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Monday, January 20, 2020
New Survey: Global Distrust of Capitalism. But Capitalism Can't Fix it.
I touched on this study in a previous posting. It was reported in the Wall Street Journal online today. The author talks about measuring trust or what What I would call, and perhaps others would also, the mood in society. And particularly the mood among the working class and youth.
The study is very revealing in that confidence in capitalism is extremely low, not just here in the US but throughout the world. More than half of respondents globally, 56%, believe that "capitalism in its current form is now doing more harm than good in the world." the study finds. The study says that the wealthier and higher educated are far more trusting of capitalist institutions than the "mass population.". It also refers to this group as the "Informed public" and the "frequent consumers of news." Well the "mass" also consumes news but the mass media is one thing and the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times or Business Week is another. The more serious journals of capitalism are much more open and honest about the system. They need this in order to govern and are aware workers in the main don't read these journals.
However I do not think it is so much consuming news that gives this wealthier crowd more confidence in the institutions of capitalism; it is their privileges and material conditions. They are more financially secure, better connected. Black folks are not more suspicious of the state and society than whites because they read different papers or watch different TV shows. Their social condition, personally and historically teaches them to be. In the last analysis, consciousness has a material base.
83% of employees say they fear losing their job. And there are paradoxes here: 79% percent Believe businesses should provide retraining for workers whose jobs are threatened by automation. And business is seen as the most competent of all of society's institutions, yet the study claims that less than one third of those polled trust that business will do thees things.
I just read the study briefly and it appears that, like many of the political candidates this election cycle, the authors believe capitalism has to change. Ethics, honesty, fairness (pay fair wages) are the answer. This is all happening as the global crisis of capitalism is intensifying. US capitalism, once the undisputed global power after the collapse of Stalinism, is this crazed animal that has the power to blow the world to bits but is clearly losing its economic superiority with the rise of China and to a lesser extent Russia and India.
But capitalism is not and has never been fair. It is a ruthless, violent system of production, the most cursory glance at the history of capitalism teaches us this.
The figures here not only confirm the utter bankruptcy of the capitalist mode of production and its intellectual defenders, but also why we are seeing unprecedented movements of the working class internationally. US workers should not mourn; we will have our turn. When the US working class moves in to struggle in a major way, the present obsession with identity politics, a product of the absence of a vibrant and powerful working class movement on the one hand and the dominance of the left liberal petit bourgeois on the other, will not dominate the discourse as it does today or in the same way.
Enjoyed your brief article. 56% believe apitalism doing more harm than good. I'd like to know who they are polling. Nigerians, Belarusians, Indians, Australians? Who? Worldwide it may be greater. I got off the shelf a book by Michael Yates, "Can the Working Class Save the World?" He's a socialist editor at the Monthly Review. I guess his answer is maybe. I'll check further. This past week I left the comment at an article at Project Syndicate, you can use any of the data mentioned:
ReplyDeleteComments I've read so far are inaccurate. Stiglitz mostly describes things well. My comment:
The Social Security Administration report on wages shows that 83 million workers on the low end of the wage scale, representing half of all workers, earn in wages collectively either 6.8% or 8.0% of the national income (depending on whether you take the Bureau of Economic Analysis total national income amount or favor the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation total amount).
The average wage income for 83 million workers is $14,725 a year. In comparison, the yearly income of a minimum wage worker, full-time year-round, is $15,080. (See SSA report: https://www.ssa.gov/cgi-bin/netcomp.cgi?year=2018)
The high-earning 7.1% of taxpayers, representing 12 million taxpayers, earn 38.9% of all income, their average income is $495,000 a year. (This is data from the Joint Committee on Taxation, Overview, March 2019) The differential between the two groups is 34 times.
Another report compares the income of the top 1% of U.S. adults with the lower 50%, reporting that the income differential is 81 times, and that in 1980 the differential was 27 times. (from Distributional National Accounts, 2016, Washington Center for Equitable Growth)
Our economy has separated into the high earners and low earners. The United Way charity reports in its ALICE report that 40% of adults face hardship or poverty. It also reports that 40% of workers earn $15 or less per hour. While the stock market may be booming, wage growth has stalled, and more and more jobs are low-wage low-hour jobs. The Jobs Quality Index reports that since 1990 62.5% of the new additional private sector jobs are these low-wage low-hour jobs. (https://www.jobqualityindex.com/)
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that “average weekly earnings for production and nonsupervisory workers”, representing 82% of all workers, were higher in December 1964 than in December 2019, 55 years ago. -- https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES0500000031 -- During that 55 years the BEA (dot gov) reports that the per capita disposable income has tripled from $14,350 to $44,455, "real disposable per capita income". (Table 2.1, Personal Income)
A dynamic similar to this, a booming stock market and slumping wage growth, resulted in the Great Depression. Marriner Eccles, the chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1935 to 1946 cited this dynamic as the cause of the Great Depression.
My blog: http://benL88.blogspot.com -- --- thanks, Richard