Martin Kirk: When Donald Trump says “Make America Great Again,” he’s alluding, at least in part, to the promise of economic growth. Just as when Bill Clinton said, “it’s the economy, stupid,” he was really saying that “it’s about economic growth, stupid.” This is the Golden Promise of politics: more economic growth. Golden, because it is effortlessly translated in voters’ minds to mean more jobs, more money in the economy, and therefore more income in everyone’s pockets. Because economic growth is, obviously, a thing greatly to be desired.

Equally obvious is the knowledge that no economic growth is a bad thing. When economies and companies don’t grow, they stagnate and falter. Which means fewer jobs, lower wages, less money to invest, more business shut downs, and bankruptcies. In short, more misery for all.

It’s all so obvious, right? It’s one of the precious few things we can all agree on in this fractious age.

But there are some new strains of thought that take a more nuanced and sophisticated view of growth. That say, yes, all other things being equal, economic growth is a positive thing. But all other things are not equal. There’s no such thing as a free lunch, and, for all its positives, economic growth has a dark side; its ecological impact. The impacts of our ever-growing economy have become so stark and so widespread that they are by any sane measure portents to catastrophe. Whether it’s the fact that Antarctic ice is now melting three times faster than we thought, or the unfolding “biological annihilation” that has already wiped out 50% of all animals and up to 75% of all insects, or the fact that, in spite of all this, we are pumping out CO2 at record levels, it takes willful ignorance or a blinding ideology to deny the severity of the crisis.

This creates a terrible paradox: Economic growth keeps economies stable today, but threatens not just future growth but medium-term social and civilizational cohesion, and ultimately the very capacity of this biosphere to sustain life. A paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last year suggested that “the window for effective action is very short, probably two or three decades at most.” And that even this dire prediction is considered “conservative” by the authors, “given the increasing trajectories of the drivers of extinction.” In terms of practical politics, that means acting immediately, preferably yesterday.

Most politicians deal with this paradox by ignoring it. It’s by far the easiest option; one afforded every incentive and reward by this political economy and the beliefs that underpin it. This belief system has been dominant for a long time now. We are, as a society, deeply comfortable with it, which means many of its core assumptions are considered unassailable–too obvious to question. The most profound being this idea that growth is always good. Questioning this amounts to political suicide for any politician.

Or, at least, it used to. We are starting to see some movement in interesting corners of the global political landscape that suggest that some leaders are showing the sort of political courage needed to shift established norms. It may well be starting to become something of a bonafide political movement. It’s young and small, still, but so were all movements at one time.

A little thought experiment shows how growth can be a problem: Insert the word “a” before it. “A growth.” That feels very different from just “growth,” right? Growth is a big part of what we all understand happens in a healthy life. Children grow, knowledge grows, love grows. But “a growth” is what happens when life gets corrupted. “A growth” is when the growth is unchecked, and thus a symptom not of health but disease; when it takes on the character of an invader, attacking its host. The word for growth that gets out of control in this way, such that it becomes “a growth,” is, of course, cancer.

But wait, I hear you cry, technological progress will save us! We can just grow meat in test tubes rather than needing so much land and clean air space for cows and their methane-laden farts, or we can all switch to renewable energy, or recycle more and better, and then we can get back to the promise of infinite growth. Unfortunately, the evidence is clear that this is simply not possible. Yes, we can make dents in our impact with such measures, and we should with all possible speed, but the way the global economy is currently programmed means such things are important–but also entirely insufficient.

So, once we discard the vain hope of being able to grow the economy infinitely and indefinitely, what are we looking at? This is where the innovation and bravery come in.

A new alliance was formed in 2017, called the Wellbeing Economy Alliance. What they are shooting for is one–or many different–economic model(s) that have, “the fundamental goal of achieving sustainable well-being with dignity and fairness for humans and the rest of Nature.” Which means they cannot just reach for socialism or any other historical model–socialism, like capitalism, relies on growth, as does communism. They have recognized that we can’t rely on past thinking; we must genuinely put our best brains forward and innovate.

We’re not talking about a bunch of random, dreamy utopians here, but real politicians who have won real elections and are exercising real power. So far, the roster of governments signing up to the Alliance includes Scotland, Costa Rica, Slovenia, and New Zealand. Other governments that are actively looking at the issue include Italy, and there are political parties emerging, like the Alternative Party in Denmark, which is also embracing the innovation challenge. These are not what are often referred to as Tier 1 countries in the international order, but neither are they so small they are irrelevant.

Scotland, for example, provides a direct line into both the U.K. and (at least for the time being) the EU. Costa Rica has long been a pioneer of innovative economic and social thinking, with impressive results: It is routinely in the top three countries in the world when measured for the well-being and happiness of their people. New Zealand is, perhaps, the most newly bold. Its prime minster has not only called growth-at-all-costs capitalism “a “blatant failure” but also has said her government would no longer accept GDP as the sole, supreme measure of progress. “The measures for us have to change,” she said in October last year. “We need to make sure we are looking at people’s ability to actually have a meaningful life, an enjoyable life, where their work is enough to survive and support their families.”

