Capitalism, civil society and the Calgary School

In response to my Comment article, “The Calgary School and the Future of Canada,” Jonathan Weverink writes:

i balk at your suggestion about limiting the public sector, and putting more into the hands of private enterprise.

even so, i am in total agreement of your point about the diversity that the private sector could bring to many aspects of what typically resides in the public sector. especially in the face of cold secularism.

i think my original "gut" reaction stems from my deep, deep suspicion of capitalism -- and the glowing endorsement of rampant greed we see coming from our elected officials, in regard to corporate entities.

i wonder if you have anything to say about the very real danger of capitalism, and the corporate tyranny that is slowly growing in the face of disappearing public goods? do you have a solution to offer, where private interests are not necessarily equated with plunder?

These are good questions worthy of thoughtful response. Let’s start with capitalism, a term I use in my book as little as I possibly can. Over the decades I’ve come to think that it’s not a particularly useful term — in the hands of either its detractors or its proponents. When I do use it, I tend to identify it with the economic side of individualistic liberalism, with its tendency to reduce the variety of social formations to voluntary associations. One might speak here of the commodification of life, in which every cultural artefact, institution, custom, tradition, way of life and livelihood becomes an economic product to be purchased on the open market. My colleague Craig Bartholomew has written on consumerism, a term which may be somewhat more descriptive and less freighted with obvious ideological baggage. To be sure, there is nothing intrinsically evil about the market, which must be seen as a structural component of human life in community, as created by God. But in our society there is a tendency in some circles to advance so-called “market solutions” to this, that and everything, including environmental degradation and a plethora of social ills. This is naïve. The market is the market. Nothing more, nothing less.

Furthermore, capitalism’s Marxian connotations make it a less than helpful term. For Marx, capitalism is not so much the economic counterpart of liberalism as a concrete system characterizing a particular stage in the historical process – a process determined and moved by class struggle. It’s not clear to me that one can so easily detach a notion of capitalism from this Marxian context, with its defective anthropology and reductive understanding of history. Then, of course, there is Catholic theologian Michael Novak, who writes favourably, and entirely too glibly, of “democratic capitalism,” which is a hopelessly reductionist way of understanding our complex society. (On this point I am closer to the late Russell Kirk than to Novak.)

To my mind, the issue of the respective sizes of public and private sectors (themselves problematic terms, but we’ll let that go for now) must be treated as something distinct from the important issues Weverink raises above. He claims to balk at my proposal to limit the public sector and to place more resources in the hands of the private sector. Yet he also professes to dislike the “glowing endorsement of rampant greed we see coming from our elected officials.” One could add to this problem the corruption and other forms of malfeasance within the ranks of government itself. Clearly, greed is not peculiar to private entrepreneurs. Placing too much of our wealth in the hands of government officials is a recipe for abuse, especially if there are insufficient checks on political power itself — a situation characterizing Canada at the moment, I'm sorry to say. Adscam is the predictable outcome of this.

It is probably true that the Calgary School is insufficiently attentive to the problems of consumerism — or capitalism, if you prefer — to which Weverink refers. This is why I emphasize at the end of my article the need to have the return of resources to the private sector coupled with a concerted effort to encourage their use for the public benefit. I might add here that the criteria for this ought to be flexible enough to accommodate a diversity of worldviews and agendas. This, of course, presupposes that our policy-makers are motivated by a genuine concern for the betterment of the larger society, including the most vulnerable, and not simply in shifting economic power from one self-aggrandizing sector to another. Unfortunately there is no guarantee that this will be the case. One hopes that enhanced democratic and constitutional mechanisms might serve to facilitate this.

I might point out something else. As I noted above, if economic resources are concentrated in the hands of government, their abuse is more likely than if they are widely distributed amongst a variety of governmental and nongovernmental agents. This argues against an excessively statist economy, at least on the domestic front. On the other hand, the economic power of some of the largest transnational corporations dwarfs that of many, if not most, of the smaller countries in especially the two-thirds world. In such a context, offering the free market as a solution is likely to ring hollow. Yet statism is not an obviously better solution either, as seen over the decades since decolonization in Africa and Asia, where corrupt governments have not been obviously virtuous counterweights to the transnationals. Here is where I run up against the limits of my own expertise, since I’m not an economist.

However, I do believe that any emphasis on the market needs to be balanced with (1) a counter-emphasis on strong labour unions to protect employees (here is where the CLAC and its overseas affiliates have a role to play), and (2) a strong legal and political framework that not only protects the diverse forms of property existing within a complex differentiated society, but is capable of upholding legitimate constraints on economic activity, including, above all, protecting the physical environment — perhaps the most basic manifestation of the commons there is. With respect to transnationals, these might well be regulated by multilateral treaty arrangements amongst the smaller, less developed countries — not to treat such corporations punitively in advance, as if they were evil by definition, but to ensure at least that, in their quest for profit, they do not run roughshod over the legitimate interests of these countries’ social fabrics. At most it might even persuade such corporate entities to view their own activities as manifestations of responsible economic stewardship.

None of this will necessarily be easy to bring about, but we certainly have good reason to work for it. For our purposes here, it need not entail a dirigiste economy, but ought to enhance the balanced development of a pluriform society, in which state and economic enterprise play their respective complementary roles in seeking shalom.