Why we love capitalism.

Adam Smith


This section very quickly defines some terms and looks at the benefits, according to advocates, of markets and capitalism.


Globalisation, capitalism and the arguments for neo-liberalism
It is important to define the key terms and to explore, albeit briefly, the arguments used to defend economic orthodoxy. Supporters of capitalist globalisation are most commonly termed 'neo-liberals' because of their renewed faith in the 'liberal' unconstrained free market. Globalisation is a much debated term but can defined straightforwardly by the decline in the power of nation states and the growing flow of resources on a planetary scale. While technology, culture and other factors come into play, globalisation is first and foremost an economic process driven by market forces. The market is a system where we buy and sell items. In theory the market is made up of thousands of competiting firms, whose desire for profit means they provide goods and services. Even some supposed 'anti-capitalists' such as David Korten, author of When Corporations Rule the World, view the market as a positive and practical way of organising economic activity. However, the market tends to evolve into capitalism. Capitalism is, essentially, a system where profits are made within a market based context and reinvested in new capital equipment, i.e. machines and IT used to produce more goods and services. Some theorists have suggested that forms of 'state capitalism’ can also be identified, where the state rather than private companies exploits workers and the environment.

Capitalism is based not on the intense competition of thousands of companies but the creation of markets dominated by just a handful of enormous firms. Food retailing is a good example of the process. In Britain thousands of bakers, green grocers and corner stores have disappeared and four or five large supermarkets control much of the market. To survive a firm must, generally, make profit. Profit is reinvested to expand the size of the firm; if profit was frittered away rather than reinvested, the firm would risk being put out of business by more efficient rivals. Investment allows a firm to expand its market share and as it sells more items it can exploit economies of scale. This concept is based on the idea that as a firm becomes bigger, production costs fall per item produced. Such economies occur because larger firms can bulk buy raw materials more cheaply than smaller firms, larger firms can make more efficient use of machinery, employ specialist staff and gain funds for expansion in the form of bank loans more easily. Smaller firms generally have higher costs and tend to be pushed out of business. There are numerous linked process that help explain the evolution of markets into capitalist systems. The creation of public limited companies, allows firms to borrow money in return for giving others a 'share', such share ownership allows swift expansion but aids the process of replacing small businesses owned by individual entrepreneurs with faceless corporations. Public companies gain an institutional existence, have the legal status of individuals and like all good bureaucracies grow tend to be self-perpetuating.

The capitalist system, as we shall see in successive chapters is a complex one, workers have to be made to work and consumers to consume to sustain the growth of companies. Ever more complex financial instruments are used to allow capitalism to grow and change in order to survive. Banks to cut a long story short lend money from depositors to borrowers and create more money in the process. Banking has been one target of anti-capitalist concern because of banks ability to make money out of money and use this power to shape society. Share ownership and the basic banking functions are the first steps on a ladder of increasing financial abstraction with ever more esoteric devices being used to make money out of money and, at the same time, to support capitalist growth. The drive for profit fuels globalisation as firms seek new markets to sell their products and new sources of cheap raw materials and labour. The creation of global markets is also strongly conditioned by the financial side of capitalist growth. 'Hot money' so called because it moves from one country to another and is transformed from one currency to another and then back again, erodes the barrier between nations. If a country introduces policies hostile to capitalism, currency tends to flow out, creating economic crisis. To maintain a strong exchange rate, pro-capitalist policies are often a necessity.

Hedge funds are an increasingly important financial institution. Hedging started by meeting a practical need but soon changes into something much more complex. Hedging is a way of providing security as in the phrase 'hedging a bet'. For example, an investor concerned that the exchange rate for £ will fall, can buy the right to sell £s in three months time at the present value, so if the currency crashes losses will be prevented. For a fee, risk is removed. Various forms of right to buy such a right to hedge are bought and sold including varied financial 'options' and 'derivatives'. Essentially, mathematically complex forms of betting have become an increasingly important global economic activity.

Supporters of the market are confident that the pursuit of financial gain, the accumulation of private property and the race for personal wealth are to be welcomed (Bhagwati 2004; Wolf 2004). They believe that capitalism is the road to prosperity, pleasure, freedom, justice and all that is beneficial. Capitalism because it is based on market forces is both natural and good. For the advocates of unrestrained capitalism the only alternative to market forces is government planning and control. They consider intervention inefficient because government planners cannot take into account all the thousands of pieces of information necessary for an economy to function well. In the Soviet Union planning did not meet the needs of consumers and provided no incentive for workers to work hard so as to raise production.

