“Why, in fact, do we feel compelled to ask if capitalism is failing? Why do we wonder if capitalism is moral? Why do 57% of respondents in an Edelman Trust Barometer survey believe that ‘capitalism as it exists today does more harm than good in the world?'”
Editor’s note: This is the third in a series of short essays by Merion West contributing editor Jonathan Church exploring the idea of capitalism, as practiced today in the United States.
Capitalism, whatever it is, is deservedly recognized as a dynamic economic system that rewards the kind of innovative enterprise that has spawned substantial improvements in material living standards over time. If we assume—probably correctly, though the counterfactual eludes us—that advances in the material conditions of life in the last few centuries would be absent (or noticeably attenuated) without the emergence of a capitalist way of life, it would be foolish to believe that we cannot learn from, and should not seek to preserve, what it is about a capitalist way of life—business, profit, and so on—that tends to generate such remarkable innovation and material prosperity.
After all, we presumably would refuse, if asked, to abandon a world in which electricity, refrigerators, indoor plumbing, automobiles, air planes, computers, the Internet, and innumerable other accommodations of modern life are taken for granted. Even ascetic folk, with their predilection for a minimalist lifestyle and indifference to extravagance or convenience, can appreciate that communism lost the Cold War and that markets, money, and the mayhem of speculative finance have a useful role in getting resources to where they are needed, or at least wanted.
In the same vein, it would be counterproductive to cast aside the insights of Adam Smith—the intellectual forefather of laissez-faire capitalism—in a cavalier belief that neoclassical economics, to which The Wealth of Nations gave birth, is merely ideological. It may be that no one solves calculus problems to figure out what they should buy when shopping on Amazon. We may grin ironically when the authors of a textbook on Chicago price theory, a quintessential exegesis of free market economics, acknowledge that “it turned out that people’s expectations (about the housing market prior to it 2007-08 collapse) were wrong relative to what happened” but then insist (with a straight face) that the question we must ask is: “were people wrong about what could have happened?” Nevertheless, the material benefits of capitalism do not give us reason to deny that modern economic theory is a significant advance in our understanding of efficient resource allocation.
Yet, as much as we should be grateful for what capitalism has bequeathed to life in the 21st century, we shortchange ourselves if we avoid reckoning with the eruption of discontent with capitalism around the world. Why, in fact, do we feel compelled to ask if capitalism is failing? Why do we wonder if capitalism is moral? Why do 57% of respondents in an Edelman Trust Barometer survey believe that “capitalism as it exists today does more harm than good in the world?”
Surely, a full explanation of disenchantment with capitalism requires more than an essay or two to explore. At the very least, it would explore environmental degradation, economic inequality, and political corruption as only a few of the maladies seemingly endemic to capitalism. But for a system anchored fundamentally on wage labor, we would be remiss and hardheaded to ignore the perennial plague of alienation in the workplace of brazenly capitalist societies.
This estrangement is evidenced in a decades-long Gallup finding that a mere one third of American employees feel engaged in their work, a level that has been steady since at least 2000. Globally, the figure stands at a paltry 23%. Turning back to the United States, only 21% of workers are extremely satisfied with their company as a place to work; just 35% strongly agree that “opportunities abound for U.S. employees to do more of what they do best;” a mere 40% strongly agree that someone in their company cares about them as a person; 32% percent strongly agree that they feel connected to the mission or purpose of their job; and 32% strongly agree that they have opportunities to learn and grow in their work. Even if these percentages exceed what we might find in the sclerotic communist societies of the 20th century (or other societies for that matter), we should surely insist that we can do better.
Perhaps it is not news that most people hate their jobs and are not so gullible as to believe that a business can run on the humane principle that one’s personhood, values, and health are as important as the firm’s bottom line, and thus that one can count on never being fired because of who he is by arrogant top brass or dehumanized by Chicago price theory purists who selectively pull data from a graph to “prove” that paid sick leave is bad for business. After all, it seems glaringly obvious to anyone with an eye for “how things work” that factory workers in the 19th century probably had a hard time keeping up their spirits when the most respectable path to good citizenship, if being a robber baron was out of one’s reach, was to work 60 hours per week in sweatshops. It seems equally obvious that mid-20th century assembly-line automobile workers probably did not smile and sing on their daily commute, like paid actors in a television commercial, simply because they enjoyed the good fortune of a mediocre, if conscientious, middle-class suburban life in the post-World War years. And it seems glaringly obvious that young corporate lawyers, fresh out of law school and saddled with student debt, harbor misgivings about spending their lives billing thousands of hours to make partner while their memory of reading the classics as undergraduate philosophy or literature majors fades into a grim nostalgia.
Unlike surveys, these bleak examples of the cheerless life of wage labor in a capitalist world more incisively capture the spirit of Terry Eagleton’s famous dictum that a socialist, whatever his other virtues and insights (or lack thereof), is “just someone who is unable to get over his or her astonishment that most people who have lived and died have spent lives of wretched, fruitless, unremitting toil.” Surveys are by no means useless, but they reflect scrupulous fine-tuning by experts who coldly try to measure opinions from detached respondents based on ordinal rankings that relegate any further inquiry vis-à-vis psychoanalysis, introspection, or philosophic exposition to idle “speculation.” They are part of the beating heart of instrumentalized reason—concerned myopically with technique at the expense of discerning and distilling the immanent social tensions of “strongly agree” and “strongly disagree”—that reinforces alienation by slicing and dicing human sentiments into numbers and graphics that can be paraded in tables and charts like circus spectacles that help organizations like Gallup sell more reports to clients.
In short, surveys are just more of the same, deflecting opportunities to look “under the hood” of bourgeois careerism in which so many, in the words of Marcel Proust, “imagine that the life they are obliged to lead is not that for which they are really fitted, and they bring to their regular occupations either an indifference tinged with fantasy, or a sustained and haughty application, scornful, bitter, and conscientious.” The social climber sees only the option of “seeking new opportunities.” But mere matchmaking in the job market is perhaps not so palatable to those for whom opportunities in a world rampant with profit-obsessed enterprise provide limited scope for the ideals that would otherwise stir their souls.
Even the weak alternative of “not-for-profit” organizations is only a further entrenchment of a system fundamentally anchored on profit and overwhelmed by hierarchies contaminated by the personalities of money-grubbing kingpins that thrive in the arena of capital accumulation. The art of life in a capitalist world lies in circumventing, or outright avoiding, the haunting questions of who we are, who we want to be, and why we feel so rootless in a world dominated by capital.
Jonathan Church, a contributing editor at Merion West, is also a government economist and author. He is author of Reinventing Racism: Why “White Fragility” Is the Wrong Way to Think about Racial Inequality, as well as Virtue in an Age of Identity Politics: A Stoic Approach to Social Justice. He hosts the podcast Escaping Ideology with Jonathan Church at Merion West and can be found on X @jondavidchurch
