Excerpts from William Greider's 2003 book:
P. 29
(On reforming capitalism)
The Federal Government cannot do this for the people. That is hard for many to digest, but anyone who takes seriously the possibility of reforming capitalism in fundamental ways has to start by abandoning some inherited political reflexes. The government has the power to articulate society’s larger aspirations, but it is not equipped to execute this deeper kind of economic transformation or, at this point, even lead the way...If an activist president set out with good intentions to rewire the engine of capitalism - to alter its operating values or reorganize the terms of employment or investment or tamper with other important features – the initiative would very likely be chewed to pieces by the politics. Given the standard legislature habits of modern government, not to mention its close attachments to the powerful interests defending the status quo, the results would be marginal adjustments at best and might even make things worse.
P. 52
Elaine Bernard of Harvard’s trade union program explained the connection: “As power is presently distributed, workplaces are factories of authoritarianism polluting our democracy. Citizens cannot spend eight hours a day obeying orders and being shut out of the important decisions affecting them, and then be expected to engage in a robust, critical dialogue about the structure of our society. Indeed, in the latter part of this [past] century, instead of the workplace becoming more democratic, the hierarchical corporate workplace model [came] to dominate the rest of society.”
P. 61
(On what exactly makes the modern system so different from serfdom?)
“Workers may not be bought and sold, only rented and hired,” Alfred Marshall, a preeminent economist in his time, wrote in 1920. Paul Samuelson, author of a standard textbook for present-day Economics 101, sticks to the same distinction, “Since slavery was abolished, human earning power is forbidden by law to be capitalized [bought and sold as property],” he wrote. “A man is not even free to sell himself; he must rent himself at a wage.” The “rented” worker is certainly much better off than the “owned” worker, no question. Yet, as their language suggests, the distinction between slavery and freedom is narrower than supposed, and aspects of property still heavily influence the transaction. Human labor is treated as an input of production no different from other inputs – machines, raw materials, buildings, capital itself - and these inputs are interchanged routinely in organizing the elements of production. Employees are now described as “human resources,” the oddly dehumanizing usage adopted by modern corporations.
The trouble is, people are not things. They are autonomous human actors, not mere “resources.” They cannot be reduced to physical inputs, even if they assent, because they are conscious, responsible agents of self, endowed with inalienable rights and inescapably liable for their behavior, legally and otherwise.
P. 64
The real basis for the insiders’ power and their legal claim to the profits is their acceptance of responsibility for the firm, their contractual commitments to pay the costs of production and to absorb the negative consequences of losses and liabilities as well as the positive results. Employees, in a sense, are awarded the opposite status: irresponsibility in the fortunes of the company and, thus, no share in its success unless management decides to grant one. In exchange for this privileged irresponsibility, workers are rendered powerless. They accept the master-servant status, are subject to the command of others, and have no voice in the company’s management or any claim to its returns.
P. 185-6
Industrial capitalism, notwithstanding the great accomplishments of human invention, has never approached the functional efficiency of nature – not even close. To the contrary, the wastefulness is prodigious and often deliberate, especially in American capitalism. Waste is designed into many products to create an allure of luxurious excess. Witness the tanklike sports utility vehicle that intimidates the other human-scale cars or a restaurant’s overflowing servings of food intended to gratify rather than nourish (the uneaten heapings wind up in the Dumpster). Less visible to consumers but more fundamental to the ecological problem are the systems of production where things get made. These processes are also massively inefficient and neglectful of long-term costs, despite management’s suppose obsession with efficiency.
Only 6 percent of the materials that flow through the U.S. production system actually wind up in products, as (Paul) Hawken and coauthors Amory Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins noted in
Natural Capitalism. The daily physical inputs consumed by the metabolism of industry amount to twenty times the body weight of every American citizen. The automobile, ostensibly modernized with its computer controls and other electronic charms, actually loses 80 percent of the energy it consumes, mainly through engine heat loss and exhaust. The other 20 percent moves the car.
One is accustomed to hearing such grim facts from ecological activists, but Hawken and the Lovinses are trying to get people to see the good news. This problem is solvable. Americans can do this.
P.189
“Waste equals food.” The world in which we live, (William McDonough and Michael Braungart) explain, has two operating metabolisms – the biological and the industrial – so every substance produced, consumed, and discarded must be able to serve as "food” for one system of the other. Spent materials become either "biological nutrients” fully digestible in the earth or “technical nutrients” that will be fed back into the industrial system.
“To eliminate the concept of waste means to design things – products, packaging, and systems – from the very beginning on the understanding that waste does not exist,” they wrote in
Cradle to Cradle.
