Are We Moving Beyond Capitalism?

Capitalism is our unquestionable ideology, our faith, reinforced among some with chosen bits of Christian mythology and enshrined in patriotism. It is something that we do not seriously question without being accused of subversion, being a socialist or a communist. To question it is heresy in the eyes of the faithful.

But the present recession and a variety of much more murky cultural developments invite us to reconsider our faith and its dogmas.

Basic to the system is the profit motive, or greed, something already suspect. Next is competition which is the foundation of violence. Then inseparable from all that is service which means working hard for someone or some institution involving some form of personal sacrifice. Here this brings us to the old system of servitude preceded by slavery which has been the foundation of our culture since its inception, though it might be that in the Celtic context servitude was absent.

Thus capitalism enshrines capital in the social slot of the aristocrat in a feudal system which collapsed and was replaced by an industrial aristocracy of wealth, the owners of capital and the new masters to be served.

There is a dissonance between this new aristocratic system and the ideology of democracy which places the masses, the people, in the position of the sovereign, a position which of old was held by the head of the aristocratic system, the king. Democracy turns the long existing system upside-down which means that our institutions are there to serve us, not the aristocracy, which in turn means that we would work for our own benefit and gain control of our own existence.

There is thus in this democratic thrust something beyond mere elections and the rule of law, something leading towards a replacement of the gathered individuals into a mere collection of servants with community meaning a shared life of people working for themselves in order to exist in a context other than that of production of good and consumption. There is an aspiration still unclear among the people for a more sound ground of being than what the market place produces, replacing the owners of capital and their profit motive, service, and sacrifice. It is as if our capitalistic system is moving increasingly away from the direction of our more personal and subjectively experience of life which is finding its expression in the democratic ideal, moving away from the thrust of history. In other words it is both going out of control in its escalation of profit for the elite and becoming irrelevant to the present and evolving existence of people, perhaps more so in the measure that it is shattering their lives.