S.O.S. Alternatives to Capitalism. Richard Swift
have appeared strange indeed to both hunter-gatherers and the first agriculturalists. Right up until the decline of classic feudalism and the emergence of the city-states of Italy and Holland, followed by mercantilist England, what we think of as self-serving human nature was the exception in a world hemmed in by social and religious obligation. The rise of the system of Atlantic trade, including colonialism and the globalization of slavery, meant a wholesale assault on these traditional systems of organization – rich in their variety from imperial China, to Aztec Mexico and the Ashanti kingdoms of West Africa. Traditional systems varied from large-scale centralized empires to localized (and jealously defended) traditions of self-rule. The Aymara and Quechua peoples of the Andean highlands are today using the pre-Inca tradition of ayllu (a self-governing, highly flexible form of home community based on collective rights) as a way of resisting outside domination. For these people (and many others), these traditions are not museum pieces but can be ‘re-inscribed’ as part of a living tradition that has shown a remarkable ability to adapt in order to survive.
Losing our diversity
The point is not that these were the pre-capitalist ‘good old days’ but that, until relatively recently, life was different from that which we experience in today’s market and commodity-dominated society. Sometimes it was better; sometimes worse. But it was always different. This is a truth that the partisans of contemporary market progress like to avoid; perhaps because what was different before could be different again. It is the diversity of real possibility that we are losing under the homogenizing influence of corporate capitalism. Today, the large institutions that shape the world economy (the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization) lay down rules of trade and investment that they insist that we all must live by from Mongolia to Mozambique. They bury centuries-old differences in an avalanche of commercial rules so as to bring order in the form of their particular notion of profit-based calculation. These rules are usually shaped not to accord with the desires and needs of the people most affected but rather to provide a degree of predictability for the large corporate organizations and capital or bond markets that structure finance. Their greatest horror is when some significant player steps outside their rules by threatening default on debt, violating investor ‘rights’ or making wealthy creditors (rather than ordinary citizens) take the economic cold plunge. Such heresies can be remarkably successful ways of dealing with economic crisis, as populist governments in Argentina (2002) and Iceland (2008) have recently proved.
Anthropology teaches us that diversity in rules, habits and social forms has always been the human way. This is why it would be easy to fill these pages with examples of those who have insisted (and still insist) on resisting capitalist monoculture, whether that comes in the form of self-serving commercial rules, politics as the sole preserve of professional politicians or the culture of celebrity and gadget worship. But too often the insistence on difference becomes just another niche marketing opportunity. The system feeds on the very dissatisfaction and predictability it has manufactured to sell new forms of ‘renegade authenticity’, particularly to young people desperate to escape the boredom and limits they have inherited. Thus revolt easily becomes just another species of the rootless consumer appetite that drives us on. What we need is to take strength from the spirit of our many ancestors and look for real diversity – not as a consumer choice but as an insistence on living and valuing differently.
Particular societies bring out a variety of different potentials in human beings, encouraging some while discouraging others. Some of these point in a quite different direction from that of our current market society. The Reformation and its followers in Germany and elsewhere worked to build a communalist New Jerusalem. The Potlatch ceremony indicated a very different attitude towards wealth, in which the most successful of tribal chiefs on the North American west coast displayed their wealth by giving it away; accumulation for its own sake would have been considered an anathema. Feudal reciprocity was the way in which the titled aristocracy took some responsibility for the well-being of their vassals. Harvest festivals were the way in which agricultural societies paid homage to natural bounty for sustaining them.
The commons played a large role in both economy and society all through the experience of pre-capitalist societies of various types – the commons being a shared resource from which each had the right to draw their livelihood, even if this livelihood was unequally shared under feudal conditions. The health of the commons – pasture land, gardens, woodland, water supply – was the concern of all. Economy was, as Karl Polanyi has so brilliantly analyzed, ‘socially embedded’ in such societies and subject to the prevailing values of that particular society rather than the kind of all-determining external force it has become under capitalism.5 As market relations began to disentangle the economic from the social and cultural, fewer and fewer human checks remained to slow down or redirect the disembodied drive for profit. Today we experience the economy as a kind of out-of-control external force disconnected from human will. We speak of the stock market, for example, as if it is a living person – sometimes confident, sometimes jittery, feeling robust, suffering an attack of nerves and so on; a kind of Old Testament Mammon god.
On the other hand, it is undeniable that the rise of market society kicked off what was to become a dramatic growth in individual rights. While many of these rights had to do with property, others formed the basis of the current constitutional order, of what we think of as democratic governance (at least in certain times in certain societies). Ironically, such rights continue to be used to oppose the concentration of wealth and power that was also a by-product of the rise of market society – which explains the very ambivalent feelings about these freedoms displayed by theorists and partisans of corporate society.6
The shift to capitalist ways of doing things (the concentration of private property, wage labor, turning environmental resources into disposable commodities) came with sharp resistance from many quarters. Historians such as EP Thompson, whose brilliant The Making of the English Working Class charted the early defense of the democratic commons in England,7 have documented how people across Europe were dragged kicking and screaming into the factories and poorhouses of early capitalism. Where capitalism in its colonial cloak ran up against the indigenous societies of the Americas or the more structured states of Asia, the response was every bit as fierce. The ‘Indians’ of the Americas proved not only unwilling to give up their way of life and territory but those who survived the colonial onslaught made for a very poor agricultural and industrial workforce. This is where the famous capitalist ‘initiative’ to create the triangular slave trade between Africa, Europe and the plantation economies of the Americas came into play. African workers, torn from their societies, proved a more efficient (if hardly willing) solution to the labor shortage. The slave revolt in Haiti, and its inspirational influence on the African diaspora in the Americas, illustrates the fierce resistance to a life of hard labor in the service of profit.
Communitarian alternatives
The ability of capitalism to recreate itself through destabilizing crises and the uprooting of peoples keeps this sense of discontent forever brewing. Today, many of the ideas about alternatives to capitalism are rooted in pre-capitalist communitarian traditions. One such can be seen in the work of the indigenous Bolivian sociologist Félix Patzi Paco, who champions the tradition of ayllu alluded to above. His is not some narrow backwoods project or anthropological oddity, but rather:
‘an invitation to organize and re-inscribe communal systems all over the world – systems that have been erased and dismantled by the increasing expansion of the capitalist economy, which the European left has been unable to halt. If ayllus and markas are the singular memory and organization of communities in the Andes, then it is the other memories of communal organization around the globe which predate and survived the advent of capitalism which make possible the idea of a communal system today – one not mapped out in advance by any ideology, or any simple return to the past. The Zapatista dictum of the need for “a world in which many worlds fit” springs to mind as we try to imagine a planet of communal systems in a pluri-versal, not uni-versal, world order.’8
Not only did burgeoning capitalism meet with fierce resistance but this dissatisfaction has led to a constant parade of ideas and projects to create an alternative. Some, such as socialism and anarchism, have been persistent poles of opposition, while others have taken