The Beast Destroying the World

 “Capitalism”…I started, but the barman hopped out of a pipkin

“Capitalism”, he countered…”That’s a flat and frothless word

I’m a good Labour man, but if I mentioned capitalism

My clientele would chew off their own ears

And spit them down the barmaid’s publicised cleavage”

“All right” I obliged “Don’t call it capitalism

Let’s call it Mattiboko the Mighty

……..

The poem finishes…

This was my fearless statement

“The Horror World can only be changed by the destruction of

Mattiboko the Mighty,

The Massimataxis Incoporated Supplement

And Gumbo Jumbo the Homely Obblestrog Spectacular”

Audience Reaction was quite encouraging

Adrian Mitchell “Come on Everybody Poems” 1953-2008

 Almost a quarter of my blogposts last year wrestled with various aspects of the economic system which now looks set to destroy the planet.

In my youth, the nuclear threat was what kept us awake at night – and that was particularly the case for those of us who lived a mere couple of kilometres from the US nuclear submarine base on the Clyde. Many thought that the collapse of the Berlin Wall had ended such existential fear - but global warming has now taken its place.

The year started with a couple of posts about important books with “capitalism“ in their title before trying to make amends for the failure of the blog to dealt properly with the ecological issue.

It was, however, Paul Collier’s “The Future of Capitalism – facing the new anxieties” which really got me scribbling last year – initially with a series of posts which reminded me that I had still not managed to complete a book which has occupying me for several years.

Writing a book about a subject you don’t understand is an activity I’ve recommended for everyone to help dispel the confusions we all have (if we’re honest enough)…More challenging is when the topic proves to be more amorphous - and changes shape as you work on it. Such has been my experience with text I started almost 20 years ago – long before the financial crash of 2008…It started with a critique that went as follows –

- Consumerism is killing the planet – and making people miserable.

- The poor are getting poorer

- political culture is getting ever more centralised (notwithstanding Scottish devolution).

- Social democrats like New Labour have sold the state to corporate interests.

- don’t blame individuals such as Tony Blair – it’s in the nature of modern politics. Note the political corruption in Italy, Belgium, Germany, France and even Britain.

- The EU is selfish and lacks vision

The paper then looked at the organisations and people I admired; what they were achieving; where they seemed to be failing and why; and went on to raise the question of how someone of my age, experience and resources might better contribute to society.

Many, of course, will scorn such an aspiration – seeing it as typical of a western “do-gooder”…

I readily admit my natural inclination to intervene in social processes (ie my “activist” mode) and that a lot of the recent writing on “chaos theory” and even “systems theory” seems to me to run the risk of encouraging fatalism – one of the four world views Mary Douglas introduced us to and which Chris Hood’s The Art of the State (1999) analyses so brilliantly

The world is getting increasingly complex these days – so it’s hardly surprising that we increasingly hear the argument for “leaving well alone” (or “laisser-faire” as it used to be called). But we do need to look carefully at who makes - and indeed funds - such arguments. They are the right-wing US Foundations funded by such billionaires as the Koch brothers..

One of my favourite writers - AO Hirschmann – actually devoted an entire book (”The Rhetoric of Reaction”; 1991) to examining three arguments conservative writers use for dismissing the hopes of social reformers:

- The futility thesis argues that attempts at social transformation will be unavailing, that they will simply fail to “make a dent.”

- the perversity thesis holds that any purposive action to improve some feature of the political, social, or economic order only serves to exacerbate the condition one wishes to remedy.

- the jeopardy thesis argues that the cost of the proposed change or reform is too high as it endangers some previous, precious accomplishment.

Have a look at any argument against a proposed reform - you will find it a variant of these three. But such fatalism offends my sense of what we used to call “free will” (and now “agency theory”). Powerful people exist – whether in corporations, international agencies or governments – who can and do influence events. Our job as citizens is to watch them carefully and protest when we can..

In the 1930s it was not difficult to identify the enemy…Today the enemy is a more voracious and complex system which we variously call “globalisation” or “neoliberalism” and only more recently “capitalism” - whose disastrous consequences the activists of Porto Allegro had exposed……although it took the crash of 2008 to prove the point…

Yanis Varoufakis used the highly appropriate term “the Global Minotaur” for his brilliant 2011 story of how surplus capital had sought its rewards – with all the destructiveness that Joseph Schumpeter had first described in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942) – but minus the “creativity”

The Minotaur not only survived but managed the amazing trick of transferring bank losses onto state exchequers and bringing on austerity and further vilification of the state…It was the poisoning of the state I first noticed – thanks to George Monbiot’s The Captive State – the corporate takeover of Britain (2000) and started to blog about in 2009. But within a few years such a critique of the political class had become commonplace.

So, to tempt you into flicking through “To Whom it may Concern” (for which just click the title in the list at the top-right corner of the blog masthead) here is a table with a selection of relevant posts with brief explanations…

Selected Posts about the Beast

Post	What sparked it off	Why it’s worth reading
How will it all end?	Wolfgang Streeck’s “The End of Capitalism?”	Has hyperlinks which cut to the core of the discussion
Why the reluctance to seek consensus?	“Club of Rome” report “Come on! Capitalism”	It’s a definitive report and my post tries to summarise other key texts about the turning point the world seems to have reached
What is wrong with us?	An article in NYRB about the ecological disaster we face	Exhaustive reading list
Populist – and proud of it!	Pelican book sparks off an Old Labourist reflections	The post puts the present concerns in an historical context
The Global Minotaur	Finding an internet version of a political economy book I had read in 2012	The book is one of the best explanations of the financial crash… but now reread as if for the first time
A Better Economics	Finding an internet version of a little-known but superbly-written economics textbook	May have been produced 21 years ago but clearly written by someone very sensitive to readers’ needs
The Future of Capitalism – facing the new anxieties”	Paul Collier’s new book	Explains why the book was so good it inspired 5 posts
Communitarianism, anyone?	Which failed to explore this underlying theme	An agenda is sketched out
Can the genie be put back on the bottle?	Are we no longer masters of our fate?	Some good reviews are summarised
The future of capitalism part IV	Acknowledgements page reminds me how important friends are to drafting process	As well as some critiques
The Beast needs fixed! Part V		A final assessment of Collier – with some suggestions for further reading