For well over a century and a half, capitalism has been a big problem for the left, and for much of that period, it was conceived of as the biggest problem. I want to cast serious doubt on this idea. I want to offer a leftist defense of capitalism. Let me begin with the leftist indictment of capitalism, which goes as follows:
1. Capitalism is correlated with various evils (exploitation, etc.)
2. Therefore, capitalism causes those evils.
For anyone who has taken logic, it is obvious that there is a big logical gap between the first and second statements. I’m not going to bother to see what evidence leftists use to fill that gap for the simple reason that I intend to show that these same evils will arise even when capitalism is absent. And if they arise when capitalism is absent, then it’s not at all clear that capitalism is responsible for those evils. Moreover, the evidence I’m going to introduce shows that these same evils emerge in a domain dominated by liberals and leftists, so even if capitalism were responsible for these evils, liberals and leftists in this other domain would also be responsible for them, and I assume no liberals or leftists would want to admit that. The natural conclusion, then, is that there is no particular reason to believe that capitalism is responsible for these evils.
The domain in question is academia, which is generally agreed to be dominated today by liberals and leftists. Here are the problems in academia that currently exist:
1. There is massive unemployment in academia. This has been the norm since at least the early 1970s, and the problem shows no signs of abating. Indeed, it got worse in the 1990s.
2. There is exploitation. Because of the jobs crisis, many people must settle for less than full-time, permanent work, and such people (called adjuncts) are generally exploited. Notice that I am not even talking here about exploitation of the staff people, but of would-be professors.
3. There is a vicious hierarchy. The hierarchy in academia is like that of an aristocracy or even a caste system. People who graduate from elite schools have the best chances of getting jobs, publications, and grants, while those of us who went to lesser schools have less of a chance of getting these things. This is in contrast with capitalism, in which theoretically anyone can rise to the top. Capitalism is much more meritocratic than academia is. It is true that those at the top in academia think that academia is a meritocracy, but those of us at the bottom do not, and since the left claims to listen to people at the bottom and to value their opinions as much as the opinions of those at the top, then leftists are committed (whether they like it or not) to doubting that academia is a meritocracy. And if academia is not a meritocracy, then it must be very far from being egalitarian.
4. The rich get richer and the poor poorer. I mean this in two senses. First, there is the sense that concerns the wealth within academia. Wealth within academia refers to actual wealth, such as grants or good-paying jobs that require comparatively little teaching, but also to honors that can be used to more easily attain that wealth, such as getting many books and articles published. Now, who are the people who typically get big grants? Why, they are the people who have already gotten big grants. Similarly, who are the people who typically get articles published in prestigious journals? They are the people who have already gotten articles published in prestigious journals. A person who has never gotten a grant at all or never gotten anything published is very unlikely to get a big grant or an article published in a prestigious journal, unless they happen to have gone to an elite graduate school. The rest of us can only dream of such things, and because life is so difficult for us, most of us fail. We get jobs at community colleges or places far away from the centers of culture or we become adjuncts or we are forced to accept employment outside of academia. The rich get richer and the poor poorer.
The second sense in which I mean this phrase is that those at the top in academia are likely to come from wealthy backgrounds. (Some leftists have recently begun to acknowledge this. One of them, Walter Benn Michaels, is alleged to have said that diversity in our colleges means “what skin color the rich kids have”). They get into the best schools, and having graduated from such schools they get good jobs and have great connections that allow them to get published easily. It’s a short step to the top. Those of us who come from more modest backgrounds have a very different fate and have a much more difficult time coping. We are less likely to get into the elite schools, and the schools we do get into turn out not to be very well respected. Failure is hard to avoid.
5. Among those at the top there is, if not greed, at least stinginess. While liberals and leftists in academia generally like the idea of sharing and fairness, this attitude doesn’t apply to their own good luck if they happen to have a big salary or to have gotten a big grant. Even though there are many people who are unemployed or underemployed in academia, people at the top have zero interest in helping them. I don’t know of any articles written by, for example, Noam Chomsky on this topic. Furthermore, he continued to be a professor long after he could have retired, thus taking up a professorial slot that could have gone to another, younger scholar. (And Chomsky could easily have made a decent living simply giving lectures and writing books.) Another example along these lines is Kai Nielsen, a philosophy professor who published article after article promoting socialism at a time when younger scholars needed to get publications in order to get jobs and promotions. That is, publishing in a journal is for the most part a zero-sum game; if one person gets a publication in a journal, another cannot, so his continued publishing, at a time when he didn’t really need to, hurt younger scholars. (With the rise of online journals, all this may change, since online journals have a very large capacity and so can publish anything they deem good. However, the old guard in academia looks askance at this new medium.) Aside from these two examples, the average attitude of the tenured liberal or leftist professor, when confronted with the problem of the unemployed and underemployed in academia, is not, “I ought to donate some of my salary to them so they can get by,” but rather “That is someone else’s problem.”
