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.

The social democrats among us – too many falsely seduced by the Reagan/ Thatcher legacy – have failed to persuade, while market fundamentalists have filled the intellectual vacuum by creating a cloak of respectability around libertarian destructionism. As David Sainsbury noted in a recent essay for the RSA, “the past thirty years of market fundamentalism has allowed the idea that there is such a thing as public interest to atrophy”. This is the same market reasoning that, to paraphrase Sandel, has emptied public life of moral argument and consequently come to view the polis with contempt.

The mega-trend of individual empowerment plays neatly to the libertarian audience: power shifts from state to citizen; employer to employee; corporation to consumer. Costless communication accelerates democracy, while technology aggressively disrupts. Atomisation, activism and the asymmetry of power inevitably increase. Citizen democracy is real, if unchecked.

A new type of leadership and a re-imagined state is needed to address the challenges of atomisation, activism and asymmetry. Mainstream theories of charismatic, situational, technocratic or transformational leadership may not be enough in a world that is increasingly chaotic, complex and fragile: traditional solutions for unforeseen problems. The state, meanwhile, needs to shift towards citizen-empowerment and away from the failing hierarchies of command-and-control. If the notion of “the failed state” is allowed to take root, then a selfish madness may well ensue.

Co-created, citizen-centric leadership offers possible salvation.

Citizen-centric leadership can transcend the market obsession of the past thirty-five years. It is rooted in the needs and aspirations of real people. It emerges from the wise consensus of their networks and communities: this is how it is a co-created. Moreover, it is supported by the neuroscience that tells us that a purposeful framework combined with individual empowerment increases both productivity and harmony. In other words, co-created, citizen-centric leadership can enhance common, or collective good.

In an age of citizen-centric power, citizen-centric leadership presents a logical solution.

This thinking helps solve two problems at once: first, the need to re-imagine the state as active polis – grounded in its original purpose of happiness, rather than the pursuit and protection of power. And second, the restoration of virtuous leadership, which will in turn address the crisis of trust and the legitimation of authority.

Active and explicit citizen-centric leadership – whether for nation state or business state – offers authentic, visionary clarity in this otherwise confused age of individual empowerment. It is rooted in the people. It is horizontal but not anarchic. It can serve as the leadership of the future, albeit one rooted firmly in the classical past.

It happened with CSR and with social and now with content, too – a failure to convert early-mover advantage into sustained leadership. We let others steal our clothes and then bemoan their encroachment on “our” space.

For a profession that prides itself on the quality of its strategic advice, it is perverse that we so consistently forget to take our own. This is partly a failure of visionary leadership; partly the lack of a rigorously defined point of view about our very purpose; but mostly a question of economics and business models.

With the exception of the big, consultancy networks, PR rarely achieves scale. And, where the holding company groups do deliver scale, so some of the choicest bits are invariably siphoned off to the media houses and ad guys. Why? Because they make a better case for the economics and are able to enumerate their arguments on a factual base. This is exactly what is now happening with content and data. PR is increasingly banished to the fringes.

With CSR, we spotted the longer term trend towards “responsibility” and the necessary citizen-centricity of corporations and brands. But rather than focus on and leverage the strategic thought, we became complicit in the green-washing of responsibility into a mere communications tool – de-legitimising issues of real purpose while the management consultancies, and others, monetised the idea. Communications remained our safe haven: something of a cocoon. It was an easy way out.

We are watching a similar pattern unfold with content. An inevitable consequence of the social world, content was always going to be its currency. We knew to say content would be king and that it has to be “likeable, shareable and atomic”, but few have moved seriously and aggressively into the content space, preferring words to actions.

Professor Richard Sambrook recently argued that no PR firm really does content well: certainly few have properly explored scalable production partnerships or game-changing studio deals. Though later converts, the ad agencies have managed to reinvent (not for the first time) the 30-second ad, while the media shops do deals based more on eyeballs than creativity or community. The forward-thinking of PR has thus been subsumed within a moderated old advertising model. Once again, PR folk have allowed the marketing veneer to cover a proper business play – and have receded in influence as a result.

