More on Currupt Capitalism

Capitalism prioritizes profit over sustainability,  ‘short-term gains’ over long-term human survival. Having posted this blog on corruption, Richard D. Wolff, Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts has also contributed his thoughts on capitalism’s inherent corruption on the Truth-Out website which SOYMB feels worthy of relaying as it is very much in harmony with our own views.

“What chiefly drives this sort of political corruption today is capitalism's structure. For many capitalist enterprises, competitive and other pressures exist to increase profits, growth rates, and/or market share. Their boards and top managers seek to find cheaper produced inputs and cheaper labor power, to extract more output from their workers, to sell their outputs at the highest possible prices and to find more profitable technologies. The structure provides them with every incentive of financial gain and/or career security and advancement to behave in those ways. Thus, boards and top managers seek the maximum obtainable assistance of government officials in all these areas and also try to pay the least possible portion of their net revenues as taxes. Boards of directors tap their corporations' profits to corrupt mostly the top echelons of the government bureaucracy, those needed to make advantageous official decisions.

Individual capitalists act to corrupt government officials to serve their enterprise's needs. Grouped into associations, they do likewise for their industries. When organized as a whole (in "chambers of commerce" or "manufacturers alliances," etc.), they corrupt to secure their class interests. When such corruption is not secret, capitalists articulate their demands to corrupted officials as "good for the economy or society as a whole." Such phrases constitute the "appropriate language" that enables officials publicly to disguise and hopefully to legitimate their corrupt acts.

Strict moral codes, regulations and laws have been imposed to prevent individual or grouped capitalists from corrupting government officials. Evidence suggests, however, that neither civic-minded ethics, nor regulations nor laws have come close to ending capitalists' corruption."

But as we have previously pointed out, Wolff’s own solution of ‘workers' self-directed enterprises’ is no solution. Changing the legal form of private ownership of a business does not change the essence - capital is a social relation that expresses itself as a form of exchange value. Capitalism is generalised commodity production, wealth being produced for sale on a market. Wolff declines to challenge this and a WSDE is just as in much need to make a profit and required to compete with rival workers as current capitalists. He may succeed in making the tread-mill more humane but humanity will still be engaged in a rat-race.

Also see here