FlourishingEnterprise

The future of business: what are the alternatives to capitalism?

Evidence shows its very clear we have reached the safe limits to growth in terms of the most pressing threat to human civilisation – that of a stable atmosphere.

Therefore, until we can find a way to decouple growth from carbon emissions and reach that mythical “dematerialised” economy, restarting global economic growth seems a dangerous folly. But what might the implications of this be for capitalism?

Limits to growth and their implications for capitalism

It’s generally agreed that capitalism has three key principles; the majority of “the means of production” (land, resources, capital) are concentrated in private hands; the majority of us work for a wage (ie for other people); and markets are used to mediate between producer and consumer (set prices, etc).

I’ve blogged elsewhere about the problems of the first two, not least of which is an addiction to growth. Put simply, it seems that capitalism cannot be compatible with continued exponential growth on a finite planet. As Tim Jackson has said, “Simplistic assumptions about capitalism’s propensity for efficiency are nothing short of delusional. A different kind of economics is needed.”

In any case, its no longer heresy to point out that capitalism has serious flaws. Indeed, mainstream commentators are questioning growth-obsessed capitalist economics and calling up Karl Marx from his grave.

Both Marx on the left and Schumpeter on the right long ago predicted the end of capitalism. And recently fund manager Jeremy Grantham said: “Capitalism… is totally ill-equipped to deal with a small handful of issues. Unfortunately, they are the issues that are absolutely central to our long-term wellbeing and even survival.”

Finding alternatives beyond capitalism

Jonathon Porrit is right when he says “it seems most improbable that capitalism will prove the last word in humanity’s organisation of human affairs…” But he is wrong to say that capitalism “…is all that is credibly on offer at present”.

There are many alternatives to capitalism. You can be excused for not having heard of them, though, as they don’t shout as loudly as capitalism.

One alternative, Professor David Schweickart’s Economic Democracy, socialises control of enterprises and the means of production, placing resources, factories and other productive capital into the hands of the people and away from the short-term interests of both the state and private sector. Crucially, Schweickart argues this form of economics would not need to rely on growth.

Business beyond capitalism – socialising profits and risks

Professor David Harvey says our economics “privatises profits and socialises risks”.

What would it look like if we shifted to a system that socialised both the profits and the risks, in which we all shared the good and the bad?

Under the vision of economic democracy, workers would control most enterprises democratically. To change to this form of enterprise structure, legislation and subsidies could support us to buy the companies we work in through labour trusts and leveraged buyouts, coupon-based markets or “share levies” on corporate profits.

Bankrupt companies (like RBS) would be restructured as worker self-managed. Enterprises like Spain’s Mondragon Co-operative Group, the UK’s Co-op Group and John Lewis, with revenues of £14bn, £12bn and £11bn respectively, have been shown to be more efficient than most private companies. State-wide examples of co-operative economics include the Quebec Social Economy. Other mass-collaborative forms of enterprise include what has been described as the “fundamentally anti-capitalist” Wikipedia.

Workers would control (but not own) the enterprises they work in and, after paying a “capital assets tax” (a sort of rent) on revenue-generating property, any surplus would be divided democratically between them.

Not all of the “means of production” would be socialised, entrepreneurs would need to be encouraged to start up new enterprises. So that the majority of enterprises remain democratically controlled, any privately owned companies could only be sold to the state, which would then put them into the control of the workers. Likewise, when a private company owner died their beneficiaries might have to sell to the state, again for the enterprise to be placed into worker control.

Enterprises would still interact with one another and with consumers in a market driven by the forces of supply and demand. Innovation and entrepreneurial activity would flourish. This economics would not tend to the need for hyper-consumerism and industry could be guided by market frameworks that shift enterprises from seeing products themselves as benefits to seeing production as a cost of delivering to real (not created) wellbeing needs.

Financial capital would also need to be socialised. The right to create money could shift away from private banks and into the hands of the people via democratically run national banks. Local credit unions could provide for personal credit, but the majority of investments – those made in business – would cease to rely on private funds. The corporate capital assets tax would be paid into an investment fund which was then distributed as investments for future enterprise creation or expansion. We could entirely do away with the private investment sector.

A network of public or co-operative investment banks at national, regional and community level could provide investments and business development services, as does Mondragon’s bank. Funds would be given out on the basis of sustainability and job creation and driven by bottom-up direct democracy, with citizens’ assemblies, participatory governance, budgeting and planning processes similar to those used by places like Porto Alegre in Brazil and now emerging in the UK.

Plan for alternative economy

Whether or not capitalism (in some form or hybrid) can make the grade is still up for debate. But we ought at least to be asking questions about its compatibility with long-term sustainability.

What we are talking about here moves us on from binary, dead dialectics of left versus right, society versus markets and state versus private. Alternative economics could provide sustainable economic development – good lives for all within the limits of our one planet. But the change needed might be radical and vested interests will fight it.

As well as the above ideas, many other changes should be considered, including other alternative economic paradigms and measures such as ending perverse subsidies, land tax reform, absolute caps on emissions, unconditional basic incomes, 100% inheritance taxation, community land trusts, cap-and-share systems and Teqs, to name just a few.

A well thought-through plan for an alternative economy might well come in handy when one day very soon the realisation dawns on society that we badly need a plan B.

As Thomas Carlyle once said: “If something be not done, something will do itself one day, and in a fashion that will please nobody.”

Jules Peck is a director of Flourishing Enterprise, a Trustee of the new economics foundation (nef) and on the advisory board of Richard Branson’s B Team. Jules is involved in a civil society and business inquiry into the issues raised in this article. To get involved, please contact Jules for more information.

Three (more) things they don’t tell you about capitalism

Professor Ha-Joon Chang has two things in common with Karl Marx. Firstly he’s right in much of his economic analysis of the ills of capitalism and secondly his prescriptions of the solutions to these ills are lacking.

Chang’s best-selling book 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism is a timely and important addition to the most crucial debate of our age. I recommend it as both a good read and helpful resource. But I think his analysis missed out three final and far more crucial ‘things’ to his 23.

Aside from giving an incomplete analysis of the ills of capitalism, Chang’s work fails in that the ‘things’ he misses out (my ‘things’ 24, 25 and 26) are the ones which show both that capitalism is fatally flawed and ireformable and that an alternative is indeed both possible and viable.

So Chang’s book is both an incomplete picture of the problematique and a flawed vision of the future. It fails to take us beyond the desperate attempts to shoehorn the needs of people and planet into the fundamentally broken and misconceived economics of capitalism.

What’s supposedly so great about capitalism?
Whilst Chang is not arguing for an overthrow of capitalism he is scathing of our current neo-liberal version of it. For each of the 23 ‘things’ he starts with a short ‘What they tell you’ section laying out myths he then debunks. These myths are the sales-pitches whose combined narrative persuade us that we can’t possibly live without capitalism.

