Socialists err dangerously when they assume a market economy is a conscious project.
By Barton Swaim
Illustration: David Klein
Airy, abstract words are the currency of democratic politics. Conservatism, liberalism, nationalism, democracy, socialism—you have to use them, but they can easily gum up your thought.
George Orwell famously objected to the haphazard use of “fascism,” and before him Samuel Taylor Coleridge complained bitterly that “Jacobin” has “either no meaning, or a very vague one: for definite terms are unmanageable things, and the passions of men do not readily gather round them.”
The ill-defined word of the moment is “capitalism.”
After Soviet communism fell, capitalism seemed to have won the argument. But anticapitalists didn’t concede.
Maybe socialism and communism hadn’t worked as envisioned, they argued, but capitalism was still the corrosive, dehumanizing force it had always been.
This viewpoint expressed itself in riots outside World Trade Organization conferences and also proposals for “participatory economy,” “eco-communitarianism” and “postcapitalist” arrangements.
These ideologies all involved economies planned by elites according to abstract goals. There was only this difference: Unlike communism, they envisioned no violent overthrow of existing power structures. All their adherents could do was hope and advocate. This was 21st-century Fabianism—the doctrine, dating to the late 19th century, that socialism would come about through gradual reforms, not revolution.
But although capitalism keeps producing historically high levels of prosperity and order, its critics on the left keep hurling new terms at it. Capitalism is now called “neoliberalism” or “hypercapitalism” or, question-beggingly, “late capitalism,” and left-wing intellectuals keep pretending they have something wonderful to replace it with.
In a recent essay, Time’s Anand Giridharadas writes that capitalism is on the run, and he’s jubilant about it. The Business Roundtable has announced its members’ dedication to maximizing “stakeholder” interests. Democrats are endorsing single-payer health insurance and the revolutionary Green New Deal.
One serious contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, Bernie Sanders, is an avowed socialist; another, Elizabeth Warren, avoids the label but favors vast, debilitating taxes on corporations and the rich; and a third, Pete Buttigieg, wants to replace “neoliberalism” with “something better.”
What’s odd about Mr. Giridharadas’s essay, and others like it, is that the reader is simply expected to understand how the word “capitalism” stands for everything allegedly wrong with the U.S. economy.
It’s a “system,” a “conscious project” that has caused “economic precariousness, stalled mobility and gaping social divides” and developed into “the win-win ideology that has governed the past few decades.” But the details of this system must be too obvious to mention.
So what is capitalism supposed to mean? The word “capital” has been around since the late Middle Ages and meant then more or less what it means now: money used to invest or build and so earn more money. In the 19th century, Saint-Simonians and other proto-socialists started referring to capitalism to signify a system in which those who had capital used it to dominate and exploit those who didn’t.
This was a gross oversimplification of a dizzyingly complex reality. It reminds me of “The Power of Words,” a 1937 essay by the French Christian philosopherSimone Weil.Her complaint was that European political discourse consisted mainly of empty abstractions, of which “capitalism” was among the most prominent. Weil didn’t defend capitalism, but she rightly sensed that the tendency to blame every societal ill on it was a mental deficiency.
A modern European economy, she contended, “consists in certain methods of production, consumption, and exchange, which are continually varying, however, and which depend upon certain fundamental relationships: between the production and the circulation of goods, between the circulation of goods and money, between money and production, between money and consumption.”
This inscrutable arrangement “is arbitrarily converted into an abstraction, which defies all definition, and is then made responsible, under the name of capitalism, for every hardship endured by oneself or others. After that, it is only natural that any man of character should devote his life to the destruction of capitalism.”
What Weil understood at a conceptual level in 1937,Friedrich Hayekexpressed in a far more technical fashion in his 1945 essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society”: that a modern market economy is an immeasurably confusing and constantly changing combination of associations and exchanges—not a “system” of any kind.
Although the term “capitalism” has long worked as a shorthand signifier for a market economy, there is a sense in which to use it at all is to accept the socialist’s premise that a market economy is a consciously created system, manipulated by its creators for their own material ends. But it isn’t that.
A socialist economy is, by definition, a system—it must be created, planned, vigilantly monitored and forcefully regulated in order to function.
But a market economy has no plan. It begins to exhibit the qualities of a system when its wealthiest actors are allowed to bend governmental policies to their advantage, but that is a vastly different thing from a system deliberately designed for stated goals from the beginning.
We will surely go on using the terms “socialism” and “nationalism” and “democracy” without knowing quite what we mean by them.
We can hardly do otherwise. But at least those things exist. “Capitalism,” in the sense in which its leftist critics use the term, never did.
Mr. Swaim is an editorial page writer at the Journal.
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