The dictatorship of employment
In a recent article in the Guardian, two of the most active voices in the ‘degrowth’ movement, Jason Hickel and Yanis Varoufakis, argued the need to ‘move beyond the capitalist model and save the climate’. They laid out the paradox of an Earth with the technology to produce everything everyone could reasonably need while at the same time ‘millions of people suffer in conditions of severe deprivation’.
They attribute this to capitalism, which they explain as ‘an economic system that boils down to a dictatorship run by the tiny minority who control capital – the big banks, the major corporations and the 1% who own the majority of investible assets’. They go on to say that, even in political democracies where the majority can choose which party shall govern, nothing seems to change and the majority who do the producing have no say in ‘what to produce, how to use our labour and who gets to benefit’.
What they are saying, in other words, is that the economic system, whichever regime or government oversees it, is the same. And that system has the objective of producing ‘to maximise and accumulate profit’ rather than to satisfy human needs or have regard for the earth’s ecology. This, the writers continue, compels a ‘perpetual growth’ imperative which leads to production being focused on goods and services that are likely to find a market regardless of whether they are genuinely useful. Examples they give of this are ‘massive production of things such as SUVs, mansions and fast fashion’, as well as the use of fossil fuels rather than renewable energy, They point out that, though renewables like solar are much cheaper to produce than fossil fuels, ‘fossil fuels are up to three times as profitable’, causing environmental considerations to be swept aside, ‘even while the world burns’.
The article sums this up in the following resonant fashion: ‘Here we are: trapped in capitalism’s set of priorities, which are inimical to humanity’s. Human ingenuity has bequeathed us splendid technologies and capacities. But, like a cruel divinity, capital not only prevents us from using them for our collective good, but in fact coerces us to deploy them towards our collective doom.’ And in this connection they point to another undeniable and very current reality: how the imperatives of capitalist production lead to violence and wars as advanced economies, via their governments, jostle for advantage over others using tools such as ‘debt, sanctions, coups and even outright military invasions’.
So what is the remedy Hickel and Varoufakis propose for all this? We must, they argue, ‘democratise our economy, so that we can organise production around urgent social and ecological priorities’, since ‘we are the producers of the goods, the services, the technologies’, and it is ‘our labour and our planet’s resources that are at stake’. To achieve this they recommend actions such as an extension of ‘public finance for public purposes’ via ‘a new public investment bank … in association with the central banks’, and an injection of ‘deliberative democracy’ into the economic sphere via a ‘Great Corporate Reform Act’ so that the workplace ceases to be ‘a dead end dictatorship’ and each employee gets to have a say in the operation of the company they work for. ‘We live’, they conclude, ‘in a shadow of the world we could create’, one in which ‘the abolition of economic insecurity, precarity, poverty, unemployment and indignity is possible, while we lead meaningful lives within planetary boundaries’.
A good deal of this is attractive, even inspiring, stuff, laying out an analysis of capitalism and a vision of the future that we could at least partly endorse. Only partly, however, since it fails to take into account certain important considerations, making similar mistakes to a number of recent commentators whose ‘post-capitalist’ ideas have often been discussed or reviewed in the pages of the Socialist Standard. This lies in the notion – utopian we would call it – that it is possible to have a society of equality, of choice of activity and of workplace democracy while retaining finance, money and governments. Even if governments were to intervene to a greater extent than they do now in the market and the buying and selling economy of capitalism, as these commentators would like, they could not resist that system’s economic laws and, if they tried, would end up triggering financial crises leading to lay-offs, unemployment and the majority of people turning against them.
Other policies ‘post-capitalist’ commentators advocate such as a guaranteed minimum wage or universal basis income would be equally subject to extreme strain under pressure of the need for each company to produce goods for profit in competition with others. And this would be the case even if somehow workers were allowed to have some form of control over the running of production or services in their workplace. As Anitra Nelson in her 2022 book, Beyond Money: a Post-Capitalist Strategy, explains, all attempts, no matter how well meaning, to ‘mould money to progressive ends’ are bound to fail. We simply cannot, as she puts it, ‘tweak the system to overcome its weaknesses’.
So while the world that Hickel and Varoufakis – as well as others with similar views – refer to as ‘post-capitalist’ might, in many of the ways they frame it, seem tantalisingly close to the Socialist Party’s vision, it could only at best amount to a more benign form of capitalism, and at worst lead to economic chaos stemming from the fact that production under the money and buying and selling system cannot, by the very nature of that system, be redirected from profit-seeking to meeting people’s needs. All this would be like trying to build safely on seismic ground. A true ‘post-capitalist’ society can only be established once the current economic system has been abolished democratically (ideally voted out) by a majority of the world’s workers and society reorganised on the basis of common ownership and democratic control of the world’s productive forces – a system of production and distribution for human need where each individual has free and equal access to a common store of goods, services and amenities.
HKM