In contrast to bureaucratic planning, the market regulates the economy via forces of demand and supply. Adam Smith, whose book The Wealth of Nations launched market based economics in 1776 believed that these market forces acted like a giant invisible hand managing wealth for the good of the community. If consumers demand goods and are prepared to back up their desire with hard cash, firms will supply their wants so as to make a profit. Competition between firms means that neither consumers nor workers will be exploited. If a firm cuts its wages workers will sell their labour to a rival and maintain their standard of living. Wage rises can be used to encourage workers to retrain, work harder and raise production through greater participation. Likewise, market forces benefit shoppers: if a firm provides shoddy or expensive goods consumers will go elsewhere. The market is freedom. It is a tool of liberation for workers, who can chose to work for the firm that pays the highest wage.
The market system leads to capitalism because firms have an incentive to invest in new technology to produce cheaper goods to undercut rivals and maintain profits. The market system is based on greed but greed fuels the common good and drives progress forward as industrialists strive to create new products and new production techniques. Such growth tends to spread prosperity to the entire community via a process of ‘trickle down’. Even if a wealthy minority do exist, they have to use their wealth to purchase goods and services from others. In doing so they create jobs and the basis for growing prosperity.

The market is seen as a force for democracy because it breaks up the power of the old feudal elements of society. Kings lose their power and companies have to respect the rest of the community if they wish to gain customers and to attract staff. Money is profoundly democratic because whatever the social rank, gender or ethnicity of the person spending it, it still has the same value for firms seeking profit. The notion of private property, a precondition for and goal of the market makes it difficult for the state to control private citizens.
The pro-capitalist messengers believe that the system brings ever greater benefits. The classic free market is decentralised with economic decisions being taken at a grassroots level. The market also provides a cleaner environment because consumers can purchase greener goods and as levels of prosperity rise societies generally become more environmentally aware. Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish statistician has argued at great length that information showing declining environmental quality is distorted and entering the third millennium resources such as oil and fish are increasing in quantity, while pollution is being defeated by prosperity (Lomborg 2001).

Globalisation brings the benefits of capitalism to all, according to the author Johan Norberg,

The statistics speak for themselves. Over the past 40 years, average life expectancy in the developing countries has risen from 46 to 64 years. Since 1950, infant mortality has fallen from 18 to 8 per cent. The proportion of illiterates has fallen from 70 per cent to about 25. Since 1970 child labour and the proportion of people in the world who have to go hungry has fallen by more than half. Since 1980 the number of people in absolute poverty was reduced by more than 200 million. The number of states which are democratically governed and respect human rights is increasing all the time. Today there are 120 democratic states with a combined population of 3.5 billion people (roughly 60 per cent of the world population), more than ever before in world history. There are still enormous problems in the world, but to anyone who cares to look it is obvious that the world, in most ways, has become a better and a fairer place (http://www.johannorberg.net/?page=indefense_qa).

The anti-capitalist movement

A very clear rejection of the institutions that multinationals and speculators have built to take power away from people, like the WTO and other trade liberalisation agreements.

A confrontational attitude, since we do not think that lobbying can have a major impact in such biased and undemocratic organisations in which transnational capital is the only real policy maker.

A call for non-violent civil disobedience and the construction of local alternatives by local people, as answers to the actions of governments and corporations.

An organisational philosophy based on decentralisation and autonomy.

A sketch of the 'movement' the anti-capitalist networks and a little on the origin of anti-capitalist ideas.



