a blog by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

Among American economists, Robert Heilbroner was quite unusual –perhaps even unique, although John Kenneth Galbraith, Paul Sweezy, and others of large, inter-disciplinary vision were his friends—in being able to put a truly analytical question: “what is capitalism?” It’s a question that demands finding the essence or nature of a phenomenon, examining the elements of that essence, especially the motivational elements, exploring its originary and subsequent forms, noting how people have conceptualized the phenomenon over time and influenced it with their conceptions. The complexity of the task was reflected in Heilbroner’s 1985 title, The Nature and Logic of Capitalism.

I have already written about how gifted Heilbroner’s colleague down the hall at the New School, Hannah Arendt, was for this kind of inquiry. She had, with exemplary clarity, put the question, “what is politics?” and answered it in a book, The Human Condition, that Heilbroner often admired in his footnotes. All the groundwork for that inquiry had been done in The Origin and Elements of Totalitarianism (her masterwork’s German title), which studied how politics can disappear. Like Freud, she had the insight that you can learn about health –about politics as the ultimate in collective human health—by understanding the pathology that can eliminate it.

In The Human Condition, Arendt had arrived at a short statement of essence–politics is people acting in concert, as equals– and then offered a huge long historical exposition of how this action-essence had for millennia been obscured, misconstrued (particularly by philosophers in the Platonic tradition), confused with other activities like labor and work, disrespected, denied, suppressed, and finally, in the 20th century, almost erased in a form of government, totalitarianism, which could not have been better designed to make action in concert impossible. The essence of that phenomenon, that pathological form of government was, she said, terrorization, ultimately the “manufacture of death” in camps that only an “advanced” industrialized nation could organize.

Arendt had put her “what is politics?” question with the hope of reviving appreciation for politics and for the moments in human history when politics had revived, sprouting up because the motivation for it had never disappeared and its elemental forms –especially its Greek founding moment–had never been forgotten. Her eulogies for politics resurgent argued that it is not a domain of danger but rather the domain of greatest and most meaningful human activity. Erasing it is the ultimate danger.

Heilbroner put his “what is capitalism?” question in a spirit of alarm. He had come to understand capitalism as an economic system that has danger for human beings built into it –as a necessary consequence of its expansionary dynamic and even of the need-fulfilling beneficences of that dynamism. Capitalism is, essentially, a system for wealth and property accumulation by a group, the capitalists, who allege (or use as their rationale) a universal acquisitive drive that moves them in their natural competition with others. Put in the negative, this means: it is not essentially a system for basic need satisfaction. It does not do what the early Greek theorists of political activity thought an economy should do: provide for the citizen’s needs so that they could then be free to be citizens co-operating with each other.

Capitalism does –like any economy– satisfy needs, from elemental ones shared by all for food, shelter and safety, hygiene, to complex ones for creating worlds of culture and symbolic display. From potatoes to palaces and performance halls. But it fulfills the needs primarily of capitalists; and not in order to free them for political activity, but rather to allow them to engage in more and more economic activity on a larger and larger scale. After it has, as efficiently and thus profitably as possible, fulfilled the capitalists’ needs, capitalism goes on, becoming capitalism for capitalism’s sake, expansion for expansion’s sake, growth for growth’s sake. And this means it becomes primarily dedicated to fulfilling the capitalists’ need to be capitalists, not citizens. It is intrinsically imperialistic in the ecology of human activities.

An adequate analysis of capitalism cannot be just an economic analysis, because one of capitalism’s crucial consequences is that it impinges imperialistically on all domains of human activity, including political activity, with the potentiality of erasing those domains. Importantly, Heilbroner’s analysis of the danger –his “beware the unintended consequences!” –came very close to Hannah Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism as an anti-political form of government. He thought that capitalism had the potentiality to erase politics. It was –and is—an intrinsically (“by it nature”) anti-political economic system. That is why in the era of capitalism the key topic for economists (even when they had no idea why they were obsessed with the topic) has always been: what should the relation of the political domain and the economic domain be?

Heilbroner realized by the end of the 1960s that concentrating his attention on how classical and 20th century economists had analyzed capitalism and imagined its development, favoring state control of it or abhoring state control of it, might very well obscure the key question “is it controllable?” Or obscure the more historically nuanced question: “are any of the variant forms capitalism has taken in its two hundred years of existence controllable—has it become progressively less controllable in its later forms?”