And this is where social and economic forces start to align in very interesting and potentially powerful ways. And open the door for seeing electoral strategies in an agenda based on innovations to take us beyond traditional growth-at-all-costs economics.

Consider a few facts: More than 50% of millennials say they would take a pay cut to find work that matches their values, while 90% want to use their skills for good. And these trends are on the up. Deloitte’s 7th Annual Millennial Survey of 12,000 young people, for example–both millennials and gen Z–reports record low opinions of businesses. Fewer than half now believe that businesses behave ethically, and this directly affects how loyal they feel to their employers; 43% of millennials and a whopping 61% of gen-Zers expect to stay in a job no more than two years. And all this against a backdrop of general public opinion that is also looking increasingly unkindly on the economic paradigm we have.

These are conditions that can be worked with. They show that there is a large and growing instinct out there that thinks that we need fundamental change to the way we do economics. Not tweaking around the edges, but fundamental change at the very roots of the global economy. There is no neat or reliable evidence to suggest that challenging infinite growth is at the top of peoples’ minds, or likely to be a particularly easy sell. But there is significant doubt in growth-at-all-costs capitalism, and that is an opportunity for innovation. Combine that with the new thinking coming out of places like the Wellbeing Alliance, and you can start to sense the causes and conditions may well be aligning in favor of the emergence of wholly new, post-growth economies. It cannot come soon enough.

Martin Kirk is cofounder and director of strategy for The Rules, a global collective of writers, thinkers, and activists dedicated to challenging the root causes of global poverty and inequality. His work focuses on bringing insights from the cognitive and complexity sciences to bear on issues of public understanding of complex global challenges.

Cross-posted from Fast Company

The post What if economic growth isn’t as positive as you think? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Could you say for somebody who hasn’t come cross the concept of a universal basic income, could you give them it in a nutshell?  What is UBI?

UBI is basically an idea that says everybody, simply by virtue of being alive, gets an income that gives them enough to survive, if not thrive, and that’s one of the debates.  There are lots of different people talking about it right now from across the political spectrum.  This is one of the things that makes it an interesting idea, or an idea that’s worth engaging with right now, because it’s an idea that’s emerging.  It’s formulating, so it’s not settled.

Martin Kirk. On a Skype with someone else…

There are lots of different ideas around lots of different conceptions.  There’s not a clear single narrative about it yet, although it’s rapidly forming.  It’s being talked about in terms of everything from reducing the size of government and the welfare state, in the way of just getting rid of all the social services and replacing them with a basic income, right through to people talking about it as a way to redesign the money system and effect fundamental transformational change to the root drivers of many of our problems, like infinite GDP growth.

So it can take you from that very simple ‘reduce government’ right through to ‘change the economic system’.  I think this is one of the reasons it’s getting a lot of people excited.  There are pilots going on all over the place. Just this last week or two the Scottish government announced its plans to run some pilots.  But they’ve been running global north, global south, for a while.  It’s actually an idea that’s got a very long history.

Thomas Paine talked about it as a negative income tax when he was writing in the 18^th century.  Hayek and the neoliberals were actually talking about it as an idea when they started formulating their ideas in the 1940s and 1950s.  So it’s got a long history.  But it’s in the last 3, 4 years it’s really started to break into the mainstream, have a bit of a resurgence, and one of the reasons that’s being driven is this conversation about automation.

This is what’s getting a lot of the Silicon valley types, the Mark Zuckerberg’s and Bill Gates’, that’s drawing them into it.  I don’t know if you saw just this last week, Hilary Clinton in ‘What Happened’, her just released book said that she was a hairs breadth away from running on a basic income platform in the 2016 election.

But in her words they just couldn’t make the numbers add up.  Jeremy Corbyn has said that the Labour party in the UK is studying it as a policy option.  Richard Branson has come out and said this is almost probably inevitable at some point.  So it’s being practiced, it’s being trialled, there are endless debates happening, it’s picking up political media, social support.

Interestingly, the one group that hasn’t latched on to this, as much as I think they should do, is environmentalists.  There is a lot that could be done with a UBI that could really address the key issues that we’re concerned about. From the way money draws its value from natural resources and the natural capital base of the planet, and that can be addressed.  You can also address the concept of growth, if you take interest bearing out of the money system.  So it opens up all these sorts of interesting ideas.

The problem right now, as I said earlier, is it’s stuck in the welfare frame.  It’s a reductive thing.  If you’re interested in transformative ideas, this is one that’s worth getting engaged with right now as the narrative is forming.

How would it be financed?

Again, this is one of the big debates that’s happening.  It’s one of the big questions that automatically comes up, “how is it paid for?”  There is a range of options.  Right through from the Conservatives who would just pay for it by scrapping so many other services.  Conservatives in the US are talking about a basic income of $10,000 a year, which is way below the poverty threshold, and below the minimum wage threshold, but could easily be paid for out of existing tax revenue if you chopped off a lot of the health services, welfare programmes that already exist.  So you’ve got that on one side.

