The first thinkers to proudly call themselves socialists would plead guilty as charged.\u00a0 For them \u2013including the French utopians Charles Fourier and Henri Saint-Simon, a young German Louis Althusser would later identify as the pre-Marxist Marx, and the Welsh philanthropist Robert Owen\u2014remaking human institutions to make them better serve human needs was good, not bad.\u00a0 The first socialists anticipated what Amartya Sen would later call \u201cpublic action\u201d and what Paulo Freire would later call \u201ccultural action.\u201d\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0The critical thinking of the first self-declared socialists addressed how to keep the unkept promises of the French revolution: libert\u00e9, egalit\u00e9, fraternit\u00e9<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0 They worried about, and tried to solve, the problems posed by a bogus libert\u00e9<\/em> that would smother fraternit\u00e9<\/em>, and by a bogus fraternit\u00e9<\/em> that would smother libert\u00e9<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 They studied and practiced ways to create \u201cfree communities of solidarity.\u201d\u00a0 Human beings should care about other human beings, ease their pain, help them if they can, respect their dignity and their freedom, and share their joy.<\/p>\n \u201cSocialism\u201d was quickly redefined after September 14, 1867, when the first edition of Das Kapital <\/em>saw print.\u00a0 What the French today call \u201cthe values of the left\u201d did not change.\u00a0 What changed was that the values ceased to be \u201cmerely normative.\u201d\u00a0 Socialism became \u201cpractical.\u201d\u00a0 It became the ideology of an agent that would create a new society that would turn its values into realities; namely, the working class.\u00a0 It became the name of a future that was destined to come into existence because of already existing unstoppable social forces.\u00a0 Those unstoppable social forces were already determining, and explaining, the facts then (in 1867) observed.\u00a0 They were the forces of industrialization driven by the accumulation of capital later carefully analysed by Rosa Luxemburg. \u00a0\u00a0Moreover, Marx introduced a new player into the language games of human beings: the word \u201ccapitalism.\u201d<\/p>\n Like \u201csocialism,\u201d \u201ccapitalism\u201d began its career as a purely pejorative term.\u00a0 Three approaches to defining \u201ccapitalism,\u201d all of them damning indictments, can be found in the works of the man who coined the term:<\/p>\n Although today (2022) millions voluntarily identify themselves as capitalists and\/or as advocates of one or another version of capitalism, nobody regards any of Marx\u00b4s approaches to defining what capitalism is as a description of the way the world should be.\u00a0 Mr. Moneybags, in Marx\u00b4s narrative, can have no will of his own.\u00a0 Even if he personally would prefer to live in free communities of solidarity, in business he plays the role history has assigned him.\u00a0 He fights to keep wages down to keep costs down.\u00a0 He hires workers because and only because it is profitable to do so, not because people need work.\u00a0 He is driven by fear of being forced by rising costs to price his products so high that they cannot be sold.\u00a0 He follows a script determined by social relations he did not choose and cannot control.<\/p>\n Honneth holds that now that it is crystal clear that the working class that is going to overthrow the existing world order does not exist, socialism needs another agent or agents to become practical again.\u00a0 Otherwise, it will be \u201cmerely normative.\u201d<\/p>\n I emphasize, on the contrary, that ethics is already practical. \u00a0Since Aristotle, and around the globe in non-western and western cultures, ethics (or its functional equivalent defined in some other vocabulary) is a practical science.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0As Charles Darwin, C.H. Waddington, Christian Smith and many others have plausibly argued, humans are social and therefore moral creatures.<\/p>\n Achieving a global mosaic of cultures adapted to their physical functions, is, principally a matter of transforming social structures, and thus escaping from what Charles Lindblom called \u201cthe market as prison,\u201d and in terms used by Karl Polanyi and John Ruggie. \u201cembedding\u201d the economy in functional social relations.<\/p>\n To appreciate the plausibility of treating the values that defined socialism prior to September 14, 1867, and other ethics of solidarity that humans at their best live by, around the globe, as active practical social forces that can be organized to transform social structures, consider Tony Lawson\u00b4s positioning theory of social structures.\u00a0 And Doug Porpora\u00b4s definition of social structures as material relations constituted by cultural rules.\u00a0 For Lawson, those relations can be spelled out as \u201cpositions\u201d such as the positions of buyer and seller, or landlord and tenant, or debtor and creditor, of employer and employee, to name a few.<\/p>\n The positions, in turn, are defined by the rights and obligations<\/em> of the persons who, at any given time and place, are occupying the positions.\u00a0 Lawson\u00b4s social ontology puts rights and obligations, and consequently morals and ethics, at the heart of the causal powers of social structures.\u00a0 I suggest that it supports regarding the ideals classically named by libert\u00e9, egalit\u00e9 and fraternit\u00e9 <\/em>and by \u201cfree communities of solidarity\u201d as already practical.\u00a0 They are practical for the same reason that the rights and obligations defining material positions that assign to investors and employers the power to determine the level of employment give \u201c\u2026 the capitalists a powerful indirect control over government policy: everything which may shake the state of confidence must be carefully avoided because it would cause an economic crisis.\u201d (Mikhal Kalecki)<\/p>\n Today (2022), regardless of what was the case at other moments in history, there are many capitalists and advocates of capitalism who believe that remaking human institutions to make them better serve human needs is good, not bad.\u00a0 It is hard to see how any sensible person could believe the contrary, now that there is no alternative to an energy transition from fossil fuels to renewable fuels \u2013 to cite just one of humanity\u00b4s existential challenges that require thinking outside the box.\u00a0 We could define socialism as a practical normative orientation that anticipated the necessity for ongoing social innovation that today for the educated public has become self-evident.