For the past month or so, The Nation Magazine has been Americans, If you had the ability to reinvent American capitalism, where would you start?” Here is my response:
As Villanova Professor Eugene McCarraher emphatically asserts, the question should not be how do we reinvent American capitalism, but rather how do we move beyond American capitalism and begin to construct both political and economic structures, which afford all Americans the opportunity for full and unfettered human fulfillment. However, rigid messiah like restructuring proposals associated with historical communism and socialism and even some welfare programs should not straitjacket the vision of a new society. Rather the entire American public must engage in a collective and democratic problem solving deliberation whereby we as a nation take concerted steps down a variety of different pathways intended to make society more democratic, egalitarian, and ultimately an environment in which every individual is afforded an opportunity for full human fulfillment, whatever that might be for each individual.
It is unclear whether or not fully integrated free market capitalism is indeed detrimental to society at large. Despite what progressives are willing to admit, fully integrated free market capitalism has never been institutionalized in this country or any other country and it is unlikely that it will ever be. At times in American history, the economic superstructure has been more or less capitalist, but never fully capitalist. The economic superstructure has, however, always been heavily biased toward a wealthy corporate elite, which depending on particular interests at a particular time and place embodied by particular segments of that elite has advocated for free markets, state intervention, social welfare, and every other economic ideology as it sees fit. The U.S. Constitution may in theory promise political equality of opportunity, but in practice true political influence has always been highly synonymous with economic power, and it is this component of American society that we as a nation must seek to eradicate, not necessarily capitalism.
Capitalism has been associated with objective goods as well as bads. In moving past present-day American capitalism, we must seek to disassociate economic power from political power so that the public at large, not a wealthy corporate elite, is able to decide which bads, if any, we as a society are willing to endure for which goods. In this way, reinventing American capitalism focused on what people really need for fulfilling lives is a project of those very people.