Michael Morton looks at the possibilities for our present victorious late capitalist system.
During the 1930s and at the time of the Fascist government in Italy, an Italian doctor and political activist called Carlo Levi was exiled to Italy’s deep south. He settled in Aliano, a village in Matera province, and later wrote of the hardship and desperate poverty he found there in a book called Christ Stopped at Eboli. The title came from what people said to him. They used to say: ‘We are not Christians; Christ stopped at Eboli’. Eboli, south of Naples, was where the railway line gave out; beyond it there was only wilderness and despair. And in the dialects of southern Italy, ‘Christians’ simply meant ‘people’, ‘human beings’. The people lamented that lacking more than just subsistence, they were not fully human. Levi’s reflections point to a sober insight: that being authentically Christian and truly human are the same thing. Don Cupitt points this out to good effect with the observation that many mediaeval paintings, such as the Maestà by Duccio di Buoninsegna in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena, depict just an orderly crowd of very similar and equal human beings. Religion, he argues, has long seen itself as a radical-humanist world. So too the Decree on the Church in the Modern World of Vatican II began:
The joy and hope, the griefs and anxieties of the people of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these too are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ. Indeed, nothing human fails to find a echo in their hearts. (Gaudium et Spes) The search for authenticity may mean almost the same as the human quest to seek and to find God, which is why St Augustine once wrote simply that the glory of God is man fully alive. But is this a personal endeavour, or can we read our authentic nature off the ideologies of modern society?
Some writers on postmodernity seem to think that we have arrived at an end-point of history in the sense that humanity’s struggle for social and political completion has ended. The cessation of the Cold War and the world-wide triumph of liberal democracy, capitalism and a belief in human rights have brought to an end all ideological struggles. But there are dissenting voices. People point to the breakdown of a liberal optimism, which stood us in such good stead since the nineteenth century. It failed largely because its theories underestimate the human inclination to avoid truth in the pursuit of self-interest. Hardly a century after the French Revolution, society and religion became pluralist, eclectic and fragmented with no fixed cycle of things and no grand narratives to explain the world. It all cast doubts upon the claims of a cheerful prolific optimism that is the politicians’ reply to modern life. It is harder now to find a niche within which the good life can be lived. It is no longer enough to avoid London and live in the country nor to choose domestic rather than public life nor even to put a trust in the old-style consolations of religion. Trying to reproduce or re-introduce them is like trying to keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree.
Karl Marx himself was ambiguous about the future. Sometimes he argued that capitalism would produce its own gravediggers, but in other sections of his writings he foreshadowed our era of globalised capitalism. Globalism certainly seems to have triumphed everywhere, in the economic, social and political arenas. But it is a paradoxical ideology. The history of capitalist venture over the past hundred years does not support any argument for proposing that capitalism is self-adjusting, never mind selfregulating. Time and again it has needed political, fiscal and legal correction to complement the ‘invisible hand’ of the market.
The history of capitalist venture over the past hundred years does not support any argument for proposing that capitalism is self-adjusting, never mind self-regulating.
Then there is inequality, as Marx once again foresaw. One facet of globalised capitalism is that it offers disproportionate rewards to its best performers, not just in the City of London but in Shanghai, Moscow and Mumbai too. What will be the future political effects of having a small elite of very rich people in countries where the majority remain very poor? In countries like Britain and the USA where there is a reasonably well-to-do middle class that slowly improves its standard of living, this may not matter so much. However, once they begin to feel that the process of globalisation is making a very few financiers extremely rich by outsourcing their bourgeois jobs out East, then there will be a backlash.
Others argue that capitalism will become so familiar and standard that in a hundred years there will be no general need for the word capitalism at all. The only students who will be writing about ‘capitalism’ or ‘socialism’ in 2107 will be those studying history.