<\/p>\n Three famous advocates of capitalism firmly committed to remaking human institutions to make them better serve human needs are Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1910) the founder of scientific management; Peter Drucker (1909-2005); and Klaus Schwab (1938-).<\/p>\n Young Frederick Taylor was an idealistic youth, who had been brought up by an idealistic mother.\u00a0 Emily (n\u00e9e Winslow) Taylor was an ardent abolitionist.\u00a0\u00a0 In general, she was a campaigner for the worthy causes of her day.\u00a0 When young Frederick was admitted to Harvard, he decided not to attend.\u00a0 Instead, he wanted to learn about real life by experiencing real life as it was experienced by the majority of the people who were living it.\u00a0 He became an apprentice on the shop floor of a factory owned by friends of his parents, far from the ivied halls.\u00a0 Later he earned an engineering degree.\u00a0 The key social problem of his times, as Taylor came to understand it, was: \u00a0\u00a0the workers want higher wages; the owners want higher profits.\u00a0 The solution was: scientific management.\u00a0 Raise productivity so high that you can simultaneously fund higher wages and fund high profits.\u00a0\u00a0 From Taylor\u00b4s day to ours, advocates of capitalism have identified low productivity as the root cause of poverty, raising productivity as essential, and capitalism as the most practical route to that goal.<\/p>\n Peter Drucker brought us the mission statement. The purpose of profits is not accumulation.\u00a0 It is funding the mission.\u00a0 \u201cWhat to do with profits after they are earned is the great political question of our times.\u201d\u00a0 A business that Drucker and his fans believe in contributes to the wider community. It is itself a work community.\u00a0 \u00a0It needs the support of the wider community to survive.\u00a0 Drucker denounced hostile takeovers designed to enforce shareholder control; he denounced exorbitant executive salaries.\u00a0 And Drucker famously wrote: \u201cIf the managers of our major institutions, especially business, do not take responsibility for the common good, no one else can or will.\u201d<\/p>\n Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum have come a long way.\u00a0 In its history since its founding in 1971, issues around forgiveness of debt can be seen as test cases where fundamental ethical principles were tested.\u00a0 At the beginning of the 1980s, the WEF tended to line up with the hardliners.\u00a0 The hardliners espoused a version of deontic ethics where the right trumped the good.\u00a0 The right that did the trumping was typically property rights and the right to demand payment on loans \u201cas agreed.\u201d\u00a0 The good that got trumped was typically human welfare.\u00a0 For several decades the answer to the question, \u201cWho holds the moral high ground here?\u201d hung in the balance.\u00a0 By 2000, a new consensus at the WEF and its allied organizations was teaching that some version of solidarity ethics, or an amalgam of several, held the high ground.\u00a0\u00a0 Massive third world debts were being forgiven. Forgiving them was being counted as the right thing to do.<\/p>\n Today the WEF defines itself as solidly on board with Peter Drucker, taking responsibility for the common good.\u00a0\u00a0 But volunteering to \u201ctake responsibility\u201d is only helpful if the volunteer is part of the solution, not part of the problem.\u00a0 A typical WEF agenda diagnoses global challenges as \u201cpeace, stability, sustainability, and the eradication of poverty.\u201d\u00a0 OK.\u00a0\u00a0 But how are these challenges to be addressed?\u00a0 A typical WEF answer features, \u201cby free trade of goods and services, free flow of capital, and freedom of investment.\u201d\u00a0 How are we to cope with such an implausible prescription following such a plausible diagnosis?<\/p>\n My advice on how to cope is to employ patient reasoning and unlimited good will.\u00a0\u00a0 Socialism can today be defined, if one chooses to do so, as a set of ideals, including ideals of mental flexibility and open-mindedness, which overlap with ideals of capitalist reformers.\u00a0 Meaningful conversations that bridge the capitalist\/socialist divide are now possible because some premises can plausibly be construed as shared.<\/p>\n _____________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n My advice on how to cope is to employ patient reasoning and unlimited good will. Socialism can today be defined, if one chooses to do so, as a set of ideals, including ideals of mental flexibility and open-mindedness, which overlap with ideals of capitalist reformers. Meaningful conversations that bridge the capitalist\/socialist divide are now possible because some premises can plausibly be construed as shared.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[232,260,874],"class_list":["post-221136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-editorial","tag-capitalism","tag-history","tag-socialism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=221136"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221136\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=221136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=221136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=221136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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<\/a> <\/em>Prof. Howard Richards is a member of the\u00a0<\/em>TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/em><\/strong><\/a>. He <\/em>is a philosopher\u00a0of social science <\/em>and<\/em> Research Professor of Philosophy at <\/em>Earlham College, Richmond<\/em>, Indiana<\/em>, USA<\/em>.\u00a0He was educated at Redlands High School in California, Yale, Stanford, University of California at Santa Barbara, University of Toronto, Harvard and Oxford. He currently teaches in the University of Cape Town`s EMBA programme.\u00a0His books include:\u00a0<\/em>The Evaluation of Cultural Action, a study of an application of Paulo Freire\u00b4s pedagogical\u00a0philosophy in rural Chile<\/em> (London Macmillan 1985); <\/em>Letters from Quebec; Understanding the Global Economy; The Dilemmas of Social Democracies; Gandhi and the Future of Economics; Rethinking Thinking; Unbounded Organizing in Community;\u00a0and<\/em>\u00a0The Nurturing of Time Future.\u00a0His new book, written with the assistance of Gavin Andersson, <\/em>Economic Theory and Community Development: Why Putting Community First Is Essential for Survival, is now available from the publisher, Dignity Press, and from Amazon and other major booksellers, as a print book and as an eBook<\/em>.<\/em> howardri@earlham.edu<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"