Light On Dark Water

Contradictions of Capitalism

Scroll down to the review of The Great A&P on this page for a fascinating bit about the A&P grocery chain. It was a fixture of life in the U.S. for several decades, and anyone over, I suppose, 55 or so remembers when "A&P" was almost a synonym for "grocery store." Many of us even recall it nostalgically, but when it appeared it was the WalMart of its day, driving small grocers and their suppliers out of business.

BUT. Here's the maddening thing about this sort of trend: Americans spent far less of their income on food after A&P revolutionized the business. That's just one of many, many reasons why our current economic troubles are so intractable: what lowers prices for Joe puts Bill out of work. I suspect that anything that could reduce that instability would also leave us, overall, less affluent. Which is not to say that it wouldn't be the right way to go. But how do you convince people of that? Do we have to have a complete collapse first?

Maclin Horton

13 responses to “Contradictions of Capitalism”

  1. Rob G

    Wendell Berry says somewhere that industrial capitalism has always had this problem: Since displaced workers are inevitable, what to do with them?
    One hopes that a complete collapse won’t be necessary for us to learn that some scaledowns/scalebacks are necessary. Politically, of course, this is a sure no-sell, and I’ve found it very difficult to get many fellow conservatives to admit there’s even a problem here. They tend to lay the entire blame at the foot of the state. It’s very frustrating.

    Reply
  2. Janet

    I think it would be interesting if you could somehow do a study to find out how much of that money that people save by having supermarkets is now spent on fast food.
    AMDG

    Reply
  3. ex pat

    Janet, this is one of the most striking things I’ve noticed since I came to the States. On the one hand, people insist on cheap meat in the supermarkets. They have to have this so that everyone from rich to poor can eat meat. On the other hand, everyone eats in Burger King all the time!
    Sorry, I realize that is as much interpretation as observation! It is noticeable, as I’ve said here before, that in an ordinary (not high class) British supermarket, you can buy more expensive free range meat. That’s in ASDA, the British equivalent of Walmart, for instance. But the only people here who eat free range meat seem to be well off foody snobs. And conservatives justify it on the basis that all, including the poor can eat meat every day. But the poor seem to be buying their daily meat in a hamburger chain. With soup bones and some cheap chuck from Martins, costing about 8 dollars in total, I can make a stew that lasts me around six meals. A single meal in a fast food place can cost that much.

    Reply
  4. Mac

    Yes, that would be interesting. And how much of that expenditure is connected to women having jobs outside the home, which used to be a necessity for some but a source of extra money for luxuries for many, and now is a necessity (at least perceived to be) for most. So many unintended consequences for almost everything we do–it’s dizzying to try to follow them all.
    “I’ve found it very difficult to get many fellow conservatives to admit there’s even a problem here.”
    Amen, amen. This drives me crazy. I am really sick of all the conservative attempts to explain away or dismiss the growing income inequality, the shrinking of the middle class, etc., or to blame them purely on the state. And of the refusal to recognize what it means for the health of the country. A lot of those arguments are partly valid, but they’re not the whole story.

    Reply
  5. Mac

    I cross-posted with ex pat above, and only just now (several hours later) noticed that comment.
    One key to understanding America is the rather striking lack of discipline and self-restraint. It’s a significant factor in poverty. You can see a vicious cycle at work when poor people waste their money at Burger King because they want what better-off people have, or because they don’t think far enough ahead to imagine what they could do with a year’s worth of that money, which tends to keep them poor, which tends to make them discouraged so they think “why shouldn’t I indulge myself now?” I’m not saying that’s always the pattern–poor people might eat fast food sometimes because they’re exhausted from working their two jobs and don’t have time to shop and cook. But this is a part of the picture. I do the same sort of thing, only I have enough money that it doesn’t make me poor. (I say “sort of thing” because I rarely eat at fast food places, but same syndrome.) My wife & I both have jobs, and also she’s in school, and it’s way easier to do as we did last night, go to El Mexicano instead of eating something prudently prepared the weekend before.
    And all those people in houses they couldn’t afford in the first place but bought because there was easy entry and an assumption that the market would go up and up. They would have been perfectly fine in a smaller house, but they want a bigger one, and they don’t want to wait ten years for it.

    Reply
  6. Paul

    Read on a blog on the Daily Telegraph website that somebody linked to on Facebook:
    What is it with the Conservatives? They seem to be Right-wing only where no one wants them to be Right-wing. Theirs is a conservatism that cares nothing about British sovereignty, marriage, natural justice, defending the borders, law and order or the armed forces, but that cares deeply about reducing the rights of British workers. Contrary to the idea banded about in the less thoughtful areas of political discourse, conservatism is not about protecting the rich: it is about creating an environment that is safe, sober, crime-free, respectful, educated, gentle and high in social capital and trust. In other words, about protecting the poor and weak. Until the Conservative Party realises this, they will continue to haemorrhage support.

    Reply
  7. Mac

    Definitely resembles a certain strain of Republicanism in this country. The assortment of cared-about/not-cared-about is a little different, perhaps slightly better, but definitely recognizable.

    Reply
  8. ex pat

    slight bow

    Reply
  9. Mac

    By the way, ex pat: after a slow start, I am really enjoying 1 Samuel. Well, still slow, because of lack of time, but now steady.

    Reply
  10. Rob G

    From Patrick Deneen the other day at FPR:
    “The Tea Party and OWS are resurrecting some of the arguments of the Anti-federalists. But the Tea Party wants smaller government without sufficient attention to centralized economic power, and OWS wants a decrease in concentrated economic power without sufficient attention to the way in which that concentration has been enabled by government. Each is peddling a partial argument – and replicating the rutted arguments that have too long dominated American politics.”
    That about sums it up.

    Reply
  11. Mac

    Yep. And the reason they’re doing that, I think, is that they approach the whole thing with such rigid ideological preconceptions. That goes beyond TP/OWS and is true of the right and the left in general.

    Reply
  12. ex pat

    I am glad you are enjoying it now. It took me a while to get into it – it improves when Saul comes on the scene. I didn’t know what to say about Hannah or Sam’s childhood.

    Reply
  13. Mac

    I just got to that point. I don’t think it was anything to do with Sam or Hannah as much as the scholarly details getting a little dense for me. But that’s my limitation. It seems like a really good mix of scholarly rigor and…I’m not sure how to describe this–a sense of really getting down into the world of the Israelites, what it was like and what it meant. Something to do, also, with the way you treat the people as real people. I laughed out loud at your description of the Ark as a “bonsai temple.” I confess I had never actually read 1 Samuel, or most of the Old Testament, and was rather taken aback by what you call the “carnival” of the Ark among the Philistines, specifically the whatever-it-was that afflicted the hindparts of the Philistines.
    I heard the story of the Lord calling Samuel in the night many times in Sunday School, but we never went any further (that I remember). I can sort of see why! I never knew exactly what he was called for.

    Reply

Leave a comment

Instagram / TikTok / X

Designed with WordPress