The Utopian World Championship

Hank Preiser: Redirecting the Global Market Economy Toward Bellamy's Quest for aJust Society

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Summary

This essay examines the positive aspects of a global market economy against inherent flaws tending to undermine its sustainablity.

Mounting problems on the horizon will require major attention to shore up a system not in equilibrium with human needs of the majority of peoples in the global society. Among the more pressing concerns and their associated costs are:
• Servicing debt (International Monetary Fund and the World Bank)
• Military policing of uncooperative nations
• Increasing worker income and benefits
• Caring for elderly, handicapped and destitute persons
• Fighting urban and white collar crime
• Safeguarding a deteriorating environment.
• Exhaustion of natural resources
• Idleness of large segments of the population
• Widespread civil unrest
• Epidemic worldwide health problems
• Proliferation of firearms in the civilian population.
At issue here is whether or not unrestrained capitalism can be modified by harnessing its positive energies for the common good. By adding some democratic socialistic concepts, as brilliantly expounded by Edward Bellamy, to the present capitalistic structure, can we remove the brutalizing effects of unregulated competition and substitute the humanizing benefits of a cooperative society? It is fairly obvious that the productive capability of capitalism is peer to none, but the distribution of its output is distorted and destructive to the human spirit. For the engine of capitalism to run smoothly and efficiently, increasing supply must be matched by increasing demand (aggregate demand of consumers, governments and business investments) to keep the system in balance. Some fine tuning is required, a difficult but not impossible task. It is also time to reassess the duties, responsibilities, and performance of the modern corporation and its expected role as a “good citizen.”

The paper summarizes the major components of Bellamy’s economic model from his most famous novel, Looking Backward, a model which is further refined and amplified in Equality. In the discussion that will follow, some of the factors that promote or impede the implementation of Bellamy’s proposals will be addressed.
Bellamy’s overarching timeless message is that when humanity by common consent learns to share its labors and resulting wealth equitably and live in harmony with the natural environment of the planet, abundance and leisure for all can be realized, in the framework of a peaceful and civil global society.

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Fukyama examines the accelerating trend of free-market capitalism in the global economy and concludes that most governments of the world are adopting capitalism as the primary driving force toward the logical endpoint of a free society modeled on Western liberal democracy. Wagar in his work, The Next Three Futures, projects, like Fukyama, that in the near future the dominance of capitalism and the widespread general acceptance of representative democracy will continue and expand to most countries of the world. Wagar predicts that by the second decade of the 21st Century, all of humankind will be traveling along the road of globalized liberal democratic capitalism, hereinafter termed global market economy (GME).

It will mean radically different things for different segments of the world system; for the privileged classes and races and their loyal hangers-on in the core countries [most advanced industrialized democratic countries], it will be a golden or at least silver age. For small numbers of affluent people in the semi-peripheral and peripheral countries, life will also be sweet. For the rest of humankind, as much as half the population of core countries and as much as nine-tenths or more in the periphery, life will be toilsome and bare.

The positive attributes of a vibrant capitalism, by technological breakthroughs, exploitation of new markets, and exhilaration from free competition in a liberal democratic setting will push the system along for years. However, the inherent shortcomings and inequalities of technological capitalism contain the seeds of its ultimate self-destruction. As Wagar points out:
Capitalism is good for winners, but it also produces losers, whole populations that lose the game of high-stakes, high-tech or high-speed economic growth.

Other mounting problems on the horizon will require major attention to shore up a system not in equilibrium with human needs of the majority of peoples in the global society. Among the more pressing concerns and their associated costs are:
▪ Servicing debt (International Monetary Fund and The World Bank)
▪ Military policing of uncooperative nations
▪ Increasing worker income and benefits
▪ Caring for elderly, handicapped and destitute persons
▪ Fighting urban and white collar crime
▪ Safeguarding a deteriorating environment.
To which must be added:
▪ Exhaustion of natural resources
▪ Idleness of large segments of the population
▪ Widespread civil unrest
▪ Epidemic worldwide health problems
▪ Proliferation of firearms in the civilian population.

 The decreasing median wage of technologically advanced nations is undercutting aggregate demand for the enormous supply of goods from countries glutted with low-cost labor. Remunerative labor and full employment, as currently defined, are on the wane especially in manufacturing jobs requiring repetitive operations in fabrication and assembly. This is due to the rapid rate of technical improvements in plant capability (mechanization and efficiency) coupled with increased worker productivity (output per man-hr.). The same is true of plants producing large quantities of basic raw materials. It has been estimated that in the next decade most of the world’s goods and services will be produced by only 20-30% of the world’s labor supply, creating a short fall of purchasing power to consume the available goods.

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