Salon features an Harper's today in which Lewis Lapham, longtime editor of Harper's Magazine, talks about the end of Capitalism.
Lapham himself is a member of the Mills' power elite: great grandson of the founder of Texaco, grandson of a San Francisco mayor, graduate of Hotchkiss and Yale, and married to a descendant of the Astors. He's the author of over a dozen books on politics and history, and edited Harper's Magazine for nearly 30 years until his semi-retirement in 2006.
Why does a man like this see the end of Capitalism?
Capitalism, Lapham says, is about change and growth:
So the American temperament —the capitalist temperament — is suited to that kind of change. Capitalism is based on friction, movement — the notion that every 20 years the matinee idols will be changed and the leadership will be removed and replaced, and that is the way it works. That, of course, when it begins to come into the world in the 17th century, is truly terrifying to people. This is largely the story of the English Civil War. ‘Behead the king’ — that would have been unthinkable a hundred years before. But suddenly even divine right can be challenged. Constant questions. Constant new inventions. Improvements in navigation, machinery, chemical compounds and so on. And the characteristics — I keep getting back to your original question — the American temperament is made in that mold. For good or for ill. There’s a very dark side to this.
It is essentially "anti-community" with no respect for limits to growth:
It’s the impertinent dynamism of ‘more’. It is a voracious, devouring appetite for more. And if we’re not careful, unless we get control of it, it will devour the earth. Capitalism had a particularly fertile soil in America because there was so much land available. People could just go west. Take land from the Indians by force. The same thing in Mexico. Call it Manifest Destiny, but it essentially was the seizure of property. There was an abundance of resources. Every man can become king for the day or make the Forbes 500. And it’s the individual as opposed to the community.
As the world's population has grown and consumption along with it, Capitalism's "dark side" becomes more and more of a problem:
[C]apitalism was not inevitable. And if it is a historical phenomenon, that is to say, if it has a beginning, as with all other things historical, it will also have an end. With the population moving from 6 billion to 9 billion by 2050, and the continuing depletion of the world’s resources — primarily water, but also oil and minerals of all kinds — to feed the capitalist notion of an endless feast constantly renewing itself is not in the cards.
Lapham sees current economic policies as attempting to keep a corpse alive:
Appleby would say that reforming the system is what we should hope for. That’s what a lot of the environmentalists say when they start talking about taxing carbons and treating the environment as a commodity in which you can trade as one would trade in other capitalist markets. I don’t think that’s true. Jared Diamond wrote a book a couple of years ago called "Collapse," in which he says that ideas, civilizations, in a state of decay cling desperately to the systems that are no longer functioning. And it’s also probably true to say that capitalism in its stronger forms went out the window in the United States in the 1930s, because now, once you get the combination of government and business — I mean, speaking to Diamond’s point — propping up a system that is essentially dead in the water is what we’ve done with the government takeover, the stimulus bill, the TARP. I suspect we’re attempting to rescue a corpse
His solution? Let it die and see what develops in its place:
Let it die and hope that it will be replaced by something that we know not yet.
Lapham's interview serves as a perfect segue into this week's Anti-Capitalist meetup on eco-socialism led by Cassiodorus. Check it out on Sunday at 6 PM EDT in the Recent Diaries.