Culture and Life

by Rob Gowland

Waste, chaos and striped toothpaste

I have remarked before on the fact that capitalism is a damn 
silly system. And in saying this I am well aware that as a system 
it has made some capitalists filthy rich and given some 
corporations more wealth than many countries enjoy.

For the majority of the people, however, capitalism is a system 
not of sharing the wealth, but of sharing the poverty. Look at 
the colossal growth in credit card debt, as people try to stave 
off poverty by juggling debts and interest payments.

Even supporters of capitalism — sick, twisted creatures that 
some of them are — must acknowledge that it is a very wasteful 
system. So many companies crash and burn every week that the rate 
of business bankruptcies is one of the regular measures of the 
state of the (capitalist) economy.

When confronted with the large number of businesses that go belly 
up in any given period, capitalist pundits airily respond that 
roughly the same number of new companies started up in that 
period, as if this ludicrous situation made everything OK.

Consider the waste of resources, time, money and effort that is 
involved in this nonsensical way of doing things. I am told that 
every week in Sydney three new courier businesses are launched.

That's three lots of people replicating one another's efforts — 
designing and printing stationery, sign-writing their van 
(perhaps acquiring their van), placing ads in all the recommended 
spots, going around hunting up customers, keeping accounts and 
much more.

Usually they are guys working as couriers who decide to "go into 
business for themselves". After all, capitalist governments and 
finance institutions go out of their way to make it look dead 
easy to become an "entrepreneur".

But the truth is that it is not easy. Capitalism is not a system 
for making workers into capitalists. So every week three courier 
firms, that started out with high hopes, go under in the face of 
mounting debts.

And that's just couriers! All that wasted effort has to be 
multiplied by all the other short-lived businesses that crash and 
burn under capitalism.

But what else can we expect from a system whose essential method 
can only be described as trial and error on a huge scale?

Capitalism's main approach to meeting human needs is to wait for 
someone to figure out a way to make money from something that 
(almost coincidentally) people may need. If the profit margin is 
high enough, it will get produced and the need will be met.

Its other approach is to spend money on a campaign to convince 
people that something a capitalist already produces is in fact 
something people have a need for. Liked striped toothpaste.

Now let's be honest: striped toothpaste is the kind of product 
socialism probably would not have come up with. It's also 
probably true that the human race could well do without it.

Capitalism, on the other hand, cannot exist without that sort of 
product, a product that consumes raw materials, production 
processes, labour power, capital, etc, without advancing the 
human condition one iota.

There is hardly any aspect of capitalism as an economic system 
that does not display its essential chaos and waste. Plenty has 
already been written in these pages about the chaos of capitalist 
manufacturing in Australia, its under-utilisation of production 
capacity, its regular and hefty business failures, its flight 
offshore to countries with lower wages, and so on.

Let's turn instead to agriculture. The bulk of our primary 
produce must be exported, and various marketing boards have been 
set up to facilitate this.

However, despite the best efforts of these authorities, 
capitalism is still dependent on the chaos of "free competition", 
and hence is unable to maintain stable, long-term sales for our 
rural products.

Some years ago, faced with the failure of capitalism to provide 
Australian farmers with even a living income, governments and 
economic "experts" encouraged the farmers to diversify into 
"alternative" types of farming.

Images of prosperity were painted for those who would venture 
into emu or ostrich farming, deer farming, growing canola or 
pyrethrum, or raising alpacas, Cashmere or Angora goats, or Boer 
goats for meat.

The national alpaca herd is still growing exponentially, most of 
the fleece being exported. Alpacas may prove to be as viable as 
predicted.

On the other hand, the ostrich, emu and deer farms in my part of 
the country (and almost everywhere else) have mostly closed, 
their elaborate fences now a mocking waste.

Cashmere and Angora goats have been much slower to establish 
themselves as a viable industry, but may get there yet. If so, it 
will be a tribute to the tenacity of the farmers involved, not 
the capitalist system.

The most popular of these new rural industries, certainly with 
farmers seeking an alternative to traditional beef and wool 
production, has been the Boer goat meat industry.

These stocky, short-legged white goats with black or brown heads 
have become a familiar sight in Australian paddocks. But the 
growers reckoned without the chaos and waste of capitalism.

The Mudgee abattoirs closed. Already struggling with the effects 
of the prolonged drought, many growers were now obliged to ship 
their goats to Broken Hill in the far west of NSW or even 
Queensland from places like Dubbo in the central west of NSW for 
slaughter.

That's a long truck journey and inevitably means the goats will 
have lost condition by the time they arrive at the abattoirs. And 
of course the farmer is paid on the basis of weight when killed.

It's a substantial whack off the farmer's income just because 
capitalism can't manage a rational organisation of abattoirs.

Growers have had to respond by organising among themselves and 
buying their own small abattoir, establishing their own 
administration, trans-shipment depots, and so forth.

What's that system called again? Oh, yes, a Co-operative.