A Pound of Flesh

by Stephen Fleischman

Interest and Profit.

They fought about it in Shakespeare’s time.

Shakespeare wrote a play about it. A character emerged depicting the essence of it. Shylock in “The Merchant of Venice”—a portrait of capitalism, in the period of transition from the feudal system.

Can you take a pound of flesh and spill not a drop of blood? That was the restriction Portia, the self-proclaimed lawyer, tried to impose on Shylock in Shakespeare’s play. The pound of flesh was the interest Antonio would have to pay if he didn’t return the 3 thousand ducats he borrowed on time. Portia excoriated Shylock’s capitalist greed while defending his right to be a Jew, in a time of intense anti-Semitism.

David M. Boje, Professor of Management at New Mexico State University, says of the play, “this is a critique applicable to today’s global corporate model of financial capitalism …

“…Shakespeare brilliantly portrays a conflict between courtly (feudal) usurer’s capitalism and bourgeois merchant’s capitalism, the triumph of the new forms of adventuring over the old in the 16th century.”

In those times, usury (excessive interest) or even a normally accepted amount was considered a very bad sin in certain Islamic and Christian nations. Today, it’s the normal way of doing business and is one of the pillars of the capitalist system. Money making money.

However, money is only a medium of exchange. It has no intrinsic value. It replaces a barter system. All classical economists, including Adam Smith and David Ricardo, recognize some form of the labor theory of value where the value of a commodity is determined by the amount of labor-power that goes into producing it.

Karl Marx brought a new paradigm to the understanding of capitalism with the hypothesis that “profit is derived from the surplus-value that is extracted when workers put in more labor than is necessary to pay the cost of hiring their labor-power’.

This led him directly to the concept of the class struggle, the relations of production between capital and labor. Capitalism can only exist through the exploitation of the working class.

We’re in another period of transition, today—the next stage in our evolving economic system. Will it be socialism or something else?

Can we imagine a society where interest and profit do not exist?

Perhaps it was the road not taken when societies emerged from feudalism, with the lord dominant over the serf. Or even earlier, before the formation of class systems when human societies consisted of hunters and gathers, where members of the tribe were equal in some form of primitive communism.

Well, let’s see. The first thing we’ll have to learn, to achieve such a state on a higher level, is to bring out the best in people, not the worst—and to do that we must recognize that human nature is complex and is made up of both.

Compassion and a desire to serve one’s fellow man is as strong a drive in people as is greed. For a society, the stratagem must be to make the common good the standard behavioral form. The competition is in doing the best for mankind—rather than, “as long as I get mine, the devil take the hindmost”.

In the context of our country, in the failing state of capitalism, how do we save ourselves? Instead of making some pacts with the future, we are clinging to the failures of the past.

Our current attempts at health care reform are a good example.

In a show at providing universal health care for the nation, the people’s representatives dare not let these toxic words—socialized medicine or public option—cross their lips. Apparently, governments are no longer here to help our citizens. Powerful corporate entities, known as the health insurance industry, a part of the oligarchy that runs this country, won’t allow it. They literally own a good many of our Congressmen and Senators, enough of them to stop any kind of meaningful health care reform. Citizens are brainwashed into thinking that what helps the insurance industry helps them.

You can fool some of the people some of the time.

The rest of us are fighting back. The fight won’t be complete until the money changers are driven from the temple. If you can live with the mixed metaphor, we, the people, must take back our Congress, elect legislators that will represent us, not the special interests. Then, we might feel that we have a government that works.

If not, history will do it for us.

Instead of “The Merchant of Venice”, we will have to look to Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” or “Richard IIII” for a more violent solution.

One way or another, in Marx’s own words, “Capitalism will dig its own grave.”

This is no longer about Democrats vs Republicans.

It is no longer about right versus left. This is about corporate power versus ordinary people.

It’s about capitalism and corporate power. It is now perfectly clear that BOTH parties, all three branches of government, and the fourth estate are controlled by corporate power.

