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Have the Anticapitalists Reached Harvard Business School? [nytimes.com]

 

By Emma Goldberg, Photo: Hannah Yoon/The New York Times, November 28, 2022

At Harvard Business School, inside a seminar room with a smattering of button-down shirts and puffy fall jackets, a group of future corporate managers were talking about capitalism. What makes capitalism truly and purely capitalism? What are its essential components? Property rights. Financial markets.

“Maybe this is almost so foundational that it’s too much to put on the board — but scarcity?” said Andrew Gibbs, 32, a second-year student who came to Harvard by way of the military. “Would it be capitalism if people were comfortable?”

Prof. Debora Spar, who teaches the widely sought-after course “Capitalism and the State,” turned to Mr. Gibbs with the eye glimmer of an instructor who knows the conversation is about to get heated. “Would you go so far as to say a necessary condition for capitalism is scarcity, which is going to drive inequality?”

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The status quo — where already huge corporate profits and untaxed superfluous wealth are maintained or increased while many people are denied even life's basic necessities — will end up hurting big business’s own monetary interests. A healthy, strong and large consumer base — and not just very wealthy consumers — is needed.

Or is the unlimited-profit objective/nature somehow irresistible, including the willingness to simultaneously allow an already squeezed consumer base to continue so — or even squeezed further?

Maximizing profits by risking the wellbeing of people will likely always be a significant part of the nature of the big business beast. And successive governments mostly dare not intervene, lest they get labelled anti-business in our avidly capitalist culture — not to mention a blaring mainstream news-media that’s naturally critical of incumbent governments, especially in regards to job and capital transfers and economic weakening.

Meantime, corporate CEOs shrug their shoulders and defensively say their job is to protect shareholders’ bottom-line interests. The shareholders, meanwhile, shrug their shoulders while defensively stating that they just collect the dividends and that the CEOs are the ones to make the moral and/or ethical decisions.

Thus real progressive change has very little or no hope of succeeding in our virtual corporate rule or corp-ocracy.

The rich/powerful basically have always had the police and military ready to foremost protect their power/money interests, even over the basic needs of the masses. Even today, the police and military can, and probably would, claim they must bust heads to maintain law and order as a priority; therefore, the absurdly unjust inequities and inequalities can persist.

I can imagine there even were/are lessons learned by Big Power/Money from those successful social/labor uprisings, a figurative How to Hinder Progressive Revolutions 101, perhaps. [And I learned all of this without reading my gold-leaf copy of the sacred Capitalist Manifesto.]

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