There are three lessons to learn from our failure to score with CSR, social and content:

First, we need to make a much better case for the profession of PR, redefining and re-articulating our own purpose. Without understanding what we stand for, what we can contribute, and how we can prove our success, we risk becoming little more than a cottage-industry niche player. Our purpose starts with helping corporations understand their own purposes and their authentic stories.

Second, we need to sell more than our time. The smaller boutiques and medium-sized firms are often limited by their heavy reliance on the time of their rock-star founders. We need to make a better case for our brands, not just our people, and how they differentiate and impact commercial success. We need to be paid for strategy and for ideas and we need to be remunerated for success. That’s why the shift to an aligned measurement model and a real understanding of data is so vital. This remains our Achilles’ heel and an excuse for clients not to pay better money.

Third, we need to be as literate in the hardcore of economics as we are in the softer-core of ideas. The idea alone is not enough. We can help find and socialise it for sure, but we also have to measure its business impact. We cannot use press cuttings or hyper-links to justify success. Without this, we are lost.

This post first appeared a Real PR Moment Blog Post

David Bowie is another artist who properly understands the power of absence – the ecstasy surrounding his recent ‘return’ testament to the authority of his brand when off-stage as well as on. He is not (usually) everywhere and rarely has been.

Here is an insight for communicators obsessed about participation and the always-on society. Sometimes, silence really is golden. Brands maybe need to speak more often through their aura – what they do not say and where they do not show – and reign in the habitual rush to communicate. Ubiquity does not have to be everything.

The temptation is of course to follow conventional wisdom – but leadership companies and brands are usually those who re-think convention.

The artist Jasper Johns is quoted as saying that Duchamp gave “fresh sense to the time and space we occupy”, while Cage noted that “one way to write music is to study Duchamp”. Marketers would do well to study the silence and to think as deeply about the spectator as the artist. Content – verbal, visual, virtual – can too readily become noise, when in fact silence is both more powerful and more resonant.

Are we ready for an era of silent brands?

Speaking at #PolisTrust at the London School of Economics, Wallis was referring to the issue of trust. He is of course correct – although the context of his comment was a rather flimsy attempt to justify the excesses of the tabloid media in Britain.

I was at LSE to debate ‘Trust in Power’, on a panel chaired by Professor Charlie Beckett, alongside author Ian Leslie (“we are all complicit in the lies of advertising, media & politics); Conservative MP Douglas Carswell (“all citizens, no society” – a libertarian cry); and Guido Fawkes, aka Paul Staines (disruptor turned establishmentarian). ‘Trust in Power’ was always a curious title – for, as generations have warned, rarely can we trust either ‘power’ or those who wield it. Healthy scepticism of institutions is the wiser route for most democracies: and surely the core function of the media is to channel and champion this? But where scepticism loses its moral compass and tips into cynicism, power-obsession and even illegality, then we can hardly feign surprise when trust evaporates.

During a day of mostly brilliant sessions, #PolisTrust seemed more comfortably focused on the ‘T’ aspects of the conjoined title. The Greek ‘polis’ and the Roman ‘civitas’ were rarely referenced – nor the citizen-state objective of common good and happiness. Leaders of the polis are meant to be (wo)men of virtue. As discussions ranged from tabloid scandals to Leveson, regulation to corruption, there was no inkling of irony that the British (tabloid) media has in the past decade mostly been abandoned by virtuous leadership and has distanced itself from true citizen principles. Recent Daily Mail headlines evidence this.

Certain sessions needed more honesty for sure. The Sun’s own ombudswoman spoke painfully about the need to help restore trust in her title, but maybe this was argued on a need-to-say basis. The Sun’s day job is the pursuit of more sales and red-top market dominance. In a declining market, aggression and trust are rarely happy bedfellows. We should just accept this, while understanding that the speed of news can only ever increase the fragility of trust.

