Capitalism's Crisis of Value and Imagination

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Capitalism's Crisis of Value and Imagination

Saturday, 08 February 2014 09:33
By Max Haiven, Zed Books/Truthout | Book Excerpt


You, dear reader, are on the front lines of a war. It is a war between money and the earth, between capital and people, between the blunt stupidity of greed and the resilient creativity of humanity. Perhaps they have destroyed or will destroy the ecosystem in which you live in the name of profit. Perhaps your body or your soul is wrecked or in the process of breaking down because you must work a meaningless, oppressive job to make enough money to survive – or perhaps you like your job but feel the ever-present shadow of the axe in this age of budget cuts and rationalization. Perhaps you are devalued by the colour of your skin, the country of your origin, or your perceived gender or sexuality and feel that devaluation in the form of prejudice, exploitation, intimidation or xenophobia. Usually you will feel it economically too. Perhaps you are among or will be among those statistics that indicate that the largest single cause of the breakdown of marriages and relationships is financial hardship. Perhaps you can no longer recognize yourself after years of seeking success or enduring failure. Perhaps you feel guilty for the ways your economic privilege is fed by the exploitation of others, the way your (relatively) cheap iPod or clothing depends on the incarceration of young people in factories on the other side of the earth. In any case, unless you are extremely fortunate, or extremely avaricious, what and who you love and value has been or will be undermined by capitalism at some point and in some way.

Of Value and Values

According to free-market ideologues, capitalism is the ultimate system for assigning value to the world's wealth. By bringing people's wants, needs and desires together into an open market, capitalism will accurately and efficiently price things as diverse as the cost of an hour of a shoemaker's time, a loaf of bread, the value of a river, or the price of a song on iTunes. These utopian dreamers, whose thinking has become associated with the term 'neoliberalism', believe that by mobilizing people's competitiveness and inherently acquisitive human nature, capitalism is, ultimately, value-neutral – markets are simply egalitarian arenas of exchange. The truth, of course, is quite different. The value of the market itself has become the overarching and unquestionable arbiter of almost every aspect of human existence today. All social, moral, ethical, and personal values are subordinate to the value of money. The result is a system where, in almost every case, the perceived needs of the market trump any other considerations.

Consider, for instance, the dramatic failure of some of the largest assemblies of world leaders in human history to take meaningful action in the face of global warming and the catastrophic climate change it will unleash. In spite of an unprecedented near-consensus of global scientists, and in spite of the evidence that the continuation of present levels of carbon emissions would lead to the destruction of the lives and livelihoods of millions (perhaps billions) of (mostly poor, brown) people, it was ultimately decided that the perceived needs of capitalist markets were more important, and that no action that in any way impeded or jeopardized 'economic growth' would be taken.

Such a perversion of any reasonable notion of what is valuable is, sadly, neither new nor shocking. It occurs everywhere, all the time. Individuals and communities around the world are left to languish in poverty, ill health and strife because markets demand lower taxes, access to resources and cheap labour. Whole nations and populations are ruined by speculative investment because markets desire the unfettered ability to gamble on currencies, food prices and government bonds. In the age of austerity, hospitals, pensions, mental health services, schools and universities and even civil infrastructure must be abandoned in the name of plugging the bleeding holes in the crisis-ridden market. And everywhere the value of the earth and the value of individuals and their labour is measured exclusively in their capacity to render profit for increasingly uncontrollable and unanswerable corporations and the god-like market they serve. ......................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truth-out.org/progressivepicks/item/21647-capitalisms-crisis-of-value-and-imagination