Then, somewhere in the middle, you’ve got people talking about it from a sort of dividend.  A lot of people refer to the ‘Alaska model’ here.  Alaska’s had a basic dividend, they call it a permanent dividend fund, for quite a long time now.  That’s paid for by fossil fuel receipts from Canada South oil, or Alberta actually, then there are profits that are ploughed back into a dividend that goes to every citizen.  So people are talking about whether it could be funded from a carbon tax, or some other form of commons based revenue.  That’s another middle ground way of paying for it.

On the far end, and this is the one that we’re interested in, particularly at The Rules, go away from the current money system completely and we say there’s a really interesting conversation to be had here about a cryptocurrency based UBI.  The technology for that is not quite mature but it’s coming and it’s coming much faster than people expect.  We will very soon have the option of using a cryptocurrency either as an alternative or a complementary currency to the fiat currencies we all use.

But if you get into that space, then the question of where does the money come from doesn’t apply there, because the money is automatically generated by a system.  It’s just deposited into people’s accounts.  There’s no central authority who’s governing that.  It’s just an automated system.  So you don’t have to ask the question of where will the money come from.

You’ve got that spread, right through from the small government, Conservative and libertarians, all the way through to the more radical, I’ll say ‘Left’, just as shorthand but it’s a little bit disingenuous to use just the Left-Right spectrum here because it’s more complicated than that.  But just as a reference point, the radical left.

The battle is being had right now.  The battle for the narrative.  Right now it’s being won, or it’s being dominated by, the centre and the right.  One of the reasons for that is the language that’s used.

Just think of the term, ‘Universal Basic Income’, every single one of those words, militates against a more transformative conception.  People don’t respond well to the idea of universal things, on the whole.  They immediately start thinking about, “Well, why is my neighbour getting stuff?  Why am I having to work and they’re gutting stuff for free?”  It triggers a competitive mind set in people, and outgroup thinking. So people automatically start to think about who is the outgroup and will they get more than I?  The fairness logic kicks in very quickly.  That’s not particularly helpful.

The word ‘basic’ drags your brain down right down to the floor, and it leads you into questions like, “What’s the least possible we should be able to give people?  What’s the basic?  What’s the minimum?”  That’s a classic welfare type thinking, and it’s linked to all the concepts of the undeserving poor.  These people who don’t deserve what they get.  Their position is all of their own making.  So it opens up all those avenues of thought and logic.

‘Income’ is almost the worst, because income is widely understood to be something you receive in return for work.  That’s the definition of the word.  So actually we’re trying to talk about a system that separates work from income.  You’re using the word that means income for work.  So none of these on their own are prohibitive, but they are framing points.  They do lead you into a certain type of logic and they’ll push the conversation in a certain direction.  It’s a direction that is far more in line with the conservative thinking than the progressive thinking.  So we’re already hampered, we’re already ham-strung by the language.

So we have an uphill battle, but then when don’t we?!  Everything we do is an uphill battle against the system on some level or other…

So what would you rather call it?

We were going to test trial stuff.  We don’t have a specific name in mind but we know the conceptual domains that will be much more useful for us.  So community domains are much better than individual domains, and ‘universal’ gets you into more individualist thinking.

You could think about some sort of language around community.  Also people have a much stronger logic for the health of communities in some respects.  People understand that income coming into a community will strengthen it.  There’s a much more communitarian logic when you start talking in terms of communities.  It triggers that sort of logic much better.  So we should be looking at that sort of area.  We were going to do a process of trying to test a few different memes and framings and see which ones resonate.

The problem is, we spoke to a lot of the people who are big players in this field at the moment, and we made the judgement that the language is too embedded now.  We could be fighting that fight forever and make no progress.  If you’re looking for the efficient entry point into this narrative, trying to change that basic language probably isn’t going to serve you very well.  You’ve just got to suck it up and think about how else we can get in there.  Because it’s so widespread now, it’s used in so many different places, that horse has bolted already.  But if you wanted to take a clear eyed view of the challenge ahead of us, it’s worth thinking about these linguistic points.

So how could a UBI best be designed to most enable a renaissance of the imagination?  Why is it a useful tool for that?

Several reasons.  One, it’s a challenging idea, and you want challenging ideas.  You want ideas that take people one step beyond where they already are.  It’s very difficult to teach people an entirely new logic with one set of ideas, or one policy prescription.  But this one, just the very idea of everybody getting an income by virtue of being alive, is quite shocking.  Quite arresting for people.

On the face of it, it’s an engaging idea.  Even if the engagement is people going, “Well, how would you pay for it?”, it’s a negative response, but its still a response.  You’ve got an awful lot in your favour from a campaign perspective just there.  The struggle to get people’s eyeballs on your things is permanent with campaigners, so this one has got a built in advantage for that.  That’s the surface level.

Once you get into the deeper level with it, it gets even better though, because depending on how you frame it, and the framing is all important – as with everything, he who frames, wins. But if you can get the framing right, it invites people to rethink money.  It invites people to rethink power structures.  If I get a cryptocurrency that doesn’t come from a bank, that isn’t issued by my government or my local authority, suddenly I’m into questions of what are those authorities for?  I’m rethinking their role on quite a fundamental level.  So it gets you into questions of money.

