BIG08.SOCIAL CAPITALISM & RANGE ECONOMICS

BIG08.SOCIAL CAPITALISM & RANGE ECONOMICS

“If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.” - Charles Darwin

When is enough, enough?

BIG outline: As a sociology undergraduate 24 years ago the lecture series on the transition from feudalism to capitalism was a big staple for the subject. In many ways sociology is an approach defined in large part by its response to capitalism, so this is delicate ground I’m treading here, but tread I must. Capitalism(s) are specific surplus-based economic systems of accumulation and allocation. That is to say, raw material (including labour) is transformed into goods and services through which capital is accumulated in a particular way, and allocated in a particular way. Charles Darwin’s quote here is about slavery, which for centuries was an important part of the accumulation of capital, and even today it is estimated there are over 45million slaves in the world. Free market capitalism is the dominant form of capitalism in the world around us, in large part because it promotes ‘creative destruction’. Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the US Federal Reserve told congress in 2005 that “the problem with creative destruction is that it is destructive.” Poverty, unemployment, crippling debt, educational underachievement, ill-health and yes slavery, being some of the destruction. On the ‘creation’ side there has been tremendous, even obscene wealth-creation through free market capitalism. There are now over 2,000 billionaires in the world, and the question central to this BIG, taking on the destructive consequences on the one side, and the obscene wealth for wealth’s sake on the other, is “when is enough, enough?” There is a problem with free market capitalism right now, even Bill Gates knows this. In 2008 the then richest man in the world, (Gates) gave a speech at Davos on the need for “creative capitalism”, a 21^st century version of free-market capitalism to address inequality. This BIG is the development of a new kind of capitalism that is required to address inequality, and it will do this by developing social capitalism and ‘Range Economics’. We can see this kind of thinking in Kate Raworth’s ‘Doughnut Economics’ which is another approach to rein in, and ‘range in’ the unsustainable extremes of capitalism.

BIG outcome: Capitalism without an awareness of the debt and destruction (creative destruction) is consequence-free market capitalism. By this time through these lectures you’ll have a more sophisticated awareness of what culture is and is not, and also what nature (including evolution) is and is not. Free market capitalism is not an analogue of what is happening in nature, and if it is not driven by laws of nature, but by institutions of culture then its creative destruction (or sin as Darwin wrote) is on us. There are no natural justifications for free market capitalism other than its own inertia, and enough human expressed interest to continue it. This BIG will make the case that economically, empirically, ecologically, religiously, and on the grounds of reason, that range economics is the rational response to what is going on in the social and natural world(s) around us as a direct consequence of free market capitalism. When I was doing my PhD research in 1999 I had the chance to interview British politician Tony Benn who told me that “You don’t go back to socialism, you go forward to it”. I think he was close with that, but not quite. Once you let the economic genie of capitalism out of the bottle it is very difficult, if not impossible, to put it back in. We’re a creative species and we can redefine what materialism is through the power of expression. What matters is something that can and needs to change. Humankind really needs to get to grips with the question ‘When is enough, enough?’ and if we work through this question, and work towards answers then we can create and shape a social capitalism rooted on range economics, reining in the destructive extremes.