The anti-capitalist movement
The movement did not start on the streets of Seattle or Davos. Submerged and open networks of anti-capitalism flowered in 1999 but had been mobilising long before (Wall 1999). Anti-capitalist sentiments predate capitalism understood as an advanced industrial or post-industrial system based on profit and investment. Given that centuries before capitalism existed, Jesus threw the moneylenders out of the temple, one wonders how he would have reacted to contemporary church towers being used as mobile phone masts or the corporate enthusiasms of some American Protestants. Five centuries before Christ entered the temple, the Buddha, Gautama Siddhartha, set up a philosophical system in opposition to the notion of economic (wo) man and the desire for ever more consumer goods, before the term economics had been coined by Aristotle. The fact that the Buddha’s holiness was indicated, amongst other signs, by his long ear lobes, a symbol of nobility enjoyed by the then Nepalese ruling class whose lavish jewellery distended their ears, suggests that Zen is only half of the process. Rebellion against empire has a long history too. The Spartacus uprising where the slaves attempted to over throw Roman power deserves a mention, immortalised as it was by Rosa Luxemburg’s brave but failed Spartacist revolution of 1919 and put into celluloid by the Marxist scriptwriter Howard Fast (Bronner 1987; Fast 1990). From the peasant revolutionaries such as John Ball to the Anabaptists who took on and nearly defeated the Saxon Lutheran Princes there is a tradition of struggle against established economic and political power that stretches back centuries (Strayer 1991).
The creation of the capitalist market in Britain, for example, during the eighteenth century was vigorously opposed with direct action by small producers, farmers and workers who insisted instead on the maintenance of a moral economy that placed need before greed (Tilly 1975). Land enclosure was fought with a series of peasant revolts and oppressive landlords were shamed in the seventeenth century by ritual processions known as charivari or skimmingtons (Wall 2004). In Ireland, oppressive landowners were humiliated by hunger strikers who starved themselves to death at their gates in the nineteenth century. The so-called Utopian Socialists continued the habit of resistance to the market, particularly in Britain and France. It is worth mentioning Robert Owen, the factory-owning radical, who attempted to build a socialist commonwealth in the early nineteenth century (Taylor 1982). Karl Marx, who spent his entire adult life attempting to understand capitalism, at the very time it was maturing, sought to create a system to help fight it (Harvey 1990; Wheen 2000). Marx’s attitude to capitalism was akin to that of many of the utopian socialists and anarchists in its complexity; while he attacked capitalism as exploitative, he also saw it as a progressive force, which by developing the means of production would pave the way to a new society. For good and sometimes for ill, the twentieth century saw Marxist inspired revolutions over much of the globe. In turn, Marx’s anarchist detractors created militant movements opposed to capitalism during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Woodcock 1963).
The Frankfurt School of Western Marxists based around figures such as Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse saw capitalism as a totalitarian system that controlled the working class via parliamentary democracy and consumerism (Jay 1973). According to Marcuse, representative democracy seduces the public into thinking that they can participate politically, when in fact being manipulated by a capitalist elite who chose the real rulers of society. The radical New Left, who agreed with Marcuse insight that consumerism, is used to buy obedience, exploded out of the relatively conservative left parties of the 1950s and 1960s. Marcuse helped inspire the student uprisings of the late 1960s and early 1970s particularly Paris 1968 (Brown 1974).
Feminists have criticised the economic system as one that enslaves women and fails to value their contribution (Peterson and Lewis 1999). Women either work for free in the home or increasingly as low paid, part-time and poorly protected workers in the formal economy (Malos 1980). Drawing upon both the Frankfurt school and feminism, green movements have crystallised during the last quarter of the twentieth century to argue that a society focussed on market economics diminishes human beings and manipulates spiritual and social needs into forms of consumerism (Snyder 1974). Greens have attacked capitalism, above all, because of its emphasis on economic growth, which they have seen as ecologically unsustainable (Douthwaite 1992; Porritt 1984).
Activists have increasingly targeted corporations as a source of ecological and human injustice. The UK based Corporate Watch was established in 1995 by campaigners who had worked to boycott the Shell oil company for its complicity in the execution of Nigerian activist Ken Saro-Wiwa. From the boycott of Nestle over its high pressure selling of powered milk to mothers whose access to dirty water in developing countries raised infant mortality to animal rights campaigns against vivisecting companies anti-corporate protest has grown in the 1980s, 1990s and into to the twenty first century.
The Zapatista uprising of January 1994 is pivotal to any understanding of the recent wave of militant anti-capitalism. This previously obscure guerrilla army occupied five southern Mexican provinces to protest at the introduction of the North American Free Trade Association, which they believed would lead to the loss of their land by multinationals. Their spokesperson Marcos argued, ‘NAFTA is a death sentence because it leads to competition based on your level of skill, and what skill level can illiterate people have? And look at this land. How can we compete with farms in California and Canada?’ (Russell 1995: 6). The Zapatistas were reported as stating: ‘There are those with white skins and a dark sorrow. Our struggle walks with these skins. There are those who have dark skins and a white arrogance; against them is our fire. Our armed path is not against skin colour but against the colour of money’ (Earth First! UpDate 53, November 1994: 3).
In Mexico there is a tradition of hostility to prices, property and other market institutions, that predates Marxism and anarchism. The Zapatistas take their name from Emiliano Zapata who led the Mexican Revolution. He fought for ‘tierra y libertad’, the demand for communal land ownership and the defence of the peasant producers. A sub plot of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, one of the most important novels of the twentieth century, is right wing opposition to the Mexican state, which even in the 1930s retained some notion of its revolutionary roots (1967). The Zapatista leader Marcos was originally a Maoist and remains influenced by Marxist forms of anti-capitalism however, such Mexican and indigenous roots have shaped the movement. To join NAFTA the Mexican government abolished article 27 of Zapata's 1910 revolutionary constitution, which guaranteed the right to land for those who worked it. The Zapatistas fought to prevent these 'ejidos', or communal landholdings from being sold to private landowners. The Zapatista Army of National Liberation began as a local militia to defend the poorest people of Mexico’s poorest provinces but mutated into a wider campaign against capitalism, motivated by fear that free trade would create even greater suffering in the Chiapas.
The Zapatistas exploited the power of the internet, a product of capitalism and driving force of globalisation, to help kick start the anti-capitalist mobilisation of recent years (Anon 1998; Holloway and Pelaez 1998). They have worked with a variety of groups including anarchists and radical environmentalists such as Reclaim the Streets (RTS) in the UK (Wall 1999). In 1996 they called an international encuentro or encounter to link opponents of neo-liberalism, which brought 6,000 participants to the Chiapas. A second encuentro in Spain in 1997 saw the creation of Peoples Global Action (PGA), who organised the 50th anniversary Davos demonstration against GATT in 1998. The PGA linked together ten grass roots networks including the Brazilian Landless movement and the radical Indian Farmers Union. Do or Die! a journal produced by members of Earth First! and RTS reported back from the first encuentro that four hallmark principles were used to create a measure of unity:
A very clear rejection of the institutions that multinationals and speculators have built to take power away from people, like the WTO and other trade liberalisation agreements.