The Guardian’s Nick Davies nailed it when he pointed out that this “ruthless drive to satisfy the commercial imperative” inevitably creates a trust deficit. Continuing to chase both headlines and sales over ideals and common good means that the restoration of trust in mass media is likely to be a non-starter. Davies cited many examples of “immoral behavior” from the media pack, many of them executed even while Leveson was still in session. There is, he argued, no real appetite for behavioural change, still less any real honesty around this fact. The market – “the place where men go to deceive one another” – is seldom a pleasant place. Davies – and others – meanwhile brilliantly exemplified the need to support, protect and champion real media investigations (properly funded) to ensure the accountability of the powerful to the important and not the trivial.

While the commitment to proper investigative journalism was restorative, the tabloid debates made me think about Ryanair. Nobody really trusts Michael O’Leary but somehow it doesn’t seem to matter. People still buy tickets for his services and fly on his planes. Their relationship with him is explicit, even if the experience is grim. It is a perversely honest transaction. We do not hear him make promises of trust – and maybe paradoxically trust him more, as a result.

Trusted leaders – editors and publishers among them – are those with higher ideals; those with social and moral courage; those who participate among citizens and do not bully or dictate terms. Explicit discussions around the moral dimension remained oddly absent from nearly all of the sessions I attended: no real self-questioning, let alone self-doubt, from those who ordinarily love to question. Too many speakers assumed a position of righteousness, while, to those who attended the opening BBC keynote, it appeared that Auntie is always going to be more concerned with Salford than with Socrates.

The many BBC folk present would do well to continually ask the questions and assess Tony Hall against the Five Tests of Trusted Leadership: his vision; his transparency & accountability to civic good; his ability to empower & democratise both the institution itself and the way it collates and distributes news; his commitment to transformation; and the proof that he does as he says he will do and is not simply a new, corporate monologist.

Real people – citizens – see through the media veneer, of course, from wherever it emanates. As in politics and business, more regular people need to be allowed in to the everyday supervision of newspapers and broadcasters. Conscious citizens would be less likely to permit the scandalous hounding of Kate and Gerry McCann, Chris Jeffries or many others. Hacked Off is not just about “celebrity revenge”, as one participant rather poorly put it, but about a visceral, citizen-centric reaction to continued wrongdoing – both morally and (in the case of hacking) legally. The sympathy for Hacked Off stems from citizens’ recognition of the importance of transcendental values: justice, fairness, equality and morality. Maybe this is why the Independent (to paraphrase Martin Hickman) is more trusted than The Sun – just as John Lewis will forever be more trusted than RBS, or Zopa than Wonga. If newsrooms were better networked with the reality of the everyday, they might somehow build stronger and more trusted relationships all round, while “editorial leadership” should be no different from any other form of leadership. Both need integrity, humility & moral courage.

As in business and politics, so in media, too. Trust needs to be a mutualized partnership between citizens and institutions: the best under-pinning statutes are therefore those with citizen presence, citizen oversight and citizen teeth. Non-accountable institutions of power are not to be trusted, nor is any body that misunderstands (commercial) authority for legitimacy. In media, as elsewhere, citizens (the Polis) are the true custodians of trust and common good – which is why media owners and editors would be wise to embrace the citizen state within all their communities.

In a conference of inveterate questioners (media, academics & students alike), no-one seemed to want to ask the most fundamental question of all: the issue is not whether we trust in power – it is surely “what sort of society to we want to be”? Our media needs to re-frame and re-engage with this debate. Getting the right sort of polis enmeshed with the media seems like a logical starting point for a new truth and reconciliation.

Cartoon courtesy of Drawnalism

http://drawnalism.com

“Much of what is amiss in our world”, as Judt commented, “can best be captured in the language of classical political thought”. In today’s city states, nation states and business states, rarely do the philosophers or the virtuous rule. They have been usurped instead by the pragmatists, opportunists, charm-sellers, bureaucrats and technocrats, all of who invariably pursue power over happiness, self-interest over common good, institutional hierarchies over individual flourishing. ‘Power politics’ and its angry, adversarial language has become the sadly accepted norm, both in government and in business. The Aristotelian fundamentals of truth, beauty, goodness and unity have been wasted along the way.

