The Customer isn’t right or wrong

Capitalism is Wrong

One night several years back I decided to grab a bite to eat at a local 24hr diner. It was one of a very few places open that late at night, and I was too lazy to cook anything for the evening. What I didn’t realize when I made this decision was that this wasn’t going to be some quick trip for a bite to eat, but it was going to be a 4 hour ordeal to get my order, food served, and eventually by bill. That part I didn’t mind too much as I’m a night owl and usually bring a book to read at restaurants anyway. However, I cannot say this was true for the rest of the customers at the restaurant. They all seemed to be extremely frustrated and most of them aimed their frustrations as the lone waitress. This one waitress had to do everything. She took orders for everyone there, helped prepare and serve food, and even checked people out when they were done. The truth of the matter was her job was not something one individual could do on their own. However, to most of the customers that didn’t matter. I heard several cursing her while she was away doing something else. I heard others saying how she wasn’t going to get a tip. After I finished my food and finally go my bill and paid, I left her a 200% tip and wished her a nice evening. This all really showed the true frustration of both the experience as a customer and as an employee at a business. Neither the customer or the worker were satisfied by the situation, and both have legitimate gripes with it. This really can only lead me to one conclusion, the system itself is the problem.

I decided to write this essay after seeing the Twitter user, Joshua for Congress, make this tweet:

I sympathize greatly with what Joshua is saying here. I usually want to side with the worker against the customer myself. However, on greater reflection I don’t think petty moral analysis is adequate. The truth of the matter is asshole customers exist and workers that do their jobs poorly exist. This is a reality of any functioning economic system. In some cases the customer may genuinely be unreasonable, but in some cases like the diner story I described they probably have a legitimate gripe. However, in the diner case it also shows that it is often also not the fault of the employee, but rather the fault of the way the business is run. This leaves me to the suggestion that to fix this problem for both customers and workers we need a new economic system.

What systems you ask? Well, I have two primary options that I am going to present: 1. Market Socialism 2. Democratically Planned Socialism. These two systems both provide certain features of which could be a superior system to the privately owned business under the capitalist economic system. We are going to use the diner I visited as a hypothetical business under both of these systems.

First for market socialism, what is it? Market socialism would be an economic system which instead of private businesses we have a system of cooperatives that still exist in the market system like a private business would in a capitalist system. They would still compete against each other, and they would still have to achieve enough profits to stay in business like a capitalist business. The difference would primarily be the workers would own and democratically run the business. This would allow for the workers to decide many different decisions such as what wages are fair, hours for working, and how many people should be employed for each shift. In the diner I visited this could mean many different things such as the workers acknowledging they need more waiters/waitresses on staff at all times, and if it is not profitable to do so they shouldn’t have the restaurant open that late at night. They could also make sure that during busy hours of business that no one employee has to work for an extended period of time. Instead of working an 8hr shift, maybe they only work 4hr shifts. All of these make for a much better system for both customer and employees as the incentive would be there to make the job easier which makes fulfilling the customers needs easier as well. In fact, democratic cooperatives such as this can actually be more productive all around. To learn more about market socialism I would recommend reading: Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism by Richard D. Wolff.

Now, the market socialist solution is incomplete in my opinion. It still runs into problems due to it being still within the market system. Cooperatives still have to compete against other cooperatives and this will tend to cause certain cooperatives to accumulate more wealth than others. It would be superior to capitalism, but it would fail to both take care of all works and the customer as efficiently as possible. This is where democratic planning comes in. On their excellent book, People’s Republic of Walmart, Leigh Philips and Michal Rozworski explain how many of the largest corporations in America already have internally planned economies. Amazon and Walmart being the two primary examples. These two corporations use economic planning which would put the former Soviet system to shame. It not only works, but it has allowed them to become two of the most efficient businesses in the entire world. They are living proof that economic planning has its advantages over the market system. Phillips and Rozworksi explain this very well in how Sears attempted to liberate the market with all their departments by forcing them to compete.

Now, if we apply this to my diner scenario this is where things get really fun. The diner I went to is a national chain diner. There are hundreds, if not thousands of locations across America. If we were to put this diner under a democratically planned economic system it could run significantly more efficient than any capitalist diner. Paul Cockshott is a computer scientist and Marxist economist that has worked out models for economic planning that could work for entire national economies. His books, Arguments for Socialism and Towards a New Socialism provide the data to show how this is done and why it would be more efficient that any form of capitalist system or even market socialist system. The ability for computers to handle massive calculations in a manner of minutes makes economic planning a very likely future for all of us. The diner could then be democratically planned based on data received by every restaurant and decisions made to fulfill all the needs to provide the customers with good service and the employees with good pay and not too difficult of working conditions. This system could be so superior since this would be centrally planned instead of each individual restaurant on its own it could even take into consideration allowing some restaurants to function in a deficit while making up for it by the restaurants that have huge surpluses all while still keeping the deficit restaurants running. As for the democratic aspect of it this can be done through technology as well. Every employee could vote on the changes in how their workplace should be run on their smartphones and this data would be used to change the planning as need be.

Now, ideally this wouldn’t stop just for our restaurants. This would be a part of a comprehensive overhaul of the capitalist economy to a socialist one. I personally do not think that market socialism vs democratically planned socialism are competing ideas, but rather they are two parts of how the transition may come into being. If we look back to earlier economic transitions we may be provided with an excellent idea of how this works. Adam Smith provided a great account of this in his masterpiece, The Wealth of Nations. As Smith described it, it wasn’t a process that happened overnight, but rather an evolutionary change that happened over an extended period of time. The transition to a post-capitalist economic system will likely happen in a similar way. We could likely see some major industries nationalized and brought under democratic planning and smaller industries developed into cooperatives. This then could progress over time into a fully developed socialist economy.

At the end of the day we aren’t in the goal of creating socialism just because we want people to be nicer to each other. Yes, that’s a wonderful thing to do, but that’s not what makes socialism. Humanity will remain imperfect regardless of what economic system is in place. We have to create an economic system which can accommodate this. The goal of socialism should be to achieve the peak of human achievement and allow the most personal liberties possible. This can only be done if we consider both sides the needs of the customer and employee dichotomy. Neither of these should be sacrificed for the other. Instead, we should be looking to transcend capitalism for something better.