inherently NG, private or public

Chris Hedges:

“Corporate capitalism thrives on the fostering of chronic psychological and physical disorders.”

https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/our-collective-trauma-is-the-road

Corporate capitalism is the way this society effectuates production and distribution.

In a complex modern industrial society production and distribution can only be accomplished in one of two ways. One is based on mostly-private ownership and control of society’s productive assets; the other is based on mostly-public ownership and control.

In either case the scales are so large that production and distribution can only be efficiently done by megamachine-scale systemic enterprises. So about 70% of the production in a modern economy is done under the auspices of either the multinational corporations (private) or the state (public). In the United States that 70% might be mostly private; in the Soviet Union it was mostly public; in a country like France it’s somewhere in-between.

It can be argued that private implementation (private enterprise) is superior … from the standpoint of being more decentralized. It can be argued that public implementation is superior … from the standpoint of being less short-term driven re: profit and thus able to pay more attention to “ESG” (environment, social, and governance issues).

The reason why societies keep debating which is better is because both suck. They are efficient only in a gross sense. Mass production and distribution is inherently dumb, bureaucratic, technocratic, impersonal, and undemocratic. Society went in the direction of industrial modernity under the influence of growth, development, progress, productivity, and accumulation values. It was a terrible mistake and now presents us with a crisis that will be very hard to resolve.