Dr., don’t get liberalism and capitalism mixed up!
Feb 24, 2017Participating in a monthly discourse being organized by Think Tank Colombo on the last 16th, Dr. Tudor Weerasinghe remarked that new concepts and creations were needed to understand the new world order that has surpassed democracy and liberalism.
That dialogue can be viewed via the Lanka News Web utube channel.
What Dr. Weerasinghe said there is somewhat confusing. He started by saying that the world has passed liberalism and that liberalism and democracy do not exist anymore. He also said sustainable development and the United Nations were functioning according to global liberalism, and that communism and Marxism were defeated by the 1990s, and that the past 20 years were victories for liberalism. What he said about a 7500 million population, virtual reality, transhumanism and sustainable development are confusing and that will only allow certain popular myths to get established. Therefore, we thought it fit to air our opinions about what he said.
According to him, three main ideologies came into being in the past 300 years with regard to the growth of mankind and social evolution, which are liberalism, nationalism and communism. However, it should be said that capitalism and liberalism are two different things.
Liberalism means a social-political system under which individual rights, equal opportunities and individual liberty are established and emphasized by law. Capitalism is an economic system intended to gain profits by private enterprise that caters to supply and demand in the market. Liberalism is an ideology and capitalism is an economic system based on profits.
Therefore, the ideological camps that existed should be capitalism, nationalism and communism. Of them, nationalism raises its head only when capitalism fails. It is like the ‘mat’ for capitalism. Nationalism raised its head in the 20th century just after the 1930 great economic depression. The failure of capitalism paved the way for the creation of a Hitler. Nationalism ended with fascism. That fascism ended with the loss the lives of six million Jews.
Marxist states were never created in this world. Marxism is an ideology as well as a grand wisdom. None of the socialist countries had Marxism. Instead, what existed were Leninism in Russia, Maoism in China and Castroism in Cuba. Marxism is an ideology that provides theories for socialist states. Unfortunately, that ideology did not exist fully in any socialist country.
In actual fact, it was the capitalists who had made maximum use of Marxism. Capitalists learnt from Marxism. The best sold book during the 2008 global economic recession was Das Kapital by Karl Marx. That is not because the world embraced Marxism, but because that book helped to understand the nature of the crisis.
The concepts like Prof. Francis Fukuyama’s 'The End of History and the Last Man' came into being in the 1990s due to the world having turned towards a single camp, that of capitalism. Thereafter, it is capitalism, not liberalism that went looking for enemies. Liberalism never looked for enemies and it did not want enemies either.
An example for the insatiable nature of capitalism is rent seeking companies. In rent seeking, society is exploited without giving it anything in return. Liberalism has introduced an opposing concept in CSR (corporate social responsibility). Social entrepreneurs take that further, in which human resources and the environment are safeguarded without earning profits. That is what the super rich like Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Richard Branson do. That is part of what Dr. Weerasinghe said about the sustainable concept.
In reality, capitalism died together with socialism in the 1990s and only liberalism made a transformation along various humane lines and come to be humanism at present. A world free of boundaries and war, hunger, poverty and disease is building gradually.
In comparison, the so-called socialist states came to be stagnant. The result was the creation of despots such as Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un. Things that remain stagnant get overpowered by something else. That is why no socialist states exist in the world today. Whoever says whatever, what really exist in China, Russia, Cuba and North Korea is nothing else but capitalism, which is called kleptocracy.
Back to the topic. What we have to tell Dr. Weerasinghe is that the world has not gone past liberalism. The world goes along with liberalism. With the new trends of liberalism, humanism has come into existence. The religion in the 21st century is humanism. We kindly request him not to get things mixed up. We had to write this to maintain ideological accuracy.
This is open for discussion, by Dr. Weerasinghe or any other academic.
According to him, three main ideologies came into being in the past 300 years with regard to the growth of mankind and social evolution, which are liberalism, nationalism and communism. However, it should be said that capitalism and liberalism are two different things.
Liberalism means a social-political system under which individual rights, equal opportunities and individual liberty are established and emphasized by law. Capitalism is an economic system intended to gain profits by private enterprise that caters to supply and demand in the market. Liberalism is an ideology and capitalism is an economic system based on profits.
Therefore, the ideological camps that existed should be capitalism, nationalism and communism. Of them, nationalism raises its head only when capitalism fails. It is like the ‘mat’ for capitalism. Nationalism raised its head in the 20th century just after the 1930 great economic depression. The failure of capitalism paved the way for the creation of a Hitler. Nationalism ended with fascism. That fascism ended with the loss the lives of six million Jews.
Marxist states were never created in this world. Marxism is an ideology as well as a grand wisdom. None of the socialist countries had Marxism. Instead, what existed were Leninism in Russia, Maoism in China and Castroism in Cuba. Marxism is an ideology that provides theories for socialist states. Unfortunately, that ideology did not exist fully in any socialist country.
In actual fact, it was the capitalists who had made maximum use of Marxism. Capitalists learnt from Marxism. The best sold book during the 2008 global economic recession was Das Kapital by Karl Marx. That is not because the world embraced Marxism, but because that book helped to understand the nature of the crisis.
The concepts like Prof. Francis Fukuyama’s 'The End of History and the Last Man' came into being in the 1990s due to the world having turned towards a single camp, that of capitalism. Thereafter, it is capitalism, not liberalism that went looking for enemies. Liberalism never looked for enemies and it did not want enemies either.
An example for the insatiable nature of capitalism is rent seeking companies. In rent seeking, society is exploited without giving it anything in return. Liberalism has introduced an opposing concept in CSR (corporate social responsibility). Social entrepreneurs take that further, in which human resources and the environment are safeguarded without earning profits. That is what the super rich like Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Richard Branson do. That is part of what Dr. Weerasinghe said about the sustainable concept.
In reality, capitalism died together with socialism in the 1990s and only liberalism made a transformation along various humane lines and come to be humanism at present. A world free of boundaries and war, hunger, poverty and disease is building gradually.
In comparison, the so-called socialist states came to be stagnant. The result was the creation of despots such as Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un. Things that remain stagnant get overpowered by something else. That is why no socialist states exist in the world today. Whoever says whatever, what really exist in China, Russia, Cuba and North Korea is nothing else but capitalism, which is called kleptocracy.
Back to the topic. What we have to tell Dr. Weerasinghe is that the world has not gone past liberalism. The world goes along with liberalism. With the new trends of liberalism, humanism has come into existence. The religion in the 21st century is humanism. We kindly request him not to get things mixed up. We had to write this to maintain ideological accuracy.
This is open for discussion, by Dr. Weerasinghe or any other academic.
Lanka News Web editorial
