Capitalism: A Conflation Story

Those of us who give a damn about societal discourse should have consistent terms. Many disagreements occur because of what the debate community refers to as two ships passing in the night. If our arguments don't meet each other face-to-face, we are talking at each other and not with each other. Communication brings understanding. Without understanding we convince no one.

The Telegraph and The Guardian are two British newspapers that I read from time to time. I sense less partisan goat offerings, and it is refreshing to see English written differently. Read this article about Detroit from The Guardian. Read this article about Detroit from The Telegraph. Richard Wolffe and Daniel Hannan, I accuse you both of conflation. They both use the term capitalism in contradictory ways.

Wolffe says that

Over the past 40 years, capitalism turned that success into the abject failure culminating now in the largest municipal bankruptcy in US history.

Hannan says that

The Observer, naturally, quotes a native complaining 'that capitalism has failed us', but capitalism is the one thing the place desperately needs.

They cannot both be right. Either capitalism was a detriment to Detroit, or would be a boon. Wolffe and the Detroit denizen seem to be speaking of capitalism in its common usage. The prefix corporate makes it more accurate, but capitalism usually references the status quo. Proper understanding of the status quo, lets us know that Wolffe is confused. He wants more workers' cooperatives, and claims the movement of production was the main woe. The status quo incursions into the production process by the State, on behalf of corporate interests, was, is and will be the problem unless we end the State. For smaller workers' cooperatives to flourish, the State imposed increased costs of production need to be discarded. Hannan is usually a sober analyst of economics, and does not disappoint in noting the problems with Detroit. His Atlas Shrugged reference is a bullseye. Ayn Rand's fictional Starnesville is a doppelgänger of Detroit in 2013. But, he should know better than to think that the Detroit denizen and he agree on what capitalism means. Hannan is no anarchist, but he definitely wants to sever the umbilical chord between corporation and State. He wishes the market would be freed.

The corporate capitalist State is the ungodly polygamous union of privileged cyclopean corporations to the tangled bureaucracy of taxgatherers. Corporate capitalism is the status quo. Corporate capitalism is the theft of our funds, to maintain and promulgate the flourishing of the largesse of corporations and the State. State regulations, State licenses, State prohibitions, State land grabs, and State monopolization are the tools of oppression. Corporate capitalism is evil, always and everywhere. I capitalize the s in State, because I want that word engraved in your minds. Corporate capitalism is impossible without the State. If you don't believe me that the State is the problem, I want you to at least consider it. Many ignore the State. Ignore the State, and it wins. I refuse to cede to it, and will ever more audaciously proceed against it.

Furthermore, we must end the State.