Of course, we won’t always be this way. Sometimes we will be small-minded and mean, narcissistic and self-serving – downright nasty. We will always have these competing traits. So what we need to do is to organize the world in such a way as to encourage our better selves and discourage our narrow-minded and nasty side. Our current system of capital accumulation (known as corporate capitalism) does just the opposite. This champions and fosters narrow-minded self-interest and greed as the cornerstone of all that is human. It also fosters inequality and powerlessness on a massive scale and is driving us in the direction of eco-destruction – including of the aforementioned lakes, reefs, jungles and dolphins.
It has reached the point where the Marxist theorist Frederick Jameson can say without irony that it is easier to think of the end of the world than the end of capitalism. For, while the world is doing badly, capitalism is getting along just fine. Oh sure, there are economic crises and financial blow-ups, but the goods are still being delivered to those at the top of the pile with an enviably smooth efficiency and the general public still seem to accept the corporate message that ‘there is no alternative’. This is, of course, a self-serving lie.
The purpose of this book is to tease out what such genuine alternatives to capitalism might look like. It looks at what the past experience of such alternatives has been, at the issues and problems that have haunted them – the paths not taken. This is a bittersweet history of rich diversity marked by massacre, noble failure and tepid success. The book then moves into the present to seek a way out of the maze of life-threatening inequality and eco-catastrophe.
The history of capitalism is, of course, tied up with the various waves of the industrial revolution, with its attendant technological advances – steam, carbon, nuclear and now cyber, to pick an arbitrary few. Today, some advocates of alternatives to capitalism hold that industrialism itself, which was so shaped by the needs of capitalists for profit and control, needs to be thrown off; their view is that human society needs to return to a kind of neo-primitivist sensibility, abandoning our technological fixes and consumer addictions. Others, who are no less opposed to the inequalities of wealth and power that scar capitalism, take the contrary position on questions of modernity. For orthodox Marxists and many of their antecedents, for many liberal reformers, for those committed to the ‘development’ of the Global South, the problem with capitalism is that it is shackling modernity rather than abetting it. This is a vital point (though far from the only one) that divides critics who think about what an alternative to capitalism might look like.
The conceit of progress that is built into modern-day capitalism produces a number of common myths. The first is the widespread belief that we are better off now than we have ever been. The second is that we have no alternative but to continue in the direction of corporate growth or dire consequences will ensue. The third is that there is a kind of trans-historical human nature that condemns us all to act only in our own narrow self-interest. The fourth is that our present state was fashioned more or less democratically, with dissent only from the backward and foolish. The fifth is that we need constant speed-up in production and work and society as a whole in order to ensure we can meet our (often unsustainable) needs. The sixth is that science and technology alone can save us from whatever problems corporate growth produces. And the seventh one, which perhaps underpins the others, is that all we have to do is make sure the pie keeps growing.
Taken together, these make up a powerful arsenal of status quo ‘common sense’ weapons that need to be unpicked so as to expose their profoundly unhistorical and dead-end nature. This volume will try to do just that, as it explores alternative ways of living and loving life.
Sources of hope – life before capitalism
Many values that today’s societies take for granted are very recent interlopers in human history. Life before capitalism was not devoid of pleasure – and was certainly not as individualistic. Modern attempts to create alternatives can draw inspiration from the past, not only from less acquisitive, more communitarian societies, but also from heroic examples of resistance.
‘If you want to find out more, you have to move backward against the flow of time, while simultaneously moving forward.’
Cees Nooteboom1
Capitalism as a total world system is a relatively new part of human experience. It has its roots in the 16th and 17th centuries, which means that it has been around for four or five hundred years at most, while we humans (Homo sapiens) have been around for 200,000 years, reaching anatomical maturity some 50,000 years ago. Our ancestors (the less predatory Homo erectus) go back over a million years. By these measures capitalism is merely the blink of an eye.
Yet for most people living today this short time span is difficult to grasp. Partly this is because we have no relatives that remember pre-capitalism, and the oral tradition that used to pass historical knowledge from generation to generation has largely been disrupted by first literate and then media culture. There have been so many rapid technological changes over the past century that they add up to a kind of rupture in human memory. We have become future-oriented, addicted to novelty and ‘into’ discovering (and possessing) the latest thing in our rootless consumer universe. Pre-capitalism is today the preserve of academic specialists or isolated tribal remnants and remote villages. Yet it is well worth reflecting on what life was like before capitalism.
Happiness is not a modern invention
The doctrine of progress that accompanied the rise of capitalism would have it that, in the words of that early advocate of the rule of property, Thomas Hobbes, life before capitalism was ‘nasty, brutish and short’.2 This is a self-serving half-truth. There was certainly brutality and slavery, and the absolute power of warlords and despots was only partially kept in check by custom and the limited killing capacity of the primitive weaponry then to hand. Human happiness, reflection, resilience and initiative are not, however, creations of market society but flourished in medieval abbeys, amongst Paleolithic hunter gatherers, in Neolithic villages, ancient Greek city-states, among the pastoralists whose herds wandered Asia and Africa, in the indigenous communities of the Americas. In all periods of history from the Paleolithic through the Neolithic right up to the Late Feudal, people enjoyed their food, loved their children, thought about the universe and its meaning and tried to live according to their values.
The further you go back, the more disdainful the judgments of the modern conceits of progress come to seem. The notion that the lives of early hunter-gatherers were impossibly difficult is today challenged by many anthropologists, including Marshall Sahlins in his classic work Stone Age Economics.3 Sahlins makes the case that hunter-gatherers had far more leisure time than we do today (provided, of course, that we are lucky enough to have jobs). Their lives depended on seasonal factors and the bounty of the local ecosystem. It is now widely accepted that traditional hunter-gatherer societies often took the form of a kind of primitive communism, which was horizontal in its organizational structure. The North American tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy or the Pueblos of the US Southwest, who lived in communal decentralized communities, were more the rule, while the imperial Aztecs of Mexico and hierarchical Incas of Peru were more the exception. These horizontal communities show a rich variation in organization, with women often playing an important role in government, as they did among the Iroquois. The French anthropologist Pierre Clastres argues that political arrangements in many tribal societies were put in place precisely as insurance against the emergence of despotic power (in other words, ‘the state’).4 He held that such arrangements only broke down with the emergence of a caste of priestly leaders who claimed a special relationship with a higher deity. The move away from hunter-gatherer societies to agricultural communities and eventually large-scale hydrological agriculture (which took place initially in riverine societies in what is today Iraq and Egypt) also saw the advent of a much stricter division of labor and the rise of the coercive political power of the state. Life expectancy actually fell in this new situation.
The kind of individualism that has developed under capitalism