Capitalism beyond the crisis

I am in favor of many of the reforms suggested pertaining to a substantive embeddening of markets in public systems of control and a fostering of institutions not regulated by market incentives, providing that such measures could have a trajectory consonant with anti-authoritarian values that embrace the full realization of capabilities and potentialities. Insofar as he ultimately promotes the continuation of private profiteering of banks and businesses I doubt that Sen's mixed economy can seriously meet the burden of defending his own limited values. I think think that at this stage we should be at least critical enough to pose the question whether labor, land (and the larger natural environment) or money should be marketable commodities at all.

I do have many reservations with Sen's article, probably too many to cover in a single post. I noticed that when Sen attempts to describe the special characteristics that makes a system capitalist his selection of essential institutions is so generic that it would probably be more apt as a description of petty commodity production rather than what we currently have, or even any of the capitalisms that were extant in the 20th century. Does anyone else think it is strange that he would obfuscate the institution of wage labor when attempting to describe the essential characteristics of capitalism? This analytic failure would be of less import to the rest of his analysis if it was not in fact emblamatic of the fuzzy/uncritical approach that previals throughout the article. Compared to several other commentators (Foster, Harvey, Bello, Panitch), Sen does not have much concrete to say, beyond moralizing generalities, about the causes and effects of the economic crisis nor does he convincingly place the crisis in historical perspective. But hey, at least he is talking to his fellow elites, such as the "eloquent" Tony Blair, in soothing tones, while reminding others that  "present economic crisis is partly generated by a huge overestimation of the wisdom of market processes, and the crisis is now being exacerbated by anxiety and lack of trust in the financial market and in businesses in general."

Sen also reserves some criticisms for those who have distorted the writings of Adam Smith by mythologizing Smith as a one-sided advocate of laissez-faire. This is good - the only problem is that in doing so Sen supplants one mythology of Adam Smith with another. In "The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation", political economist Michael Perelman shows in exhaustive detail that far from being a humanistic figure "overwhelmingly" concerned with the conditions of the poor and underprivileged, Adam Smith's writings concerning the downtrodden were extremely contradictory and often problematic. I have no time to go into the details at the moment, suffice to say that Perelman shows that Smith often displayed contemptuous, dehumanizing and condescending attitudes towards the rural poor and the larges masses of poor workers in the cities: moreover Smith was extremely fearful that the degraded urban poor would invade property, while the book also delineates many authoritarian and elitist tendencies in Smith's writings.