ALL YOU CAN EAT: GREED, LUST AND THE NEW CAPITALISM
By Linda McQuaig
Surveying the economic changes that led to the final extermination of the
English peasantry in the eighteenth century, the historian Eric Hobsbawm describes
farmers as faced with a "distinctly hard bargain." The old traditional
system, though inefficient and oppressive, was still a system of
"considerable social certainty and, at a most miserable level of some
economic security; not to mention that it was hallowed by custom and
tradition." Capitalism, on the other hand, was hardly an unmixed blessing
for those who lived on the land. "Altogether the introduction of liberalism
on the land was like some sort of silent bombardment which shattered the social
structure he had always inhabited and left nothing in its place but the rich: a
solitude called freedom."
It was an important moment, marking the thaw of the "great frozen
ice-cap of the world’s traditional agrarian systems and rural social
relations" in order to free "the fertile soil of economic
growth." And it is this same historical background that is front and center
in Linda McQuaig’s new book All You Can Eat.
What McQuaig is after this time out is the "new capitalism," a
force she identifies with the extreme form of liberalism that has dominated the
world economy since roughly 1980 (product of the Thatcher and Reagan
revolutions). This new capitalism (along with the "new market
economy," the "new materialism", the "new greed" and
other things) is contrasted to both the old period of restrained, regulated
capitalism of the early post-war period and the pre-capitalist economy of
England.
In making her case McQuaig draws heavily on the work of economic historian
Karl Polanyi, whose work The Great Transformation describes the triumph
of capitalism and market economies. Society, defined as people working together
for common goals (that is, a common good), takes a back seat under capitalism to
Homo Economicus: the totally selfish materialist assumed by neo-classical
economics. People and nature are turned into the commodities of labour and real
estate. The right to private property becomes the most sacred and inviolable of
all human rights.
McQuaig’s point in introducing so much historical material is to show
(after Polanyi) that there is nothing natural or inevitable about capitalism and
a market economy. Human beings are not limited to narrow considerations of
self-interest, but are primarily social animals whose natural interest is in
preserving their communities and the environment. It is capitalism and the
"free market" that have to be enforced by law. As Polanyi has it:
"While laissez-faire economy was the product of deliberate state action,
subsequent restrictions on laissez-faire started in a spontaneous way.
Laissez-faire was planned; planning was not." Historically, what we have
wanted is protection from the market, an institution capable (in Polanyi’s
words) of "annihilating the human and natural substance of society,"
and one which, left alone, "would have physically destroyed man and
transformed his surroundings into a wilderness."
All You Can Eat is both a highly readable survey of some very general
points about human nature and a welcome effort at bringing Polanyi up-to-date.
But, like McQuaig’s other books, it sometimes relies too heavily on rhetoric
to make its points without presenting enough factual data. A stronger case, for
example, needs to be made for the failure of IMF and World Bank policies in the
Third World. And while she does her best to both popularize and personalize her
account, as she did with James Tobin and the Tobin tax in The Cult of
Impotence, she also overstates her case on occasion. It is simply not true,
for one thing, that Polanyi’s work "has been largely ignored in
mainstream circles." I would imagine The Great Transformation is a
far more popular work today, outside of a handful of right-wing think-tanks,
than Frederich von Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom.
The age of transformation was also the beginning of modern politics. Oddly
enough, using the language of the day McQuaig would be considered an
eighteenth-century Tory. The Whigs were the great merchants and landowners who
promoted laissez-faire economics, while the Tories stood for a traditional order
based less on individual rights than on social responsibilities.
Both sides continue to think they are on the side of natural rights, a
natural order and natural law. And they are both right. The real difference is
in their view of what that nature is. McQuaig characterizes the Whig
interpretation of nature as being dominated by lust and greed. That seems harsh,
but then you have to wonder: Is it an assessment with which they would disagree?
Notes:
Review first published online January 18, 2002.
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