It gets you into questions of power.  It gets you into questions of growth.  It gets you into all these rich fundamental areas of logic that capitalism relies on for its life force.  That’s one of the reasons that we really like it.  It’s got all the dimensions to it.

I think of it, you walk into a room and this room’s got 20 doors off it, and some of them are more fruitful than others to go down.  UBI offers you a lot of doors to go through in terms of where you can take people’s thinking and the narrative, or trigger people’s thinking and logics.  It’s not the only idea around of its kind around, but I don’t know many others that have this pure potential in them to get people thinking differently.

If it were introduced tomorrow, in what way might it catalyse a whole flourishing of imagination do you think?  There’s not many spaces left in modern life where imagination is really encouraged or really flourishes.  How would the introduction of a UBI address that?

There’s no such thing as a quick silver bullet solution that’s going to take people from bad logics to good logics, to ecological logics overnight.  One of those reasons is because our entire language locks us into a financial producer/consumer logic.  So accept the basis that our environment is anything but neutral right now.  It’s dis-incentivising our spending time on the imagination, on community, on following passions.  We all have to work for our income, so we have to do what’s required of us, not what is necessarily our passion.

Just think of the idea – what would you do with your life if you had the freedom to live, not a rich, but a materially safe and comfortable life, without working?  What would you do?  Without having to go to an office?  You might choose to, and that’s great, because some people love work of that sort.  But you wouldn’t necessarily need to.

So now you’re moving beyond a situation where our lives are focused around work and income and provision for ourselves, and focused much more on the idea of living.  A lot of people go straight to, “Well, people will just be lazy.”  But that’s not true.  All the evidence suggests, of course some people, a small number of people will choose not to work, not to do anything and sit around watching TV all day, but those people do a lot of that anyway.  They are not the majority of us in society.  The majority of us get a lot of value from our work, from being productive, from engaging with our communities, from engaging our minds and learning.

Those are the stuff of life for a lot of us.  So once you even take one step away from the absolute imperative into work, into wage work I should say rather, all manner of things can change.  But I don’t think we can predict exactly what will happen if that’s the case.  We’re going to become almost like a leisure society over the next 50-100 years, particularly as automation kicks in.

We’ve got plenty enough wealth, and even when automation kicks in, there will be plenty enough generating capacity for everybody without needing to grow the capital supply infinitely.  So the whole paradigm we’re going to be living in is going to change over the next decades.  The concept of work is going to change even if we don’t implement something like universal basic income.  But if we do, if we get ahead of the curve of automation, if we start to release people from the imperative of wage labour, I think we’ll find a number of magic things happen.

What happens if we move to automation without a UBI?  We end up with lots of people who have no work – the implications are really quite alarming, am I right?

They’re quite dystopian.  But I can’t imagine any government will allow that.  If you want to stoke social unrest, no better way to do it than have millions of people unemployed wandering around being desperate.  So as lay-offs happen from automation, governments are going to respond in one way or another.  They’re not going to want masses of unemployed people wandering around feeling disenfranchised.

I’m not sure we’re going to be facing that sort of future, because it does not serve the interests of the current power structures.  If you look at the way a lot of the Silicon valley people talk about UBI, what they’re actually talking about is a different business model for themselves.  They’re not thinking about it in terms of different economic systems.  They’re not thinking about it as a social justice move towards an environmentally sustainable future.  They’re thinking, “How can we make sure people still have money to buy our services when they don’t have jobs to go to because of the automation that we’ve triggered?  How can we keep our consumer base, a consumer base?”

This is the minefield of this conversation. And obviously, Mark Zuckerberg writes a manifesto and makes one speech at a Harvard commencement session and suddenly he’s the poster child for UBI.  That’s why this is such a fraught area right now, as these people weigh on into it and are dominating the environment, forming the narrative, setting the frame.  So the rest of us have to step up a bit, and make sure their conception doesn’t win.

You mentioned that UBI is potentially a very powerful tool environmentally.  Would it not, just giving people more money, would they not just be buying more iPads, going on more holidays?

Consume more?  Yeah, absolutely.  That is a risk, but it’s not a guaranteed outcome.  There are ways you can mitigate it.  If we go down the cryptocurrency route, you can easily, as easily as walking, build in certain rules into that system, that strongly incentivise local trading.  Dis-incentivise global supply chains, dis-incentivise buying from distant, therefore abstract, people in environments.  So that’s one thing you can do if you take a cryptocurrency route to not kick off lots of negative consumption.  There are a range of things you can do, but this is something to keep an eye on.

Cross-posted from Rob Hopkins’ blog. Click here for more stories  and perspectives on Universal Basic Income.

The post How a Universal Basic Income could Fire the imagination appeared first on P2P Foundation.

But question capitalism in public and you’re likely to get some angry responses. People immediately assume that you want to see socialism or communism instead. They tell you to go and live in Venezuela, the current flogging-horse for socialism, or they hit you with dreary images of Soviet Russia with all its violence, dysfunction, and gray conformity. They don’t consider that you might want something beyond caricatures and old dogmas.