In the wake of such philosophical carnage, citizens should simply not place their trust in power which, as Hailsham, Acton and Pitt all warned, is little more besides a corrupting and corrosive force. Many years ago, a good friend admonished me that “you cannot be a politician without a political party”. My retort then, as it is now, is that you should not seek to be a politician without decency, virtue and higher ideals. The pursuit of power alone is not enough. A commitment to higher ideals, as Douglas Alexander argued recently, offers the best antidote to dis-engagement, whethere in parliament or the workplace.

The classical philosophers observed that ‘power’ is not the ultimate goal of the state. That belongs to the happiness of its citizens, who need to participate in its wellbeing and progress. The state is a partnership, where trust is mutualized. Yet while we, as citizens, may instinctively know this, we blindly continue to mistake narrow power for authentic authority; power for leadership; power as an agent of change. But power is none of these. Power alone is indecent.

The wider crisis of trust is in reality a crisis in the legitimacy, leadership and order of power. None are authenticated from above: all should be manifest from within. This is why the very notions of ‘polis’ and ‘civitas’ are as relevant today as they were two thousand (plus) years ago. The issues then, as now, are all too familiar – justice, fairness, equality, morality – but still we let institutions and individuals within them play the power-without-trust game on everything from gay marriage and women bishops to bedroom taxes via war & peace. We have become apathetic to asking the right questions and have anaesthetized our social and moral imaginations. It does not have to be thus.

Citizens are the proper custodians of both common good and trust. In pursuit of tomorrow’s good, more courage is needed to unlock genuinely progressive ideas, including, for example, braver thinking around a Citizen Income (to re-imagine the benefits state) and a Citizen Volunteer Force, to re-energise a dis-enfranchised youth and to codify and properly fund a bigger society and the delivery of civic good. My Citizen Renaissance co-author Jules Peck has written on the need for a new citizen capitalism and for the establishment of Res Communes – citing the flourishing participative democracy and budgeting movement pioneered in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and how such thinking is now taking hold in pockets across the globe.

“Transformative ideas” such as these, writes George Monbiot, “require courage: the courage to confront the government, the opposition, the plutocrats, the media, the suspicions of a wary electorate”. In other words, the courage to confront the indecencies of power. As elsewhere, the parallels between politics and business are there for all to see.

In the current, cold climate of power-without-trust, courageous and more thoughtful citizens can both be the change and lead the change. Citizens who have the wellbeing of the state(s) – city, nation or business – front of mind are immediately more authentic and trusted leaders. The intuitive agenda is theirs: citizens can and must entrust themselves with a higher and more legitimate purpose.

First and foremost, we need to re-discover the love of and urgency in asking the right questions of those ‘chosen’ to ‘lead’. Without questions, accountability will flail, if not fall. As Socrates commented, we spend too much time asking questions about subjects that matter little and too little time asking questions about subjects that matter most. It is worth noting that while the UK Prime Minister has just under 2.3 million followers on Twitter (each of who can rightly and vociferously hold David Cameron to account), the polymath Stephen Fry boasts 5.6 million+ in his thrall. While Twitter is by no means the only mechanism of accountability for power, the numerical inversion of Cameron and Fry demonstrates that we are not yet using the easy tools at our disposal to put right the world gone wrong.

Citizens are now empowered to deploy technology to drive reform through accountability. This is an of-the-moment generational opportunity, as Manuel Castells points out – using networks to re-learn the possibility of learning to live together, in real democracy, with more trusted foundations. There should be no more institutionalized getting away with it behind opaque screens of secreted information, or, as Castells’ points out, just “accepting the contradiction between a citizen-based democracy and a city for sale to the highest bidder”.

