John Minto: It's immoral to see people as resources, not humans

COMMENT

It has been amusing to see so many earnest columns published in the Herald extolling the virtues of capitalism and attempting to construct for it a moral or ethical framework.

One can safely bet that all the contributors are ensconced safely in the middle class or the upper echelons of our ruling elite. I cannot detect any contributions from the huge underclass that is now an established part of our capitalist society.

Attempts to construct a moral basis for capitalism must inevitably fail. It is based on private ownership of community assets and their development for private profit.

Becoming a capitalist is a simple case of having enough money to buy shares in a company that owns such assets and which employs people to produce goods and services from them and, in so doing, makes profits from both the assets and the work of the employees.

It is essentially a parasitic relationship between non-working shareholders and the people employed to add value to the assets owned. Looking out for oneself and becoming personally enriched are seen as the desirable ends.

The big majority, of course, never become shareholders but are employed at the lowest rates possible to add value for the non-working shareholders.

But the most fanciful notion put forward by contributors to this debate is that the economic base of capitalism is somehow synonymous with free speech and democracy.

Tales of Soviet-style communism are held up as spectres for anyone who dares to think otherwise.

The truth is clear on this point at least: under capitalism, democracy and free speech are tolerated only until they lead to a serious threat to the capitalist economic structure itself.

At this point what poses as democracy goes quickly out the window. Chile, Nicaragua and Venezuela are examples.

On another September 11 - 1973 this time - the democratically elected Government of Chile led by Salvador Allende was overthrown in a military coup led by the murderous dictator Pinochet. The Sandinista Government similarly faced armed overthrow, and today it is the turn of Venezuela.

Aside from being democratically elected, what these governments shared and what Venezuela continues to do today is to espouse not the abandonment of capitalism but putting in place a softer version in which there is a greater distribution of wealth in favour of those who do the work.

The United States was at the centre of each of these attacks on democracy. The CIA assisted the coup in Chile, funded the Contras to wage war against the Sandinista Government of Nicaragua, and is active in Venezuela to preserve capitalism from the redistribution of wealth.

I can see no other outcome if a genuinely left-wing government were elected here. It would be actively destabilised by business interests within and foreign governments without. It would be overthrown by force if those steps failed.

Democracy and free speech survive here just as long as the accumulation of wealth by a relatively small number of people is tolerated by those who have become impoverished.

The same could be said for some other forms of economic organisation around the world, but let's not pretend that capitalism has any inherent good - unless, of course, one thinks it is moral to deliver obscene wealth to a small minority but huge hardship to those who suffer as a consequence.

Over the past 20 years tens of thousands of people have been driven out of well-paid skilled and semi-skilled jobs by the removal of tariffs and the pursuit of so-called free trade. Huge numbers of people are now either unemployed, underemployed or suffer the new scourge of overemployment, whereby breadwinners may work 60 to 80 hours a week in a succession of low-paid jobs to provide for their families.

In these cases social distress has been imposed by a capitalist structure that values the accumulation of wealth in private hands above a decent standard of living for all.

Levels of real poverty in New Zealand are rising, as they are in all capitalist economies. In the US, 34 million people live in poverty while here 30 per cent of our children live in poverty - however one defines it. Whatever happened to a fair go for everyone?

Capitalism values people as an economic resource rather than as human beings, and therein lies its essential immoral character.

It would be good to think we might try to design our own economic system rather than debate the blueprints of other systems. What we need, of course, is one that works for members of the community, rather than members of the community becoming slaves to a system not of their making.

* John Minto is a spokesman for Global Peace and Justice, Auckland.