Corporate power versus ordinary people. For my generation it began with the Kennedy and King assassinations and the Vietnam War. We gained some ground for a few years in the 1970′s with the impeachment of Nixon, but Carter failed in spite of his good intentions and it went viral in the 1980′s with the election of Ronald Reagan. Since then our entire culture has been hollowed out by it. We now have two generations that have been educated under the Reagan/Bush/Clinton/Bush corporatist educational philosophy. Civics, Good Government, and the history of the Labor Movement has slowly but surely disappeared from school curricula. Reading by phonics went away suddenly in the mid eighties and was replaced by Whole Language, a dismal failure, that left a decade of classes of 1980′s and 1990′s school children behind the curve on reading and writing. And with G.W. Bush, “No Child Left Behind” put the failure of our educational system on steroids. I’m a baby-boomer. I was in the high school class of ’69 (the best class;). We were taught that Government is good. Our kids, and their kids, have been taught that Government is bad. We learned about the Red Scares, the Palmer Raids, the Army/McCarthy Hearings, and the Haymarket Riot. We learned who Joe Hill, and Paul Robeson, and Thurgood Marshall were. Our kids and grandkids have not been taught about those things in school. Thirty years have gone by. The me-first, sink-or-swim, liberalism-is-bad, Government-is-bad, greed-is-good thinking has now been instilled in a majority of our population. It’s assumed to be the norm by two generations who don’t remember the world without computers, internet, and cable TeeVee.

Our manufacturing sectors no longer exist. We’ve gone from the largest importer of raw material and the largest exporter of finished goods in the 1950′s, 60′s and 70′s, to the largest exporter of raw materials and the largest importer of finished goods today. The American middle class experienced 40 years of growth after World War Two. Since the mid 1980′s, wages have declined in spite of the vastly increased productivity of the workforce brought about by the digital revolution, and the stability of the middle class is gone. Seventy-five years of labor protections brought to us by the blood, sweat, and tears of generations of union organizers and labor activists have been broken. Our bread-and-butter jobs are gone and won’t be coming back if the corporatists have anything to say about it.

Why do corporatists worship the memory of Ronald Reagan? Among other things it’s because Reagan and his followers revolutionized the way politicians communicate with voters. Cable TeeVee became widespead and began to replace broadcast. The Fairness Doctrine, which required broadcasters to broadcast content in the public interest was abolished. Electronic media, which was then nascent, was conglomerated and brought under tight corporate control. The News Divisions of the large broadcast networks were taken out from behind the firewall of the Fairness Doctrine and put under the umbrella of the Entertainment Divisions. Roone Arledge, a sports broadcast producer, took control of ABC News. When “Cable News” became popular in the late 1980′s all bets were off. The news was officially canceled and has for the past 15 years been replaced by “info-tainment”, which was once called “bread-and-circuses”. The motion picture “Network”, produced in 1979, was eerily prescient. Our entire population has been dumbed down to the point where they will now seem to swallow any crap that comes out of their corporate TeeVee, including the myth of Barack Obama, who has shown himself to be just another player in the corporate game.

Nothing will change unless there is honest campaign finance reform and corporate money is taken out of politics. But the Supreme Court has ruled that corporations are persons and that for corporations, money equals speech. Corporations have been deemed to be persons and granted protections under the First Amendment, but somehow they can still buy and sell other corporations. I don’t get that. Where I come from they call that slavery. But overturning corporate personhood will require a constitutional amendment and/or the overturn of at least two Supreme Court decisions, and I don’t see it happening anytime soon. Our entire government is now under tight corporate control. And don’t get me started on the environment, the climate, the wars, the torture, the militarized police, and all that other stuff.

Capitalism is a great system when proper tax and trade policies are enacted and the marketplace is properly regulated. We know this from our history. Karl Marx may have been wrong about the scalability of Communism, but he was dead right when he described Capitalism as an unsustainable system when left unchecked. If left on it’s own it will grow like a cancer. We are now in the cancer stage of Capitalism. Our economic and political systems are strangled by it and it is killing itself. It is eating itself from the inside and it will eventually collapse if Government does not take control and make it work.

Hopefully our species will survive to see that happen.

(crosposted at Daily Kos)