The creator of The Wire, David Simon, delivered an impromptu speech about the divide between rich and poor in America at the
Festival of Dangerous Ideas in Sydney, and how capitalism has lost sight of its social compact. This is an edited extract
David Simon, creator of The Wire, near his office in Baltimore. Photograph: Stephen Voss/Redux / eyevine
America is a country that is now utterly divided when it comes
to its society, its economy, its politics. There are definitely two
Americas. I live in one, on one block in Baltimore that is part of the
viable America, the America that is connected to its own economy, where
there is a plausible future for the people born into it. About 20 blocks
away is another America entirely. It's astonishing how little we have
to do with each other, and yet we are living in such proximity.
There's
no barbed wire around West Baltimore or around East Baltimore, around
Pimlico, the areas in my city that have been utterly divorced from the
American experience that I know. But there might as well be. We've
somehow managed to march on to two separate futures and I think you're
seeing this more and more in the west. I don't think it's unique to
America.
I think we've perfected a lot of the tragedy and we're
getting there faster than a lot of other places that may be a little
more reasoned, but my dangerous idea kind of involves this fellow who
got left by the wayside in the 20th century and seemed to be almost the
butt end of the joke of the 20th century; a fellow named
Karl Marx.
I'm
not a Marxist in the sense that I don't think Marxism has a very
specific clinical answer to what ails us economically. I think Marx was a
much better diagnostician than he was a clinician. He was good at
figuring out what was wrong or what could be wrong with capitalism if it
wasn't attended to and much less credible when it comes to how you
might solve that.
You know if you've read
Capital or if you've got the
Cliff Notes,
you know that his imaginings of how classical Marxism – of how his
logic would work when applied – kind of devolve into such nonsense as
the withering away of the state and platitudes like that. But he was
really sharp about what goes wrong when capital wins unequivocally, when
it gets everything it asks for.
That may be the ultimate tragedy
of capitalism in our time, that it has achieved its dominance without
regard to a social compact, without being connected to any other metric
for human progress.
We understand profit. In my country we measure
things by profit. We listen to the Wall Street analysts. They tell us
what we're supposed to do every quarter. The quarterly report is God.
Turn to face God. Turn to face Mecca, you know. Did you make your
number? Did you not make your number? Do you want your bonus? Do you not
want your bonus?
And that notion that capital is the metric, that
profit is the metric by which we're going to measure the health of our
society is one of the fundamental mistakes of the last 30 years. I would
date it in my country to about 1980 exactly, and it has triumphed.
Capitalism
stomped the hell out of Marxism by the end of the 20th century and was
predominant in all respects, but the great irony of it is that the only
thing that actually works is not ideological, it is impure, has elements
of both arguments and never actually achieves any kind of partisan or
philosophical perfection.
It's pragmatic, it includes the best
aspects of socialistic thought and of free-market capitalism and it
works because we don't let it work entirely. And that's a hard idea to
think – that there isn't one single silver bullet that gets us out of
the mess we've dug for ourselves. But man, we've dug a mess.
After
the second world war, the west emerged with the American economy coming
out of its wartime extravagance, emerging as the best product. It was
the best product. It worked the best. It was demonstrating its might not
only in terms of what it did during the war but in terms of just how
facile it was in creating mass wealth.
Plus, it provided a lot
more freedom and was doing the one thing that guaranteed that the 20th
century was going to be – and forgive the jingoistic sound of this – the
American century.
It took a working class that had no
discretionary income at the beginning of the century, which was working
on subsistence wages. It turned it into a consumer class that not only
had money to buy all the stuff that they needed to live but enough to
buy a bunch of shit that they wanted but didn't need, and that was the
engine that drove us.
It wasn't just that we could supply stuff,
or that we had the factories or know-how or capital, it was that we
created our own demand and started exporting that demand throughout the
west. And the standard of living made it possible to manufacture stuff
at an incredible rate and sell it.
And how did we do that? We did
that by not giving in to either side. That was the new deal. That was
the great society. That was all of that argument about collective
bargaining and union wages and it was an argument that meant neither
side gets to win.
Labour doesn't get to win all its arguments,
capital doesn't get to. But it's in the tension, it's in the actual
fight between the two, that capitalism actually becomes functional, that
it becomes something that every stratum in society has a stake in, that
they all share.
The unions actually mattered. The unions were
part of the equation. It didn't matter that they won all the time, it
didn't matter that they lost all the time, it just mattered that they
had to win some of the time and they had to put up a fight and they had
to argue for the demand and the equation and for the idea that workers
were not worth less, they were worth more.
Ultimately we abandoned
that and believed in the idea of trickle-down and the idea of the
market economy and the market knows best, to the point where now
libertarianism in my country is actually being taken seriously as an
intelligent mode of political thought. It's astonishing to me. But it
is. People are saying I don't need anything but my own ability to earn a
profit. I'm not connected to society. I don't care how the road got
built, I don't care where the firefighter comes from, I don't care who
educates the kids other than my kids. I am me. It's the triumph of the
self. I am me, hear me roar.
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