A confrontational attitude, since we do not think that lobbying can have a major impact in such biased and undemocratic organisations in which transnational capital is the only real policy maker.

A call for non-violent civil disobedience and the construction of local alternatives by local people, as answers to the actions of governments and corporations.

An organisational philosophy based on decentralisation and autonomy. (Do or Die 8, 1999)
PGA used the internet to organise internationally and rejected the participation of formal NGOs and political parties including Greens and Marxists. In February 1998 the first meeting of PGA brought together 300 delegates from 71 countries, including the Uwa peoples of Columbia, Canadian Postal Workers, European Reclaim the Streets activists, anti-nuclear campaigners, French farmers, Maori and Ogoni activists, through to Korean Trade Unionists, the Indigenous Women’s Network of North America, and Ukrainian radical ecologists. ‘All were there to form a global instrument for communication and co-ordination for all those fighting against the destruction of humanity and the planet by the global market’ (Do or Die 8, 1999). A series of rolling protests at international events to promote the free trade hegemony was launched, as noted by the Economist, at the fiftieth anniversary of the GATT, in Switzerland.
A global day of action against capitalism was organised for June 18th 1999 to coincide with that years meeting of the G8. In Britain, the ‘Carnival against Capitalism’ was a carefully planned act of chaos. Fifty thousand gold flyers distributed at clubs and pubs, a global e-mail discussion list and vigorous fly posting were used to draw 10,000 partygoers to the meeting point at Liverpool Street Station. Banners proclaimed ‘Kill Capitalism’, ‘Global ecology not global economy’. Coloured masks were distributed and flags green for ecology, red for communism and black for anarchy, were used to lead demonstrators in different directions. The entire financial centre of London was severely disrupted (Wall 2004).
Major protests followed at Seattle that, as noted, derailed the WTO agenda setting talks. September 2000 saw the IMF meeting in the Czech Republic under siege. The World Social Forum met in a conscious parody of the World Economic Forum’s traditional gathering, for the first time in February 2001. The event in Porto Alegre in southern Brazil was also accompanied by direct action;
José Bové, [...] was the star turn at ‘anti-Davos’, especially after he joined leaders of Brazil’s Landless Movement on an excursion to destroy a plantation of genetically modified soya owned by Monsanto, an American company. He was briefly arrested and threatened with deportation, but was later allowed to stay. Protesters trashed a nearby McDonald’s in his honour. (Economist, 3 February 2001)
In April 2001 a Quebec meeting to create a free trade area of the Americas had to be fortified to resist an assault by anti-globalists. The next WTO meeting was in Qatar, a remote police state, chosen to reduce the possibility of protest. Such actions at major international events have continued to occur since 2001, a wave of protest is being planned as this book goes to press against the G8 meeting in Scotland in 2005. Many events have turned to violence with protesters being killed or severely injured. Local networks that undertake grassroots action of a less dramatic but no less important kind accompany such large scale and vivid events (Plows 2004).