These old “isms” lurk in the shadows of any discussion on capitalism. The cyber-punk author William Gibson has a term for this effect: “semiotic ghosts”–one concept that haunts another, regardless of any useful or intended connection.

There’s no good reason to remain captive to these old ghosts. All they do is stop us having a clearheaded conversation about the future. Soviet Russia was an unmitigated social and economic disaster; that’s easy to dispel. But, of course, not all experiments with socialist principles have gone so horribly wrong. Take the social democracies of Sweden and Finland, for example, or even postwar Britain and the New Deal in the U.S. There are many systems that have effectively harnessed the economy to deliver shared prosperity.But here’s the thing. While these systems clearly produce more positive social outcomes than laissez-faire systems do (think about the record-high levels of health, education, and well-being in Scandinavian countries, for example), even the best of them don’t offer the solutions we so urgently need right now, in an era of climate change and ecological collapse. Right now we are overshooting Earth’s carrying capacity by a crushing 64% each year, in terms of our resource use and greenhouse gas emissions.

The socialism that exists in the world today, on its own, has nothing much to say about this. Just like capitalism, it relies on endless exponential GDP growth, ever-increasing levels of extraction and production and consumption. The two systems may disagree about how best to distribute the yields of a plundered Earth, but they do not question the process of plunder itself.

Fortunately, there is already a wealth of language and ideas out there that stretch well beyond these dusty old binaries. They are driven by a hugely diverse community of thinkers, innovators, and practitioners. There are organizations like the P2P (Peer to Peer) Foundation, Evonomics, the Next System Project, and the Institute for New Economic Thinking reimagining the global economy. The proposed models are even more varied: from complexity, to post-growth, de-growth, land-based, regenerative, circular, and even the deliciously named doughnut economics.

Then, there are the many communities of practice, from the Zapatistas in Mexico to the barter economies of Detroit, from the global Transition Network, to Bhutan, with its Gross National Happiness index. There are even serious economists and writers, from Jeremy Rifkin to David Flemming to Paul Mason, making a spirited case that the evolution beyond capitalism is well underway and unstoppable, thanks to already active ecological feedback loops and/or the arrival of the near zero-marginal cost products and services. This list barely scratches the surface.

The thinking is rich and varied, but all of these approaches share the virtue of being informed by up-to-date science and the reality of today’s big problems. They move beyond the reductionist dogmas of orthodox economics and embrace complexity; they focus on regenerating rather than simply using up our planet’s resources; they think more holistically about how to live well within ecological boundaries. Some of them draw on indigenous knowledge and lore about how to stay in balance with nature; others confront the contradictions of endless growth head on.

Not all would necessarily describe themselves as anti- or even post-capitalist, but they are all, in one way or another, breaking through the dry seals of neoclassical economic theory upon which capitalism rests.
Still, resistance to innovation is strong. One reason is surely that our culture has been stewed in capitalist logic for so long that it feels impregnable. Our instinct is now to see it as natural; some even go so far as to deem it divine. The notion that we should prioritize the production of capital over all other things has become a kind of common sense; the way humans must organize.

Another reason, clearly linked, is the blindness of much of the academic world. Take, for example, the University of Manchester, where a group of economics students asked for their syllabus to be upgraded to account for the realities of a post-crash world. Joe Earle, one of the organizers of what the Guardian described as a “quiet revolution against orthodox free-market teaching” told the newspaper: “[Neoclassical economics] is given such a dominant position in our modules that many students aren’t even aware that there are other distinct theories out there that question the assumptions, methodologies, and conclusions of the economics we are taught.”In much the same way as House minority leader Nancy Pelosi rebuffed college student Trevor Hill when he asked whether the Democratic Party would consider any alternatives to capitalism, Manchester University’s response was a flat no. Their economics course, they said, “focuses on mainstream approaches, reflecting the current state of the discipline.” Mainstream, current, anything but fresh. Such attitudes have spawned a global student movement, Rethinking Economics, with chapters as far afield as Ecuador, Uganda, and China.

Capitalism has become a dogma, and dogmas die very slowly and very reluctantly. It is a system that has co-evolved with modernity, so it has the full force of social and institutional norms behind it. Its essential logic is even woven into most of our worldviews, which is to say, our brains. To question it can trigger a visceral reaction; it can feel like an attack not just on common sense but on our personal identities.

But even if you believe it was once the best system ever, you can still see that today it has become necrotic and dangerous. This is demonstrated most starkly by two facts: The first is that the system is doing little now to improve the lives of the majority of humans: by some estimates, 4.3 billion of us are living in poverty, and that number has risen significantly over the past few decades. The ghostly responses to this tend to be either unimaginative–“If you think it’s bad, try living in Zimbabwe”–or zealous: “Well, that’s because there’s not enough capitalism. Let it loose with more deregulation, or give it time and it will raise their incomes too.”

One of the many problems with this last argument is the second fact: With just half of us living above the poverty line, capitalism’s endless need for resources is already driving us over the cliff-edge of climate change and ecological collapse. This ranges from those that are both finite and dangerous to use, like fossil fuels, to those that are being used so fast that they don’t have time to regenerate, like fish stocks and the soil in which we grow our food. Those 4.3 billion more people living “successful” hyper-consumption lifestyles? The laws of physics would need to change. Even Elon Musk can’t do that.

