Coping with the economic crisis Book

Some years back I read Greider's Who Will Tell the People and was deeply impressed by the quality of his thought. With that experience in mind, I was very much looking forward to The Soul of Capitalism, and subsequently very much disappointed.

I guess the theme of The Soul of Capitalism is something to do with ideas for making capitalism more responsible and responsive to the public. Greider moves from chapter to chapter focused on various concepts that would nudge us toward better outcomes: maybe pension funds could become more activist shareholders; maybe Employee Stock Ownership Plans could result in more employee-owned companies; maybe we could offer better incentives to financial institutions to support more socially productive enterprises; and so on. None of these these are bad or wrong--and Greider is often able to find small scale examples of individuals that have taken some positive steps toward realizing some benefits from implementing these sorts of ideas.

But the notion that these kinds of volunteer driven, grassroots-y efforts to effect relatively modest change will be a force that can transform the global economy feels like utterly unwarranted optimism. And more than 10 years since this book was published, reality seems to bear out the view the transformation that Greider saw in the making has not, at least so far, come to pass.

It is perhaps worth remembering that this book came out in 2003, at a time when the left in the United States was thoroughly demoralized. The Bush administration was wildly popular and Democrats in Congress usually appeared helpless and craven. It was a time that, if you were on the left politically, maybe the kinds of solutions that Greider is putting forth were pretty much the best you could hope for.

But at a time when a self-proclaimed democratic socialist has won nearly 20 primaries in America, the prospects seem a little brighter for a genuine left movement that might actively challenge the more unsavory aspects of unbridled capitalism. Will that actually come to pass? Well, who knows. More often than not in our history, the left has ended up missing opportunities for any number of reasons, which is neither here nor there for the purposes of this discussion.

At this moment, the solutions in the Soul of Capitalism feel like a weird artifact from an earlier time, when we hoped that--somehow--capitalism would simply fix itself without pressure from a sustained national movement or policy made by the federal government. It feels slight and insubstantial, about to be blown away in the wind.