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Introduction: A sad and beautiful world in peril

It is pretty obvious that our world is in trouble. Well, maybe not the earth itself or even the global ecosystem that calls it home. These are likely to survive in one form or another so long as their star (the sun) doesn’t burn out. It is more the place occupied by the human species that is in question as we destroy the ecological conditions necessary to support us in the numbers and style to which we have grown accustomed. That’s right – we are doing it to ourselves. Species suicide.

‘Oh, here we go,’ you might say, ‘another one of those “end-of-the-world-is-nigh” books.’ Well, it’s true nonetheless. We are doing it incrementally, by stealth, like one of those new bombers you can’t detect until it’s too late, or like the drones that blow you up when you think you are safe hanging out with your family on the rooftop. We think we are OK but the evidence is mounting that we are not: increasing instances of often deadly extreme weather; stultifying urban environments like those of Beijing and myriad other Chinese cities that are choking on coal smoke; our sad dependence on the oil economy with its toxic spills; explosions of all kinds as we heat the climate to cooking point. Renewable resources – fresh water, fertile soil, global fish stocks – are fast being rendered non-renewable by greed and wasteful misuse. Then there is the human cost in lives of precarious labor, huge refugee populations and fully one in six of humans barely able to survive on pennies a day. I could, of course, go on but I don’t want to discourage you at this early stage.

That’s the sad part – so what about the beautiful? The list is almost endless. A Canadian lake during a misty dawn; a walk in the fields of the English west country; the sounds of a jungle at night; dolphins playing in the waves; the bounty of colorful fish that inhabits any coral reef – and that’s just the natural world. Then there’s the idiosyncratic human species – from your children embarking on their wonderstruck discovery of life in all its diversity and glory right through to that odd fellow in Montreal who dresses up in a panda suit to protect student demonstrators from police violence. When our best natures aren’t suppressed, we can be loving, funny, carefree, courageous, thoughtful and capable of wondrous acts of generosity.

Of course, we won’t always be this way. Sometimes we will be small-minded and mean, narcissistic and self-serving – downright nasty. We will always have these competing traits. So what we need to do is to organize the world in such a way as to encourage our better selves and discourage our narrow-minded and nasty side. Our current system of capital accumulation (known as corporate capitalism) does just the opposite. This champions and fosters narrow-minded self-interest and greed as the cornerstone of all that is human. It also fosters inequality and powerlessness on a massive scale and is driving us in the direction of eco-destruction – including of the aforementioned lakes, reefs, jungles and dolphins.

It has reached the point where the Marxist theorist Frederick Jameson can say without irony that it is easier to think of the end of the world than the end of capitalism. For, while the world is doing badly, capitalism is getting along just fine. Oh sure, there are economic crises and financial blow-ups, but the goods are still being delivered to those at the top of the pile with an enviably smooth efficiency and the general public still seem to accept the corporate message that ‘there is no alternative’. This is, of course, a self-serving lie.

The purpose of this book is to tease out what such genuine alternatives to capitalism might look like. It looks at what the past experience of such alternatives has been, at the issues and problems that have haunted them – the paths not taken. This is a bittersweet history of rich diversity marked by massacre, noble failure and tepid success. The book then moves into the present to seek a way out of the maze of life-threatening inequality and eco-catastrophe.

The history of capitalism is, of course, tied up with the various waves of the industrial revolution, with its attendant technological advances – steam, carbon, nuclear and now cyber, to pick an arbitrary few. Today, some advocates of alternatives to capitalism hold that industrialism itself, which was so shaped by the needs of capitalists for profit and control, needs to be thrown off; their view is that human society needs to return to a kind of neo-primitivist sensibility, abandoning our technological fixes and consumer addictions. Others, who are no less opposed to the inequalities of wealth and power that scar capitalism, take the contrary position on questions of modernity. For orthodox Marxists and many of their antecedents, for many liberal reformers, for those committed to the ‘development’ of the Global South, the problem with capitalism is that it is shackling modernity rather than abetting it. This is a vital point (though far from the only one) that divides critics who think about what an alternative to capitalism might look like.

The conceit of progress that is built into modern-day capitalism produces a number of common myths. The first is the widespread belief that we are better off now than we have ever been. The second is that we have no alternative but to continue in the direction of corporate growth or dire consequences will ensue. The third is that there is a kind of trans-historical human nature that condemns us all to act only in our own narrow self-interest. The fourth is that our present state was fashioned more or less democratically, with dissent only from the backward and foolish. The fifth is that we need constant speed-up in production and work and society as a whole in order to ensure we can meet our (often unsustainable) needs. The sixth is that science and technology alone can save us from whatever problems corporate growth produces. And the seventh one, which perhaps underpins the others, is that all we have to do is make sure the pie keeps growing.

Taken together, these make up a powerful arsenal of status quo ‘common sense’ weapons that need to be unpicked so as to expose their profoundly unhistorical and dead-end nature. This volume will try to do just that, as it explores alternative ways of living and loving life.