It would be a sad and defeated world that simply accepted the prebaked assumption that capitalism (or socialism, or communism) represents the last stage of human thought; our ingenuity exhausted. Capitalism’s fundamental rules–like the necessity for endless GDP growth, which requires treating our planet as an infinite pit of value and damage to it as an “externality”–can be upgraded. Of course they can. There are plenty of options on the table. When have we humans ever accepted the idea that change for the better is a thing of the past?Of course, transcending capitalism might feel impossible right now. The political mainstream has its feet firmly planted and deeply rooted in that soil. But with the pace of events today, the unimaginable can become the possible, and even the inevitable with remarkable speed. The path to a better future will be cut by regular people being curious and open enough to challenge the wisdom received from our schools, our parents, and our governments, and look at the world with fresh eyes.

We can let the ghosts go. We can allow ourselves the freedom to do what humans do best: innovate.

Photo by andres musta

The post Don’t Be Scared About The End Of Capitalism–Be Excited To Build What Comes Next appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Demagogues thrive amid fear and insecurity, which is why they paint the world in such dark terms. It’s a strategy that has put right-wing populist leaders in power in an Axis of Egos: from Brazil to Turkey, the Philippines to Russia, authoritarian strongmen like Trump are on the rise. Meanwhile, many centrist liberals, like the Democratic Party in the US, have been so intent on rejecting left-wing populist solutions, and so sure of their ability to beat anyone running on a white supremacy platform with its misogyny and homophobia, that they opened the door for Mr. Trump to walk straight through. Their preference is always to maintain the status quo that has served them so well.

As dangerous as the election of Trump is for the world, we can also see in this moment the truth that we simply cannot rely on the electoral political system to save us, because it is designed to prevent the fundamental change we need. Its own survival is at stake and it will marshal all its champions and resources to defend itself and stop the emergence of a new system. But when we work, or continue working for change from the ground up; when we build or keep on building new ways of living and being with each other where we live; when we construct or keep constructing the future we know is possible with our own hands, rather than hoping distant leaders will build it for us, we find our true power. Finally, when we combine that with the unbending hope that has powered change through the ages, we know our power has meaning.

A 400-year-old economic system is dying and another is struggling to be born. Change on this scale is not going to be smooth or easy. We should not be surprised, then, that moments like this?—?where the establishment is dealt a body blow?—?become more and more common. We can despair when that blow comes in the form of right-wing extremists, or we can step-up. We are the ones we are looking for, who can and must grasp the opportunities in these crises that are undoubtedly there.

So it’s time to come together, taking time to remember the earth. Remember all the successful struggles for justice that came before us, and imagine all those to come. Find each other and help midwife the inevitable transition that brings forth from the ashes of neoliberal capitalism a system that works for the good of all life on Mother Earth. This is not just activism; this is our responsibility as human beings alive as this all unfolds.

This is why we are here.

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Few ideas have more profoundly poisoned the minds of more people than the notion of a “free market” existing somewhere in the universe, into which the government “intrudes.” In this view, whatever inequality or insecurity the market generates is assumed to be natural and the inevitable consequences of impersonal “market forces.” … If you aren’t paid enough to live on, so be it. If others rake in billions, they must be worth it. If millions of people are unemployed or their paychecks are shrinking or they’ll have to work two or three jobs and have no idea what they’ll be earning next month or even next week, that’s unfortunate but it’s the outcome of “market forces.”

Reich’s point is that market forces aren’t the result of a free market, which doesn’t exist, never has existed, and probably never will exist. What we do have is a highly engineered marketplace with hundreds of thousands of rules — rules most often created behind closed doors by people who will benefit from every word and comma they put into place. These rules take endless form — the tax code, appropriations bills, new laws, court rulings, executive orders, and administrative guidance to name just a few.

Democrats and Republicans alike — at all levels of government and in all three branches—design these market forces. They grant favors to local businesses, friends, and favored industries, as well as emerging and dying technologies. While these rules are more likely to limit the liability from the disastrous effects of mountain top coal removal than they are to provide tax benefits to solar energy, most industries have figured out how to play the game. They hire lobbyists, donate to politicians — and they find the benefits exponentially greater than the cost. Journalist Nicholas Kristof noted that the chemical and pharmaceutical industries alone spent $121,000 per member of Congress on lobbying last year. Research from Harvard’s Safra Center for Ethics shows that corporations in general get up to $220 return for every dollar they “invest” in lobbying Congress.

The governing classes and elected officials have always created the rules of the economic game. These legal frameworks and the systems they support affect our nation’s economy and daily life more than the most visible government programs, including social security, food stamps, or health care.

Reich goes on to say:

The rules are the economy. … As the economic historian Karl Polanyi recognized [in his 1944 book, The Great Transformation], those who argue for “less government” are really arguing for different government — often one that favors them or their patrons. “Deregulation” of the financial sector in the 1980s and 1990s, for example, could more appropriately be described as “reregulation.” It did not mean less government. It meant a different set of rules.

