Capitalism

With the demise of communism as an economic and ideological alternative to capitalism, many thinkers have proclaimed the final and ultimate victory of the capitalist system and its supposedly attendant sociopolitical values of democratic rights and individual liberty. According to Francis Fukuyama, for instance, history has proven that capitalism constitutes the best way of arranging the basic production and distribution of human goods. The global spread of capitalism signals an end to the contention between the fundamentally incommensurable economic ideas and doctrines; all that remains to be done is a fine-tuning of the balance between the private profit economy and those public goods that government is better qualified to provide. The process of capitalist globalization, then, represents nothing less than the civilizing of the human species.

Yet critics of capitalism persist, even in the face of optimism that capitalism will bring prosperity and well-being around the globe "in the long run." (The economist John Maynard Keynes [1883–1946] once famously quipped that "of course, in the long run, we're all dead.") Feminists point out that capitalism has done little to erase the economic and social disparities that exist between men and women. Authors concerned with race relations make a similar point about the market's failure to break down inequalities between people of differing skin colors and ethnicities. Environmentalists charge that capitalism's emphasis on unlimited growth as the only sustainable form of economy has led and will continue to lead to the ruin of the planet and, eventually, to the extinction of the human species. Latter-day communitarians and republicans hold that contempt for legal authority and civic virtue stems from the capitalist-inspired glorification of leisure and luxury. And religious authorities worldwide (including leaders of major Western churches, such as Pope John Paul II) have sternly criticized capitalism for eroding spiritual and moral values in favor of unrestrained accumulation and consumption. Capitalist ideas appear destined to remain controversial even, or perhaps especially, in the age of economic globalization.