Capitalism: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

Capitalism:  The Good, The Bad, The Ugly.

The following insights  have been gleaned from Capitalism and Christians:  Tough Gospel Challenges in a Troubled World Economy by Arthur Jones by Arthur Jones, 1992.  Jones is Catholic and he draws heavily from Catholic social teaching.  His academic background is economics; his experience lies in writing and editing for business and financial magazines.

In addition to writing on business, finance and economics, Jones has also spent years writing about poverty.  In addition to the marketplace, an ethical base is needed.

Jones asserts that "though I love business, . . . I don't like capitalism."  Jones likes small and medium sized businesses, but he disapproves of modern, large, corporate capitalism as practiced in modern America.

For Jones, much of corporate capitalism, is ugly capitalism, oppressive capitalism.  It is: "a) detrimental to the common good, b) injurious to the planet [pollution], c) but, worst of all, it promotes a false god, materialism, in the form of personal affluence and social success."  Ugly, corporate capitalism takes resources from the poor, dominates and damages all other social institutions in society including family and religious ones, and seeks legitimation from Judeo-Christian values.  Corporations dominate the world economy; and they widen income and wealth inequality.

What are the alternatives to ugly, corporate capitalism?  Certainly not ugly communism.  But how about cooperatives such as is found among the Basque in northern Spain.  They founded a cooperative movement called Mondragon.  Mondragon was founded after the Spanish Civil War by a Catholic priest.  In 1987, there were 172 worker owned cooperatives that employed 20,000 people:

"Mondragon embraces ninety-four industrial cooperatives that manufacture everything from machine tools to refrigerators to auto parts; nine agribusinesses from cattle raising to forestry; seventeen housing cooperatives and forty-four educational facilities; a supermarket chain with two hundred and twenty-five outlets, plus research and development assistance centers.  During the 1981-1986 recession, not one job was lost---workers took home eighty percent of their previous pay, worked longer hours, but they were doing it for themselves, their community and their fellow workers.'

Mondragon is based on Catholic social teaching.

More on economic inequality.  What explains America's current racial wealth divide?  America's top expert on our racial wealth gap, Thomas Shapiro, has done it again.  See the review of his brand new 2017 book titled The Asset Value of Whiteness in the Chuck Collins weekly blog  inequality@1ps-dc.org

See also an older but very good book, 1954, Money and Power by Jacques Ellul; the following are excerpts of a review that I wrote:

One cannot Christianize the rich and the powerful.  First, they will have to repent, change and restitute.  "The Communist party is a typical example of the rich and powerful as described in the Scripture.  It is the party that uses the poor, quite a different thing from being a party of the poor."

"The Bible plants the poor in the very center of truth and Life.  Mt. 25 is God's question to us; it demands a response.  God adopts the poor in order to put us all in question.  The church needs to continually hear this question because the church is largely the church of the comparatively rich."

"Scripture shows us that the rich do not like this question at all, and this is why they do not like the poor at all.  The rich build their wealth on the poverty of the poor; they are rich and they deprive the poor of their wages (James 2:2-6 and 5:1-6)."

The rich emphasize their rights, but neglect their responsibilities.  The rich put property rights ahead of people responsibility.  The rich need the poor to humanize them.