Capitalism, by its very nature, is a permanent state of war

In this chapter, I briefly examine the origins of the anti-capitalist movement, outline the arguments of their opponents who support free market globalisation and describe the different variants of anti-capitalism discussed in later chapters.

Well the introductory bit of the introductory chapter, setting the scene.

cold concepts = economic concepts drive the world

warm conspiracies = small elite groups rule the world

I play with these phrases...the balance between economic structures and maniputlation is a big and interesting question.

I don't go simply for what I describe delicately as the 'political economy of evil bastards', our problems our deeper than Bush, Blair and Brown.

The quotes at the head of each chapter are aimed to provoke a bit and give a literary feel.


Here goes:



1 WARM CONSPIRACIES AND COLD CONCEPTS

‘It was you who told me,’ I said gently, ‘that capitalism, by its very nature, is a permanent state of war, a constant struggle which can never end.’
‘That’s true,’ she agreed without hesitation, ‘But it’s not always the same people doing the fighting.’ (Houellebecq 2003: 284)

Everything becomes saleable and purchasable. Nothing is immune from this alchemy, the bones of the saints cannot withstand it […] Ancient society therefore denounced it as tending to destroy the economic and moral order. Modern society, which already in its infancy had pulled Pluto by the hair of his head from the bowels of the earth, greets gold as its Holy Grail, as the glittering incarnation of its innermost principle of life. (Marx 1979: 229-230)


October 1998, Davos, Switzerland. Grey suited civil servants are meeting to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the creation of its free trade successor the World Trade Organisation (WTO). A little ritualised cake cutting and mutual backslapping is all the local film crews are expecting. Instead of such self-aggrandisement, the cameras roll to the sight of:
a colourful crowd of demonstrators on the far side of rolls of barbed wire […] Free trade”, they claim, “despoils the environment and enslaves dispossessed peoples”. “God is dead”, reads one banner; “The WTO has replaced Him.”’ The protest, organised by a new network Peoples Global Action, starts quietly but becomes noisier. Most of the demonstrators act peacefully but some start to throwing stones, and bottles, then overturn cars and set them ablaze. (Economist, 1 October 1998)
Since 1998 international trade conferences, summits and other state-corporate jamborees have been disrupted on a continual basis (Anon 2000c; Katsiaficas et al 2002). If Davos marked some kind of a start, Seattle is better known. In November 1999 huge protests involving hundreds of thousands of critics of free trade disrupted the WTO talks at Seattle. Since Seattle, a huge, militant and diverse anti-capitalist movement has emerged as a global force. The aim of this book is to explain the economics of this anti-capitalist movement and, in so doing, to examine how a fairer and more ecologically sustainable world can be created.
The movement challenges the misdeeds of powerful globalising elites who seek to redistribute resources from poor to rich, to open up areas of ecologically diverse wilderness to loggers and oil companies and to start profitable wars for weapons manufacturers. However, the removal of such elites is unlikely to be sufficient to achieve a just and ecological world. At its most subversive the anti-capitalist movement is about ideas, it attacks the key concepts of conventional economics. The movement has challenged not just genetically modified crops and social injustice but contested economic assumptions ranging from free trade and economic growth to property rights. This is a rebellion against cold economics concepts as well as assumed warm conspiracies by corporations and right wing politicians. The most radical anti-capitalists tell us that almost everything we know about economics is wrong and given economic logic is the logic that runs modern society the implications of such a critique, if correct, are breathtaking.
The movement has been surprisingly successful, often slowing and sometimes reversing the supposedly irresistible march of global market forces. Not only did the Seattle trade talks collapse largely because of the protest but in September 2003, some four years on, WTO agenda setting discussions at Cancun, Mexico fell apart after an alliance of developing countries put forward many demands of the anti-globalisers. In 2003, anti-capitalists who rose up to prevent water privatisation toppled the Bolivian government (Guardian, 21 October 2003). The once forgotten global financial architecture of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, G8 and associated institutions is constantly in the news, visible and under almost continuous criticism. From opposition to genetically modified food to successful demands to reduce third world debt, movement victories are multiple.
The movement’s diversity is also important. Mid-west anarchists have come together with trade unionists, socialists and major non-governmental organisations like the World Development Movement and Oxfam along with radical farmers like José Bové from France in the Confédération Paysanne, Greens and others. Revolutionaries in Mexico and Argentina have been part of a movement that stretches to local community groups in the more conservative parts of Birmingham or Kyoto. This has been the first radical movement to fully utilise the internet to coordinate days of action and other protests on a global scale. The movement in all its multiplicity argues that neo-liberal globalisation creates poverty, destroys diversity, wrecks the environment and erodes democracy. The globalisers on the contrary argue that there is no alternative to conventional market economics and neo-liberalism is the only secure path to prosperity. The stakes are very high.
For all these reasons and more, the anti-capitalist movement demands attention but while its slogans seem self-apparent its ideas are often contradictory, sometimes complex and have deep historical roots. It is an amalgam of different schools of thought with different forms of analysis and varied demands. The aim of this volume is to unpick the intellectual knots in the protest network, to show how anti-capitalist ideas have developed. In this chapter, I briefly examine the origins of the anti-capitalist movement, outline the arguments of their opponents who support free market globalisation and describe the different variants of anti-capitalism discussed in later chapters.

