Evidence it’s time for Bernie, Richard Wolff and Robert Kutner to meet and talk
Inspired by Harold Meyerson, I plowed thru Kutner’s over-long Dec. 1, 2021 article. I’m glad I did. See if you agree Robert Kutner has now come around to Bernie’s point of view and is open for connection and collaboration.
EXCERPTS from “Capitalism vs. Liberty” Dec. 1, 2021 by Robert Kutner of Prospect.org URL at bottom of this.
Karl Polanyi’s Red Vienna (1919 until 1934)
The great prophetic critic of this healthy dynamic is not Karl Marx but Karl Polanyi. Like Marx, Polanyi astutely explained the tendency of capitalism to commodify things which need to prioritize by other norms and values, such as human society and human labor. Unlike Marx, Polanyi appreciated the risks of fascism. Most importantly, Polanyi saw tendencies rather than iron laws. He left room for human agency and diverse experimentation.
Polanyi came of age as a journalist and public intellectual in the 1920s, in what was then known as Red Vienna. The city of Vienna had socialist municipal governments from 1919 until 1934. During this remarkable period, the city government created social housing for the middle class as well as the working class, a model to this day. Vienna levied taxes on employers of private servants as well as taxes on cars, horse racing, and other luxuries, to help finance an array of services, including family allowances for parents, preschools, and unemployment insurance run through the trade unions. Electricity, gas, and water were socially owned. None of this undermined Austria’s private economy, which was far more endangered by the austerity policies criticized by Polanyi. In his theoretical work, Polanyi viewed democratic socialism as the system to carry out the political liberalism of the Enlightenment, and economic liberalism (laissez-faire) as corrosive of political liberalism.
… Far better would be the creation of a large, genuinely social housing sector that need not be traditional public housing. We have a model for this in the form of housing land trusts that create diverse forms of social housing permanently protected from market pressures — pioneered in Bernie Sanders’s Burlington and in Karl Polanyi’s Red Vienna. …
Polanyi published his epic book on capitalism, The Great Transformation, in 1944. He lived another 20 years, long enough to see some evidence that the democracies were taking history’s lessons to heart and constraining capitalism’s destructive tendencies, and to hope that we would go beyond social democracy to democratic socialism. He did not live long enough to see it all reversed, confirming his darker insights.
In the 1920s, Karl Polanyi’s Red Vienna featured socially owned housing, water, and electricity, and used taxes on the rich to finance child allowances, preschools, and other social services.
One of Polanyi’s most powerful concepts is what he called the “double movement.” Capitalism overwhelms other social institutions on which ordinary life and economic security depend. Eventually, the common people revolt and are willing to sacrifice democracy for a measure of security and respect. Thus does capitalism destroy democracy in a bank shot. Capitalism also destroys democracy directly, by substituting money and power for citizenship, precluding reformist remedies, and signaling the common people that they are fools to think that voting could make a difference.
Polanyi’s double movement uncannily describes our own era. Ordinary people are disaffected from the dislocations and excesses of capitalism but unsure whom to blame or whom to trust. Ever since Carter, much of the Democratic Party has been so compromised and bedded down with Wall Street that displaced middle- and working-class people are skeptical that Democrats and liberal remedies can make much of a difference in their lives. The cumulative result is Trumpism, a weird combination of racist nationalism and redoubled corporate rule. Libertarians like to teach that liberal democracy and free markets are handmaidens. But autocrats from Trump to Hitler to Xi demonstrate that dictatorship and market modes of production and employment can coexist all too well. The signal disgrace of our era is the ease with which the corporate center-right has gone along with Trump and the Republican efforts to destroy what remains of democracy. If it’s possible to oust unions, cut taxes, and gut regulation, losing democracy is a price worth paying, if it’s a price at all.
