Capitalism: the writing on the wall

Criticism of the set of economic attitudes that is failing the world, condemning it to insecurity and inequality, can be found across the political spectrum. In its mildest paternalist conservative form, it is a recognition that the laissez faire approach has undermined society, and that the attempt to impose it around the world has made it a more dangerous place.

More liberal critics have attacked the practices of the big corporations, low pay and appalling working conditions, the sacrificing of safety to profit in the production of everything from cars unfit for the road to heart valves that explode and kill their unfortunate recipients, and called for solidarity, as well as for more intervention and regulation.

While greens have pointed to the damage done to planet and people in the pursuit of economic growth, argued for more local economies, taxation of the making of money from money, reform of the banking system, and a citizens income. There is clearly an alternative to the chaos and violence unleashed on the world by the economics of the Washington Consensus.(cont)

In ecosocialist terms it is the forging of a common life outside of market and state, defence of and extension of free space, the healing of a society broken by economic inequality in redistribution. It is, as the autonomist argues, the creation of marginal as much as mainstream figures, of the unemployed as much as the workers, of the piqueteros as much as of the trade unions and political parties.

Critics of all persuasions can benefit from the realism of the revolutionaries when it comes to assessing approaches based on the existing institutions of a system that only pays lip service to freedom and democracy. When metropolitan county councils demonstrated there was another way of doing things, central government shut them down; the miners were defeated in 1984-5 by government political violence.

But there are things we can do: a green society will be a result of little things lots of people have done not a few heroic activist gestures, there is an alternative we can all be a part of. Derek Wall's 'Babylon and Beyond: The Economics of Anti-Capitalist, Anti-Globalist and Radical Green Movements' is a brilliant short summary of where we are now and suggests some ways forward.

NSWF