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Progressive capitalism

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Lopifalko (talk | contribs) at 06:32, 21 August 2019 (→Criticisms: This may not be the most elegant method in terms of the layout, but it shows that this part and its sources deal with capitalism in general not specifically progressive capitalism). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

  • Comment: Needs independent reliable sources with sustained coverage of the subject, not just writing by proponents of the subject. Lopifalko (talk) 08:47, 18 May 2019 (UTC)

Progressive capitalism seeks to make improvements in capitalism as practiced in the United States with the emergence of neoliberal American capitalism in 1980.[1]

Progressive capitalism aims to improve economic results through three defining beliefs: 1) The important role of institutions including taxation, social insurance, public health, public school, public services, public infrastructure, research, labor law and regulation of markets; 2) The need for the state to be involved in their design; and 3) The advocacy of social justice. It is being popularized by Ro Khanna.

Nick Beams writes that progressive capitalism will not address the problems created by neoliberal capitalism.

Details

Capitalism incorporates the principles of private property, capital accumulation, wage labor, voluntary exchange, a price system, and competitive markets.[1][2] It aims to deliver strong economic results and achieve competitive advantage in a global economy. Progressive capitalism is a refinement of capitalism. It aims to improve economic results through three defining beliefs:

  1. The important role of institutions including taxation, social insurance, public health, public school, public services, public infrastructure, research, labor law and regulation of markets;[3]
  2. The need for the state to be involved in their design; and
  3. The advocacy of social justice, defined as fairness (the assignment of rights and duties in the institutions of society, which enables all people both to receive the basic benefits of society and to contribute to obligations of society).

Progressive capitalism seeks to show how these improvements can be used by politicians and policy-makers to produce programs of economic reform. It does this by analyzing and proposing reforms and policies for the United States federal governance, corporate governance, equity markets, national systems and universities including support for innovative research, education and training systems.[4]

Finally, progressive capitalism describes the role the state should play in the economy—an empowering one, improving on the current American capitalism[1] approach with better results that promote economic growth, more well-paying working/middle class jobs and help for new small businesses (for example, with wage support programs like the Earned Income Tax Credit). It enables better results for society and families than alternatives such as the command-and-control role of traditional socialism or the concentrating results from today's American capitalism which tends to redirect benefits toward the economically powerful and marginalize the economic majority.[5][6]

Progressive capitalism is being popularized by Ro Khanna,[7][8][9] who believes free enterprise rewards hard work and innovation and is not just for the privileged and connected few.[10][11] Progressive capitalists believe that a partnership among the private sector, federal government and research universities fuels growth and that strategic investments will increase both the demand and supply of well-paying jobs in the 21st century. The partnership generates new technology and builds the launch pads for new and growing businesses. Joseph Stiglitz writes that society needs a better understanding about the true source of "the wealth of a nation" which lies in the creativity and productivity of the nation's people and their productive interactions with each other and their institutions. He explains how progressive improvements of capitalism would achieve a more dynamic economy, with greater shared prosperity and uplift the majority again to a middle-class life.[12]

Criticism

Criticism of progressive capitalism

Critics of neoliberal capitalism associate the economic system with social inequality, unfair distribution of wealth and power; materialism, repression of workers and trade unionists, social alienation, economic inequality, unemployment, and economic instability. Nick Beams writes that progressive capitalism will not address the problems created by neoliberal capitalism[13] which institutionalized a system whereby the wealth created by the labor of the working class was siphoned up to the heights of society. This wealth concentration leads to the decline in real wages and the greatest level of social inequality seen at any point in US history.

Criticism of capitalism

Many socialists consider capitalism in all forms to be irrational in that production and the direction of the economy are unplanned, creating many inconsistencies and internal contradictions.[14] Marxian economist Richard D. Wolff postulates that capitalist economies prioritize profits and capital accumulation over the social needs of communities and capitalist enterprises rarely include the workers in the basic decisions of the enterprise.[15] Democratic socialists argue that the role of the state in a capitalist society is to defend the interests of the bourgeoisie.[16] Capitalism and capitalist governments have also been criticized as oligarchic in nature[17][18][19] due to the inevitable inequality[20][21] characteristic of economic progress.[22][23]