Yet Polanyi’s sensibility gives me some hope. Looking at the tendency of capitalism to crush efforts to build decent human economies, you can become a defeatist and a cynic; or you can keep at it, appreciating that sometimes solidarity produces results and that nothing lasts forever. The 15 years of Polanyi’s Red Vienna stand as a model. Likewise the 40 years between the 1930s and the 1970s when the New Deal system contoured America. Swedish social democracy has been around for almost a century. While global capitalism keeps chipping away at the Swedish model, that model continues to provide decent lives for most Swedes. As capitalism goes, a century of decency is pretty good.
…
Bernie Sanders has been a champion of social ownership going back to land trusts during his mayoralty in Burlington.
ONE BASIC STRATEGY, I think, is to keep creating islands of social ownership and to limit capitalist ones. Our colleague Ganesh Sitaraman calls these “public options.” Ideas like postal banking and other forms of public banking, such as establishing individual accounts directly at the Federal Reserve or a green development bank, can do that. Likewise public power and public broadband. Or the original public option of socialized health care. Or direct public development and distribution of patent-free drugs. Social institutions like these demonstrate the superior equity and efficiency of socially owned alternatives; they also weaken competing private ones and thus the political power of capital. As Chattanooga suggests, this can be done at the municipal level, as well as by states and the national government.
Social ownership doesn’t mean just government institutions, but includes others that are non-capitalist in their logic and ownership structure. Once, such institutions were plentiful in America. The New Deal created islands of public ownership, such as public power, public housing, and public financial institutions like the original Fannie Mae and a much enlarged Reconstruction Finance Corporation. But the first half of the 20th century was also an era of non-capitalist mutual and nonprofit institutions.
Most savings and loans were nonprofits; most insurance companies were mutually owned. The first wave of prepaid group health plans were co-ops. These embodied values other than capitalist ones; they promoted direct democratic governance in ways that bureaucracies don’t; and they stood as bulwarks against the relentless incursion of capitalist institutions. In recent decades, however, financial capital viewed these institutions as pools of money they wished to appropriate. The stewards of these institutions saw a chance to cash in and enrich themselves. Congress obliged by making such conversions legal. Most mutual financial institutions have become conventional for-profits. Most nonprofit health plans were converted to for-profit HMOs. This sector needs to be reclaimed. …
I happen to love public libraries, not just because I love books, but because when you enter a library nobody is trying to sell you anything. It is free and the ethic is noncommercial. It is like breathing different air. …
In a recent Prospect piece, “The Agony of Social Democratic Europe,” I concluded that the cause of the social democratic near collapse was the pervasive spread of neoliberalism as embraced by watered-down “center-left” parties as well as by conservative ones. As the lives of ordinary people became more and more precarious thanks to ultra-capitalism spread by globalism, they had no good reason to vote for social democrats.
In the 1980s, when Swedish social democracy was coming under threat by the general turn to the right and the deregulation of global financial markets, two of the smartest Swedish economists, Rudolf Meidner and Gösta Rehn, realized that to defend social democracy you needed something more like socialism. But as Swedes, they did not want statism. Meidner and Rehn both came out of the trade union movement, the central pillar of the Swedish model. Their idea was to build socialism on what they called “wage-earner funds.” Every year, a set percentage of all profits of Swedish corporations would be directed to funds collectively owned by workers. These would not only enhance pensions. More fundamentally, in less than a generation, they would lead to collective worker ownership of Swedish industry, but without undermining Swedish entrepreneurship. On the contrary, as a source of patient capital they would be far better than private financial markets impatient for quick returns. But by the 1980s, the Swedish Social Democrats were already becoming more neoliberal, and the social democratic leadership killed the plan. …
FULL TEXT: https://prospect.org/politics/capitalism-vs-liberty/
Capitalism vs. Liberty
“All that we liberals cherish — socially, economically, and politically — is being undermined by toxic capitalism. What might lie beyond it, and how might we get there?”
BY ROBERT KUTTNER DECEMBER 1, 2021