We are told that society does best where the interests of shareholders, not wider stakeholders’ are born in mind. But Chang refutes this in ‘thing 2’. We are told that capitalism is the best system because it rewards those who are most productive. But in ‘thing 3’ Chang clearly debunks this myth. We are told that capitalism is the only system capable of producing the kinds of things we so badly need – like yet another version of the ipad. Again Chang debunks this in ‘thing 4’. We are told that individuals are inherently self-seeking and cannot co-operate (‘thing 5’) and so we need the market to ensure the highest wellbeing for society. Again this is debunked well and truly by Chang and numerous others.

Another common rationale for capitalism’s value are that only through continuing ‘creative destruction’ and economic ‘progress’, as defined as never ending growth, can we hope to satisfy human needs. The red-in-tooth-and-claw, ever competitive, ever striving for ‘more’ which is key to capitalism’s accumulation drive, is vital to ensure our wellbeing. Otherwise life would sink into a morass of Leviathan-esque life “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”.

But these things are not true. Man can be co-operative and live in reciprocal manners. We are not rational, but we are not entirely irrational either. And the roles which the capitalist mode of production has given us, of labourer and capitalist, are far from the only natural order of things. Perhaps we no longer need to be dictated by the booms and busts of ever-striving profit and accumulation? Perhaps we can all be worker and boss? Perhaps we can plan our economies to serve the interests of all, not just of the 1%?

What Chang got right with his 23 things
Chang is correct about many of his ‘’things’. There is no such thing as a free market (thing 1), and so called ‘free-market’ policies cause far more harm than good, creating huge public bad and few public goods (things 6 and 7).

Companies should not be run in the interests of shareholders (thing 2). We are not smart enough to leave things to the market (thing 16), in any case our best markets are already very much planned economies (thing 19) and indeed more state-led markets give the best outcomes (things 12 and 21).

All of these challenge the underpinning narratives that keep capitalism ‘credible’ (to some). The next three ‘Things they don’t tell you about capitalism’ suggest that an alternative to capitalism is both needed and possible.

Thing 24 – Growth does not equal happiness
Ever increasing economic growth (the rational for capitalism) long since ceased to bring increasing marginal returns to wellbeing. In the ‘rich world’ wellbeing has flat-lined since the 1970s. So in fact, all the extra growth and wealth we have accumulated since the 1970s could be distributed more fairly and could arguably satisfy all the basic needs of the worlds 7bn.

A few facts might help to make this point. The combined wealth of the world’s 500 wealthiest people is equal to that of the bottom 60% of the world’s population. The top 1% in the US have more wealth than the entire bottom 90%. Just one of these individuals’ wealth – say Warren Buffett’s – could increase the wealth of 1bn of the world’s poorest people by around 20%.

So the key rationale and driver of capitalism, the ‘treadmill of accumulation’ makes no sense any more. We don’t need to keep accumulating and transforming the natural world into yet more ‘stuff’. We can share out what we have already and merely replace that in a sustainable manner as needs be. So whatever form of economics we might need, we don’t need capitalism and all its ills.

Thing 25 – Limits to growth
We have reached the limits to economic growth on which Capitalism depends. Just in terms of climate change, as we show in this blog, we need to halt, and in the rich world find a reverse gear for, any further expansion of the global economy.

Chang does touch on issues of environmental limits in his book. But he fails to understand how fundamental these challenges are to capitalism’s expansionary dynamics and urgently we need to respond if we are to save humanity from unliveable conditions.

Combine these two things, ‘thing 24’ and ‘thing 25’, and you start to see that there is no real need for capitalism anymore. It is neither necessary for satisfying our wellbeing needs, nor is it possible without plunging our one and only planet into a state which would fundamentally undermine the needs of our children and future generations. So capitalism comes with numerous attendant ills and yet it is not even necessary.

What is missed by ignoring ‘things’ 24 and 25
What Chang misses is that the downsides to capitalism and its myths are in fact the inevitable outcome of the dynamics of the ‘treadmill of accumulation’ and the ‘capital surplus absorption problem’. These negative effects of capitalism are not just unfortunate by-products of a misfiring engine. In many ways they are the engine.

Inequality and poverty, consumerism, deb-tonation, polluted values, the rollercoaster of boom and busts economics the creation of dangerous financial products. All of these ills and more are the direct and inescapable outcomes of capitalism on a finite planet.

Chang is either unaware of what we now know about wellbeing and natural limits or he ignored these factors because they would not have fitted with his desire to find a way to save capitalism. In ignoring ‘things’ 24 and 25 it is possible to assume that we might ‘make capitalism nicer’. If all that extra growth and ‘stuff’ fulfilled our lives and if we lived on an infinite planet then maybe ‘nicer/greener’ capitalism would be possible.

This badly underestimates just how non-negotiable are the core characteristics of capitalism. It is these core characteristics of the absolute and never-ending requirement for capital-accumulation and profit which cause the many ‘things’ he lists. But he assumes that these 23 ills can be assuaged by tinkering with the operating system, a patch here and a patch there. What he misses is that these patches will do nothing to confront the reality of ‘thing 25’ – absolute limits to growth.

And because he is not aware of the alternatives to capitalism, (thing 26) and how much better they can deliver prosperity and ‘good lives for all’, his thinking and horizons have been self-limited and constrained. We should not let our own horizons be so constrained.

Thing 26 – There are alternatives to Capitalism.
So what of the alternatives?

Time and time again we are told by otherwise thoughtful people that ‘there are no alternatives’. But this is wrong. There are many alternative visions and forms of economics around. They might not be as well PR’ed as capitalism. But then that’s hardly surprising since capitalism works well for the world’s most powerful men – who happen to own much of the world’s media.

Beyond-capitalism economics already exists in pockets of experimentation around the world. The most obvious of this is perhaps the co-operative movement which, along with State Owned Enterprises (SOEs), already makes up a significant proportion of the economy.

You could call this new economics ‘Sustainable Wellbeing Economics’ or, as Professor David Schweickart calls it in After Capitalism, ‘economic democracy’ and ‘democratic socialism’. Or, as Professor Erik Olin Wright calls it In Envisioning Real Utopias, ‘participatory democracy’. The name does not matter. What does matter is that it is built around the principles of the need for a democratic and sustainable model of economic ‘progress’ or ‘development’, which most equitably satisfies the human needs (not wants) of all 7bn of us.

Whilst there are no blueprints for such an economics there is a huge amount of work which has been done by people like Schweickart and Olin Wright as well as others like Professor David Harvey (his Enigma of Capital is another must-read). All three of these are distinguished academics at leading US Universities. And their work is far from just academic. It is based on extensive examination of real, existing and emergent elements of this new form of economics.

Time for change
“Capitalism is not beautiful”, said John Maynard Keynes. “It is not intelligent, it is not virtuous and it not just. But when we wonder what to put in its place, we are extremely perplexed.”