In the book 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism, the University of Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang writes:

The free market doesn’t exist. Every market has some rules and boundaries that restrict freedom of choice. A market looks free only because we so unconditionally accept its underlying restrictions that we fail to see them. How “free” a market is cannot be objectively defined. It is a political definition. The usual claim by free-market economists that they are trying to defend the market from politically motivated interference by the government is false. Government is always involved and those free-marketeers are as politically motivated as anyone. Overcoming the myth that there is such a thing as an objectively defined “free market” is the first step towards understanding capitalism.

Our “Unfree Market”

Many opposed environmental regulations, which first appeared a few decades ago on things like cars and factory emissions, as serious infringements on our freedom to choose. Opponents asked: If people want to drive in more-polluting cars, or if factories find that more-polluting production methods are more profitable, why should government stop them? Today, most people accept these regulations, but they’re a sign of an unfree market. So some limitations on freedom (i.e. protective legislation) can be helpful. But most ‘unfreedoms’ can be devastating. In essence, we have to choose which unfreedoms we want to live with.

Most would consider monopolies a sign of an unfree, and even an immoral market. Monsanto, through the licensing of technology with its GMO seeds, controls 90 percent of the soybeans and 80 percent of the corn planted and grown in America. According to the Center for Food Safety, this drove up the average cost of planting a single acre of soybeans 325 percent and for corn it has been 2,659 percent between 1994 and 2011. So through their monopolized control of seeds, they are driving the price of food through the roof, ensuring the starvation of millions of people around the world.

Powdered cocaine is a drug generally preferred by rich, white Americans, while the poor tend to use crack cocaine. While both are illegal, crack carries a legal penalty 100 times longer than the same substance in powdered form. It seems that there’s also no free market when it comes to jail terms. Not surprisingly, with wealth, power, and influence come lighter criminal penalties.

Higher education has also never been part of the free market — admissions spots at universities are “sold” more often that we we’d like to believe, whether through the influence of legal donations, or powerful friends or family.

The free market is an illusion. If some markets look free, it is only because we so totally accept the regulations that are propping them up that they become invisible.

Social Inequity by Design

“We can have a democracy or we can have great wealth in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.”—Louis Brandeis

An undeniable result of this unfree market is the continued consolidation of wealth and influence. On average, CEO pay has increased 937 percent between 1978 and 2013. The average worker’s pay increased just 10.2 percent over the same period. This increase has little to do with the increasing value of these CEOs, and everything to do with the power and influence they have over the rules of the system that allow them to enrich themselves.

The real earnings of the median male have declined 19 percent since 1970, and the median male with only a high school diploma saw his real earnings fall 41 percent from 1970 to 2010. Among those classified as poor, 20.4 million people live in what is considered “deep poverty,” meaning their incomes are 50 percent below the official poverty line. One quarter of the nation’s Hispanics and 27 percent of African Americans live in poverty.

Reich writes, “There is no longer any significant countervailing force (like powerful labor unions), no force to constrain or balance the growing political strength of large corporations, Wall Street, and the very wealthy.” He also describes research conducted by Princeton professors Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, which analyzed 1,799 policy issues to determine the influence of economic elites and business groups on public policy issues compared to average citizens. It found that, “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact on public policy.”

The notion that we live in a democracy turns out to be just another illusion. The deteriorated state of our democracy more easily enables the wealthy and powerful to write the rules and give themselves the greatest benefits. Activists Martin Kirk and Alnoor Ladha argue that the current set of rules that articulate the values of our economic operating system can be best characterized as extractive, exploitative, greedy, selfish, elitist, hierarchical, patriarchal, life-denying, and indeed, psychotic. They invoke the Cree Indian term, wetiko, which is a cannibalistic spirit with an insatiable desire for consumption, that eventually even subsumes its host. They are essentially saying that the animating force of late-stage capitalism is the mind-virus of Wetiko.

In sum, we have a system that has already chosen winners and losers. A system that elaborately ensures who gets into Ivy League colleges, gets the best jobs, makes the most money, and enjoys the most privileged lives. This is the same system that decides which businesses receive the most corporate welfare, benefit most from regulations, receive the best protection from foreign competitors, and are most likely to get the best returns on their lobbying dollars. We have, at the end of the day, the freest marketplace that money can buy. A system created by Wetikos to perpetuate Wetiko.

Thirteen Ways to Start Fixing the Problem

The solution lies not in a freer marketplace with less government intervention, but in a marketplace that expresses the wishes and best interests of the majority — in one that fairly protects the rights of minorities with what we might call a “democratic marketplace,” driven by a commitment to justice, equity, interdependence, ecological regeneration, and the well-being of all life.

How do we move toward this goal? Here are thirteen ways to start fixing the deep psychosis of our system.

1.  Get money out of politics. We must overturn Citizens United v. FEC, support organizations like Free Speech For People (which has led an attack on the ruling), and ultimately transition to 100 percent publicly financed elections.

2.  Require disclosure on the source of funding for any and all documents published academically or in the public domain.

