The motto of capitalism might be “Be careful what you wish for.”
It is an economic system that can generate great wealth, even widespread prosperity, but it also is prone to excesses and instability.
If capitalists manage to gain control of the political system as well as as the economic system, those excesses can get more extreme and more damaging. Capitalism also is prone to boom-and-bust cycles. If unchecked, capitalism can create bigger booms and bigger busts. With Trump in the White House, the bigger boom looks to be guaranteed only for the already-wealthy, and the bigger bust is for everyone else.
Until recently, mechanisms existed to curb some of capitalism’s excesses, and some of these mechanisms benefited workers directly — protecting them from exploitation or allowing them to share more of the wealth generated by their labor.
These mechanisms are called “flanking subsystems.” They are “state agencies, committees, programs (such as welfare), and quasi-governmental entities such as central banks, that actively intervene in relations of production, exchange, and investment” (35).
McCarthy writes, “… capitalist democracies pursue stabilizing interventions that overcome capitalism’s own anarchic and self-destructive tendencies” (35).
Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal is perhaps the clearest example of “stabilizing interventions,” and we have many vestiges of it with us today (at least for now); for instance, Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (Social Security), which has saved millions of people from poverty, and the National Labor Relations Act, which encouraged collective bargaining and protected workers who sought to organize unions. Later interventions protected people from discrimination and injury at their jobs. Others benefited everyone, not just workers, by protecting clean air and clean water from the capitalist penchant for polluting landscapes. The Bureau of Consumer Protection is one. Medicare and Medicaid are popular interventions. The Affordable Care Act is another.
However, since his election, Trump has been removing (or attempting to remove) many of the guardrails that keep capitalism from producing the anarchy and self-destruction McCarthy discusses.
Although capitalist interests may dominate U.S. politics, they have been kept in check, to some degree, by other interests, since until recently, the United States had a functioning democracy. McCarthy says these checks ultimately make capitalism sustainable, saving it from itself. He writes:
Sometimes what capitalists want is not what they need. And therefore, to effectively stabilize capitalist social relations, capitalist states need to govern on behalf of capitalism [but] not necessarily at the behest of capitalists…. It must protect capitalist relations of exploitation and domination from the very conditions those relations produce while also ensuring capitalist relations remain dominant in the political economy (36).
Trump is throwing all of this out the window. In many ways, he is giving the capitalists what they want rather than what they need: diminishing workers’ rights to organize, reducing protections from injuries at the workplace, undermining protections from discrimination, removing environmental regulations to allow more pollution of the water and the air, etc.
Promising great wealth for everyone, Trump is setting the capitalists loose while providing nothing for workers. While claiming to be their champion, he is making them more vulnerable.
In addition to making workers physically, emotionally, and financially vulnerable, his policies make their lives more precarious by many of his other decisions — closing Job Corps, which provides vocational training; closing down the Federal Emergency Management Agency; limiting information on disease outbreaks and rationing vaccinations against deadly diseases, etc.
If McCarthy is right, this may result in a deep crisis. Capitalism creates “monsters that it cannot fully control,” and it is dependent upon bureaucratic and democratic governance to be kept in check. Those monsters “also have the capacity to harm the thing that brought them into existence — that is, capitalism itself” (36).
A healthy capitalist system cannot be sustained by a nation of disempowered, unemployed, stressed, poisoned, ill, or abused workers.
