To refrain from capitalism or to improve it? The importance of equity during crisis

Abstract

The article deals with the last decades’ shift of the Western world to liberal capitalism values when the significance of privatization, liberalization, globalization and New Public Management has sufficiently risen. Earlier, such rather specific regions as the Nordic countries, Latin America, Eastern and Southern Asia had introduced many elements similar to the Anglo-Saxon experience. Many Eastern European countries, upon rejecting totalitarian regimes, in fact without compromises have chosen the path of Western liberal capitalism, although this way was hindered by communist heritage, corruption and clientelism. However, not everybody in the world agreed with such a change of the economic-social paradigm. Mostly in the West, the intellectual critics of the system appeared, representing modern economic, political, social and cultural-philosophical theories. The economic crisis of 2008–2010 shook the world and promoted a radical criticism
of capitalism. One of such critics is the Italian left-wing sociologist Franco Berardi (Bifo) who considers the contemporary economic system as dead and only artificially stimulated. The real values, according to F. Berardi, must be not economic consumption and alienated work for satisfying one’s needs, but spiritual and emotional values which can direct psychic energy towards the joy of life autonomous from capitalism. F. Berardi contrasts autonomy with the whole exhausted contemporary capitalist system which, in his opinion, does not have possibilities to expand.
The article deals with the issue of refraining from capitalism which, according to the author, is not fruitful, because it is possible to “improve” capitalism by imposing more equity (social justice). The author sees the biggest problem in society’s division into “winners” and “loosers” who have no relations at all. Capitalism creates not only globalization, which is useful to the “winners”, but also its antipode – glocalization – which imprisons a large part of population in geographically restricted social ghettos because of income, education, competence, age differences, illnesses and disability. The system’s efficiency criterion, besides the well-known 3-E conception, should be the fourth E (equity), when it is necessary to pay attention to the problems of marginal groups. In order to reach social justice, it is necessary to implement new methods of social sciences, such as participatory research and benchmarking research. It is necessary to improve methods of public administration, first of all social administration methods, in order to provide efficiency for the benefit of social reintegration. It is necessary to diminish public administration “transaction costs” and “asymmetrical information”. Not only the
well-known New Public Management methods, such as “quality management” or clients’ satisfaction surveys, but also less known methods such as global budgeting or priority planning should be used. New Public Management should be  xpanded or timely changed by New Governance values which supplement or change economic calculation by civil participation, democracy, active non-governmental activities, transparency and absence of corruption, diminishing of social exclusion.