Occupying Our Minds

It’s stark, but dividing the world up into the 1% (the self-perpetuating elite currently laying claim to the lion’s share of the world’s wealth) and the 99% (everybody else) is certainly focussing people’s minds.

Image courtesy of wheelzwheeler via Flickr

It tells us instantly that Capitalism 1.0 (or Capitalism 1%) has proved itself to be a monumental failure. The implicit deal on which it was based – that it was OK for the rich to get richer if everyone else shared in the process, if jobs were created, public services protected, infrastructure maintained, the environment looked after, and our children’s interests given due regard – has been so comprehensively betrayed as to leave the lucky 1% with no place to hide.

It tells us instantly that the fantastical illusion that took possession of our minds and our dreams – that year-on-year increases in production and consumption on a finite planet, indefinitely into the future, was a feasible proposition – must now be exorcised once and for all.

It tells us instantly how poorly served we have been by global media elites whose only interest lay in protecting the interests of the 1%, whilst keeping the 99% regaled with latter-day equivalents of bread and circuses.

And it tells us instantly that there is no going back to Capitalism 1.0 now that the 99% have seen it – for many, apparently, for the first time – for what it really is.

Before going any further, it has to be acknowledged that this is a predominantly rich world, Western perspective. It looks and feels very different in countries like China, India, Brazil and Indonesia, where variants Capitalism 1.0 still exercise a powerful hold – even as they head towards the same inevitable 99%/1% destination.

Back here in the Developed World, we have a real opportunity to rethink things fundamentally.

First, let’s acknowledge that it serves little purpose demonising the 1%. Not least because it’s probably little more than 1% of that 1% that are knowingly intent, even now, on sustaining that privileged position at the expense of everybody else. So the key question is this: how might we best address the 99% of the 1% who must surely be experiencing the same kind of anger and fear that the rest of us are?

The anger runs deep and durable. How can it be that the 1% of the 1% who crashed the system in their own narrow interests have shown no contrition? Have continued to further enrich themselves even as everyone else takes the pain? And have somehow ensured that the unaccountable capital markets (of which they are the principal guardians and beneficiaries) are still allowed to override basic democratic entitlements?

Jonathan Freedland captured this very eloquently in a recent Guardian article:

“Democracy’s humbling has been most dramatically visible in Greece and Italy, where elected leaders have been pushed aside in favour of technocrats and fixers, elevated without so much as shaking a single voter’s hand. Their mission will include the surrender of much economic sovereignty, putting those decisions further out of reach of their own citizens. What Greeks and Italians endure today, other Eurozone nations might well face tomorrow as they are told to make similar sacrifices of autonomy to save their economic skin.”

So much for the anger. The fear is increasingly present. For all its inherent contradictions, Capitalism 1.0 delivered a lot, if measured in terms of improved living standards and astonishing technology breakthroughs for hundreds of millions of people – let alone in terms of the relative absence of war that we’ve enjoyed during that time.

And that’s why it’s been so resilient.

But having it demonstrated to us so definitively that this particular Emperor has no clothes brings no particular joy – it’s the only Emperor we’ve known, after all. As Paul Gilding said in a recent blog:

“Occupy Wall Street is simply the kid in the fairy tale, saying what everyone knows but has, until now, been afraid to say – the Emperor has no clothes – we have system failure. They’ve given focus to what people were already seeing and feeling; that our problem is not just debt, or inequality, or recession, or corporate influence, or ecological damage. It’s the whole package. The system is profoundly broken and beyond incremental reform.”

With fear and anger now pervasive, it’s hardly surprising that the majority of people in countries where “Occupy” protests have sprung up continue to support those protestors. Though they themselves make no particular claim to this, the Occupy protestors somehow embody that anger, and provide some limited reassurance against the fear. They have succeeded in getting politicians to start talking seriously about fairness, about equity, about justice – about all those fundamental political issues that have been so successfully kept off the agenda by the 1% of the 1%.

So where will all that unleashed energy take us? The resulting debate is certainly invigorating – but hardly very helpful from a more radical sustainability perspective. There’s still so much missing. Even the more progressive voices would appear to be very reluctant to acknowledge the double jeopardy in which we now find ourselves.

The shock to the system from the near-collapse of our global banking industry has been traumatic – and we’re by no means at the end of that sorry process as yet. Even so, that is nothing compared to the near-imminent collapse of the ecological systems on which we depend – particularly a stable climate. And the two are intimately connected.

However, it has become received wisdom that environmental issues should now “be put on the back burner”, given the ferocity of the economic recession. That’s what George Osborne goes out of his way to emphasise in every keynote speech he does. Even dealing with climate change, which is widely acknowledged by scientists as the single most important challenge facing humankind today is now seen by many politicians as “an unaffordable luxury” – as can be seen in every twist and turn of the Conference of the Parties in Durban.

Hence we find ourselves in some terminal zero-sum game: we either combat the grim consequences of global recession, or we get to grips with climate change and a host of other sustainability issues. But not, apparently, both at the same time.

Put at its simplest, it’s like this: no variation of capitalism will have anything to offer of any lasting value at this stage if it continues to ignore these non-negotiable physical limits within which we must learn to operate without further delay. Yet nearly 40 years on from the publication of “Limits to Growth”, it’s remarkable just how many otherwise intelligent, caring, progressive commentators are still entirely blind to this all-important dimension of sustainable wealth creation.

In that regard, they’re just not listening to the more authentic voices of the Occupy Movement. Whilst it may be true that no coherent prescription for the future of capitalism has yet to emerge from any of the Occupy protests, their analysis has been permeated with a deep environmental sensibility right from the start. My good friend Barbara Panvel forwarded to me this representative quote from an Occupy Wall Street blogger:

“Ultimately, we are protesting not only on behalf of the 99% left behind, but on behalf of the 1%. No one deserves to live in a world built upon the degradation of human beings, forests, waters and the rest of our living planet.

The truth is that dwindling rainforests, spreading deserts, mass tree die-offs on every continent, looted pensions, groaning burdens of student debt, working two or three dead end jobs, children eating dirt in Haiti, elders having to choose between food and medicine – the list is endless, and we will make it no longer possible to hold it in disconnection from the money system. That is why we converge on Wall Street.”

Capitalism 1.0 has clearly failed. Capitalism 2.0 (an equitable and genuinely sustainable variant of capitalism) could still deliver what most people want: access to a good education and good work; high-quality public services; infrastructure renewed; the environment properly looked after and recognised as the foundation for all wealth creation; and the interests of future generations factored into every decision we take in our own interests today.

For those in the 1% who remain uncertain or even apprehensive, ask yourself what the alternative is. It’s either that – our last, best chance of enabling capitalism to provide for the needs of all people alive today and those still to be born – or capitalism will implode.

Why people don’t see this as a proverbial “no-brainer” remains something of a mystery.