자본주의 사회에서 국가가 불신받는 이유
또한 자본주의에서 정부에 대한 깊은 의혹과 적대감을 양성합니다. 그리고 그것은 복잡한 이유가 아닙니다. 그것은 보편적인 선거권 제도 하의 정부가 많은 사람들에 의해 선출 되기 때문입니다. 이는 정상에 있는 거물들에게는 정확히 문제입니다. 그들은 정부가 권력을 갖기를 원하지 않습니다. 만약 그렇다면(정부가 권력을 갖게된다면), 정부는 많은 사람들이 원하는 것을 반영할 것이며, 정부 행동을 통해 자본주의가 착취를 통해 획득한 결과를 취소할 것이기 때문입니다.
It also breeds in capitalist a deep suspicion and hostility to the government. And that is for no complicated reason. It’s because the government in a system of universal suffrage is elected by masses of people, which for the big folks at the top is exactly the problem. They don’t want the government to have power. Because if it does, it will reflect what the mass of people want, and that is to undo through government action the results of what capitalism does through exploitation.
Now follow the logic. You have to keep the government poor. You have to keep the government small. You have to keep the government dependent on the rich. You have to do all those things. Ok, that means one of the things you don’t allow the government to do is to have economic power over capitalists. That would be the worst conceivable lever for masses to get back at you. Here then is the problem. Capitalists are organized in lots of different enterprises. They depend on each other, but aren’t centralized. This produces chaos. Let me give you an example.
General Motors wants to produce more cars, so they will need more iron and steel to make the cars. But, if iron and steel producers haven’t increased their productive capacity, they can’t make the extra iron and steel. Therefore, there has to be lots of coordination between the enterprises. But coordination is a problem, because they are also competitors. You see, General Motors would like there to be more producers of iron and steel, because more competition will drive down the cost and then General Motors could by the iron and steel more cheaply. So, you can’t have good coordination between General Motors and iron and steel producers, because neither of them trusts the other as far as they can spit.
Well then, how are you going to get the coordination?
The answer is, hypothetically, you could turn to the government. You could say, “Hey, you’re the government, you’re separate, you aren’t competing with us, you aren’t buying and selling from us. So, how about we give you the right coordinate so our decisions work out.” But of course they can’t do that, because that would create a powerful government, which they don’t trust for reasons based on what if the masses got a hold of that powerful government. They don’t believe the government could be limited to just coordinating them in the way they want. They fear that it could be used by the masses to impose their will on the system. So, they impoverish the government, or at least most of it.
So, what’s left is the market. And we live with that. That’s why for capitalism over the last 300 years has never gone long without an economic downturn. Every 3 to 7 years we have a recession or a depression, a downturn, a crisis. We have 50 words for this because it’s such a common phenomenon. We’ve spent the last 150 years trying to figure out what we need to do to capitalism to stop it from being so unstable. Keynesian economics were by far the most important efforts to try and do it. So, we now all practice Keynesian monetary and fiscal policy. We are now living in the wake of the collapse of ’08, proving what we should’ve known all along, that we don’t know how to stop crisis. We have failed.
That capitalism is caught up in such a craziness that in can’t allow the institutions that might coordinate it, because they are too afraid of them. So, they end up putting the society, and themselves, at risk through this instability due to the absurd contradiction so undemocratic an economic system and a political system based on universal suffrage [Wolff’s side note: notice the irrationality of putting also themselves at risk]. There is NO solution to these contradictions. That was Marx’s point. Once you understand the crazy was this system has evolved itself then you come pretty quickly to the solution that what we need is not another law, not another regulation.
We need system change! We’ve got to get out of a system that is riven with these socially destructive and immensely costly contradictions. And one way to do that, the way I would prefer, is to overcome the contradiction by finally making the economic system democratic so it isn’t at odds with a political system that is at least trying to be democratic.ㅋ We end up in this crazy arrangement where the absence, the cultivated absence of democracy inside the enterprise is constantly making a joke out of the effort to have a democracy in the residential community in the realm of politics.