S.O.S. Alternatives to Capitalism. Richard Swift
to pave the way for the current pre-eminence of wealth and power. The smallholder (although still around) proved far too vulnerable to the market forces that concentrated resources in the hands of a few. A very few smallholders became successful entrepreneurs while the great majority were forced into a precarious position at the edge of the capitalist economy.
There were, of course, those who railed against the limitations of the capitalist revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries with their narrow notions of freedom. Most famous, perhaps, were the Levellers during the English Civil War, who foresaw the inequalities of wealth and power that were to plague capitalism throughout the coming centuries. They were given short shrift by Oliver Cromwell, who first argued with and then executed them. In the 13 colonies, Thomas Paine found the American Revolution lacking in democratic substance. The radical priest Jacques Roux and his Enragés championed the economic rights of the poor during the French Revolution, demanding an end to private property and a classless society. Roux so alarmed Robespierre and the Jacobins that they brought trumped-up charges against him and caused him to commit suicide in his jail cell in 1794. There has always been a sense among its critics that capitalism has never really delivered on its promise of a thoroughgoing political democracy, a persistent sense that inequality and the rule of property consistently work to undermine the self-rule of the majority.
One of the features of capitalism that has enabled it to survive is its ability both to create and to take advantage of economic crises. This phenomenon was investigated and systematized by the political economist Joseph Schumpeter, who referred to it as a tendency for ‘creative destruction’. Schumpeter saw this underlying attribute as a kind of positive resilience that keeps capitalism from collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. For centuries, its opponents have looked to such crises as a source of hope, believing that the beast had finally overstepped the mark and could be brought to ground. These booms and busts are not new but have supplied the rhythm of the deployment of capital from the 16th century onwards, destabilizing people’s lives through the enclosure of the commons, the expansion of empires, and the shift of industry from less profitable to more profitable regions. This destabilizing effect has always been a major source of the dissatisfaction with capitalism. It has inspired people to search for alternatives that provide a more balanced and stable form of existence, where they can count on regular access to the fundamentals of their survival – food and shelter, peace and community. Capitalism constantly puts these things at risk in its restless search for new avenues of profitable growth. Oddly, this has aroused dissatisfaction from both conservative and radical sources: conservative, in the sense that people struggle to preserve whatever well-being they have managed to achieve but find it constantly threatened; radical, in the sense that the search for security calls forth the need to imagine and fight for a new order of things in which people control capital rather than the other way around.
Those who, for moral, economic or political reasons, are opposed to the insecurity, inequality and egoism that seem inevitable consequences of the capitalist way of operating do, however, face a significant uphill challenge. Not only has capitalism shown great resilience in overcoming the periodic crises it has faced but it has also even been embraced by its onetime ideological opponents: state socialism in China and the countries of the former Soviet bloc. These societies have now embraced the market as the most effective economic driver of future development. Today, most of the public economies of such countries have come under the sway of private capital – much of it foreign. China, in particular, has become ‘the workshop of the world’, with its labor force working under extremely exploitative conditions within a political system that still proclaims itself communist. Here, opportunities for resistance by workers are much more limited than they were in the early days of industrialization in the Western world. With few exceptions, trade unions are imposed from above and work with management to help discipline the workforce. Any worker resistance is met with staunch measures by police or private security forces. While some local worker complaints are allowed if sent through official channels, overall co-ordination of worker resistance, direct action or critiques of ‘communist’ capitalism that joins up all the analytic dots are all vigorously suppressed. Yet these dissenting activities still go on. ‘Mass incidents’ of labor unrest in China rose from 70,000 in 2004 to 180,000 in 2010 with virtually every economic sector affected.3 This has led some to identify contemporary China as ‘the epicenter of global labor unrest’.4 It is certainly one of the ironies of the modern world that what remains of this failed experiment in communism is being used to undermine the struggles of workers for a better life.
Primitive accumulation
One reading of economic history restricts the idea of ‘primitive accumulation’ to the early stages of capitalist development. This refers, for example, to the enclosures that established private property and forced rural people into the satanic mills in early industrial England, and to the high-seas privateering (piracy, really) that contributed to capital formation and helped to establish the Canadian banking industry. According to this view, the features of primitive accumulation that included brutal working conditions, slavery and child labor are identified with a bad old capitalism that has long since passed. Today, it is claimed, we have a sophisticated corporate version, a regulated and civilized capitalism that eschews bad behavior and operates in the interests of society as a whole. But while features such as child labor and piracy may have been modified – or at least displaced to countries such as Bangladesh and Somalia – new forms of primitive accumulation have taken their place. These stretch from the speculative derivatives market to privatizing the water we drink and the spaces we inhabit. The very notion of a public sphere has come into question, with the restless search for profit rendering the notion of public services and places an anachronism. A destabilizing market rationality is now in the process of penetrating every corner of our lives.
The features may have changed but the fundamentals of a recurrent primitive accumulation are still very much with us. As previously noted, capitalism still depends on the constant ‘creative destruction’ identified by Schumpeter during the Second World War when he wrote his classic Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. Market enthusiasts are not apologetic about this destruction; rather the opposite – they identify it with the whole adventure of human progress. Without it, they believe, stagnation would ensue. One business school (the Rotman School at the University of Toronto) has even set up a Creative Destruction Lab to push the process along.5 Creative destruction and its twin of heavy-handed primitive accumulation strategies tend to surface particularly when old avenues for extracting economic surplus begin to stagnate. A recent example was the situation when the post-World War Two consensus between workers, capital and government began to unravel in the 1980s. A period of relative prosperous stability based on decent wages and welfare provision for the sick, old and poor came under increasing pressure from corporations dissatisfied with their share of the economic pie. They advocated and funded a political program based on cutbacks, privatization, deregulation and other means of transferring wealth from labor to capital. This ran its course and these days the restless search for profit has shifted to the rather arcane region of the economy known as ‘financialization’. The production of real goods and services now takes second place to speculative activity involving paper values and the rise and fall of stock and bond markets. Today, the value of the global derivatives market (bets on the future value of almost anything you can think of) is estimated at $1,200 trillion, which, it is generally agreed, is some 20 times the value of world economy.6 This has been a fantastic source of profit for the small group of banks and related investment industries that dominate the global finance sector.
Needless to say, this can and does have a destabilizing effect on the overall economy. The speculative paper economy is in effect ‘creatively destroying’ people’s livelihoods, forcing them to adapt to the brave new world of casino capitalism. The immediate losers here may be from the financial sector – although many of the top executives have a range of ‘nest egg’ strategies (tax shelters, niche real estate) that are available to all those with wealth. But the most profound impact is on the jobs and livelihoods of those who have no such means of protecting themselves. Even in the real economy, strategies of primitive accumulation can be destabilizing. Under globalization, for example, which is characterized by its proponents in the most glowing modernist language, economies previously based on industrial employment are being hollowed out as such work shifts