All of these five evils are associated with capitalism. That they emerge in a domain far removed from capitalism suggests that capitalism has nothing to do with creating them and that they are more likely simply part of the human condition.
1. Capitalism is correlated with various evils (exploitation, etc.)
2. Therefore, capitalism causes those evils.
For anyone who has taken logic, it is obvious that there is a big logical gap between the first and second statements. I’m not going to bother to see what evidence leftists use to fill that gap for the simple reason that I intend to show that these same evils will arise even when capitalism is absent. And if they arise when capitalism is absent, then it’s not at all clear that capitalism is responsible for those evils. Moreover, the evidence I’m going to introduce shows that these same evils emerge in a domain dominated by liberals and leftists, so even if capitalism were responsible for these evils, liberals and leftists in this other domain would also be responsible for them, and I assume no liberals or leftists would want to admit that. The natural conclusion, then, is that there is no particular reason to believe that capitalism is responsible for these evils.
The domain in question is academia, which is generally agreed to be dominated today by liberals and leftists. Here are the problems in academia that currently exist:
1. There is massive unemployment in academia. This has been the norm since at least the early 1970s, and the problem shows no signs of abating. Indeed, it got worse in the 1990s.
2. There is exploitation. Because of the jobs crisis, many people must settle for less than full-time, permanent work, and such people (called adjuncts) are generally exploited. Notice that I am not even talking here about exploitation of the staff people, but of would-be professors.
3. There is a vicious hierarchy. The hierarchy in academia is like that of an aristocracy or even a caste system. People who graduate from elite schools have the best chances of getting jobs, publications, and grants, while those of us who went to lesser schools have less of a chance of getting these things. This is in contrast with capitalism, in which theoretically anyone can rise to the top. Capitalism is much more meritocratic than academia is. It is true that those at the top in academia think that academia is a meritocracy, but those of us at the bottom do not, and since the left claims to listen to people at the bottom and to value their opinions as much as the opinions of those at the top, then leftists are committed (whether they like it or not) to doubting that academia is a meritocracy. And if academia is not a meritocracy, then it must be very far from being egalitarian.
4. The rich get richer and the poor poorer. I mean this in two senses. First, there is the sense that concerns the wealth within academia. Wealth within academia refers to actual wealth, such as grants or good-paying jobs that require comparatively little teaching, but also to honors that can be used to more easily attain that wealth, such as getting many books and articles published. Now, who are the people who typically get big grants? Why, they are the people who have already gotten big grants. Similarly, who are the people who typically get articles published in prestigious journals? They are the people who have already gotten articles published in prestigious journals. A person who has never gotten a grant at all or never gotten anything published is very unlikely to get a big grant or an article published in a prestigious journal, unless they happen to have gone to an elite graduate school. The rest of us can only dream of such things, and because life is so difficult for us, most of us fail. We get jobs at community colleges or places far away from the centers of culture or we become adjuncts or we are forced to accept employment outside of academia. The rich get richer and the poor poorer.
The second sense in which I mean this phrase is that those at the top in academia are likely to come from wealthy backgrounds. (Some leftists have recently begun to acknowledge this. One of them, Walter Benn Michaels, is alleged to have said that diversity in our colleges means “what skin color the rich kids have”). They get into the best schools, and having graduated from such schools they get good jobs and have great connections that allow them to get published easily. It’s a short step to the top. Those of us who come from more modest backgrounds have a very different fate and have a much more difficult time coping. We are less likely to get into the elite schools, and the schools we do get into turn out not to be very well respected. Failure is hard to avoid.
5. Among those at the top there is, if not greed, at least stinginess. While liberals and leftists in academia generally like the idea of sharing and fairness, this attitude doesn’t apply to their own good luck if they happen to have a big salary or to have gotten a big grant. Even though there are many people who are unemployed or underemployed in academia, people at the top have zero interest in helping them. I don’t know of any articles written by, for example, Noam Chomsky on this topic. Furthermore, he continued to be a professor long after he could have retired, thus taking up a professorial slot that could have gone to another, younger scholar. (And Chomsky could easily have made a decent living simply giving lectures and writing books.) Another example along these lines is Kai Nielsen, a philosophy professor who published article after article promoting socialism at a time when younger scholars needed to get publications in order to get jobs and promotions. That is, publishing in a journal is for the most part a zero-sum game; if one person gets a publication in a journal, another cannot, so his continued publishing, at a time when he didn’t really need to, hurt younger scholars. (With the rise of online journals, all this may change, since online journals have a very large capacity and so can publish anything they deem good. However, the old guard in academia looks askance at this new medium.) Aside from these two examples, the average attitude of the tenured liberal or leftist professor, when confronted with the problem of the unemployed and underemployed in academia, is not, “I ought to donate some of my salary to them so they can get by,” but rather “That is someone else’s problem.”
All of these five evils are associated with capitalism. That they emerge in a domain far removed from capitalism suggests that capitalism has nothing to do with creating them and that they are more likely simply part of the human condition.
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