Monbiot on Capitalism vs Commerce

 George Monbiot wrote today, 

"One of capitalism's greatest successes is to shut down our imaginations. With the help of its favoured tools - neoliberalism and fascism - it persuades us that 'there is no alternative'. Our first task is to re-ignite our moral imaginations and name our alternatives. I cannot count the number of times I've been told, 'if you're against capitalism, you must be a communist,' or 'you must be a feudalist'. In fact, as in my case, you can be fiercely oopposed to capitalism, to communism, and to feudalism. It helps if you undertstand what capitalism is. This means recognizing that it's true nature is endlessly disguised. It's a distinct economic system which arose around 600 years ago. In The Invisible Doctrine, we give this definition:

Capitalism is not the same as commerce. The Dutch VOC and the British East India Company were not trading with the people whose land, labour and resources they seized. Nor were the slavers in the Caribbean and the Americas. Nor is investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) commerce: nations are forced to surrender resources to corporations or pay compensations. Nor is conversion of rainforests to cattle ranches or  extraction of deep-sea minerals. No one's freely trading or being properly remunerated in such cases. Yes, colonial looters might then trade the wealth they steal: capitalism can intersect with commerce, and can overrun commerce, but it is not the same. 

Commerce has been happening for thousands of years. You can have capitalism without commerce and commerce without capitalism.  Commerce without capitalism - a trade between equals, with no coercion and genuine choice - is a pretty good aim. Think of a street market, in which sellers and buyers are of more or less equal standing, there is real choice between stalls and no one is forced to sell to or buy from anyone else. Now imagine that everything the street market sells is fairly traded with the people from whose lands the produce or parts came. Imagine that any costs or damage inflicted in its production are fully compensated and made good. Imagine there's no coercion or violence at any point in the chain. Imagine something like the nutmeg trade when it belonged to the Bandanese, before European powers sought to monopolise the product then seize the land and labour required to produce it. You see? It's not difficult to begin imagining something else. 

Now, let's look at it from the other end. Capitalism's promise is that we can all aspire to private luxury. Never mind that the system is built on some people exploiting others who must remain poor if exploitation is to succeed. Never mind that there isn’t even physical space (let alone ecological space) for universal private luxury. One day, you too will own five superhomes, a giant yacht, a private jet etc. So will the child slaves digging coltan in the DRC, and the Uyghurs making components in Chinese labour camps. How was anyone persuaded that the gains would be universally enjoyed? That is, and always was, a lie. 

Now imagine that no one is allowed to keep accumulating until they are able to exert power over others. By power I mean both economic power and – because one buys the other – political power, leading to oligarchy, that we see arising yet again around the world. Imagine, as the Belgian philosopher Ingrid Robeyns proposes, that just as there’s a poverty line below which no one should fall, there’s a wealth line above which no one should rise, set by wealth taxes. It would break the patrimonial spiral of accumulation that Thomas Piketty identified. Now imagine those taxes were used to create something quite different from private luxury: much better public services and public luxury. Magnificent public parks and buildings and swimming pools and sports grounds and other stuff the ultra-rich enjoy, but for everyone. Imagine we all had our own modest private domain, a decent home and the essential components for a decent life, but when we wanted to spread our wings, we could do so in ways that everyone can share, at far lower ecological cost. 

Public luxury means creating space for others, not taking it away. So we have another component of a new economics – “private sufficiency, public luxury”. I could go on, but you get the gist of it: these things are not hard to imagine. Alternatives to capitalism are right there waiting for us. But we cannot have them if we won’t imagine them. And imagining them is much easier than you, er, imagine.