Those commentators who would pastiche Winston Churchill argue that capitalism, for all its faults, is the best system that we have available. They point out that as the years of the 1960s and 70s came and went, the sheer irrelevance of socialism seemed to be apparent – the endless strikes, bolshie unions, winters of discontent and the paralysis of central government in the face of forces and movements that no-one seemed to want. Then industrial production waned, and with it the working classes. The post-war boom faded in the face of intensified international competition which forced down rates of profit. The only solution was for capitalism to make a dramatic sea-change. Staff were reduced, nationalised industries turned to private ventures and production was exported to wage-spots in the ‘developing world’. The labour movement was suddenly constrained and forced to accept humiliating restraints on its liberties. Investment turned from industrial manufacture and towards the service, finance and communications sectors.
From the socialist point of view, the irony was plain. The changes that were moving it to oblivion were precisely those that it had tried to understand and explain. Socialism was not vanquished because the system had altered; it was out of favour because the system was all the more intensively what it had been before. Capitalism had not reformed itself, leaving socialist critique superfluous. Socialism had been rejected because the system appeared so hard to beat, and that was what caused so many to despair of radical change.
The point of Socialism, and even of its radical Marxist variety, may now not be apparent to people in this country who see the Yorkshire coal-mines closing, the motor industry disappearing from the Midlands and the Western working class shrinking away. On a world-wide scale, the inequalities between rich and poor have produced a strong militant disaffection on the part of the world’s poor, who feel that they are not being invited to the party.
And whereas Marx and Engels had looked for disaffection in Manchester and Bradford, it is to be found today in the slums of Dar-es-Salaam and the kasbahs of Damascus. Everyone knows that the 6.5 billion people now alive cannot live like the rich, middle-class consumers in the West. In maybe only a few decades the oil will noticeably start to run out and what took about 400 million years to lay down will have been used up in a century and a half.
Sustainability may be a boring word, but it really is the biggest challenge to global capitalism today, because if capitalism literally cannot produce the goods, than what earthly use is it?
And if it does deliver, the capitalist system would need to grow from below. Only 17 years after the fall of the old Soviet Union, the modern city of St Petersburg is a strange city where poverty and squalor sit uneasily alongside fashion, wealth and a reproduced western Europe for the tourist in the shape of hotels, restaurants and shops. But the old Soviet Leningrad is never far away and we are probably mistaken in believing that any overriding Adam Smith 7 sofia 83 May 2007 ideology can save us. Despite the victory of capitalism, there is a resistance to looking clearly at its flaws, but it must be the time now to have a discussion about the kind of economy we want. The primary locus of political attention in the past halfcentury has been on the state and its relationship to the individual. It has all been to do with taxation, regulation, redistribution and public services that are the staple diet of labour policies. The fruits of this philosophy are tangible, but in the end the fact is that government cannot save people. The central social issue of the future will not be the relationship of the individual to the state but to the people for whom they work, the organisation that their work supports and the people in their immediate orbit or local community. It could be called socialism without the state, or capitalism with more capitalists, but it doesn’t matter. It would be what John Stuart Mill called: ‘the conversion of each human being’s daily occupation into a school of the social sympathies and the practical intelligence.’ Even Adam Smith, famous for his description of the invisible hand of the market and the ‘greed is good’ school of raw capitalism, has been reappraised. (He has just appeared to replace Sir Edward Elgar on the £20 note.) Smith argued elsewhere that economic liberty delivered political, legal and intellectual enlightenment. He supported state intervention to promote fair competition and root out privilege. He backed universal, public education and lamented outlandish profits and rewards. Compassion and benevolence are the catalysts of civil society. In the end, we seem to be moving towards the advice of the gnomic guru in T.S. Eliot’s play The Cocktail Party.
His advice to more than one of the characters looking for a way out was simply ‘work out your salvation with diligence’. He may have had a point. Either the world is no longer ideology-shaped, or else it never was in the first place. It is just an ironic feature of human life that what once stood so strong sometimes merely turns out to belong to a passing era.
Michael Morton is a Catholic parish priest and a SoF trustee.