Lawrence Bush's column about "socially responsible capitalism" ("Religion and Skepticism," January-February issue), points hopefully to some positive developments that may drive large capitalist corporations to be more socially responsible. He is responding to William Greider's 2003 book, The Soul of Capitalism, which does the same hopeful pointing. I will not here dispute the existence or effects of those developments in the U.S. (such as unions becoming major shareholders of companies, establishing worker-owned firms and coops, etc.). A large literature already does that. I want to make a very different point about what is absent from Bush's article but should not be.

Everything depends on what we mean by "socially responsible." In Bush's view, "socially responsible" means that large corporations should provide more jobs, pay better wages, compensate host communities for the burdens of resident corporations, stop polluting, and so on. And he is no doubt right to call these goals and objectives desirable. Who but the most die-hard apologists for corporate capitalism would dispute him? Yet this is an extremely limited notion of what "social responsibility" ought to mean.

To be clear, let me offer a stark parallel. During most of the first century of U.S. history, many people discussed and argued over slavery, especially in the southern states. To use the currently fashionable language, we might say that

the debate turned on "socially responsible slavery." Sure, there were die-hard apologists for slavery who rejected the debate altogether (much as their counterparts today reject all talk of "socially responsible capitalism" as nonsense or worse). Then there were all sorts of critics of slavery who felt strongly that slave masters should better feed, clothe, and care for their property in human beings: stop beating and raping slaves, stop taking children from parents, stop selling and thereby separating spouses, and so on. We might say that such critics called for a "socially responsible slavery."

Labor poster from Images of American Radicalism
by Paul Buhle and Edmund B. Sullivan

We all know that there was another kind of critic of slavery in the American South. The "abolitionists" never accepted that the social responsibility of slave-owners and slave-masters could or should be limited to treating slaves better. However desirable improved treatment surely was, it fell far short of what counted as "social responsibility" for the abolitionists. To them, being "responsible" in and for a society of human beings endowed with "inalienable" rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" meant something more than treating slaves better. It meant the abolition of slavery.

I think that a very similar difference exists among the critics of capitalism now. As an "abolitionist" in regard to capitalism, I would like respectfully to offer and explain a criticism that goes further than Bush's.

Capitalism, like slavery, can be criticized for the negative effects it has on any hope for equality — in wealth, income, power, access to culture, and so on — in societies where it prevails. But my criticism focuses less on those effects than on the basic structure of capitalism, the way it works to generate those effects. Capitalism is a system in which a relatively small minority of people offers the majority a stark choice: either accept employment in our companies or else die or live a difficult, disrespected, marginal existence accepting welfare from relatives, friends, charities or the state. The conditions of capitalist employment are also stark. An employer will only hire a worker if the wages or salaries paid to him or her are less than the value added by his/her labor. The employed worker must produce more than he/she is paid, must deliver to the employer an extra — that famous "surplus" about which Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Karl Marx wrote so eloquently — for which nothing is given to the worker in return.

As all three of those great economists explained, the values of the commodities produced in capitalist enterprises have two component parts: 1) the values of all the tools, equipment, and raw materials purchased by the capitalist as "inputs used up" in production, plus 2) the value added by the human labor that transforms those inputs into finished commodities for sale. It follows that the only way capitalists can take a profit from production is if they do not give back to the workers the full value of what their labor added. Profit is thus a kind of social theft that capitalists perpetrate on their employees. In the formal language of economics, the term for this is "exploitation," defined very precisely in terms of a surplus produced by some that is appropriated by others.

With their wages and salaries thus constrained, the mass of exploited workers faces a future of constantly needing a job. Given the profits they extract, capitalist employers have the incentive and accumulate the wealth to offer those jobs. Capitalism is thus a system of production perpetuating a structural inequality and injustice located at its core. This is its likeness to slavery. This is why so many critics of capitalism found their way to the phrase "wage slaves" to describe the condition of the mass of working people.

The basic point here is not complicated. To interpret Jewish values as a commitment to a society with real equality, democracy, and human solidarity requires us to confront in capitalism a system of production that blocks the achievement of such a society. The key issue for critics of capitalism is different, I would suggest, from Lawrence Bush's concern with property and its distribution. Whether the state, the local community, or groups of individuals "own" the means of production, the question here is how the production process is to be organized. Will workers continue to produce a surplus delivered to and used by a different group of people (who may be called "capitalists" or "commissars" or "management" or still other names)? Or will we have the courage to say that the structure of production in a good society requires that workers who produce a surplus must themselves collectively receive and decide on its disposition? Once that issue is clearly posed, the inadequacy of "worker ownership" becomes clear. In the relatively few enterprises that are worker-owned, what remains largely unchanged is the structure of production whereby the workers produce a surplus which the top managers and/or board of directors continue to take into their hands and distribute. The basic problem thus remains and will remain so long as the abolition of the capitalist structure of production does not figure explicitly on the social agenda for all to consider and debate.