We can no longer stand by in a perplexed manner as capitalism causes civilization to nosedive into the ground. Allowing capitalism to continue to collapse in an unplanned way will be painful. As Thomas Carlyle put it, “If something be not done, something will do itself one day, and in a fashion that will please nobody.”

In fact we no longer need to stand by perplexed. We know far more than was known in Marx’s or Keynes’ day. We have the benefit of years of experimentation with capitalism, markets, state planning, co-operative and ‘commoning’ movements. From the work of countless Nobel Laureates we know far more about the bounds of human rationality, about reciprocity, behavioral economics and game-theory, about welfare and wellbeing economics, about the possibilities and limits of human ingenuity and technology.

Its time for us to set aside our fears of going beyond capitalism, a system we have got so used to and so mesmerized by, that we have become blind to its faults and its alternatives.

As Einstein put ”Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Or, as Professor Tim Jackson has said “that ecological damage should be the result of a series of consumption practices which clearly fail to increase wellbeing has all the characteristics of a social pathology.”

It is time we proved ourselves sane and dared to dream of, and develop an alternative.

I’ll finish on a quote from Professor Chang’s conclusion in ‘The 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism’,

“Nothing short of a total re-envisioning of the way we organise our economy and society will do.”

Citizen Economics Beyond Capitalism: Stealing Back The Commons

Michael Jacobs, an ex-SpAd to Gordon Brown, has recently written in the New Satesman that ‘green social democracy can save capitalism’. Well, not everyone agrees. For some, the ‘green social democracy’ experiment has, thus far, not worked, and indeed, might be running out of time.

And as for capitalism – or at least capitalism1.0, it’s no longer heresy to question its infallibility. Since I last blogged about capitalism, a host of mainstreamers like the BBC’s Stephanie Flanders, the FT’s Martin Wolf, UBS’s George Magnus, Joseph Stiglitz and Nouriel Roubini, have started questioning our growth-obsessed, capitalist economics and calling up Karl Marx from his grave.

And, as a search of Amazon will show you, there’s no shortage of recent books both questioning capitalism and laying out ideas for its updating or replacement.

But why might we have to consider alternatives to capitalism and what might an alternative look like?

Limits to growth

As we’ve mentioned often on this site, people like Professors Tim Jackson and Herman Daly has shown that, due to the scale and urgency required to tackle things like climate change, technological solutions to ‘decoupling’ growth from carbon emissions are nothing short of delusional.

So its becoming clear that continued growth of the macro economy would push us into climate meltdown and commit the world’s poorest and our children to unthinkable trauma. As someone I’m now working with, IPCC scientist and Deputy Director of the Tyndall Centre Professor Kevin Anderson, recently said, “we can either deal with climate change or have a growth economy – not both.”

Economist Kenneth Boulding famously said pretty much the same thing, now being repeated by finance brokers Tullet Prebon, “to believe in infinite growth on a finite planet you have to either be an economist or a madman.” In any case, whether we want to keep growing or not may be out of our hands, as writer Richard Heinberg points out “growth is over, like it or not.”

The good news is that emerging macro-economic modelling from the New Economics Foundation (Nef) and by Professors Peter Victor and Tim Jackson is showing that an end to global economic expansion needn’t stop us delivering high employment, high wellbeing and fiscal balance.

In other words, there is hope that the rich world can well afford to find a quantitative reverse gear so that the poor world can hopefully continue to develop qualitatively.

But what are the implications for our current economic-incumbent capitalism?

Some would argue that capitalism has played a role, along with other forms of market and non-market socio-economics, in historic improvements in material and non-material wellbeing. But capitalism brings with it endless ‘externalities’, as historian Mike Davis argues in the fascinating Late Victorian Holocausts, “Millions died in the golden age of Liberal Capitalism; indeed, many were murdered … by the theological application of the sacred principles of Smith, Bentham and Mill.”

For todays ‘full-world’ challenges, a new, or radically updated system is needed. This new economics will need to deliver two key things. It will need to deliver wellbeing to all, current and future generations. And it will need to do that sustainably. Call it ‘sustainable wellbeing economics’.

The problem for capitalism, as it jockeys for position as our preferred economic model for the next 300 years, is that it relies on continued and exponential economic growth to support the dynamic of profit maximisation and the ‘treadmill of accumulation’.

Attempts at incremental reform of capitalism – Michael Jacobs’ ‘green social democracy’ and other models such as ‘market ecology’, ‘natural capitalism’ and ‘capitalism-as-if-the-earth-matters’ have failed. Eco-socialists will say they were always doomed to fail. Others that they might have worked if given more time.

But time is something we don’t have. NASAs climatologist James Hansen says “we may already be too late’. Kevin Anderson that, without urgent change we’re locked into 4 degrees of warming[1]. As we blogged recently, that’s scientist-speak for apocalypse.

As our current economics continues to unravel towards ‘peak money’[2] and social unrest, with the pain of real austerity hitting Greek citizens, and with the Red Cross giving out food parcels in Spain, where there are now 2.3m ‘vulnerable’ people, many are asking ‘are we next?’

There are of course alternatives to pure free-market capitalism. Red-in-tooth-and-claw Anglo-Saxon capitalism is just a more extreme version of variants such as European Social Democracy, Asian mixed economy and Keiretsu capitalism. But no form of capitalism has ever been able to sustainably provide ‘good lives’ for all. And certainly never been able to, nor could ever, operate without growth.

Res Communes – sustainable wellbeing economics of, by and for the citizens

I’m involved currently with a group of people from the Transition Towns movement, Nef and elsewhere which is developing a draft document which we plan to put online as an open-sourced wiki manifesto. The idea is that anyone out there will be able to help us fill in the gaps.

It’s a vision of economics which is very much in the ‘for, by and of the people’ heritage and its been inspired by the work of Nobel laureates like Ostrom, Stiglitz, Sen and Kahneman, and the work of Manfred Max-Neef, Peter Barnes and Tom Crompton, amongst others. Their work has been updating our understanding of socio-economic relations, values, co-operation, the commons, reciprocity and wellbeing and pointing the way towards alternative forms of socio-economic relations beyond growth and capital-ism.

In line with the commons/state/private sectors of ancient Rome, this new economics Res Communes economics would aim put the citizen centre stage of a socio-economic transition to a resilient, mutualised, co-operative, communitarian, localised and participatory democracy, with a radical shrinking away of the short-termist private, Res Privita and state, Res Publica sectors.

Transitioning to this new form of economics will have wide ranging implications including for everything from social relations, equity, cultural values (from extrinsic to intrinsic wellbeing satisfying values), new visions and narratives of ‘prosperity’, commercial, national and international accounting, the balance between ‘use’ and ‘exchange’ values, and the end of a debt-based monetary system.

To see how elements of this are already emerging, witness the flourishing participative democracy and budgeting movement pioneered in Porto Alegre Brazil and now taking hold in the UK and elsewhere.

We should rightly question everything about our current economics. If elements can’t be compatible with sustainable wellbeing economic principles, then they ought to go. Even currently construed shibboleths such as markets will need to prove they can be our slave not master if they are to make the grade for the transition to this new economics.