3.  Create new anti-trust laws that prevent and eliminate monopolies.

4.  End all corporate financial subsidies.

5.  End insider trading.

6. Initiate an immediate living wage and transition to a basic minimum income for all citizens.

7.  Expand the definition of unionized labor to increase the number of workers that unions represent.

8.  Set a corporate minimum tax rate of 25 percent.

9.  Eliminate the second home mortgage deduction.

10.  Increase funding available to fund Employee Stock Ownership Plans and build greater tax incentives for co-operatives and other forms of employee ownership.

11.  Stop transferring the cost of product externalities from business to society. The American Sustainable Business Council has a working group developing policy recommendations that would begin to move us toward full-cost accounting.

12.  Permanently eliminate payroll taxes.

13.  Mandate that women make up 50 percent of the directors of all public and private companies over the next three years.

This is not an exhaustive list, but rather an example of what is possible that highlights how many existing solutions already exist. We have been taught that politics and economics are separate fields. But that is an artificial distinction that serves the power elites and their agents of exploitation. We must reign in the corporate take-over of society so that we can reimagine commerce, community and government itself, and usher in a just transition to a post-capitalist, post-wetiko world.

*An earlier version of this article appeared in the Stanford Social Innovation Review on March 30, 2016.

Originally published at FastCompany. 

Part of the Seeing Wetiko series. See all articles here.

Photo by angermann

The post Seeing Wetiko: The Freest Marketplace Money Can Buy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

In this interview presented by the Upstream podcast, Martin Kirk – founder of The Rules – explains how this ancient concept of Wetiko is currently playing out in our modern capitalist era. In everything from our individualistic, profit-seeking impulses to the phenomenon of Donald Trump, we see how Wetiko has permeated our society. It’s about time that we recognize this dangerous characteristic and begin to transition towards a more authentic, life-affirming existence on this planet.

For more information on the Seeing Wetiko campaign, visit seeingwetiko.com

And for more interviews and documentaries from Upstream, visit ustreampodcast.org

The post Seeing Wetiko appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Image by Larry Pollack

Those were my thoughts when I saw “Seeing Wetiko,” an “online gallery” of artworks, music and videos just released by the global arts collective The Rules.  “Artists and activists from around the world have come together in a burst of creative energy to popularize the Algonquin concept of wetiko, a cannibalistic mind virus they claim is causing the destruction of the planet,” the group announced.

Wetiko is an indigenous term used to describe “a psycho-spiritual disease of the soul which deludes its host into believing that cannibalizing the life-force of others is logical and moral.”  The dozens of artworks on the website convey this idea in vivid, compelling ways.  The term wetiko was chosen for the project as a framework for understanding our global crisis, from ecological destruction and homelessness, to poverty and inequality.  To illustrate the scope of wetiko today, the website features a wonderful four-minute video, graffiti murals from Nairobi, carved marks from the US, a film about plastic bottle waste in Trinidad and Tobago, and a theater performance about patriarchy in India.

The Rules is a global network of “activists, artists, writers, farmers, peasants, students, workers, designers, hackers and dreamers” who focus on five key areas needing radical change – money, power, secrecy, ideas and the commons.

In an essay in Kosmos Journal describing the wetiko project, Martin Kirk and Alnoor Ladha, co-founders of The Rules, write:  “What if we told you that humanity is being driven to the brink of extinction by an illness? That all the poverty, the climate devastation, the perpetual war, and consumption fetishism we see all around us have roots in a mass psychological infection? What if we went on to say that this infection is not just highly communicable but also self-replicating, according to the laws of cultural evolution, and that it remains so clandestine in our psyches that most hosts will, as a condition of their infected state, vehemently deny that they are infected?”

The project organizers cite Jason Hickel, an anthropologist at the London School of Economics, who explains that “according to strands of Native American philosophy, wetiko is only possible when you commit the fundamental mistake of seeing yourself as an individual separate from the whole, separate from other humans and other non-human forms of being, not just animals and plants but also rivers and forests. It’s only once you presuppose this way of being of separation and disunity, when it’s written into the DNA of your culture, that it becomes possible to instrumentalize other forms of being for your own gain – to consume them for your own enrichment.”

The Rules goes on:  “All over the world, there is a feeling that something is deeply wrong.  It is often felt more than seen, an unnamed darkness that keeps millions (even billions) of people disconnected from the reality of authentic life-affirming experience.  Too many of our so-called leaders are asleep at the wheel — they talk about economic growth-at-all-costs as the only viable solution to mass poverty, wealth inequality, the climate crisis and other planetary-crises humanity must confront in the 21st Century.

“Those with a spiritual bent might say that a shadowy presence has shrouded much of the Earth. People are sleeping through the same nightmare, unable to awaken within the dream.”

By giving a fresh adaptation to the word wetiko, The Rules clearly hope to foster deeper reflection on the pathologies of neoliberal capitalism as a system based on wetiko.  “A key lesson from meme theory and the healing arts,” the curators write, “is that when we are conscious of the beliefs that shape our lives we are less likely to replicate them blindly. Conscious awareness is the beginning of an antidote, like green shoots through concrete.”

Lead image by Sara & Vicki Garrett

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