The idea that economic systems are largely cultural values seems an absurd idea. I mean economics is a major in college and culture is not. Economics is viewed through the lens of spreadsheets, GDP, stock indexes, and consumer confidence to name a few. An economic system is portrayed as an input-output machine that makes the world go round. What does any of that have to do with culture? Well, to put it bluntly, EVERYTHING.
Culture is something we take for granted when it is our own. You don’t think it is weird when someone looks you in the eye and shakes your hand or waves good-bye. You do think it’s a bit weird when people bow to one another or, god forbid, kiss each cheek. These are just cultural norms for how people will say hello and good-bye. Economies function much in the same way. People need to have similar cultural values for an economy to function because without it you have a French guy kissing an American and an American shaking a Chinese guy’s hand and all of the sudden everyone is offended and World War III is on the horizon.
Capitalism has a tremendous cultural effect on the people that live with it. For instance, you think you need to work hard at your job to earn a paycheck to pay for things you want, and you’re willing to work a relatively set amount of time each week to do so. Why? You don’t have to do that. You could only work when you needed money. You could work to have as much free time as possible. You could grow your own food and barter for anything else you wanted. Most people would say that’s weird, don’t do that, don’t be weird. It seems culturally weird because you are not valuing the things that capitalism values.
Capitalism is all about the money. Capital is in the damn name. It says go get as much money as you can so you can buy all things that capitalists create. It is a value system that says what can I monetize and to what extreme. This is not an economic system, but a cultural system. It is a culture based upon acquiring money. This has not always been the case and it will not always remain the case. The culture that capitalism creates takes the ethos out of the economy because it pretends that culture has nothing to do with it, but that does not always have to be the case.
Capitalism has its benefits for society. It causes people to try and produce more and more. To create things more inexpensively and at a faster speed. It also tries to squeeze profit out from every angle like a fist clamping down on a lime to get the last drop of juice into too stiff drink. This is where the culture of capitalism needs to change. Profit can be squeezed through innovation, but it can also be squeezed out of you.
The greatest feat of capitalism has been its ability to distance itself from humanity. By becoming something that can be understood through spreadsheets it has been able to distance itself from the suffering it can create. When workers are laid off from GM and Ford it is not done by walking into a factory and saying, “These people fucking suck. They are horrible at their jobs, and, quite frankly, their incompetence is rather insulting.” The decision to lay people off is made by looking at a spreadsheet and asking where is more profit? Do people really matter less than more profit? These companies are making profits, but are they making more profits? If human beings are a casualty then so be it.
What if our cultural values changed? What if we as a culture began to value human beings for their humanity and not their productivity? What if we asked people who are you? And not what do you do? What if a successful business owner felt good, not about all the money he made, but how much they are able to pay their employees? You may say then businesses would fail and the economy would suck. Maybe, but capitalism has seen businesses fail and the economy suck many times before.
How we view success says so much about our culture. If you are rich you are successful. If you are poor you are not. Capitalism has made us value money over people. Why should we settle for a society and a culture like that? Money is not real. It can get you real things, but it is an abstract idea that facilitates exchange. People are real though, and we are what make money have meaning. If we give money meaning and money is the central driver of capitalism then we as a society have the power to dictate the direction of capitalism. All we need to do is change our culture.
I may sound like a Marxist, but I do not believe that communism is the definitive way to go. What I do believe is that economic systems are really a set of cultural values. What we value controls the economy. The more we value money the less we value everything else. Capitalism has done some wondrous things for the world, but it has also devastated humanity in ways never seen. People have starved in the millions for profit. Wars have been waged. Slavery has been instituted and upheld to better make a profit. In short, we have allowed human suffering on a scale rarely seen in history to make more money. That is a shortcoming of cultural values. Those are not the values we tell ourselves are important. So why do we allow a system to perpetuate them? Economies bend to the will of our values. If we don’t bend capitalism to our values then either they are not our values or we have surrendered to a culture we find foreign.