He synthesized a huge amount of historical analysis of capitalism world-wide to suggest that it has had four main types and periods (1760-1848, 1848-1893, 1893-1941, 1941–) which “at our level of Olympic observation might be likened, at least metaphorically, to youth, young adulthood, maturity and old age.” Innovatively, Heilbroner defined each period in this periodization (about which many historians agree) by its terminal crisis, which sends it into its next stage. Each started off with a burst of capital accumulation activity and “boom” and then came, given the inherent instability of the system, to the limits of its thrust, to stagnation, and the intensification of its conflict with the social forms in which it was operating—or, in the terms I just suggested, the intensification of its conflict with other human activities. “Capital is a process oriented to profit, not to social well-being,” as Heilbroner put the matter succinctly, so it cannot help but come to crisis and to conflict with other activities, as a youth oriented only to his own aggrandizement –a hoarder–would inevitably become a social misfit and a monomaniac, even a sociopath, destroying his own context, as he grew older.

Answering his “what is capitalism?” question along the lines of ‘it is an activity initiated by a part of the human population that becomes monomaniac in its assertion of the priority of its need for accumulation of wealth over all other needs and activities,’ Heilbroner was saying, in effect, it is an authoritarian regime –a particular kind of plutocracy. This, of course, is not a novel formulation. Socialists have been railing about “the capitalist plutocrats” for a century and a half. What was new in Heilbroner’s analysis, I think, was that he realized that if the plutocracy expands past a certain point, it does not exist alongside various governmental forms in various nations, it incorporates them, they become incapsulated –unmetabolized, but without power or meaning–in its corporate body, so to speak. The plutocracy does not necessarily take over the government in any given place, although there may be (and have been) corporatist fascisms. But it does erase any sense people have that they are political actors who elect governments –that their actions or their votes are about something other than the plutocracy. Their only role is the Sisyphusean one of laboring in a system that rolls bigger and bigger rocks over them at a faster and faster rate.

This point of omnipresesnt plutocracy, in Heilbroner’s view, comes about in the old age of capitalism. There are elements of capitalism since 1941 that have so weakened –not strengthened—it that it is more invasive and threatening to other forms of human activity than it has ever been. It must draw sustenance from the activities it has ingested. In its period of headlong growth and accelerating crises and breakdowns, played out now on an international scale with only minimal international political and legal checking, it has become desperate and disoriented. Unable to make decisions that are “self-interested,” much less in other people’s interests; unable to have any long-term vision. Apropos here is the observation that Arendt made about the relation of power and violence, which was also the center-piece of Gandhi’s non-violence theory and practice: violence is resorted to when power is absent or fading. When capitalism becomes desperate and also maximally abstract, self-referential, and far from people’s daily lives and aspirations to act together, it becomes more violent, more controlling, more self-contradictory, more invasive, more reality-denying and …mad.

Heilbroner’s concrete illustrations of old age capitalism’s destruction of other human activities came from different domains. For example, he noted that athletic activities and many artistic activities have been drawn into the system –commercialized– to such a degree that they hardly exist except for the benefit of corporate sponsors. Similarly, the relentless commercialization that is carried forward by advertising invades the most private and intimate dimensions of life. But commercialization also invades political activity to the point where political discussion can hardly take place except inside some money-commodity cluster or for the sake of such a cluster, inside the belly of capitalism. Commercialization, which Heilbroner calls “the single most self-destructive process of modern capitalist civilization,” has, however, taken a particular form in the last post-Soviet decades. I will write about this next time, but say here, that present tense commercialization is largely a function of the emergence of a particular industry –and thus a particular source of commercialization — as the one most dominative in old age capitalism. It has superceded the fossil fuel energy and armaments industries in that dominative role (as it now controls them). In the dynamic of capitalism for capitalism’s sake, the financial industry, once a service industry for capitalism, has become the key locus of its crises and breakdowns. Thus the Depression of the last few years in the old age fourth period of capitalism is a very different matter than the Great Depression of capitalism’s third, maturity period. It is the Geriatric Depression.

[Note, please enter your email under SUBSCRIBE on the homepage if you wold like to be notified when a new post goes up.]