It is time to relearn what it means to be human.

So to start gently, not too much Keynes, Friedman, Marx or Negri, here is the preface from New Zealand Green Party Member of Parliament Nandor Tanczos.

Well Nandor where does one start, the man is amazing:

Tánczos, one of the more "colourful" of New Zealand's politicians, attracts both strong criticism and enthusiastic support.

The New Zealand public knows Tánczos primarily as the voice advocating the liberalisation of the cannabis law in New Zealand, although he also actively campaigns against genetic engineering and in favour of restorative justice. He also has a reputation as New Zealand's first and only Rastafarian MP. His most significant legislative achievement, the Clean Slate Act, conceals non-violent criminal offences if the offender does not re-offend after 7 years. His Misuse of Drugs (Hemp) amendment bill led the way for regulation changes to allow hemp growing in New Zealand. He currently has the Waste Minimisation Bill before parliament. In addition to his political policies, Tánczos also supports open source software, and uses Mandrake Linux on his work lap-top.

Tanczos is also notorious for his admission to occassionally consuming cannabis. He is however, a teetotaller

More from the wiki oracle here.

I was so lucky to get this, he sums up the real essentials of non capitalist economy with poetry and precision.

This is the language of 'Jah' and Shakespeare...a prophetic voice but with some impressive intellectual under pinnings.

Read and enjoy....you may well have seen this before it is happily floating around the blog sphere on several sites.


