The economics profession’s self-subordination to corporate capitalism is nowhere more in evidence than in its strict limitation of debates over alternative economic systems to two possibilities: private capitalism versus state capitalism. Economists pretend that something less limited is occurring in their debates by attaching various names to each of the two basic alternatives. Thus private capitalism is variously called neo-liberal, neo-classical, free enterprise, and free market, to mention some of the prominent adjectives attached to that form of capitalism. Similarly, state capitalism gets names like Keynesianism, welfare state, social welfare, managed and even socialism.

Yet in fact, what is never challenged, let alone displaced, from either side, is the fully shared notion of there being no alternative to the micro-level internal organization of the modern, corporate producing enterprise. That organization is simply presumed necessarily to be composed of, on the one side, a board of directors selected by and responsible to the major shareholders of the enterprise. This board makes the decisions of what, how, and where to produce and sell the enterprise’s products, and it also distributes the net revenues derived from those sales (for such socially influential purposes as investment, advertising, payments to creditors and merchants, allocations to management for their salaries and operating budgets, etc.). On the other side, there are the workers who work in the manners dictated by the board, on the raw materials and with the means of production provided by the board. The workers are specifically excluded from participation in the boards’ decisions and its distributions of the surpluses.

This shared presumption by economists on both sides of “the debate over alternative systems” reflects their likewise shared disconnection from Marx’s critique of capitalism. As articulated in Capital, a central object of Marx’s critique was precisely the internal organization of capitalist production: the enterprise where workers produced the surplus. Marx carefully explained how workers added value by their labor to the values of the raw materials and tools used up in producing commodity outputs. Since those outputs immediately belonged to the capitalist employers who then sold them, those capitalists thereby appropriated as surplus value the difference between the total value of those outputs and their cost of buying the raw materials and tools and paying the workers. Marx’s point was to pinpoint and expose workers’ exclusion and alienation from the social disposition of the surpluses their labor produced inside capitalist enterprises. His goal was to show how that capitalist organization of the surplus contributed to the inequalities, instabilities (business cycle inefficiencies, costs and wastes), and injustices of capitalism. His alternative, which he only briefly sketched, was the “associated workers” or the “community of workers” who could alternatively organize producing enterprises such that they not only produced the surpluses but likewise appropriated and socially distributed them. In such “communist” enterprises, workers would function as their own boards of directors.

Were economists today even passingly aware of Marx’s critique of the internal organization of enterprises, they could not proceed as if all alternative systems would necessarily organize enterprises in the same capitalist way. They would have to examine all the many examples, past and present, when workers have in fact organized production otherwise and in ways more or less like Marx theorized (e.g. various kinds of cooperative, communal, collective, etc enterprises). They would have to debate when, where, and how these were or might be socially generalized. They would have to compare and contrast their functioning with those of capitalist enterprises whether the latter were private or state.

Keynesian economics never was and is not now the theory of the alternative economic system to private capitalism. It is more the rationalization for the state-interventionist form of capitalism, whereas neoclassical economics serves that function for private capitalism. It is understandable that proponents of capitalism prefer to constrict debate among economists (and via them among media pundits and politicians) to two alternative forms of capitalism. That serves nicely to keep all non-capitalist alternatives off the table and out of the popular consciousness. It is far less understandable among critics of capitalism who could and should know better than to limit their pursuit of alternatives to forms of capitalism. Yet that is what so many do in their invocations of more government, more regulation, more state controls, etc. without the transformation of the organization of the surplus inside enterprises. Ironically, it was the failure to reorganize enterprises along the lines of Marx’s criticism that left in place the capitalist boards of directors with the incentive and the resources (the surpluses they appropriated) to undermine and reverse every social experiment to date in Keynesian (or “socialist”) state capitalisms.