Elements of this new Res Communes economics already exist

There are many new and old forms of alternatives to the shareholder-owned enterprise model that are showing the way forward. Take the countless mutual, employee, community and cooperatively owned enterprises which include some of our best-loved enterprises like John Lewis and Waitrose. There is no reason why we could not all work for, buy from and own such enterprises which can live beyond the growth obsessed profit motive.

Witness the Buen Vivir movement championed by Evo Morales and the flourishing commons and ‘commoners’ movements that, as commons-guru David Bollier of puts it, is repudiating “the corruption of the market/state duopoly”.

Take Spain’s £4.3bn Mondragon Co-operatives Group, with 53,000 stakeholder-owners. The World Bank has said that, for over twenty years, Mondragon was “more efficient than many private enterprises…. there can be no doubt that the co-operatives have been more profitable than capitalist enterprises.”

Indeed, some of our best loved enterprises in the UK are co-ops such as John Lewis and Waitrose and the mighty Co-op Group which, aside from its food and farming markets is now representing a healthy threat to the myopic privately owned banking system which has done so much harm to society. And think of perhaps the world’s most successful and well known commons-based, collaborative, non capitalist, participative enterprise – Wikipedia – with over 7m entries and used by 2m people a day.

These sorts of successes are showing that the idea that profit maximising, shareholder-owned capitalist enterprises are far from the only alternative. Maybe some day soon we will all work for, own and buy from similar enterprises.

Implications for the left

Perhaps the time has come to move on from the tired, left-right dialectic of state-versus-market, capitalism versus communism. Nether state nor private ought to have the upper-hand. In a truly participative economic democracy it should be the people and the notion of the commons which calls the shots. This will have huge implications for politics.

As this is fundamentally a change-manifesto, which recognises the current system is badly faulty, its not necessarily going to be an easy agenda for conservatives. But for the left, for whom this ought to have been home-turf, these changes represent an exciting opportunity for renaissance.

Despite Blair’s dragging of the Labour Party across to the right of centre, Labour could once again find its roots as the party of the people. Its worth remembering that Clause IV, despite its characterisation as wholly and dogmatically about nationalisation and state control, was in its original 1918 vision in fact about common ownership. The text ran:

“To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service.”

Only after 1944 did Clause IV firmly become a policy of nationaliation. If the Labour Party had stuck to its earlier vision and explored opportunities beyond both state and private, we would not have had to put up with the traumas of Blairism.

So if the Labour Party in the UK stands, and deserves, any chance of finding a solid footing and rising to the challenges of our time, then a vision of Res Communes ought to be central to its reinvention.

Reason for optimism

There is reason to be optimistic. Growth long since has failed to deliver increases in life satisfaction for those in the rich-world. We need not fear the end of growth and a new post-capitalist economics. It’s an exciting time to be alive – truly revolutionary changes are afoot.

There’s a C17^th poem which starts:

“The law locks up the man or woman, who steals the goose from off the common, but leaves the greater villain loose, who steals the common from off the goose”.

Perhaps its time we stole back the commons?

“What did you do when the earth was unraveling”?

I lay awake last night with my six-month-old daughter sleeping in my arms and I cried. I cried for her future, for what she won’t have, what she won’t see. I grieved for a loss she is not yet aware of, for the theft of a life she deserved, stolen by my generation as we sleep-walk into a nightmare future caused by our selfish, thoughtless, wasteful and destructive lifestyles.

And I wondered what I will say when she asks “Daddy how did you all let this happen?”

In 2050 my daughter will be 38. What we do now in the next few years will dictate what kind of a world she lives in then. We now know that if we fail to act radically and urgently to confront and halt climate change, by 2050 the world will be well on the way to unavoidable misery. Just delve into books like Hell and High Water and Six Degrees to see vivid and terrifying glimpses of that hell.

I hope that I will still be around in 2050, to hold her and to help her try to make some sense of what is unfolding. I truly am terrified. You should be too. What I am writing about is not fiction, its not a movie script or science-fiction. It’s real science. And it’s being denied and ignored by hollow, spiritless politicians who would not know one end of a microscope from the other.

The latest science tells us that if within the next 3 years we don’t find the political leadership to stop the rise in carbon emissions, then that world she inherits will be the stuff of nightmares. A world of Hell and high water.

Make or break time

We have very little time now to make the changes needed. It’s now make or break time. There is still a chance we can turn back from this fate but our politicians have wasted so much time in bickering, that our challenge now is far more perilous and punitive than it might have been.

Leading climate scientists like Professor Kevin Anderson are now telling us that, to avoid pushing us into the perilous 4 degrees rise in global temperature which would tip us into that world, rich nation emissions need to peak by 2015. Yes 2015. In just three years time. They then have to start to fall by 10% every year for us to have a hope in hell of avoiding climate chaos.

The implications of such a steep fall in emissions must surely mean the end of economic growth, and the need for a new economics, as anything more than 3 or 4% carbon reductions p.a. are, according to the Stern Review and others, not compatible with economic growth.

4 degrees rise in average global temperatures might not seem much but the planet’s climate is a delicately balanced system. And 4 degrees increase is warmer than the earth has been for 30m years. Even 2 degrees warming – which without extraordinary, unprecedented change we are now very likely to be locked into – is pretty catastrophic, despite being labeled as “safe” or “acceptable” by many. And yet our current inter-governmental and national policies have us locked into that hellish 4-degree world.

Hell, high water

Without radical and rapid change my daughter will live to see; sea level rises of 3-6ft (there go many coastal cities and delta regions, home to many of the world’s people), regular, life-threatening heat waves and storms like Sandy will be common-place, the global extinction of our coral reefs (which are the nurseries for our fish stocks), 40% of global agricultural land in permanent drought (there goes breakfast, lunch and dinner), the die-back of many of the world’s forests, regular and devastating wildfires and hundreds of millions of refugees.

But by far the most serious impact, the doomsday scenario, which is looking ever more likely, is where climate change takes on a life of its own and positive feedbacks mean ever-escalating impacts, with nothing we can ever do to stop them. Once that happens its game-over for civilisation. And these things won’t just happen ‘somewhere else’. They will happen everywhere – where you live.

Manufactured denial

As David Attenborough has said “there is no valid argument for climate denial”. And yet still, astonishingly, this, the biggest story of our times, humanity’s biggest ever challenge, is routinely ignored and sidelined by most people in the mainstream media.

Our news media is crippled by a turmoil of it’s own making, embroiled in its own scandals, they seem unable to see, or choose not to see the facts that are repeatedly presented in thousands of science publications. You do not hear these facts in part because very powerful vested interests prefer you to remain in the dark, in part because it involves us all.

And you don’t hear them because, as some senior scientists are now admitting, scientists themselves are afraid to tell the truth for fear of losing their jobs or funding. This fierce denial of the truth is cracking however and the apparent power of a few could quickly look like emperors clothes.

