Seven Ethics Against Capitalism

Towards a Planetary Commons

Oli Mould

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781509545971
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Geography
• Index: Social Sciences

Capitalism has become so dominant that it is difficult to ever imagine a world in which its injustices and inequalities are not violently present. In this ambitious and compelling book, Oli Mould turns his diagnosis of capitalism's perversions towards defining the new set of ethics we need to succeed in organizing a more just society.

In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, capitalism has been rocked to its foundations and 'the commons' as a means of providing for all people in our world has come crashing into the foreground. However, in order for the commons to be a viable alternative to the injustices of capitalism, it needs to be grown to a planetary scale. This is not an easy process, but if we can commit to act ethically in the world, then suddenly anything is possible. Blending theoretical thinking and real-life examples of commoning in action, Mould guides the reader through a suite of ethical mindsets – mutualism, transmaterialism, minoritarianism, decodification, slowness, failure and love – which can stand firm against capitalism's seemingly inexorable ability to co-opt and subsume all before it. When thought of collectively, these ethics can offer tantalizing visions and practical approaches towards a world beyond capitalism.

Ethic 1:
Mutualism

It is no secret that the works and philosophies of Ayn Rand have had a profound impact upon our world in the twenty-first century. Influential politicians on both sides of the Atlantic have revealed being heavily influenced by her work, and even the personified apotheosis of antiintellectual populism Donald Trump has admitted that The Fountainhead is one of his favourite works of fiction.¹ Rand’s work is also said to have been a big influence in the lives of many of Silicon Valley’s potentates. Steve Jobs, Peter Thiel, Travis Kalanick, Elon Musk: they have all at some point in their lives expressed admiration for the work and thinking of Ayn Rand.²

In Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, the hero of the story, John Galt, proclaims in a famous speech: ‘By the grace of reality and the nature of life, man – every man – is an end in himself, he exists for his own sake, and the achievement of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose.’ Galt’s lengthy speech is essentially Rand’s manifesto of her philosophy of ‘objectivism’; that the reality of the world can be directly perceived, and that any morality and social form must stem from the self’s own perception of this reality. In essence, it eulogizes selfishness as the driving force of a fairer society. It rejects community, religion and government as they leach power from the individual and act as checks on the true potential of man.

It is easy to see why such a philosophy is attractive to technology entrepreneurs and career politicians of the right, and not just because of the highly masculine language; objectivism essentially gives a moral pass to selfishness and sociopathic tendencies. And such a belief in the emancipatory power of the individual over the straitjacketing of the collective is a fundamental kernel of the kind of unfettered capitalism that the paragons of nationalist populism are leading us towards. Yet it is the kind of thinking that has not only catalysed our current global tumultuousness; it is wholly unqualified to counter it.

The toxic mix of an economy of technological determinism that entices us to be more introverted, competitive and singular, with government policies that remove welfare and social security and encourage the privatization of everything, has created a world in which any kind of connection with someone else has become a transaction. Even some of the most intimate encounters we have as individuals with someone else are cast as ones in which the individual benefits. In other words, how I relate to and belong to the rest of our species becomes first and foremost a question of ‘what do I get out of this?’

To engender a world in which the injustices of contemporary capitalism are countered, then, this Randian self-interest and individualism need to be completely banished from central streams of government, business and society in favour of mutualism. Furthermore, such a radical mutualism can begin to foster a world in which the collective is cherished via the empathetic encounters we can have with one another. In other words, the energies that are currently directed towards rewarding the self, when shared, reward everyone to a far greater degree. Hence, this ethic of mutualism argues that renouncing self-interest proposes a radical connectivity with each other as mutuals.

A history of self-interest

To first banish individualism, though, is to know its ideological roots. Rand’s work (and the broader philosophy of neoliberalism, which will be discussed latterly) is perhaps its zenith, but it has a long history that has defined the morality of our world for multiple millennia since the Neolithic Age. I would, however, like to start in the crucible of Western thought: ancient Greece.

Thucydides was an Athenian general heavily involved in the Peloponnesian War in the fifth century BCE. As the ‘father of political realism’, he saw individualism as the driving force of his generation’s civilization. His view of Athenian democracy was one where the strong should rule the weak, as only the powerful had the necessary qualities to lead society progressively. He was also a staunch realist, believing the world to be made up of observable phenomena, strictly focused on cause and effect, and disregarded any other kinds of extra-perspective phenomena.

Thucydides’ philosophical view on the importance of self-interest as the driving force of progress, democracy and civilization was a sentiment that influenced a number of key thinkers of the ‘Enlightenment’ period. The Enlightenment thinkers of this time were reacting to the dominance of the church and the doctrinal view of humans’ submission to a divine ruler. That all of humanity was ‘fallen’ and salvation was only to be bestowed by the Almighty was now seen as almost heretical, and denied the innate ability of humans to forge their own futures. So it is easy to see why Thucydides’ ideology of rationalism and self-interest percolated through to the Enlightenment’s key philosophers, such as Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and Wollstonecraft, who sit in the canon of Western Enlightening thought alongside scientific theoreticians such as Galileo, Newton and Wren.

