Without entirely dismissing the ineffectual and gridlocked Congressional machinery in the US government, West and Unger made roughly the following suggestions for how to proceed to get around, rather than get in bed with, or March to the same cadence as unbridled capitalism. I have taken the liberty to try to "internationalize" their suggests:
(1) -- Rather than having the rich continue serve themselves, show them how investing in both the "national" and the "international" common good, such as protecting the environment, improving general health, ending over use and dependence on fossil fuels, and assisting development in poorer countries, can all be win-win profit-making idea, and at the same time can be a rewarding experience for the putative leader of the Western World.
(2) -- While always remaining vigilant of, and sensitive to intellectual property and proprietary rights, corporations and rich industrialists can broaden the gateways of access to the vanguard of innovative knowledge-based products and services providing them to states and friendly poorer countries, and thereby beginning to disseminate experimental productive practices, especially in healthcare and the environment, to targeted areas that need it most, and then begin to infuse capital into small and medium size businesses that form the heart of the US as well as most national economies. Nothing is more profitable than a need whose time has come.
(3) -- Make available through the Internet or other forms of modern media, the types of education that accords priority to development needs and capabilities, both conceptual and practical: of analysis, synthesis, theory, and recombination of ideas and things that can advance development, raising the standards of living in backwater states within the US as well as in poor, and poorly governed nations.
(4) -- And to this end, try to begin to us global influence and pressure (through the UN when it can be effective), to help reconcile local management and good governance as needed, with international standards of quality in business practices and investments.
(5) -- Engage local societies in the competitive provision of public services as the best way of delivering those and other services -- as well as for enhancing the quality and efficacy of such services, while using the powers of government to ensure minimum standards for them.
(6) -- Call on wealthy philanthropists around the world to provide seed money and mentorship to kick-start viable investments that can help make quantum improvements in health services and in start-up environmental enterprises, as well as other businesses that might prove valuable locally, but insisting on their eventual autonomy as sustainable "stand-alone" local and state run enterprises. In short, institutionalize and expand to other areas and to a wider list of wealthy donors, what Belinda and Bill Gates are during in the health area in Africa. But also for venture capitalists whose interests are necessarily not restricted only to philanthropy.
(7) -- Insist on management and accounting practices that will minimize if not end corruption all along the business pipeline, up to the government itself, using the UN, where applicable, as a proper oversight body.
(8) -- Target areas with large numbers of idle and angry young men, typically at high risk for terrorists activity, with access to entrepreneurial opportunities and start-up funds for establishing businesses in depressed and high risk areas.
Since these ideas were only suggestive, even when they were first introduced thirty years ago, surely they demonstrate how, when the core idea of acknowledging capitalism's central and dynamic role in global development, is placed in its proper role and context -- that is to say, as a critic rather than as an alternative to capitalism -- then these critiques can lead to practical suggestions that might serve to steer capitalism into specific win-win projects.
And while some may still see this as the "left getting in bed with the capitalists," it can also be seen as helping to humanize capitalism by using proper critiques that serve to vector capitalism along a new more compassionate but still profitable path, perhaps unleashing a whole new vanguard of entrepreneurs and philanthropists, who together can spearhead a number of joint humane but still profit-making enterprises.
This in my view beats sitting on the sidelines "waxing on" about abstract theoretical concepts and unworkable political ideas. Utopia must finally come down out of the academic clouds and back down to earth where it can help improve democratic life across the globe. Five stars
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