Finally, alarm bells are ringing

Over the last few weeks the world seems to have woken up to these realities, even if the links to the implications for economic growth are still only rarely made. We have seen a World Bank Report predicting “terrible climate disaster”, and a PwC report ringing the alarm bells. PwC partner Leo Johnson (brother of London Mayor Boris Johnson) has told me of his fear for his children’s futures and said of the task now facing us if we are to avoid runaway climate chaos “We have passed a critical threshold – not once since World War Two has the world achieved that rate of decarbonisation, but the task now confronting us is to achieve it for 39 consecutive years”.

Likewise numerous CEOs of global firms have started to ring the alarm bells, shocked as they are at Government inaction to avert disaster. Richard Branson has set up an emergency taskforce which I am involved in, the B Team because, he says, “we have no Planet B”.

And yet still we slumber

But we’ve also seen a continuation of our crazy, suicidal, business-as-usual politics with the news that there are over 1000 coal-fired power stations being planned around the world.

Whilst Yvo de Boer, former head of the UN inter-governmental negotiations on climate change has said that the next UN climate report will ”scare the wits out of everyone”, we have also seen the brake being firmly jammed on international progress towards binding, science based commitments to halt climate change.

The US, despite Obama’s recent rhetoric are actively trying their best to derail the climate negotiations, whilst many other countries drag their feet or block progress. Meanwhile our own Government in the UK, despite anger from the policy world, is aggressively rowing back from making any meaningful commitments which might show support for international action in the crucial next round of UN negotiations.

So what are these politicians up to? Where do they think their children and grandchildren, nephews and nieces will be safe in 2050?

Some of the more progressive members of Government do know better but, by dint of being progressive, have little influence over the close cabal around Cameron and Osborne. Of my former colleagues in the Quality of Life Policy Group, Nick Hurd MP’s new daughter will be 38 in 2050, Zac Goldsmith MP’s children will be in their 40′s, Lord Deben (John Gummer), now Chair of the Climate Change Committee, will have grandchildren of similar ages. I’m sure that they are as fearful for the future as I am.

But sadly there are many others in ‘the greenest government ever’ sic, for whom this all means very little. Somehow they have got into their heads that they know better than the world’s leading scientists. Either that or they assume they’ll be able to ride out the storms of the 2050′s in their luxury yachts. How wrong they are. No one will be untouched by the horror we are about to unleash as Kevin Anderson and others predict that this 4-degree world will be “beyond any possibility for adaptation”. That’s science-speak for saying that no matter how rich or clever we are there will be no way to adapt to such a world. In fact, if that is the future we chose, those who were clearly responsible will find nowhere to hide from the anger of the people.

George Osborne’s and David Cameron’s children will be around the age they both are now in 2050. How will they look back on their fathers’ legacies I wonder? Likewise John Hayes MP’s children will be a similar age. Will they be proud of what he and his climate skeptic colleagues did to cause their suffering?

What did you do?

But a 4-degree world might still be avoidable. If there is a will there must be a way. We can all of us stand up and say “enough of this madness, I’m angry and scared and I’ve had enough.” Either our so-called ‘leaders’ change now or they will have to go.

We must all ask ourselves, what will we say when our children and grandchildren ask us in 2050 what we did to try and avert this dreadful, avoidable world?

Fatih Birol, chief economist of the International Energy Association and previously with OPEC, has said of the fact that we are now almost locked into this future that “everybody, even school children, know this will have catastrophic implications for all of us.”

Speaking of those same children in his recent TED lecture, NASA climatologist James Hansen has said how terrified he is for the future of his grandchildren.

Paul Gilding, to a pitch black packed auditorium, asks a similar question in his must-see Fear and the Coming Collapse of Civilisation TED talk “Imagine what you’ll tell your children when they find out we knew all these things, and didn’t act. And the lights go out.”

In part of his apposite and poignant poem Hieroglyphic Stairway, Drew Dellinger writes:

It’s 3:23 in the morning
and I’m awake
because my great, great grandchildren
won’t let me sleep
my great, great grandchildren
ask me in dreams
what did you do while the planet was plundered?
what did you do when the earth was unravelling?

surely you did something
when the seasons started failing?
as the mammals, reptiles, birds were all dying?
did you fill the streets with protest
when democracy was stolen?
what did you do
once you knew?

Whoever you are, no matter what age, whatever you do or did, CEO, retired oil industry executive, advertising executive, teacher, miner, accountant, mother, Telegraph or Sun reader, you all live on this same one spaceship Earth. You can and must make a difference. This is real and very nearly present danger of apocalyptic proportions. Are you going to lie down and take it? Or are you going to wake up, get informed and turn your fear and anger into something productive. Are you willing to fight for an alternative to Hell and High Water?

We have no time left. No time for yet another ‘kick it into the grass’ and ‘discount the future’ obfuscation. No more reviews and taskforces or endless talk-shop committees. Time now for real action.

What can you do? Firstly get informed. Don’t wait for the media to tell you about this. They won’t, or if they do it will be too late. Don’t gamble on that and don’t gamble on the hope that ‘they’ will come to their sense. This is your world, your future and that of your children and grandchildren. Become informed. Cut your own carbon footprint and join a local Transition group or start one up. Tell your friends, colleagues and neighbors about this. Ring the alarm bells.

Write to your MP, and demand action. Tell them you are scared and angry. Put them on notice. That’s you democratic right. It’s your democratic duty. That’s what your grandparents and great grandparents fought so hard for. Don’t let them down. Don’t squander the rights they fought for and do your duty to future generations as they did for us.

This is our chance to make a difference. In his book Hell and High Water, Alastair McIntosh speaks of the ‘spirit of the blitz which will be needed to avert disaster. Unlike previous generations we have had it easy. Well now its our turn to step up, this can be our ‘finest hour’, our “fight them on the beaches”, our St Crispin’s day, our D Day.

Are you willing and ready to stand up and be counted? I know I am. I’ll fight for the future my daughter and all future generations deserve. What else can I do? And you?

what did you do while the planet was plundered?
what did you do when the earth was unraveling?

surely you did something
when the seasons started failing?
as the mammals, reptiles, birds were all dying?
did you fill the streets with protest

Hurricane CasSandra?

There is something prophetic about Hurricane Sandy in its foretaste of what Obama is now calling a ‘warming world’. Watching New York being battered by the storm was eerily like a scene out of climate-apocalypse movie The Day After Tomorrow.

That prophetic nature of Sandy was coincidental in the name given to the superstorm. Those interested in the Greek myths will recall that Cassandra (often shortened to Sandra or Sandy) was so beautiful that Apollo, offspring of Gaia, granted her the gift of prophecy. Apollo himself was god of truth and healing but also plague and death. He also had dominion over the ‘Colinies’ or city-states of which Sandy’s landfall New York is a modern day equivalent.

