(Photo: Emiliano / Flickr)Reasonable conversation about capitalism is possible again. Debates about its strengths and weaknesses resume. The United States’ post-1950 taboo against honestly evaluating capitalism finally is fading. The public increasingly ignores over-the-top celebrations of capitalism as humanity's peak achievement, God's choice, perpetual prosperity generator or guarantor of individual freedom. Politicians, journalists and academics could stop their uncritical cheerleading for capitalism, although most still pay their bills that way.
The reasons are many. Capitalism no longer "delivers the goods" to most Americans. With consumer debt already high, more borrowing can no longer postpone hard times. The "American Dream" slips farther out of reach. As Cold War memories recede, labels like socialism or communism no longer stifle debate. Destroyed cities like Detroit; students with unsustainable debts; declining wages, benefits and job security; and millions unemployed or foreclosed - to them, the usual rationalizations of capitalism seem hollow and ridiculous.
This July's national survey found 26 percent of Americans believing that capitalism is "not working too well" and another 16 percent that capitalism is "not working at all well." Imagine the consequences if a new political party arose to represent those 42 percent by demanding basic changes in the economic system.
However, that survey and resumed debates about capitalism have not yet faced or solved a shared problem. Widespread confusion and disagreement surround what capitalism means and thus what exactly "is not working." This situation weakens the clarity and appeal of solutions offered by capitalism's critics.
A two-dimensional definition of capitalism - as private property plus markets - prevailed for the past 150 years. It neatly contrasted socialism or communism as public property and planning. Privately owned enterprises producing goods and services and free market exchanges of resources and products defined capitalism. State-owned and -operated enterprises and government-planned resource and product distributions defined socialism or communism. Those definitions' inadequacies should have been obvious. They persisted likely because they served leaders in both systems well.
Private capitalists and their supporters demonize government regulations, taxes and public services they oppose as socialism or communism and equate them with atheism, revolution, violence and dictatorship. The old definitions work for them. Keynesians and social democrats advocate government intervention to preserve capitalism by offsetting its excesses and flaws. Because they fear being called communists, they use the old definition (that of communism being total state ownership and planning) to reject communism emphatically. Leaders in countries such as the Soviet Union and China - products and custodians of "revolutions against capitalism" - defined their economies as opposites, negations of capitalism. Polarized definitions - capitalism as private property and markets and socialism or communism as public property and planning - usefully emphasize their difference and distance from capitalism.
Those polarized definitions are now being challenged and displaced. This is partly because of their close associations with socialist and communist economies that imploded and capitalist economies languishing in deep crises. Searches for alternatives to both systems uncovered the old definitions' flaws. New agendas for effective economic change begin with different definitions.
Definitions focused on private versus public property distinguish capitalist from socialist economies poorly. For example, the 1917 Soviet revolution guaranteed private property in land - the agricultural economy's key resource - to millions of peasants. De facto private property comprised the "family plots" alongside collectivized agriculture after 1930. Soviet-style socialisms often did not "abolish" private property. Likewise capitalist economies often did not abolish public property: postal systems, utilities, schools, transport systems, credit agencies and many other sectors remained public enterprises. ...
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