Varieties of anti-capitalist economics
Ecosocialist
Derek Wall offers an insightful overview of non-orthodox economics,
from Social Credit to Marxism to Elinor Ostrom.
ECONOMICS
AFTER CAPITALISM:
A Guide to the Ruins & a Road to the Future
By
Derek Wall
Pluto Press, 2015
Pluto Press, 2015
Derek
Wall, ecosocialist activist and international coordinator of the
Green Party of England and Wales, has written a primer on the main
strands of economic critique of globalized capitalism.
It
is a short and easily readable book, well suited to someone looking
for a starting place. For those already embedded in one of these
strands, it provides a welcome introduction to some of the others.
It
is written in a pedagogical rather than polemical way, promoting
understanding before judging — although Wall does not shy away from
explaining his own views in the end. This is a great format.
“Globalization”
has been so transparently unstable and unfair that it has generated
its own internal critique from Keynesian “insiders” like
billionaire investor George Soros and former World Bank chief
economist Joseph Stiglitz.
Wall
says that despite their genuine insights, and those of John Maynard
Keynes whose views he also outlines, these figures are “vaccinating
against anti-capitalism.” They want to save the system by repairing
it. Whether this can succeed is another question.
Other
critics of unregulated capitalism (but not necessarily of
capitalism per se) that Wall looks at are anti-corporate
power campaigners and “funny money” theorists, who were prominent
in the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement that spread around the world.
The
“funny money” theories, centering on how fractional reserve
banking creates money by issuing credit, have origins in the Social
Credit movement founded by the anti-Semitic Major CH Douglas in the
early 20th century. Despite this odd origin, there are some
interesting insights.
Nevertheless,
these ideas are criticized by Wall, in the end, for failing to
understand the overall system. Instead, they focus on futile bids to
reform only one of its facets — the banks and international
finance.
A
further trend Wall presents is the traditional Green economic theory,
represented particularly in the “small is beautiful” school. This
is reflected in policies such as creating local currencies and
promoting small business.
This
view has an important insight, namely “that economics is a system
that tends to dominate and distort human values”. This leads to
challenging the assumption that human wants are unlimited (unlike
resources to meet them).
Wall
says: “Greens would argue that instead, the economic system in its
reliance on economic growth, makes us want more and more … through
branding, advertising.”
Yet
there are more systematic critiques of capitalism than traditional
Green views, and some of these overcome its pro-market weaknesses.
Marxism is a broad school, and Wall gives a summary of Marx’s own
views, followed by later developments. He finishes with three
outstanding contemporary Marxist thinkers: Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez
and British political economist David Harvey.
Wall
sometimes describes Marx as ambivalent about whether he supported
capitalist globalization or not: was it a force for material progress
or a brutal imposition on the colonial world? This seems a labored
device at times. Marx was not necessarily in two minds himself, so
much as describing a contradictory process as it unfolded: where
capitalism brought great suffering, it also brought a great
development of economic forces, which may in turn lay the basis for
more positive changes.
Wall
leaves this apparent contradiction hanging, but partly answers it
later in the book. Whether he does justice to Marx is a matter for
further debate.
Moving
on to the “autonomist” school that has risen to prominence in the
last 20 years, Wall looks at an alternative to understanding
capitalism according to objective economic laws. Autonomists, drawing
on Marx, anarchism and postmodernism, see capitalism developing
“subjectively” in response to the (often latent) rebellion of the
working class.
At
every turn, capitalism seeks to disorganize and disrupt the process
of “recomposition” that may bring more coherence to
anti-capitalist resistance among the working class.
Rounding
off the survey, two currents, perhaps closest to Wall himself, are
surveyed: ecosocialism and ecofeminism.
Whether
it is greens seeking to import a socialist analysis, or Marxists
seeking to incorporate the insights of ecology, ecosocialism is a
diverse, but vibrant and new set of ideas. Here we meet the concept
of “the commons” — communal property in various forms, with
ecosocialism fighting to extend this valuable alternative to private
property and the neoliberal market.
Whereas
autonomism is defined as much by its diverse practice as its
theorists, ecofeminism is a largely academic school. This might seem
easier to survey, but the range of views within it are broad. These
are by no means all anti-capitalist, but offer some radical
perspectives on how labor and nature are understood.
Here
we also meet Nobel Prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom, whose life
work looked at many examples of “commons” in practice through
history. Ostrom uncovered how they succeed (where neoliberal theory
says they cannot), but also where and how they fail.
Ostrom
was not a radical anti-capitalist, but if commons are to be a
foundation stone of new economics (as Wall suggests), then Ostrom is
surely an important contributor.
In
the conclusion, Wall cites Ostrom and Marx as two key thinkers that
need to inform efforts to create a post-capitalist economics. Marx,
for keeping the global and revolutionary aspects of communal,
anticapitalist economics in perspective, and Ostrom for invaluable
insight at the micro scale.
Wall’s
message, in summing up, is to defend and extend the commons beyond
capitalism. We cannot settle for reforms to the system, as some like
the Keynesians Soros and Stiglitz would have us do. We must also be
wary of commons efforts being co-opted by the system.
Yet
we also cannot wait until after the revolution: “To say no change
is possible until everything changes … is the ideology of the
dogmatist.”
In
such a wide-ranging survey of extremely diverse schools of thought,
it is inevitable that not everyone will be satisfied. I have
indicated some dissatisfaction with the treatment of Marxism. On the
other hand, the outlines of many other schools of thought, perhaps
equally unsatisfactory to their own adherents, were often
illuminating and gave me new sympathy for their views and efforts.
In
looking for inspiration for post-capitalist economics, some
contemporary examples are treated, but too briefly: the real
revolutionary experiences of Venezuela and Bolivia, in Latin America,
and the revolutionary experiment in Rojava in Syria’s north.
Rojava,
although very new, has started off like most 20th century revolutions
— radicals seizing an opportunity amid the collapse of a capitalist
state due to war or civil war. Yet the philosophy of Rojava’s
leaders is quite new, owing as much perhaps to anarchist and
ecosocialist thought as to Marxism. Wall touches on it; perhaps the
history being written there is too unfinished to write more.
Venezuela
and Bolivia, on the other hand, have come to power through elections,
a path that repeatedly ended with blood or betrayal in the 20th
century — and still may, as the experience of the 2009 coup against
Manuel Zelaya in Honduras and Syriza’s capitulation to austerity in
Greece attest.
If
there is a criticism of the book’s content, it is that it perhaps
pays too little attention to these kinds of real, living examples
that have progressed so much since the first edition of the book
appeared in 2005.
The
more formulaic injunction to defend and extend the commons is
important, but it requires more elaboration in practice. Perhaps that
practice is yet to come.
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