It seems it took a disaster like Sandy (plus a second term win) to give Obama the political space to finally talk (if not yet act) on climate change. It also helped that Republican Michael Bloomberg, Mayor of New York, backed Obama for President, so worried was he about the likely climate inaction from his own Republican party should they win.

Bloomberg said that Sandy had so scared him that he now knows significant action on climate change is needed.

In one version of Greek mythology Cassandra spent a night at Apollo’s temple where the temple snakes licked her ears clean so that she was able understand the language of nature. Again the links to Hurricane Sandy are clear. Sandy was surely nature’s way of giving us a foretaste of the revenge of Gaia?

PwC have just released a report detailing some of that Gaian revenge we are storing up for ourselves, committed as we are now to a 4 or 6 degree world. Without radical, urgent action, those 4 degrees will lock us into a world which is hotter than it has been for 30m years with sea level rises of 3-6ft (there go many coastal cities), 40% of agricultural land in permanent drought (there goes breakfast, lunch and dinner) and hundreds of millions of refugees.

That’s a world which Professor Kevin Anderson, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, has called “incompatible with organised global community”. I’ve asked what he means by the phrase and it’s not a pretty picture. Flooded subways will be the least of our worries. In fact a 4 degree world quite possibly brings with it the holy grail of Gaian revenge – unstoppable runaway climate chaos driven by feedback loops. Then climate change takes on a life of its own and nothing we try to do will stop it. All of this could happen in my lifetime and certainly within that of our children’s. What we do now, in 2012, and soon after, will decide if that is our legacy to our children.

The really scary thing is that despite what we know, despite our modern scientific oracles, our leaders are so obsessed by the status quo and their growth-mania that they cannot accept what they are hearing.

The inconvenient implications of what Anderson and PwC are saying is that the kinds of cuts in emissions we now need to pull us out of our nosedive are so punitive that as Anderson has said “we can have economic growth or deal with climate change, but not both”.

Politicians have dithered, prevaricated and obfuscated for so long that its now too late to have our cake and eat it. Rich world emissions need to peak by 2015 and then fall every year by around 10%. As Stern and others have pointed out, anything over 3 or 4% p.a reductions in emissions is just not possible without stalling the economy into zero growth.

This inaction by politicians is one reason why we are seeing a flurry of panic by business leaders who are realising just how bad things are, not just for commerce but for mankind and for their children’s futures. A new CDP report suggests that business came to the same conclusions as Bloomberg and has been shocked into action by Sandra. The recent letter from CEOs of companies like Unilever and Kingfisher, a similar letter from the energy sector and the launch of an initiative I’m involved in from Richard Branson and Jochen Zeitz’s – the B Team – all illustrate just how worried business now is about current climate policy driving us inexorably towards 4 degree hell..

Just as Delphi, originally dedicated to earth-Goddess Gaia, was subject to a takeover bid by the more macho and ‘rational’ Apollo, our macho, rational economics has taken over the narratives and oracles of our times. No longer do our ‘leaders’ see or hear the real world around them. All they hear is the siren call of growth, the market and materialism. So when it comes to the task of deciding whether to continue to pretty to the altar of growth and materialism or save the planet and humanity they take the former.

Intriguingly, and taking my Greek myth theme another step, as Sandy descended on New York, people reported that Sandy turned the World Trade Center into an æolian harp that played an eerie song of foreboding just hours before the storm hit New York.

I wonder if Tory Energy Minister John Hayes knows that the Aeolian harp is named after Greek God Aeolus, god of the wind. Judging by his and his colleagues dislike of renewable energy, I suspect their ilk are expensively educated but ignorant and don’t really give a damn.

Its all a bit tragic really.

Capitalism – the god that failed?

We ought not fear a move beyond capitalism. Its had a good innings. Despite its attendant problems, as David Harvey points out The Enigma of Capital, capitalism served us well in dispossessing arbitrary feudal institutions and liberating creativity. Both Marx on the left and Schumpeter on the right, predicted the end of capitalism.

Let’s be clear what we mean by ‘Capitalism’. It’s generally agreed to have at its heart three key principles; the majority of ‘the means of production’ (land, resources, capital) are in a concentration of a minority of private hands, markets are used to mediate between producer and consumer (set prices etc) and the majority of us work for a wage (i.e. for other people) and do not ‘own’ the outputs of our work.

All three must be present for something to be called capitalist. Thus China, the world’s current economic poster-child, is not capitalist as most land and industry is not in private hands.

So which of these three is inherently incompatible with limits to growth?

Most problematic is the majority of the economy being in private ownership. This lends itself to the drive for profit maximizing and the ‘treadmill of accumulation’. In turn the in built moral hazard of the ‘invisible elbow’ of the market is unable to even consider public goods and causes systemic externalities harming both people and planet.

The result is inefficient use of natural resources for wellbeing satisfaction, concentration of wealth and political influence with its inherent capture, path-dependency and lock-in. Hence our failing attempts to regulate and to provide ameliorating welfare state provision.

The majority of finance capital being in private hands also causes massive issues. As our economies have become more and more orientated towards financial services and speculative, rather than real, commerce, this has starved real productive industries of investment. Despite these speculative markets being built on sand, the higher profits they make means productive industry is starved of investments. This forces the economy into ‘privatised Keynesianism’ where ordinary consumers are forced to go into debt to be able to purchase enough new production to keep the merry-go-round going. When the music stops, too-big-to-fail banks get bailed out whilst ordinary consumers are left to carry their debt on top of paying out to save the banks. No one gains from this except the capitalists profiting from the make-believe speculative financial markets. The irony is these banks have been at the forefront of the spread of neoliberalism and free markets, and yet they have now shown just how ‘non-market’ they actually are. They are creatures of massive state subsidy – out in the free market the would (and should) perish.      

But above all a system built on majority private control of the means for production and its profit-drive brings with it what Professor David Harvey calls the Capital Surplus Absorption Problem – a non-negotiable requirement for 3% exponential and compound growth. In the absence of absence of decoupling, this just ain’t possible on a finite planet.

The majority of the means for production being in private hands also means that most people have to work for wages. The predomination of wage labor in turn leads to inequality and society being split between the under/unemployed and the overworked. It also brings inevitable and painful, bi-polar booms and busts so constant in our economies. Capital owners are continually forced to repress wages in order to divert the ‘surplus’ to increase profits and pay back hungry private investors. They have to pay workers significantly less than the value of outputs and by doing so they thus starve the economy of sufficient demand for productive output (we can’t afford to buy enough ‘stuff’) and the merry-go-round stalls.

Markets per se are less problematic and indeed are possibly in some form vital for civilization as we know it. They could perform a good job of communicating between supply and demand if set within the right framework. Whilst non-market alternatives such as Parecon have been proposed, they seem to many to be fairly intractable. Perhaps we don’t have to throw the baby (the market) out with the bathwater?

