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 21st 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.
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