Haymarket Books

Whether consciously or not, such a focus on misbehavior by the state or by criminals serves to avoid blaming the system and its rules and regulations, its structure of rewards and penalties. Pinpointing “the bad guys” perpetuates the ancient art of scapegoating, deflecting blame on convenient targets when in fact the system is the problem.

For centuries, in every capitalist country, individual economic actors have been charged, convicted, and imprisoned for violating some law, and businesses have been shut down or sanctioned for similar reasons. But the individuals and businesses that follow sooner or later replicate their behavior.

Capitalist societies can continue to monitor, identify, regulate, and prosecute economic misdeeds, but doing so never will prevent cycles and crises. It never has. Overcoming the systemic roots and nature of capitalist crises requires a change in the economic system.

I will begin by noting how corporations and the rich used their rising profits and their falling tax burdens to shape politics. As they altered the tax system to their advantage, they worked hard to define “the tax issue” politically as having nothing to do with shifting burdens from one social group to another. Politicians and politically motivated think tanks inundated public discourse with affirmations that all taxes were excessive burdens that sustained wasteful bureaucrats.

Most Republicans preferred tax cuts for business and the rich (versus average citizens) more than most Democrats, and most Republicans preferred cutting government employment and social welfare services more than most Democrats. But both agreed on far more than they disagreed on.

government spread the ideological message that the socialization or nationalization of banking had not happened, that banks unable to function without massive government supports were nonetheless still “private enterprises.” The government’s supports were always referred to as “temporary,” although no one could know how long each of them might be continued or whether and when they might need to be resumed.

Depression provoked congressional hearings that revealed extensive conflicts of interest and fraud committed by banks and their investment subsidiaries.

the height of the post-2007 crisis, major banks demanded and received massive government help on the basis of a threat. They were, they insisted, “too big to fail.” The idea seemed to be that letting them collapse or default would have such devastating consequences for the larger economy that the government had to help them “in the national interest.” The fallout from the collapse of the Lehman Brothers investment bank was used as the perfect example of why such a “colossal mistake” could not be replicated. They used such arguments in public and congressional debates, eventually garnering trillions of dollars in government support.

One aspect that has remained nearly constant is the class structure of production. By that I mean the internal organization of enterprises. Under capitalism, a mass of workers produce by their labor more than they get back as wages and salaries. In the language of economics, the value added by workers in production exceeds the value paid to those workers for the work they do. The difference between the value added by workers and the value paid to workers is what Karl Marx called surplus.

Overcoming the crises that are endemic to capitalism requires changing more than the form of capitalism. It requires changing the internal organization of capitalist production itself.