(In this vein, the individual and family citizens of the Eurozone – and Cyprus in particular – should not be made to pay a very personal price for the failure of institutions. Tax-raising ‘wealth’ levies demonstrate medieval behaviour and the muscularity of indecent power).

There needs to be a re-assertion of citizen thinking, whereby citizens can justly ‘sack’ states where common good has been made redundant. Such is the potential intervention of active engagement and active consumption. As I have written before, if a Tahrir Square moment can condemn a regime, then it can certainly de-throne a business or a brand – from the outside in and from the inside out. There should be zero tolerance for the quasi-feudal wielding of indecent power that oppresses those less privileged and those with an institutionally subdued voice, sometimes denigrated as “ill-informed rubbish”. Citizens can answer back and those who cannot need fellow citizens to stand by their side.

We all need to recognize that business states now often have as much societal authority and influence as city or nation states, both in scale and reach, and, as employees, citizens can coalesce around active horizontal networks to demand reform and renewal. Employee Activism offers authentic power and the crowd is wise. Citizen employees can build genuine pressure for a greater presence in leadership decision-making in the workplace, where a democratic polity has every right to thrive. Citizen councils and supervisory boards need real mandates and real teeth, protected in law, to safeguard the virtue of corporations and guard against excess. Leveson missed a trick here.

“A conscious business”, write Mackey and Sisodia, “behaves like a responsible citizen in its communities”. Employee Activists should consider reclaiming the ‘Corporate Social Responsibility’ agendas that are more often owned at Board-level and make them meaningful for the real people who populate the organization – because community investments are best made by the citizen employee community itself. Likewise, business planning can become crowd-wise and collective from within – Will McInnes in his book Culture Shock offers the great example of HCL Technologies: better solutions, more belief, higher levels of engagement and, yes, exponential revenue growth often results.

Zopa is a more virtuous organization than Wonga. Zappos, meanwhile, a poster-child for shared capitalism, has a vendor extranet that enables suppliers to drive orders for the corporation: a neat and decent inversion of the traditional approach. And, without doubt, the partnership model of business is one that speaks to stability and fairness: contrast the recent sharing of profits at John Lewis Partnership among all staff, for example, with the oligarchy of privileged bonus’ purveyed by those in the banking sector. There are many good examples of this more just distribution of power – the £4.3bn Mondragon Co-operative Group, with 53,000 stakeholder-owners, is just one of these. It is Spain’s seventh largest company by turnover.

Citizens similarly need to reject the bi-polar power politics of left and right: Hobbes & Hayek versus Marx & Keynes. These are invariably over-intellectualised arguments presented mostly by those in or seeking power – themselves already members of the self-preservation societies. Constant arguments provide cheap fodder for a supplicant citizenship and invariably take place in a bubble, away from the truer needs of regular people. As with companies, parliamentary democracy needs more active citizens within its institutions – the ‘political class’ that has evolved is probably not the type that Aristotle envisaged. Doctors, teachers, students, soldiers and, yes, benefits claimants all need proper and present representation – a new agora, maybe, in the otherwise hallowed halls of reformed Upper Houses.

Alongside this rejection of indecent power and restoration of citizen trust, we also need a new politeness, for sure: an Aristotelian ‘kindness’ and decency, that removes redundant power from relationships and restores balance and respect to opposing points of view. In does not have to be a Hobbesian jungle everywhere we turn. It is no coincidence that the western economies that better ‘survived’ the great crisis of recent years – Canada and Sweden are two obvious beacons – did so from a more consensus-driven, communitarian economic and social base.

In essence – in both the workplace and the polling booth – citizens can demand that leaders shift not sway, thus making their own power more transparent and legitimate. Both profits in business and engagement in politics are best achieved by those with a higher and first sense of purpose and commitment to participation. Aiming for profit or power alone rarely works beyond the short-term. Neither are sustainable.

