Most Chileans have recently rejected the remnants of military dictator Augusto Pinochet, along with the policies of Milton Friedman and numerous American interventions. They are working on a radically new Constitution. In the United States, former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden have increasingly praised (or simply ignored) neoliberal orthodoxy in order to pressure and obtain massive government intervention in American capitalism. Much of what remains of private capitalism survives on massive and unprecedented government financial, monetary and fiscal support. A tired replay of Cold War demonization provides the ideological cover for waning neoliberalism. Both main parties support the government’s huge and growing economic interventions as anti-China, homeland security-oriented policies that are urgently needed.

Have pity on the poor libertarians. Their hearing is fading because the same intrusive government they blame for all economic evils demands loyalty in its fight against China. Former President Richard Nixon was less dishonest 50 years ago when he reportedly said, “We are all Keynesians now. In contrast, today’s GOP talks about a “conservative economy,” but is content to quibble over the details of the government’s gigantic money creation and deficit financing.

Today’s declining American capitalism can no longer repeat its previous bland celebrations of private enterprise and free markets. Too much has gone wrong, causing criticism and deepening divisions in American society. The last time American capitalism stumbled on this point – the Great Depression of the 1930s – public health did not suffer a massive failure at the same time. Yet, then too, the critique of capitalism has reached far, wide and deep. He spoke through the unionization by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) of millions of people alongside skyrocketing enrollments in two socialist parties and one communist party.

Yet the New Deal negotiated by former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the business class, on the one hand, with the coalition of trade unionists, socialists and communists, on the other, achieved much more than the President Biden is currently researching. The pendulum then shifted much further from private enterprise and free markets to broad and deep government economic interventions, exemplified by social security, unemployment compensation, the minimum wage, and the federal hiring program. The pendulum now swings in the same, albeit less distant, way from the neoliberal tradition of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan to government-led and regulated capitalism focused on ‘winning’ competition with China (or, as Trump promised , punish “cheating” ”carried out by American business partners).

Then, the poles of the economic debate reflected political oppositions. It was a private capitalism of self-regulation and self-healing versus regulatory government interventions to save capitalism from self-destruction. Now something fundamental has changed. The three capitalist crashes of 2000, 2008 and 2020, each much worse than the last, along with the failures to prepare for or deal with COVID-19, ushered in massive and continuing economic intervention by the government. The Federal Reserve has broken all previous records for money creation. The Treasury has broken all previous records for financing the government’s budget deficits with an expanding national debt. The private versus government parameters of the economic debate have disappeared, replaced by de facto debates about the size, duration and appropriate beneficiaries or targets of government, monetary and fiscal interventions.

Of course, government interventions in the economy were necessary, solicited and obtained throughout the history of the United States by its private capitalists. But the latter feared that enlargement and ultimately universal suffrage would orient the government towards serving the interests of labor (the majority) rather than capital (the minority). It was therefore important to demonize government economic interventions, to compare their effects unfavorably with what private capitalism had done and could still do. But now what remains of private capitalism increasingly depends on government intervention and expects it as the equivalent of life-saving assistance in medically extreme situations. The old demonization of government economic intervention seems increasingly hollow and out of touch with reality. To modernize Nixon, we could say, “We’re all interventionists now.” And this has its inevitable effects on economic debates in academia, politics and the media.

Die-hard libertarians and other supporters of the free market, private capitalism increasingly includes liberals, social democrats, under-conservatives, Keynesians, socialists and communists. They constitute a diabolical and dreadful bloc of “the other”, defenders of government economic intervention. While there are gradations among them, ranging from Xi Jinping to Donald Trump to Joe Biden, they are all seen as supporters of massive government economic intervention. By articulating such a perspective, the diehards inadvertently isolate and marginalize themselves and the economic debates that define them.

Contradictory speeches are increasing. U.S. officials denounce private Chinese mega-corporations for their close ties to the Chinese government and military, as if their U.S. counterparts do not have comparable ties to the U.S. government and military. Chinese officials have celebrated their “socialist” achievements over the past 25 years, as if China had not invited and allowed private capitalist enterprises to enter and fuel those achievements. Increasingly, spokespersons for economies with higher degrees of private capitalism refer to economies with greater government intervention as “models” to learn from. So, “we” must “learn” from “them” in order to better compete with them.

Slowly one realizes that it may never have been appropriate to focus analytical attention and doctrinal controversy on the private and public sectors of capitalist economies. Perhaps all capitalisms have mixed private enterprises and free markets with state-owned enterprises and state-regulated enterprises, markets and economic planning activities. We know that slave economic systems mixed private slave businesses with public slave businesses and state regulations of slave businesses. We know the same is true of feudal economic systems. It was a distraction to focus on the private versus public conflict as if it were essential to understanding the place of capitalism in history and in modern society.

Perhaps economics as a discipline is shifting gears to focus on a different basic discourse and debate. At the micro level, this debate would oppose and compare the functioning and the effects (economic, political and cultural) of two alternative workplace organizations. One of them, contemporary capitalism – embodied in both private and public enterprise – features a version of the inherited dichotomies of slavery and feudalism. In these dichotomies, a small minority – slavers in slavery, lords in feudalism and employers in capitalism – make all the key decisions in the workplace, hold major positions of power, and accumulate disproportionate wealth by compared to what the majority – slaves, serfs and employees – get. The alternative workplace organization is now struggling to emerge from the shadows and fringes of these dichotomous discourses and realities. It testifies to a communal, collective or cooperative organization of the workplace. Instead of hierarchy, this alternative is a horizontal organization that makes all participants in the workplace equally powerful. Everyone has a voice to democratically decide what to produce, how and where, and what to do with the surplus or profits to which all participants in the workplace have contributed. These are called self-managed worker enterprises, or WSDE (see Democracy at work: a remedy for capitalism).

At the macro level, the emerging debate would focus on how key institutions – markets, planning devices, relationships between workplaces and residential communities, schools, government, political parties, etc. – would be linked differently to alternative business organizations. The entire capitalism versus socialism debate would then be reorganized around this question: which business organization – capitalist versus WSDE – best serves the interests of the communities engaged in such a debate.

The debates between capitalism and socialism would then cease to focus on private property against public property and free markets against markets regulated (or planned) by the government. They would rather refocus on hierarchical-capitalist organizations versus democratic-collectivist organizations of workplaces (factories, offices and shops). The original notion of socialism as a fundamental criticism and an alternative to capitalism would thus amount to shifting its detour in the debates on the private against the public.

This article was produced by The economy for all, a project of the Independent Media Institute.