For more on this subject I’d recommend readers to check out the work of Professors David Harvey and David Schweickart as well as that of Richard Smith in his excellent paper from which I stole the title of this blog – Capitalism he God that failed.

Alternatives to capitalism

You may not have heard of them but there are many alternatives to capitalism with significant followings.  There is a heated debate between fans of the Market Socialism versus those of Non-Market Socialism.

Market-based proposals include worker-managed models of ownership and control like those of Professor David Schweickart’s Economic Democracy (and here) and similar models by Estrin, Weiskopf and Fleurbaey. Others include ‘managerial’ forms of Market Socialism such as Bardhan’s proposals where enterprises are run by banks or mutual funds or where they are run by shareholders, as in John Roemers, Coupon Socialism.

Then there are Social Empowerment hybrids of capitalism and socialism such discussed in as the work of Professor Erik Olin Wright, and Eco-socialism and Ecological Marxism (Professor John Bellamy Foster et al) proposals.

Non-market socialist proposals include Michael Albert’s Parecon,

There is also heated debate heated debate as to whether any of these Market or Non-Market forms of Socialism could work in practice, or indeed should be called ‘socialism’.   

But one thing is for sure, many of the elements of these alternative proposals exist already in pockets of experimentation and can be seen to be delivering far more social value in a far more sustainable manner than pure, market based capitalist socio-economic relations and structures.

These living examples include Participative Democracy experiments pioneered in places like Porto Alegre, Brazil and now in the UK.

They also include the flourishing co-operative movement which has worldwide membership of around 800m people and serves 3bn others.  

Notable examples of these include Spain’s Mondragon Co-op Group Mondragon and the UK’s Co-operative Group and John Lewis, with revenues of £14bn, £12bn and £11bn. These enterprises have been shown to be more efficient than most private companies.

Similarly, in the co-operative banking sector, in 2009 60% of French bank branches were co-ops and in 1970 more capital sat in building societies in the UK than in banks. Much of the success of many co-op movements such as those in Almeria Spain have been shown to be down to the innovation and entrepreneurial support which comes from these co-operative investment banks.

State-wide examples of co-operative economics include the Quebec Social Economy.

Other mass-collaborative forms of enterprise include whats been described as the ‘fundamentally anti-capitalist‘ Wikipedia. 

Res Communes – the rise of citizen-led, fair-market, alternatives to capitalism

Marx was right afterall….

Its been interesting lately to hear voices from the mainstream questioning our growth-obsessed capitalist economics and calling up Karl Marx from his grave.

They include Stephanie Flanders from BBC Newsnight in her recent Masters Of Money documentary on Marx, Martin Wolf in the FT with his piece last week ‘Is unlimited growth a thing of the past?’ , UBS’s Chief Economist  George Magnus writing a piece titled ‘Give Karl Marx a chance to save the world economy’, and similar statements from Joseph Stiglitz and Nouriel Roubini, to name just a few I’ve spotted.

It seems that all of a sudden Marx was right all along, certainly in his analysis of capitalism’s failings, if not also in his prognosis of its fall. Not so long ago this analysis was thought of as extremist. Now mainstreamers are thinking back to University lectures on Marx and how his writings rang true in their youth.

This is new and interesting, and whilst few of them are willing to admit that there are actually alternatives to capitalism, that surely will be their next great leap.

Alternatives already exist….

As our current economics continues to unravel, with the pain of real austerity hitting Greek citizens, and with the Red Cross giving out food parcels in Spain, where there are now 2.3m ‘vulnerable’ people, many are asking ‘are we next?’

Despite mainstream denial there are many alternatives to capitalism. Marx himself did not just ask all the right questions and make predictions about the fall of capitalism, he also described the shape of its replacement.

There are of course alternatives to pure free-market capitalism. Red-in-tooth-and-claw Anglo-Saxon capitalism has always been the most extreme version. Variants such as European Social Democracy and Asian mixed economy and Keiretsu capitalism have always been fairer and nicer to people and planet. But no form of capitalism has ever been able to be quite as nice as was needed to provide ‘good lives’ for all.

More radical alternatives range from beyond-capitalism revolutionary-socialism and eco-socialism to reformist market-socialism and natural-capitalism. The great and sadly missed Eric Hobsbawm, who died last week, was one of many whose work inspired these and other alternatives.

These are not new alternatives. Many have been around for a long, long time. They have just been ignored by the mainstream and its denial. That denial worked in the good times but the good times are over.

Bumping up against limits to growth

We know we can no longer safely continue to grow the global economy. To do so would push us into climate meltdown and commit our children to unthinkable trauma. The implications for us in the rich world call for significant change. For the poor world to develop in material terms, the rich world needs to find a reverse gear.

As Professor Tim Jackson’s IPAT calculations have shown, if we wanted 3% growth rates globally, even to reach a liberal 450ppm CO2 target by 2050 (100ppm too high to be safe) we would need to reduce the carbon intensity of every global $ of economic output by 11%p.a. every year from now till 2050.

And yet the very best we have managed during the height of capitalist ‘efficiency’ 1990-2007 was 0.9% p.a. carbon intensity reductions. The difference between 0.9% and 11% is huge. It would require a 130 fold improvement – no mere incremental improvements in technology – more like something akin to a perpetual motion machine – to achieve these efficiencies. And we need those levels of absolute (not relative) decoupling to start today and go every year till 2050 on every global $ of output, be it in Germany or India. This is just not possible.

This is why the IPCC’s Professor Kevin Anderson has now said that ‘we either deal with climate change or have a growth economy – not both.”

And climate change is only one of the many key planetary boundaries the Stockholm Resilience Institute shows we are now hitting up against. As Professor Kenneth Boulding has said, and finance brokers Tullet Prebon are now repeating, “to believe in infinite growth on a finite planet you have to either be an economist or a madman.”  

Capitalism can’t survive without growth

Capitalism has played an important role, along with other forms of market and non-market socio-economics, in the improvements in material and non-material wellbeing we have seen over the last 200 years. But at the same time the built-in dynamics which Marx pointed to have led to innumerable ‘externalities’ and inequities which society could well do without.

It is becoming clear to many that the new economics this will require may not be compatible with capitalism. This is because capitalism is, by default, reliant on economic growth to support the dynamic of profit maximisation and accumulation.

So sooner or later we will have to give up on capitalism. Maybe very soon or maybe in five, ten, or twenty years time. Capitalism has got us as far as it could but for todays full-world challenges a new system will be needed.
The need to move beyond incremental reform

These challenges call for radical change not incrementalism.  Sadly, attempts at reform of capitalism – ‘market ecology’, ‘natural capitalism’ and ‘capitalism-as-if-the-earth-matters’ have failed. Some will say they were always doomed to fail as they ignored hard truths about capitalisms requirement for growth in a finite world. Others that they might have worked if given more time. But time is something we are running out of. As NASAs James Hansen has now said ‘we may already be too late.’

