The TV series The Sopranos suggests
sometimes that the only difference between big business and organized
crime is the mob's willingness to use murder to accomplish its ends
"Capitalism is organized crime." the thought keeps coming back to me.
Capitalism is a way of organizing crime in such a way that it can
masquerade as something altogether different.
But
at bottom, they are the same. To understand this is to see that
capitalism cannot be reformed; it has to be transformed into something
else.
If we are going to see the crime hiding in capitalism, we
have to have a clear idea of what crime is. What would a criminal moral
philosophy look like? Listen to Norman Bucklew, serving a life-sentence
for murder and armed robbery in Leavenworth:
I'm a
thief. I don't think robbing a bank is wrong. If I want to take the
money in a bank, then I'm going to take it, and if you catch me and put
me in prison, I'm not going to sniffle about being in the pen. But
don't try to tell me what I did was wrong?
I don't
respect the law because laws are for people who are weak and need them.
If someone comes into my house and takes something, I'm not going to
call a cop. I'm going to deal with it, and if I'm not man enough to get
it back, then that guy has a right to take whatever he wants because I
don't really deserve to own it. That's how society should be. If
justice needs to be applied, I will apply it, and the reason that I
have a right to apply it is because I have the power to do it. Having
the power gives me permission.? As a child I was taught not to be a
stool pigeon. Don't tattle on other kids. I was taught if someone hits
you, you hit them back, and if they even think about hitting you again,
you make them never want to see you again..? I might die in prison, but
I'm not going to become an upstanding member of your society, because
in order to that I would have to become a stool pigeon and always run
to the cops, a coward afraid to settle my own problems without hiring a
lawyer?The purely criminal perspective, then, is that you have a right
to whatever you are strong enough to take and to hold on to. The only
limit to the exercise of power is an opposing power.
Now
imagine a society that lives according to this philosophy. One day a
new philosopher (named Thomas Hobbes) arises among them and points out
that the life they lead is a state of war. How can you enjoy the things
you have in your house when others are constantly trying to break in
and take them? How can you go out to get more and leave what you have
unprotected? How can you even go to sleep at night? Life under these
conditions turns out to be nasty, brutal and short. So the reasonable
thing to do would be to agree on a set of laws and institutions for
their enforcement which protect life and property. Instead of having to
risk your life applying your own justice, you turn justice over to the
state. You now have peaceful relations with your neighbors, instead of
war, because the State is now the only legitimate user of violent
coercion. In this way, the category of crime comes into existence.
Crime is the unlawful taking of things that belong to other people,
whether their lives or their property. Without the state and its laws,
nothing really belongs to anyone. Crime is now an intruder, something
the majority opposes and can declare war upon.
But has
crime really been pushed outside, or has it, instead, just been
organized? When people who lived as Norman Bucklew did agree to adopt
laws that let them sleep at night, it just means that they can carry on
in peace with the same purpose as before, namely to take away as much
as they can from each other, only now without the use of private
violence. It's really only the state of war made polite. Each
individual must still always be vigilant to avoid being evicted, fired
or bankrupted to someone else's profit. There is no common commitment
to the well-being of everyone; there is only the individual's
commitment to himself, regardless of the impact of his strivings on
others. This is, in essence, a society organized for the flourishing of
crime.
When we say this, what do we mean by "crime"? Crime is the
willingness to seize whatever one can get without consideration of the
effect of that seizure on the lives of others. It is a refusal to
cooperate and an insistence on competition. It is a willingness to rely
on coercion and deception to get what one wants. In this sense, every
large corporation is as criminal as Norman Bucklew and the Mafia. The
only difference is in their degree of organization.
Apologists
for capitalism say we owe nothing to each other just because we are
members of society. The basic norm of capitalist society is
self-sufficiency.
Most Americans, in fact, think they do have
social responsibilities to the needs of others. But the doctrine of
complete independence from others is a powerful idea in American
thought and it occasionally leaks out in unadulterated form. Bush's
Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill has wondered aloud whether Social
Security and Medicare are really necessary. "Able-bodied adults," he
said, "should save enough on a regular basis so that they can provide
for their own retirement and for that matter for their health and
medical needs." This man, it seems, agrees with Margaret Thatcher's
infamous remark, "There's no such thing as society." And in a way, they
are right: capitalism isn't so much a society as it is an anti-society
-- a system of organized crime. A real society, a legitimate society,
would, instead, be organized cooperation: society organized into forms
of cooperation aimed at the full and free development of all its
members.
Greetz NL m@rt1n
