Capitalism

There are moments that really make you realize what everyone is complaining about, when it comes to capitalism. Take what happened on the stock market yesterday. Admittedly, the big picture of the plunge in stock values that occurred had to do with ongoing concerns over the Fed's plan for rate hikes. But the precipitating cause appears to have been much more specific. 

As the Wall Street Journal summarizes, Home Depot issued a "disappointing" forecast for the coming year. What was the main concern? The retail giant said that it expected less in overall profit. Why? Were sales and earnings way down? Nope. It's just because it planned to devote an extra $1 billion to raising the wages of its hourly employees. 

This instantly sent the stock price into a tailspin, and ultimately dragged down the entire Dow Jones Industrial Average, and thence the stock market as a whole. 

Now, I'd love to live under an economic system in which marginally raising the pay of low-wage hourly employees struggling to make a living in a time of rampant inflation did not instantly lead to the vicious retaliation and flight of one's shareholders. This is the sort of thing that makes people detest capitalism, and I don't blame them. 

In my bones, I've always hated capitalism. I hated capitalism, I maintain, even before it was cool to hate capitalism. I hate it because I hate greed, and competition, and the vicious struggle for existence, and the fact that there is ultimately no one looking out for us in the universe, and we live a precarious existence poised on the Damiclean sword of starvation and penury. 

This is all still clear to me. What has become less clear to me with age is how to get rid of all these things. It's not as simple as it seemed to me in high school to legislate away these evils. The proposal to just share all the money equally, it strikes me now, risks mistaking as absolute what is actually contingent and relative in our society (such as the value of the U.S. dollar).

And so I found myself in mid-adulthood in much the same situation as the narrator of a Donald Barthelme story, "The Rise of Capitalism." "I thought I had understood capitalism," he says, "but what I had done was assume an attitude—melancholy sadness—toward it." 

Thus, as a teenager, I was convinced I had made a political analysis of our economic system. In reality, I had identified and protested against the existential plight of human nature. I didn't want to be alone in the universe! I didn't want people to be motivated by self-interest! But are those things a product of the present arrangement of the means of production; or are they part of what it means to be human? 

Maybe the term "capitalism"—as it is often used in social criticism today—just describes features of human life that are inevitable, but that inspire a melancholy reaction (such as the following thought: human beings have to generate value, and value is socially-defined. If value is in some sense generated by scarcity, then is it intrinsically impossible to ever share it perfectly equally?)

But then, even once we have conceded to capitalism its inevitability, there are these moments when it still seems to be abusing its privileges. It's taking advantage of the concession to reality we were willing to make to it. Even if we will let capitalism exist, it should know that we do so only on sufferance. It shouldn't take advantage of this privilege to be just downright nasty and irrational. 

Like when stock holders drop out of Home Depot at the first sign that the company intends to pay their low wage workers just slightly more in a time of skyrocketing living costs. Couldn't these investors just leaven their immediate naked self interest with a little bit of humanity? 

Or, if they must be motivated by greed, couldn't they at least adopt a longer term perspective, and realize that workers need to be paid a living wage too, if they are ever going to participate in the economy as consumers—including by buying things from and ultimately generating more profits for Home Depot? 

Is it so much to ask that we could make a kind of grand compromise? Fine, capitalism, you can stay. You  get to do your thing. There's a bed in the corner where you can sleep. But you have to stay in your lane. You can't just go around bellowing and bullying the rest of us like you own the place. Capitalism, but with a little bit more humanity—is that really so impossible to achieve?