On Capitalists and Pigs
In his Memoirs, Tennessee Williams recalls meeting the Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko in 1972. The previous evening, Yevtushenko had gone to see Williams’ new play, Small Craft Warnings, and had not been impressed.
“You put only about thirty percent of your talent into it,” Yevtushenko told Williams, “and that’s not just my opinion, but that of people seated around me.”
The poet went on at great length about the play’s shortcomings, but Williams, an affable sort, invited him to lunch anyway. At the Plaza Hotel, Yevtushenko proceeded to order two bottles of Château Lafite-Rothschild and a bottle of Margaux, a “great bowl of caviar,” Williams writes, “the best pâté and the most expensive steaks for himself and his equally voracious interpreter.”
By this time, Williams was greatly put out. “You,” he said to Yevteshenko, “are a capitalist pig.”
“Capitalist pig” is a strange thing to call a Soviet citizen, even a dissident Soviet poet. The term “capitalist” was used in the Netherlands and France in the mid-17th century to refer to someone who owned capital, as distinct from land or buildings; in other words, someone who didn’t actually do anything except acquire money.
By the end of the Depression, the term “capitalist” had become linked to the term “pig,” because many capitalists were suspected of having increased their fortunes at the expense of the starving poor. But while individual capitalists were criticized, capitalism itself, as an economic system, was ever more solidly entrenched.
“Capitalist pig,” however, seems to me to be an inappropriate epithet. Capitalists aren’t pigs themselves. Truffle gatherers in France use pigs to find truffles, and then sell the truffles for an enormous profit. The gatherers are the capitalists, not the pigs. In Italy, according to detective novelist Michael Dibdin, they use dogs (in A Long Finish, truffles are so valuable that poaching on another gatherer’s territory could be a motive for murder). “Capitalist dog” seems slightly less pejorative than “capitalist pig,” but it’s still not the animal who’s the capitalist.
When I worked for Harrowsmith, a now-defunct environmental magazine that was published from the 1970s into the 1990s, the magazine was purchased by a large media company. When I tried to tell the new owners that the magazine was already making as much money as it was ever going to make, they shook their heads. They said we had to make 11 percent more profit every year, in order to satisfy their stockholders. It was clear that the media company did not exist to sell magazines, it existed to sell stock. That is about as clear a definition of capitalism as I’ve come across.
According to John Kenneth Galbraith, writing in 2004, the term “capitalism” had so far declined in popularity that it had fallen into disuse, at least by economists. “Capitalist” has also become an inaccurate term, as private companies owned by “old-time industrialists” are no longer the norm. Now, Galbraith writes in The Economy of Innocent Fraud, we can’t say that “oil is controlled by John D. Rockefeller, steel by Carnegie, tobacco by Duke.” Control of those commodities is now in the hands of corporations, which are not identified with individuals but run by managers, most of whom are faceless and nameless to the average consumer. (The same is true of journalism.) The system that drives Western economy is not capitalism, he writes, it is something called “the market system,” which is another misnomer.
Calling it a market system implies that the marketplace is driven by consumer demand, but that, says Galbraith, “is a bland, meaningless disguise of the deeper corporate reality – of producer power extending to influence over, even control of, consumer demand.”
Consumer control in an age of marketing and advertising, Galbraith points out, is an illusion. “Market system economy” implies that “no individual or firm is dominant. No economic power is evoked. There is nothing here from Marx or Engels. There is only the impersonal market.” The implication that the market is driven by consumer demand, he says, is “a not wholly innocent fraud.” Demand is no longer determined by the consumer, it is manipulated by advertising. And, more recently, by false advertising.
Capitalism originally meant the exercise of a free-market economy in the absence of government intervention. Today, however, government intervention in the marketplace has become the norm. Donald Trump’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Mick Mulvaney, who described himself proudly as “a right-wing nutjob,” said that the then president wanted him, as director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau “to get the CFPB back to the point where it can protect people without trampling on capitalism.” But it was exactly the job of the CFPB – an agency established by Elizabeth Warren to compel Wall Street to conform to rules that protect consumers – to curtail what Newsweek columnist Neil Buchanan has called the “Dumb Guy’s Version of Capitalism,” which is the belief that what’s good for American companies is good for America. Squashing the CFPB was, in fact, government intervention, the exact opposite of true capitalism.
Capitalists think that capitalism is allowing companies to do whatever they want in order to increase profits, but capitalism has never meant that. Capitalism, like democracy, has always meant that what is good for the highest number of individuals is good for the country. What our modern version of capitalism wants is what is good for the smallest number of individuals: the capitalists themselves.
Yevtushenko was right to object to being called a capitalist pig. Pigs can only dream of being allowed to eat the truffles. This was a curious aspect of the American Dream, and may help to explain its demise: anyone could aspire to become the very person they despised.