the fierce resistance to a life of hard labor in the service of profit.
Communitarian alternatives
The ability of capitalism to recreate itself through destabilizing crises and the uprooting of peoples keeps this sense of discontent forever brewing. Today, many of the ideas about alternatives to capitalism are rooted in pre-capitalist communitarian traditions. One such can be seen in the work of the indigenous Bolivian sociologist Félix Patzi Paco, who champions the tradition of ayllu alluded to above. His is not some narrow backwoods project or anthropological oddity, but rather:
‘an invitation to organize and re-inscribe communal systems all over the world – systems that have been erased and dismantled by the increasing expansion of the capitalist economy, which the European left has been unable to halt. If ayllus and markas are the singular memory and organization of communities in the Andes, then it is the other memories of communal organization around the globe which predate and survived the advent of capitalism which make possible the idea of a communal system today – one not mapped out in advance by any ideology, or any simple return to the past. The Zapatista dictum of the need for “a world in which many worlds fit” springs to mind as we try to imagine a planet of communal systems in a pluri-versal, not uni-versal, world order.’8
Not only did burgeoning capitalism meet with fierce resistance but this dissatisfaction has led to a constant parade of ideas and projects to create an alternative. Some, such as socialism and anarchism, have been persistent poles of opposition, while others have taken the form of smaller practical and utopian projects. The modern era, dating back to, say, the times of the French and US revolutions, has seen thousands of such communitarian alternatives come and go. Some have been religious in their inspiration (the Anabaptists and Hutterites, or later the Russian Doukhobors, for example) while others have tended towards the secular. Some were more vertical in their organization, often gathered around a charismatic figure who welded absolute authority over the community. Others were more horizontal, being fiercely democratic. Most aspired to some egalitarian ideal that was a reaction to the polarization of wealth and power that has been an abiding feature of capitalism, including the communities created by Winstanley and the Diggers (the radical wing of the English Revolution), or, later, New Harmony in Pennsylvania or the Oneida Community in upstate New York inspired by John Noyes.9 Such attempts to escape the rule of the capitalist market can be seen right through to the 1960s back-to-the-land movement and the sustainable eco-communities that still exist across Europe and the Americas.
Today, alternatives to capitalism continue to survive and thrive in a number of living forms and social movements. The emphasis shifts with the context. Now there is a new language underpinning new ideas – as when the prefix ‘eco’ is added to that old warhorse ‘socialism’. Ecosocialism contains a suspicion of technology and the gospel of progress that was unfamiliar back in the days of state-socialist Five Year Plans or various social-democratic schemes of modernization. There are new movements that advocate doing things slowly – slow food, slow cities, even slow money. Some speak of radical autonomy, in response to a state increasingly divorced from its democratic pretensions. Others aim to rethink the entire enterprise of economic growth and speak of a future based on degrowth. There is also now an attempt to fuse the struggles against poverty and wealth into a common notion of a democratic sufficiency in which all might share. Today’s advocates of an alternative to wasteful capitalism have their roots in past human experiences. They can all find voices of past dissent that still speak to them and offer possibilities of roads not yet taken.
1 Cees Nooteboom, All Soul’s Day, Harcourt Books, New York, 1997.
2 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Penguin Classic, 1981.
3 Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics, Routledge, New York, 1989.
4 Pierre Clastres, Society against the State, Zone Books, Cambridge, 1990.
5 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, Beacon Press, Boston, 1944.
6 Samuel Bowles and Herb Gintis, Democracy and Capitalism, Basic Books, New York, 1986.
7 EP Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, Vintage, New York, 1966.
8 Walter Mignolo, ‘The Communal and the Decolonial’ Turbulence (Ideas for Movement), nin.tl/1a9hwZY
9 Kenneth Rexroth, Communalism: from its origins to the 20th century, Seabury Press, New York, 1974.
Capitalism: a system of reckless resilience
How capitalism developed – and why it depends upon ‘creative destruction’. The rise of neoliberalism as a political philosophy and the transformation of old enemies such as Russia and China into authoritarian free marketeers. And why capitalism is beyond the control even of the captains of finance.
‘The most convincing and enduring foe of the global financial economy ultimately is the global financial economy itself.’
Ulrich Beck1
What is the problem with capitalism anyway? Hasn’t it delivered modernity and prosperity over the centuries? Has a better economic system ever emerged, offering a more efficient way for allocating resources? Isn’t the invisible hand of the market the only way for billions of people to interact economically without falling under stultifying bureaucratic control?
Those who make the case for capitalism vary from its most sophisticated economic thinkers (such as Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman) to the thousands of graduates of business schools who all sing from the same songbook of market perfection. Even the best-known liberal critics of capitalism such as John Maynard Keynes and John Kenneth Galbraith saw no real alternative to it as the most efficient form of economic organization, although they were committed to finding ways to iron out its instabilities and disequilibria through the intervention of the public power of the state. But such reforms have fallen out of fashion given the ascendancy of neoliberal orthodoxy since the 1980s. Today, government after government still suffers from frozen policy imaginations in the face of the speculative bubbles that destabilize everything from public finance to the plans and dreams of ordinary people. The panicked ad hoc bail-out of banks and corporations ‘too big to fail’ and the imposition of austerity packages on the masses to pay for it now appear to be the only recipes in the public policy cookbook. By and large, government policies, despite bold words about re-establishing a coherent regime of regulation, have failed to gain much more leverage over these corporate actors than did the previous regime of speculative ‘market freedom’. It was this neoliberal dispensation, obsessed with removing the regulatory shackles on the ‘free’ movement of capital, that allowed the creation and sale of an avalanche of unstable paper assets – secondary mortgage markets, derivatives, credit default swaps, and so on. According to the economic historian Jeff Madrick, most of these difficulties remain to be addressed:
‘These included the lack of transparency in the derivatives markets, where prices were set in obscurity on trillions of dollars of transactions. Market theory calls for clear and open pricing information. It includes the conflicts of interest of the credit ratings agencies, which were paid by the issuers seeking high ratings. This is bound to lead to market failure. There are also the absurd compensation practices of Wall Street, which largely protected the traders and other decision-makers