PREFACE
Nandor Tanczos
Human beings face the greatest challenge in the history of our species. We face the destruction of the life support systems on which our very existence depends, and we face it because of our own activity.
There are some who deny or diminish that threat. They mostly either retreat into fairy tale thinking – that technology, or the ‘free’ market, or UFO’s will save us - or hope that by closing their eyes they can it go away.
Yet the evidence is mounting almost daily that the threats are very real and are gathering momentum. A new report from the UK is saying that if we don't turn carbon emissions around in the next decade, we will not be able to stop runaway climate change whatever we do.
Authoritative voices are warning us that we are very close to the point where world demand for oil will outstrip the capacity of the oilfields to supply. Our total dependence on fossil fuels, the use of which has provided the energy for an enormous expansion of human activity and population, is like a chemical addiction. And as the USA has recently confirmed in Iraq, strip a junkie of their supply and the temptation to turn to crime can be irresistable.
“The American way of life” says George Bush the First “is not negotiable”.
A time of crisis, however, is also the time of greatest opportunity. More and more people are waking up to the need to change, to change at a fundamental level, and to change right now. People are waking up to the fact that the institutions of society that so many have put their trust in are failing us. Government won’t do it. Big business can’t do it.
Because the challenge we are facing is about more than changing a few policies or practises. It requires a fundamental rethink of what it means to be a human being. Government and business can become allies, but the power to make real change lies in the hearts and the lives of ordinary people.
It is already happening. The international people’s movement against genetically engineered (GE) plants and animals has demonstrated how the reckless agenda of multinational corporations, aided and abetted by our own governments, can be stopped in its tracks and rolled back. One conglomerate has been outed bribing government regulatory officials in Indonesia, GE companies are pulling out of the EU and Australia, and GE agriculture firms are facing massive stock market losses. The promised gold rush is proving to be a fantasy, largely because of global consumer resistence.
While the campaign has significant support in the scientific community, for many ordinary people it began as a sense that something just didn’t feel right. That feeling is often quickly backed up by investigation, but the sense of something being fundamentally arrogant and wrong about GE is the key - it is our humanness talking to us.
What is it to be human? Western society, at least, defines us as individuals whose value can be judged by what job we have, what colour credit card, what kind of car we drive and the label on our clothes.
Yet beneath these displays of status, real people are emotional, social and spiritual beings - intrinsic characteristics that cannot be considered in isolation from each other. We seem to have forgotten that our relationships – with one another and all the other beings with whom we share this beautiful planet – are fundamental to who we are.
There is a passage in the Bible that says “where there is no vision, the people perish”. The inability to step back and clearly see and understand the ‘big picture’ is the central problem that we face in the world today. The main motivations for Western industrial society for the past few hundred years - belief in unlimited growth and technology as the solution to all problems - are the very things that are killing us.
We cannot grow forever on a finite planet. If we continue to assume that endless growth and consumption is possible, and disregard the biosphere’s capacity to meet our greed, and if we continue to neglect social justice and fair and sustainable wealth distribution, we will reap a bitter harvest.
Neither will technology on its own fix the problem. Yes, we need better technology, more efficient technology that uses non-polluting cyclical processes and that does not depend on fossil fuels. But just more technology will not do, because the problem is in us and the way we see ourselves in the world.
We humans think that we can own the planet, as if fleas could own a dog. Our concepts of property ownership are vastly different from traditional practises of recognising use rights over various resources. A right to grow or gather food or other resources in a particular place is about meeting needs. Property ownership is about the ability to live on one side of the world and speculate on resources on the other, possibly without ever seeing it, without regard to need or consequence.
The ability to ‘own’ property is fundamental to capitalism. Since the first limited liability companies - the Dutch and British East India Companies - were formed, we have seen the kidnapping and enslavement of 20 - 60 million African people and the rape, murder and exploitation of indigenous people around the world. Colonisation was primarily about mercantile empires, not political ones. It was all about forcing indigenous, communitarian people to accept private individual ownership of resources, which could then be alienated, either by being bought or stolen. The subsequent political colonisation was just about how to enforce that ownership.
Today property rights are being extended through GATT and TRIPS agreements and through institutions such as the WTO and the World Bank. Private property rights are being imposed over public assets such as water, intellectual property and, through genetic engineering and biopiracy, on DNA sequences. Even traditional healing plants are under threat. In Aotearoa - New Zealand we have had multinationals attempting to patent piko piko and other native plants. This is all part of the ‘free’ trade corporate globalisation agenda - to create tradeable rights over our common wealth, accumulate ownership and then sell back to us what is already ours.
This is only possible because we have lost our place in the scheme of things. We think of the environment as something ‘over there’, as something separate from human activity, something to either be exploited or protected. The reality is that we are as much part of the environment and the planet as the trees, insects and birds.
It is time to relearn what it means to be human.

The book at the end of the world.

Mr. Lebeziatnikov who keeps up with modern ideas explained the other day that compassion is forbidden nowadays by science itself, and that that's what is done now in England, where there is political economy. (Dostoevsky 1993: 14)


Over successive days I am going to blog from my book Babylon and Beyond, So you can read and comment on my ideas for free. Thanks for the person at the Brighton real alternatives to capitalism meeting, who said 'why don't you put it on the web'.

Babylon and Beyond can be bought, I know buying things is a bit last millenium but if you must, here and here and here.


I would love it if you ordered copies for your local public library. This is the sacred principle, prosperity without pollution, increasing access rather than the cycle of production - consumption - profit - garbage.

