Now it is true that competition among capitalist firms forces them–whether the agents who run them like it or not–to try to maximize profit. It’s also true that this competition forces capitalists to take a large portion of that profit and re-invest in expanded production, since a firm that fails to do this–other things equal–will tend to lose out to firms that do. This often leads capitalist firms to try to look for technological innovations which will lower costs and increase output–all the better to accumulate more profit than competitors. But that is where the link between capitalist production and innovation ends. There is no general sense in which capitalism can be said, abstractly, to be “innovative”. It puts pressures on certain specific classes to try to secure very specific kinds of innovations–just as it creates pressure to avoid (or even to destroy) other kinds of innovations. The innovations capitalism creates incentives for are those that maximize profit–e.g. those which reduce labor costs, increase output, and so on. There is no necessary link between this kind of innovation and the kind of innovation that improves human well-being and creates a more sustainable world. In fact, capitalism creates massive barriers to innovations that could have the potential to vastly improve our lives and save the environment–all because they are not profitable at all, or not profitable in the short term, or because they actually threaten existing profits. The intuitive pull derives from the fact that some alternatives to “competition” require that we embrace unfairness, punish the diligent, and reward the undeserving. There is something to this idea inasmuch as there clearly are–and even socialists concede this much–specific contexts in which competition is a good thing, where it would be unfair not to reward the “winner”, and so on. For example, there are many sports-related contexts–here the “context” is defined by the particular rules of the game or practice–where we would reject any alternative to fair competition. So competition isn’t inherently bad and we may even prefer it in certain specific contexts–games, contests, awards and honors, music and film auditions, etc. So, the ideological move here isn’t to invoke competition per se, but to vastly over-extend it to all spheres of social life, i.e. to assume that competitive interactions are the model for all human interactions. You’ll notice, of course, that even many liberals accept this move and couch their claims for redistribution in the language of “leveling the playing field.” This accepts the competitive-game metaphor but rejects the idea that the players are equally prepared to play. But, pace liberals, it is anything but obvious that competition is desirable outside of the rather specific contexts I named above. It strikes me as rather perverse to think of decisions that have profound effects on people’s lives–and on the future of the planet!–on the model of a fair game. “Who should be granted access to medical care?”… “I don’t know, why don’t we have a big ping-pong tournament and whoever makes it to the finals gets health insurance… The rules of the game are fair, aren’t they? And winners deserve to be rewarded, don’t they?” -- pink-scare.blogspot/2012/07/ecology-technological-innovation-and.html
Posted on: Sat, 10 Aug 2013 22:25:31 +0000
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