If we had had the sense to have started an effort to decouple growth from material throughput and environmental impacts perhaps 30 years ago we might have found technological ways to continue growth immaterially. But today, with runaway, unstoppable climate change upon us, its just too late for anything but an end to global growth in the scale of the economy.

Res Communes – an alternative vision of economics for, by and of the people
Work in progressive circles such as the Transition Towns movement and the New Economics Foundation (nef) is starting to take shape around a new vision of progress and a new form of Sustainable Wellbeing Economics which champions a shift from privatisation to propertisation of the global commons.

This economics takes inspiration from the work of Nobel laureates such as Ostrom, Stiglitz, Sen and Kahneman, updating our understanding of socio-economic relations, co-operation, reciprocity and wellbeing.

Taking inspiration partly from ancient Rome’s legal system, and moving us on from the tired, left-right dialectic of state-versus-market, this new economics puts the citizen centre stage with an emphasis on a predominant Res Communes commons sector run for, by and of the people.

This economics will be based on a socio-economic transition to a mutualised, co-operative, communitarian, localised, participatory democracy and a radical shrinking away of the private, Res Privita and state, Res Publica sectors.

Such a system may have a role for markets but this role will be as servant not master to the overarching goal of delivering ‘good lives which do not cost the earth’.

This will have wide ranging implications including for social relations; for changing cultural values from extrinsic to intrinsic wellbeing satisfying values, for new visions and narratives of ‘prosperity’, for commercial, national and international accounting, for the balance between use and exchange values, for a new era beyond ‘worker’ and ‘boss’, for a radically different and smaller finance sector and changes to many other aspects of our current system.

But already there are many new and old forms of alternatives to shareholder owned enterprises which are showing the way forward. Take the countless mutual, employee, community and cooperatively owned enterprises.

One of many examples is Spain’s £4.3bn Mondragon Co-operatives Group, employing 53,000 stakeholder-owners. The World Bank has said that consistently, for over twenty years, Mondragon group co-ops have been “more efficient than many private enterprises…. there can be no doubt that the co-operatives have been more profitable than capitalist enterprises.”

These sort of successes are showing that the idea that shareholder-owned capitalist enterprises are far from the only alternative. Maybe some day soon we will all work for, own and buy from similar enterprises.

We live in exciting times

The good news is that an end to growth need not stop us delivering high employment, high wellbeing and fiscal balance. This is shown by the emerging macro-economic modelling work of Nef and Professors Peter Victor and Tim Jackson. We in the rich world can well afford to find a reverse gear so that, within global stasis, the poor world can continue to develop.

There is reason to be optimistic. Growth long since has failed to deliver increases in life satisfaction. We need not fear the end of growth and a new post-capitalist economics. Its an exciting time to be alive – truly revolutionary things are afoot.

A call to action

Over the next year a group of us will be publishing a draft Res Communes manifesto for post-growth, post-capitalist change. We will be open-sourcing this for anyone who wants to help us produce our final vision and manifesto for change. Watch this space and get involved………

This blog is dedicated to Eric Hobsbawm, an inspiration to Jules and father of his friends Andy and Julia.

Living examples of experiments in sustainable wellbeing economics

Elements of this new Res Communes economics already exist

These living examples include Participative Democracy experiments pioneered in places like Porto Alegre, Brazil and now in the UK.

They also include the flourishing co-operative movement which has worldwide membership of around 800m people and serves 3bn others.  

Notable examples of these include Spain’s Mondragon Co-op Group Mondragon and the UK’s Co-operative Group and John Lewis, with revenues of £14bn, £12bn and £11bn. These enterprises have been shown to be more efficient than most private companies. The World Bank has said that, for over twenty years, Mondragon was “more efficient than may private enterprises…there can be no doubt that the co-operatives have been more profitable than capitalist enterprises.”

Similarly, in the co-operative banking sector, in 2009 60% of French bank branches were co-ops and in 1970 more capital sat in building societies in the UK than in banks. Much of the success of many co-op movements such as those in Almeria Spain have been shown to be down to the innovation and entrepreneurial support which comes from these co-operative investment banks.

State-wide examples of co-operative economics include the Quebec Social Economy.

Other mass-collaborative forms of enterprise include whats been described as the ‘fundamentally anti-capitalist‘ Wikipedia. 

Happy Citizens?

This blog first appeared here at LeftFootForward and here at citizenrenaissance.

So the results of the first annual survey of UK wellbeing are out. As with Nef’s Happy Planet Index (HPI), the survey maps levels of wellbeing across the UK.

On the Happy Planet Index, we in the UK score very badly – so how do scores vary within the UK?

Well, Blackpool – despite its Pleasure Beach – comes out bottom on some of the measures. York comes out top for life satisfaction and Scottish Islands do well also.

According to the Independent’s headlines, if you want to be happy, get a job, be a woman and move to my hometown of Bath.

I opined on Left Foot Forward in 2010 that this ONS process in motion is one of the few visionary and progressive things the government has done. Even the prime minister has championed this work in the face of protests from regressives.

On that regressive note, it is no surprise that amongst the news coverage on the survey this week, the Daily Mail had a stereotypical rant. It is also a shame that those on the left are still snotty about such a progressive agenda.

In echoes of the Taxpayers Alliance, shadow cabinet office minister Michael Dugher derided the ONS project as “a statement of the bleeding obvious” and a waste of taxpayers’ money.

The ONS survey shows that, as one might expect, it is no fun being unemployed. Our current (for how long) work experience chancellor has more and more to answer for on that count.

The survey shows that what really matters to people are what think-tank the New Economics Foundation (nef) calls the five-ways-to-wellbeing. What matters, and what we need our politics and economy to support, are things like flourishing relationships, a sense of community, being able to give back and help others, enjoying nature and learning new skills.

And yet our politicians mostly seem to have an impoverished vision of what ‘good lives’ are all about. They seem bent on blindly following what professor Tim Jackson sums up so well in his Ted talk as the ‘insatiability doctrine’: “We spend money we don’t have, on things we don’t need, to make impressions that don’t last, on people we don’t care about.” When things get bad they exhort us to ‘go out shopping’ rather than punish the socially useless or do anything but carry on with business-as-usual.

Sir Gus O’Donnell, until recently head of the civil service and ex-head of the treasury in the UK, said he thinks that within ten years wellbeing will be the economy’s headline indicator and that our wellbeing will be the fundamental thing we are measuring, with GDP a subsidiary indicator. I’d welcome that.

It’s important we don’t just measure these things for the sake of measurement and government uses what we are learning about the nature of ‘good lives which don’t cost the earth’ to alter policy. We need this new policy direction to support a shift in our economics and social values which can improve wellbeing and shift us to a Sustainable Wellbeing economy.

We can only hope that Cameron and his ministers will continue to champion these measures and use the work of the ONS and Nef to develop a progressive policy landscape fit to meet the challenges of our ecological overshoot and wellbeing undershoot.

But I’m not holding my breath and if they don’t then there is an open goal waiting for the left for whom this should be home ground.