Babylon is two things:

1) An outline of different forms of anti-capitalist economics. Moving from the ideas of capitalist anti-capitalist like George Soros and Joseph Stiglitz, Korten and Klein, to green localists like Caroline Lucas and Vandana Shiva, Marxism from Marx to Castro, Anarchists and autonomists like Hardt and Negri, monetary reformers like Major Douglas or Tobin, ecosocialist like Joel Kovel

I look at what they say and how it can be criticised. Everything you wanted to know about anti-capitalism but were too afraid to ask.

2) Its an introduction to an economy beyond capitalism, capitalism has a built in tendancy to 'enclose' resources which are free including human creativity, to build giant undemocratic corporations and to grow for ever. In my view it is unjust and ecologically unsustainable. We can do better.

I am most interested in what might be described as 'wiki economics' an economics based on creativity rather than state control or market forces.

But there are other alternatives from Parecon to Bolivarian socialism to LETs or syndicalism or eco feminist economics, the point is to debate them and make them live.

Actually you never know Bolivarian socialism might be the real deal!

This is, of course, a political task as well, currently I am the Green Party Principal Speaker and I intend to keep on struggling for a world that actually works unlike the present order which is racing toward ecocide. If you want join the Green Party and support my efforts in this direction click here.

This is the project, you can read more over successive days and weeks. Here are some more details.

Description

"A thoughtful and inspiring guide to capitalism and anti-capitalism. This really is the first book that carefully explains the different varieties of anti-capitalist thought ... I thoroughly recommend that you read Babylon and Beyond."

Caroline Lucas, MEP

"There are far too many books on anti-capitalism out there already -- but with Babylon and Beyond, Derek Wall has removed the need to read most of them. Just read this one: a succinct, intelligent and witty summary of what it's all about."

Paul Kingsnorth, author of One No, Many Yeses: A Journey to the Heart of the Global Resistance Movement

"A synthesis of Red and Green is the future of progressive politics. Wall illuminates the interface of ecological and socialist ideas; divining common threads and offering the hope of a democratic, just and sustainable future for humankind."

Peter Tatchell, human rights campaigner

Babylon and Beyond provides the first clear and accessible guide to the economics of anti-capitalism. Anti-capitalism is a diverse movement: critics accuse it of knowing what it is against, but not knowing what it is for. Anti-capitalists want radical change, but what shape should that change take?

The truth is that different sections of the movement advocate distinct -- sometimes complementary, sometimes contradictory -- programmes for change. This book concentrates on perhaps the most divisive issue of all in the anti-capitalist struggle: how to transform the economy.

There are greens who think we must hold back economic growth and Marxists who believe the economy must move forward along capitalist lines before there can be revolutionary change; there are those who remain faithful to notions of collective or state ownership of all aspects of the economy, and those who think various kinds of reform or regulation of capitalist practice is more appropriate.



Babylon and Beyond is a modern guidebook to the complicated terrain of alternatives to global capitalism. Derek Wall explains and summarises the rich variety of theories available within the anti-capitalist movement. Chapters cover Marxism, Autonomism, Anarchism, Ecosocialism, Capitalist reformers (like George Soros and Joseph Stiglitz), Green localists (like Colin Hines), and others. Unique in its coverage, clear and accessible, the book is ideal for activists, and anyone who is trying to find a useful way forward.

This book is published in association with the Green Economics Institute.




Derek Wall is the author of five books including Earth First and the Anti-Roads Movement (Routledge, 1999) and, with Penny Kemp, A Green Manifesto for the 1990s (Penguin, 1990). He teaches Political Economy at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is Principal Speaker of the Green Party of England and Wales.




Foreword: Nandor Tanczos

1 Warm Conspiracies and Cold Concepts

2 Vaccinating against Anti-Capitalism: Stiglitz, Soros and Friends

3 White Collar Global Crime Syndicate: Korten, Klein and other Anti-Corporates

4 Small is Beautiful: Green Localism

5 Planet Earth Money Martyred: Social Credit and Monetary Reform

6 Imperialism Unlimited: Marxisms

7 The Tribe of Moles: Autonomism, Anarchism and Empire

8 Marx on the Seashore: Ecosocialist Alternatives

9 Life After Capitalism: Alternatives, Structures, Strategies

References

Index