Citizens should not fear engagement with the outliers – from Transition Towners to the more outraged Occupier Horizontalists – to inspire and inform and to provide a cutting edge to their thoughts. As with the history of all social movements, the current ‘craze’ for horizontalism may well pass and something new emerge in its wake. But this is not to belittle its importance – as a clarion call for the re-establishment of citizen-led, democratic representation and decision-making. Such new networks offer a pricking, revolutionary voice against old hierarchy – and technology simply adds to their speed and power.

These very networks often echo the fights for freedom of the Civil Rights movement and indeed the Enlightenment. In all cases, there is a logical imperative that finds active citizenship, not power, and a natural state of social democracy at the core. It is therefore time that we once again all recognize and embrace the citizen state within and re-trace our own roots back to the higher ideals of the city states of ancient Greece.

A pseudo-revolution into a “free market” of citizenship (all citizens, no state) is most certainly not the answer, where those (Douglas Carswell MP among them) use the evident failures of government to parade a neo-libertarian view of the world. “The market”, as Diogenes observed, “is a place set apart where men may deceive one another”. Free marketeerism is such a deception: another binnable distraction of the twentieth century, along with many of the other –isms: Marxism, Consumerism, Managerialism among them. We need better government to help engineer, protect and curate real change: an organisational instrument designed to help the citizen body flourish towards happiness and wellbeing. This is a moment for constructive reform, not destructive revolution. The case for the balanced power and virtue of the good state needs to be re-made by responsible citizens and embraced by us all.

Citizens thus need to rally against the prevailing indecency of power and to think beyond both the short-term memory of the late twentieth century and the short-term future of austerity. Society needs to re-connect with the philosophical yesterday and use it to build a better, possible, more powerful tomorrow. We are all children of the Greeks. We should frame our trust – in one another – and our purpose accordingly. “What is the point in battleships and city walls”, asked Socrates, “unless the people building them and protected by them are happy?”

Go for a Walk

Professor Ian Goldin author of ‘Divided Nations’, argues that “unbridled connectedness” is “not necessarily a good thing” but that it can spark “a new renaissance”. But how do we connect not only with others, but with ourselves and with our creative souls? Sarah Churchwell cites Paul Klee who famously “took a line for a walk” when he drew. Writer Esther Freud likwise “takes a thought for a walk”, and learned from her father, the artist Lucien, to always create an intimate, protected space – her own universe – where creativity and thinking can flourish. “Art delivers truth”, says ‘I am not an Expressionist’ sculptor, Maggi Hambling, who contends that “money is boring”. Stroll to Maggi’s famous ‘Scallop’ on Aldeburgh beach and hold that thought while you walk, alongside Simon Schama’s brilliance on how the use of “words” de-mystified and de-bunked religion… and ultimately gave us all permission to be godless.

Re-imagine the Citizen State

Recent posts on Citizen Renaissance – on a World Gone Wrong and Stealing Back the Commons – explore the re-imagination of capitalism, politics, business and society. Douglas Alexander MP is likewise thinking about why citizens have dis-engaged from politics. “The answer to low turnout is higher ideals”, he argues, alongside a passionate plea for making politics “a participative, not spectator, sport”. “Trust needs humility” from leaders. Meanwhile, “dis-engagement, not apathy” has provoked “a crisis of legitimacy – which can only be properly restored with the transfusion of power from state to people”. Political systems built on hierarchies are unlikely to survive in an age of networks.

Make The Orgasmatron Science Fact by 2043

We may have “no knowledge” as to whether video games (or Facebook) are good or bad for the brain” says Professor Ray Dolan and we are maybe increasingly “blurring the distinctions” between “cause and explanation”, “real love and medicated love”. But we are certainly gaining a better understanding of the plasticity and algorithms of the brain and, according to Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, beginning to flirt with the real possibilities that “deep brain stimulation” will deliver. This may require invasive procedures but it also means that the Orgasmatron, famously trailed in Woody Allen’s 1973 classic movie ‘Sleeper’ is more likely to be Science Fact not Science Fiction, within the next thirty years. Watch this space. We are clearly being seduced by a science that so few of us actually understand.

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.”