamentally an anticapitalist proposition. While not everyone on the left is a full-on Marxist, I can't imagine anyone on the left not fundamentally agreeing with Marx's critique of capitalism, which has yet to really be answered by free market ideologues--largely, I think, because it is unanswerable. It happens to be the truth. A system which rewards greed and self-interest is one that is going to, at the very least, present some challenging moral questions. In my opinion, Marx's cure is far worse than the disease, and while I don't believe that communism is prima facie evil as a theory I think it's safe to say that it's not an effective system because a lot of its assumptions about human nature are simply wrong. Suffering doesn't necessarily bring virtue. The poor are not intrinsically more pure than the rich. Not everyone is willing to continually sacrifice for their fellow man. In the end, the results of communism are far worse than the results of capitalism, and that is why I find myself a reluctant capitalist, albeit one who believes that the only way to mitigate some of capitalism's inherent flaws is for government to take an active role in the marketplace, as well as for everyone to be cognizant of the imperfections of capitalism. For example, the entire rational economic actor model is complete nonsense, invented by economists who needed something to model human behavior. The notion that people act in their own best interests all the time is laughable, and the idea that people are informed enough or interested enough to do things like read scientific reports or look at their doctor's disciplinary history is dubious. Then again, even most libertarians believe that there should be some sort of state that does some of this stuff, so I don't really feel that I need to draw out this argument.
According to many on the left, business and the rich are implacable foes to progress. I think that this narrative is fundamentally wrong, though it often feels plausible. Other countries don't have the have vs. have not dynamic that we do in America, and let's not forget that the postwar period saw business generally aligned with the liberal policies of John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, as Jon Chait notes in The Big Con. What changed wasn't so much business as a cultural shift during the 1970s and 1980s--as the Greatest Generation began to fade away and the Baby Boomers began to take over, the prevailing cultural attitudes were oriented in a much more greedy, "I'll get mine" sort of mentality. And even now there are companies that are willing to support liberal goals, as well as plenty of rich liberals in the Northeast and West (though the rich are still a prime Republican demographic). This doesn't mention that most other countries--particularly Europe--don't have this sort of snobs vs. slobs dynamic.
So I'm not entirely convinced that we lefties can't live with capitalism, and during the post-WWII years it produced some reasonably effective outcomes. What the left should do is primarily to mount a cultural critique. There is some hope that today's youth is less status- and money-obsessed than the Boomers, so perhaps there's hope for American Capitalism. Or maybe Niebuhr was right and we've been able to avoid dealing with social justice questions by being able to take modest measures to distribute wealth more evenly, rather than major social restructuring a la Clement Attlee, 1945. But the narrative that the left often uses to frame these questions tends to be at least partly incorrect, and needs some work.