I don’t wish to delve into the countless volumes of incredible scholarly analysis that occupy entire library shelves (and indeed dusty subterranean computer servers) devoted to the intricate nuances of these thinkers’ theoretical minutiae. But I hope it would not be too glib of me to say that many of these Enlightenment thinkers (although by no means all) utilized the progression of scientific, philosophical and/or mathematical scholarship to question the rule of faith in their societies, and the majority championed human nature and creativity as the source of civilization, freedom and progress. Humans were rational, empirical, inquisitive, autonomous and ultimately capable of forging their own path in life. The individual was the master of his of her (but of course at that time as of now, mainly his) own fate.³

These philosophical ideas matured through the centuries in the vernacular of liberalism. This was articulated most famously by Adam Smith, when he published The Wealth of Nations in 1776. In it, Smith argued that if everyone acted with self-interest, then an ‘invisible hand’ would guide us all to liberty and more socially desirable ends. ‘Progress’ therefore could only be achieved if we all acted with self-interest. Indeed, he argued, ‘by pursuing his own interest [a man] frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it’.⁴ Smith was clear that by each being self-interested for one’s own security and gain, society would be ‘promoted more effectually’ and liberty would prevail. He dismissed overt and conscious attempts at societal provision (such as governments) as ineffectual and a waste of resources. The ‘invisible hand’ metaphor (which in fact Smith used only a handful of times in his writings) has been used most vehemently by modern-day economists as a means to describe the efficiency of market provision. Now, it has been used as shorthand for the naturalized mechanisms of the market. Subsequent neoclassical and laissez-faire economics has distilled Smith’s liberal theory of self-interest as the ‘naturalized’ way in which supply and demand, when tuned efficiently by people acting as homo economicus, should form the basis of modern socio-economic provisioning. Rational logic was eclipsing spiritual faith as the naturalized order of societal progress.

The rise of international mercantilism actualized many of these economic rationalities. It proliferated the opportunities to enact these economic ideals across vast distances, and large global companies rose from the massive financial gains. The East India Company, for example, at its height accounted for half of the world’s trade (something Jeff Bezos can still only dream of), and did so through the intense trade of imported goods, mainly from India. Enacting the basic principles of self-interest and competition, the company became a key player in the expansion of the British Empire. Global trade of goods from the Far East, the Americas, India and Australia fuelled the growth of markets for more ‘decadent’ items in Europe (including slaves), and ushered in the dawn of contemporary globalization. The Industrial Revolution allowed for the more efficient production of manufactured goods, thereby expanding the opportunities for market growth even further. Once the US enters global trade during the turn of the twentieth century, modern capitalism has spawned a near globally ubiquitous marketplace.

At the epicentre of this market expansion was the philosophy of Thucydides’ core belief that self-interest was the only way to progress as a civilization; more wealth equals more civilization. The economic systems that built up around this core belief, the processes that powered the expansion of markets and the importance of private ownership, and the belief in the ‘natural’ reallocation of wealth or trickle-down effects were central tenets of the progression of capitalism in the twentieth century as it spread around the globe.

However, it was not always so smooth. A series of crises in the global capitalist system through the first half of the twentieth century began to destabilize the foundational beliefs in its robustness. The Great Depression of the 1930s showed that capitalist systems could fail spectacularly, resulting in gargantuan levels of national debt in the Western world, mass unemployment, deprivation and starvation. The subsequent rise of fascism in Europe and World War II were seen by the Smithian devotees as outcomes of the decline of civilization’s belief in the centrality of self-interest and free-market capitalism as the guiding hand of progress.

The onset of political ‘meddling’ by sovereign states (or the too-hasty implementation of Keynesian economic policies after the Great Depression and post-World War II) was characterized by bureaucratization, state management structures, nationalized investment in infrastructures, the welfare state and notions of the social that began to encroach upon the perceived smooth functioning of the economics of self-interest. Such processes were inefficient because they were anti-competitive. If Smithian economics taught us anything, it was that unregulated and unfettered competition was the engine of societal progress. If the markets failed to provide for all, it wasn’t because they included systematic inequalities; instead, failure of the markets was purely down to their manipulation towards a more socialized or ‘common’ goal. In other words, people simply weren’t being selfish enough.

So while self-interested individualism propelled economic growth and created vast surplus wealth for the globally mobile capitalist class, it had not infiltrated political and social life, at least not yet. Overly bureaucratic states were not operating under the same logic, and so were hampering further growth and progress. In order to overcome this, the logic of competitive self-interest needed to be extended further, beyond economics and into the heart of government and society itself.

Neoliberalism

At least, this was the view of economist Friedrich Hayek; in the 1920s he was a prominent member of the Chicago School, a foundational body of scholarship of neoclassical ec...