Permit me to anticipate a response that some readers may make to my argument here. They may think that a board of directors or a top management team is some kind of absolute necessity without which production would not be possible; economic and then social chaos would ensue. Such people believe that civilization itself requires a few non-producers — directors and managers — always to be in charge of production by the workers. In this way, capitalism becomes "naturalized" — something that human "nature" makes un-avoidable. Then, the best we can hope and work for is the sort of "social responsibility" that Lawrence Bush discussed in his article.

I reply with another analogy. Not so long ago, it was widely believed that the survival of civilized society depended upon parents choosing the appropriate spouses for their children. The idea of leaving the choice of marriage partner to young people themselves was contrary to human nature (they were too young, too inexperienced in the ways of the world, too impulsive, etc.). To take the radical step of depriving parents of control over their children's marriage choices was seen as an evil threat to the very future of civilized society. Such beliefs continue in parts of the world today. However, history has provided us with a profound lesson. In much of the world today, young people regularly marry outside of the direct control of their parents. The predicted demise of society and civilization has hardly occurred. Society and civilization changed — and many of us would say for the better — but in any case, they did not collapse.

Similarly, not so long ago historically, it was thought that human communities could not survive unless a king or tsar or kaiser wielded autocratic power. The very idea of democracy, of making government dependent upon the active, participatory will of the governed, was thought to threaten society and civilization with violent and destructive chaos. Once again, history has taught us that the dire predictions were expressions of fear and a deep conservatism. Kings are gone and society has surely changed because of it, yet many of us would agree that the change was for the better. Civilization did not collapse.

Nowadays, the fearfully conservative assert the absolutely natural necessity for production to be organized more or less as it is in capitalist enterprises. The mass of workers simply cannot be entrusted to take control of all they produce — not only the portion they get back as wages and salaries but also the surplus above that. They lack the skills needed, the managerial savvy, the executive mystique. Production, economy, society, and even civilization itself could not survive the chaos that would inevitably result from abandoning the capitalist system of production. Any commitment or program to abolish the capitalist structure of production belongs in the realm of wild utopian fantasy, not something that prudent, realistic folk should consider.

Yet this dire prediction is just like those others proved false by history. When societies grow out of capitalist structures of production and shift to collective systems where the workers not only produce the surplus (profits) but also collectively decide their disposition, we need not fear the collapse of the economy, let alone of civilization.

Indeed, we can be confident about this precisely because U.S. citizens have been practicing actual transitions from capitalist to non-capitalist organizations of production for many years. For example, for many years, hundreds and sometimes thousands of hi-tech workers in Silicon Valley have been quitting their high-paying jobs in capitalistically organized enterprises. Risking their incomes and job security, they opt instead to set up collective enterprises where they all participate in the work equally and all collectively control and distribute the surpluses (profits) they collectively produce. These skilled workers have voted with their feet against a capitalist organization of their production activities and have established something altogether different. They have insisted that their non-capitalist structures of production greatly improved their productivity as workers as well as the quality of their lives. They have been successful — and sometimes dramatically so — in many cases. A growing literature shows clearly that many of the most important technological breakthroughs in the computer, telecommunications, and bio-tech industries have been achieved not by the capitalistically organized enterprises but rather by these enterprises deliberately organized in a non-capitalist manner.

Of course, these skilled workers don't see themselves as abolitionists in relation to capitalist production, but that is just the point. They lack the conceptual framework that would enable them to see that. Instead, because they own their new enterprises and sell products (for example, software programs) as commodities in markets, they imagine themselves as within the capitalist system rather than escapees from it. Yet they are actual abolitionists — at least in and for their own working lives — even though they don't know it (yet). They have proved more than the viability of non-capitalist, egalitarian structures of production; they have proved their enormous productivity both economically and personally.

In conclusion, the Jewish values movingly affirmed in Lawrence Bush's article can and, I believe, must take us beyond a notion of social responsibility that merely requires capitalists to treat their workers and the workers' communities better. Those values carry a moral imperative to demand the abolition of the capitalist mode of production. Those values can also speak directly and persuasively to all sorts of workers in the U.S. and elsewhere who already criticize their conditions of labor. The thoughts and actions of many of them are already groping — albeit unselfconsciously — toward a post-capitalist system of production. More than lost opportunity, it would be inconsistent with Jewish values not to reach out to such workers by defining social responsibility to include the abolition of that exploitation lying at the core of capitalist production.  

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