Technically, there is room for democratic improvement for capitalism, which might bring betterment to society, but capitalism is very close to its limits. Capitalism is not a good enough system. Capitalism is immoral. Capitalism is based on the privileges of authorities and the powerlessness of ordinary people. Privileges are unjust and create alienation. As long as there are injustice and alienation in society, it cannot be right. Capitalism is not a rational enough system because it requires too much unnecessary work and excessively exhausts natural resources. Capitalism cannot establish a stable production and therefore cannot form a stable society. That is the reason capitalism cannot prosper. That is the reason capitalism is a bad enough system and should be replaced. But in today’s society, no idea exists that might remove capitalism. There is no alternative to capitalism. Good leaders who try to restrain capitalism by reforms cannot achieve significant success because capitalism cannot be improved enough to form a good and sane society. After good but unsuccessful leaders, disappointed people often choose a strong right-wing leader who makes the situation worse.
Capitalism suffers in production-saturated societies but prospers well in scarce societies. That is why capitalism often searches for help in wars in which it destroys everything and practically runs its development from the beginning. Capitalism may always withdraw from the crisis; however, one should not think about how to help capitalism survive, but rather about the creation of a far better system for all people. Such a system must take power from authorities and give it to the people. I have proposed such a system, but it is so different from all existing models that people cannot readily accept it even though they would all live far better.
The New Social System: Humanism
All political and economic measures, which I have mentioned so far, can be applied in capitalism. The new system that I have proposed accepts the model of the market economy. Private companies will continue to operate in the same way as today. Significant changes will occur in public companies.
In capitalism, the opinion is built that states are lousy businessmen. In fact, so far that is relatively true. The reason can be found in more privileged working positions of workers in the state sector concerning the ones in private companies. Following the philosophy that inadequately interprets the working rights of workers, jobs in the state sector are generally more protected than in private companies. The workers can hardly lose their jobs even if their work performance is weak, contrary to the workers in privately owned companies. Privileged positions create the lower efficiency of state companies, and as a result, the state companies lose the productivity battle against private enterprises. However, by the structure of production, the state-owned companies are hardly different from the capitalist system of production, and therefore the result of work in state-owned companies should not be worse than the privately owned companies. However, it may be much better. The state-owned companies will organize new production based on more market than capitalism can afford. In the first place, a permanently open labour market will be established, and that will make the economy more productive than the private companies may achieve.
The new division of work is a necessity
Privileges of all kinds must be put to an end. A good economy requires the complete abolition of privileged work positions. One should protect the economic existence of workers rather than jobs. The reform of the new economy will firstly affect the division of labour. There is no fairer or better distribution of employment than an open market competition of workers for every position. The worker who envisages and offers the highest productivity for any public work post at any time will get the job. Productivity could be measured by earned money, by quality and quantity of produced goods, or by the productivity evaluation of workers by other workers or clients. A worker who offers more profits, manufactured goods, better, cleaner, or cheaper production will get the job. That is an idea. How to make such changes to bring the most possible advantages and the least possible disadvantages to society is just a technical problem. I have defined a pretty good solution in my book Humanism, but that will probably have to be more developed by practice.
This kind of labour division naturally requires equality of the number of work posts with the number of workers. Otherwise, it could lead to unnecessary fights for jobs. The new system will make full employment a reality. If the creation of new work positions is not needed, full employment will be achieved by reducing work hours in all companies proportionately to the unemployment rate.
Also, under the new system, each public job will be equally desirable. This will be achieved by giving the job with defined productivity to the worker who demands the lowest price for current labour and, consequently, a lower income. The price of current work will be one of the factors that determine the height of the salaries. Therefore, better jobs will realize relatively lower incomes and worse jobs will be compensated through relatively higher incomes. This way, the labour market will set objective heights of salaries and will balance the interest in all job posts. Since the workers themselves will be setting the price of their current labour, by the same token, they will be the most satisfied with their earnings.
The system would have no meaning if the workers, on their way to succeed greater competitive powers, offer productivities that they would not be able to realize. Today’s politicians do precisely that for example. The new economy will form a very effective system of accountability for the realization of productivities workers offer so that they would not dare offer productivities they cannot accomplish. I will talk more about that later in this essay.
No economy can be more productive than the one where the best available worker gets each job. Such an economy will easily become significantly more productive than the capitalist one so that capitalism will be forced to recede. Also, the workers will no longer be interested in working for private enterprises where they do not have enough freedom to choose jobs or decide on their incomes, nor do they have the opportunity to cut into the profits. In the new system workers will participate in the distribution of profits, which as a rule is not the case in private companies. Soon after this system is implemented, private enterprises will be forced to withdraw and join the new system.
Defining the value of man’s productive power is a necessity
To create a good society, one should define and accept all values that are or should be, relevant to the community. Then, one will need to determine which of these values each person possesses. The sum of all values that a person creates throughout his life, presented by a numerical value, may be called human productive power.
The value of human productive power will incorporate, firstly, capitalist values, such as real estate, money, shares, and all assets that capitalism recognizes as valuable. In fact, this measure will enable simple free association of private enterprises. Owners of private companies will receive stocks for their ownership of the integrated company. They will not be forced to merge their companies, but they will do it under heavy pressure from higher productivities of public companies. Besides it, they will learn that a greater merged company would be more stable to conjuncture changes. The joined owners of companies would realize smaller profits in good businesses, but also smaller losses in bad businesses because large companies will cover the disturbances of earnings on the market. The production of such companies will be very stable because it will be increasingly based on customer orders. If owners of private companies today could have an option to join such a company they would most likely do it because that would save more of their capital value in the frequently arising crises of capitalism.
With human productive power, the establishment of an effective system of responsibilities of workers will be possible. In publicly owned companies, workers will share profits proportionally to the numerically determined responsibility they propose for their work. This is an idea for which I just hint on here. It cannot be understood well enough without reading and analyzing the book Humanism. The same goes for most of the new ideas I am presenting here. The higher responsibility will naturally realize a larger share in profit, in the case that the company’s profit increases. Such profit will now be expressed in a value that reflects the workers’ human productive power. And vice versa, in case of production losses, workers who propose higher responsibility for their work will realize more substantial losses in value representing their productive power.