How do we discuss economics in our society? Consider this from Michael Harrington’s Socialism: Past and Future (1989):
“But those Keynesian concepts and statistics are value-laden. “Gross National Product” is, after all, truly a gross measure and certainly a very capitalist one. It assumes that any activity that yields a profit – be it the production of carcinogenic cigarettes or automobile engines that contribute to acid rain – is to be given a positive weight. If the GNP goes up, no matter what its composition, it is thought that the society is advancing. But that advance could well be a stride toward catastrophe, for example, toward a greenhouse effect that will threaten life itself.” (p. 217 Arcade Publishing 2011 edition)
This quotation here is evidence of how biased the culture is in favour of capitalism, how ignorant (to be generous) are those allegations from the Right that we are too socialist, when even the language of economics is geared away from socialism towards the values of capitalism. Popular culture and corporate media do not discuss economics except in the terms that are useful to capitalism and imply that capitalist economics and economics in general are one and the same thing. Unless we see this and step out of the capitalist frame of reference, our discussions of economics will always be biased in favour of the wealthy and powerful, viewing the world through their eyes while assuming our approach is ideologically neutral.
In addition, the rhetoric of capitalism constantly portrays it as the wild and risk-taking swashbuckler of economic systems, the very opposite of life under Stalin, where “the basic decisions with regard to work, production, and consumption were made by a centralized bureaucracy” (226). Harrington continues:
“If, a believable joke reported, a Soviet pin factory was assigned a quota of so many tons of pins, it would turn out one monstrously large and unusable pin; and if it were told to produce a certain number of pins, it would achieve the numerical goal with a myriad of pins so thin that they were also useless.” (227)
It is easy enough to see the absurdity of such a practice. But is it indeed any more absurd than the GNP fetish Harrington in effect describes? We see here the Soviet and capitalist versions of what are essentially bureaucratic and robotic mentalities. Truly, Noam Chomsky’s frequent condemnation of both camps, with their managerial arrogance, is not misplaced.