References

  1. ^ a b c Louis Hyman and Edward E. Baptist (2014). American Capitalism: A Reader. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-1-4767-8431-1.
  2. ^ Heilbroner, Robert L. "Capitalism". Steven N. Durlauf and Lawrence E. Blume, eds. The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics. 2nd ed. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) doi:10.1057/9780230226203.0198
  3. ^ John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (1971) 4, "the principles of social justice: they provide a way of assigning rights and duties in the basic institutions of society and they define the appropriate distribution of benefits and burdens of social co-operation."
  4. ^ Sainsbury, David (2013). Progressive Capitalism: How to achieve Economic Growth, Liberty and Social Justice. UK: Biteback Publishing. ISBN 9781849545846.
  5. ^ Hewlett Foundation, William & Flora. "Beyond Neoliberalism: Rethinking Political Economy" (PDF). Hewlett Public Board Memo Re: Neoliberalism. Retrieved 06/06/2019. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |access-date= (help); Cite has empty unknown parameter: |dead-url= (help)
  6. ^ Pollin, Robert. 2007. '"Resurrection of the Rentier", book review of Andrew Glyn's Capitalism Unleashed:Finance, Globalization and Welfare. New Left Review 46:July–August. pp. 141–142. http://www.peri.umass.edu/fileadmin/pdf/other_publication_types/NLR28008.pdf. "The underlying premise behind the mixed economy was straightforward. Keynes and like-minded reformers were not willing to give up on capitalism, and in particular, two of its basic features: that ownership and control of the economy's means of production would remain primarily in the hands of private capitalists; and that most economic activity would be guided by ‘market forces’, that is, the dynamic combination of material self-seeking and competition. More specifically, the driving force of the mixed economy, as with free-market capitalism, should continue to be capitalists trying to make as much profit as they can. At the same time, Keynes was clear that in maintaining a profit-driven marketplace, it was also imperative to introduce policy interventions to counteract capitalism’s inherent tendencies—demonstrated to devastating effect during the 1930s calamity—toward financial breakdowns, depressions, and mass unemployment. Keynes's framework also showed how full employment and social welfare interventions could be justified not simply on grounds of social uplift, but could also promote the stability of capitalism."
  7. ^ "How progressive capitalism can be the recipe for economic growth and innovation". FOXBusiness. 15 May 2019. Retrieved 2019-08-21.
  8. ^ Payne, Charles (May 15, 2019). "Rep. Khanna: I am a progressive capitalist". Fox Business. Fox Business. Retrieved May 15, 2019.
  9. ^ Klein, Ezra (May 2019). "Ro Khanna and the tensions of Silicon Valley liberalism". Vox. Retrieved May 1, 2019.
  10. ^ Cooper, Mark (March 30, 2015). "Content Author". TPRC 43: The 43rd Research Conference on Communication, Information and Internet Policy. 43 (TPRC 43): Download. Retrieved April 20, 2019.
  11. ^ Stiglitz, Joseph (2019-04-19). "Professor at Columbia & Nobel laureate in economics". New York Times. New York Times. Retrieved April 19, 2019.
  12. ^ Stiglitz, Joseph E. (2019). People, power, and profits : progressive capitalism for an age of discontent (First ed.). New York. ISBN 9781324004219. OCLC 1097200732.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  13. ^ Beams, Nick. "The fraud of "progressive capitalism"". www.wsws.org. Retrieved 2019-06-07.
  14. ^ Brander, James A. Government policy toward business. 4th ed. Mississauga, Ontario, John Wiley & Sons Canada, 2006. Print.
  15. ^ Frances Goldin, Debby Smith, Michael Smith (2014). Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA. Harper Perennial. ISBN 0-06-230557-3 pp. 49–50.
  16. ^ "The role and character of the state under capitalism". Democratic Socialist Perspective. 7 August 2008. Archived from the original on 6 April 2018. Retrieved 6 April 2018. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |dead-url= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
  17. ^ Klein, Ezra (11 April 2014). "The Doom Loop of Oligarchy". Vox. Archived from the original on 6 April 2018. Retrieved 6 April 2018. In the year's scariest economics book, Thomas Piketty argues that capitalism, left unchecked, subverts democracy by always and everywhere concentrating wealth at the tippy-top. That creates a class with so much economic power that they begin wielding tremendous political power, too. And then they use that political power to further increase their wealth, and then they use that wealth to further increase their political power, and so on. You might call this the Doom Loop of Oligarchy: wealth buys power, which buys more wealth. You can see it playing out over the last two weeks in American politics. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |dead-url= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
  18. ^ Gorman, Connor (14 January 2018). "Guest Commentary: Capitalism is Economic Oligarchy, Socialism is Economic Democracy". Davis Vanguard. Archived from the original on 6 April 2018. Retrieved 6 April 2018. {{cite news}}: Unknown parameter |dead-url= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
  19. ^ O'Reilly, Jim (21 August 2016). Capitalism as Oligarchy: 5,000 Years of Diversion and Suppression (1 ed.). Jor. ISBN 978-0692514269 – via Google Books.
  20. ^ Muller, Jerry Z. (March–April 2013). "Capitalism and Inequality: What the Right and the Left Get Wrong". Foreign Affairs (Essay). Vol. 92, no. 2. Council of Foreign Relations. ISSN 0015-7120. Archived from the original on 6 April 2018. Retrieved 6 April 2018. Inequality is indeed increasing almost everywhere in the postindustrial capitalist world. But despite what many on the left think, this is not the result of politics, nor is politics likely to reverse it, for the problem is more deeply rooted and intractable than generally recognized. Inequality is an inevitable product of capitalist activity, and expanding equality of opportunity only increases it—because some individuals and communities are simply better able than others to exploit the opportunities for development and advancement that capitalism affords. {{cite magazine}}: Unknown parameter |dead-url= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
  21. ^ Satherly, Dan (19 January 2015). "Inequality inevitable under capitalism – expert". Newshub. Archived from the original on 6 April 2018. Retrieved 6 April 2018. {{cite news}}: Unknown parameter |dead-url= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
  22. ^ Yilmaz, Serafettin. "Theories of Class and Social Inequality". Archived from the original on 6 April 2018. Retrieved 6 April 2018 – via Academia.edu. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help); Unknown parameter |dead-url= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
  23. ^ Roche, Cullen (22 August 2014). "Is Wealth and Income Inequality Inevitable in a Capitalist System?". Pragmatic Capitalism. Archived from the original on 6 April 2018. Retrieved 6 April 2018.  'Inevitable' is a bit of a generalization. 'Highly probable'—yes. The thing is, capitalism runs on profits. And profits are optimized when they're monopolized. A good capitalist will try to monopolize the means of production therefore maximizing profits. And when profits are monopolized then you are very likely to get inequality because only a handful of people own the means of production. So capitalism has a natural tendency towards monopolization because capitalists naturally want to maximize profits. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |dead-url= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
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