Joel Kovel — The Enemy of Nature — The End of Capitalism or the End of the World?
The author seems to adopt the word commons to denote quite a radical political stance. He argues that Communism failed as a result of not properly understanding the role of money. He gives examples of what he considers to be successful commons, although these are all small-scale. Nonetheless, Kovel is very passionate about his cause and gives a very good explanation of the meanings around capital and money. Note from the title however, the idea that nature and capital are diametrically opposed — a view which, I am suggesting — is unhelpful in trying to resolve our problems.
Hernando de Soto — The Mystery of Capital
Described by one commentator as one of the world’s smartest 75 books, Hernando de Soto’s The Mystery of Capital looks at the less obvious manifestation of capital — namely property. Property rights, he explains, developed sometimes over hundreds of years in Western nations and are so embedded in Western culture that we are mostly oblivious to their impact. As such, when Western nations offer help to poorer countries they overlook the crucial role property plays on the efficient workings of capitalism. De Soto does not claim to be left-wing or right-wing in his politics. Nor does he look to defend or attack the concept of common land. The book however is a very compelling argument for what could potentially lift millions out of poverty. This sets the bar very high for authors such as Joel Kovel, above, who advocate a wholesale adoption of shared land and property.
Robert Skidelsky and Edward Skidelsky — How Much is Enough?
Father and son authors consider the prediction of early economists that the world would by now have reached a point where all human needs are met and capitalism would therefore be redundant. People should no longer have the need to work more than 15 hours per week and would have time to enjoy ‘leisure’. By leisure, the authors mean activities not pursued simply because of the need to make money. This could include work and research pursued simply for their own sake, writing, art, crafts, and much else besides. Therefore, leisure is not simply recreation in their analysis. The authors refer to this definition of leisure as ‘the good life’ and explore historical precedents for defining what this means. They come up with — Health, Security, Respect, Personality, Harmony with Nature, Friendship and Leisure itself. The authors include family under friendship and explain that Harmony with Nature is a better and more honest way of addressing environmental issues. Personality also requires a bit of explaining. Essentially it is about being able to put a personal stamp on one’s work and also through one’s possessions and — importantly for this book — on the places we live.
The authors go on to describe how they hope to encourage people to move from striving towards satisfying ever more — and often artificially induced — wants, to embracing the good life of flourishing and self-realisation. Amongst other suggestions they look at a tax on spending and at Universal Basic Income. They describe these measures as, ‘non-coercive paternalism’.
‘Starhawk’ — Truth or Dare
The author emphasises that value is immanent and as such we all have intrinsic value — we do not have to earn or prove our worth. Also, an excellent exploration of power-over dynamics, which the author contrasts with ‘power-within’ and ‘power-with’. The author explores this within the historical context of agrarian societies, gradually turning from matrilineal cultures to patriarchal and becoming increasingly geared towards warfare. Women in particular became marginalised as societies developed in a state of constant preparation for conflict. Much of the exploration of this Starhawk then applies to the behaviour of small groups of various sorts in our current societies. There are some interesting comments on a possible future society where the problems of power-over dynamics have been addressed and resolved.
Wendell Berry — Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community
A collection of essays, of which the longest shares the book’s title. This essay looks at the difference between private and public morality and argues that the state can only really legislate for public morals and then only in a prohibitive way. Berry argues that ‘community’ bridges the gap between the private and the public, by endorsing suitable behaviours, particularly with regard to sex and relationships. Berry, as in all of his writings, regards community as a people rooted to a particular physical place. The other essays in the book are largely along similar themes. One makes a particularly interesting critique of Christianity and how it largely fails to address issues of ecology and yet many of the key reasons for adopting an ecological approach to life are there within the Bible. Berry’s treatment of place, community, ownership, land use and ecology are of particular relevance to this book.
Theodore Zeldin — The Hidden Pleasures of Life
In this, as in his other books, Zeldin is most interested in the interactions between people. For him, learning the dreams, hopes, fears and motivations of our fellow humans is life’s ultimate pleasure, sparking our imaginations and creativity. One of the most interesting aspects of the book is how Zeldin seeks to re-envisage some established aspects of modern culture, seeing them working in new ways to encourage more interactions between strangers, more travel and more education. Of particular note are his ideas for hotels, shops, schools and universities. Zeldin also looks at how insurance companies might do more to promote travel and education, rather than just protecting us from what might go wrong when we plan our own adventures. With extensive historic references, Zeldin shows us that human cultures have come up with numerous interesting ways of organising our lives in the past. As such, he concludes that our current Western ways are not set in stone.
George Monbiot — Feral
An excellent look at the idea of re-wilding parts of the Earth — Monbiot looks in particular at Wales and Scotland, along with some other countries in Europe. He advocates minimum human interference after the work of re-establishing previously displaced species has been done — along with possibly the removal of invasive species. Nature is left to do the rest — he refers to such places as ‘self-willed’. He contrasts these aims with those of environmentalists in particular, who, in the UK, often seek to preserve a landscape in a state that was never its natural state, but is instead one of a past human intervention. Most notable in the book is the author’s interest in how wild places can spark our imagination and renew our interest in life.
Andro Linklater — Owning the Earth
An extensive summary of land ownership patterns across the world, showing that the same issues have occurred again and again in different ages and cultures. Linklater is particularly interested in how people have sought fairness and equality in their politics and in the distribution of land and other assets. However, this is always set against allowing the rights of people to seek their own fortune through either hard work, ingenuity or exploitation. Every nation, and the politics of every government, must try to strike a balance in this regard.
Linklater himself, as a younger man, has lived in various communities that have aimed at a more equitable distribution of resources. His experiences he likens to that of some of the early settlers of America, where those who worked hard quickly became concerned that others not so inclined to join in with the labour would nonetheless be rewarded equal shares of the produce. Clearly this has not really ever worked out too well. Fairness needs to be a bit more complex, Linklater suggests, than simple equality.
Chris Carlsson — Nowtopia
The book is mostly looking at real-life projects running in the United States. Carlsson nevertheless provides a lot of background about the motivations and aspirations behind such ventures and it’s an entertaining read. His main concern is the scaling up of projects to a size where they might have a serious impact on contemporary culture. Carlsson suggests essentially that larger scale projects must inevitably adopt a bureaucratic structure and eventually become indistinguishable from the businesses of the surrounding culture.
Murray Bookchin — The Ecology of Freedom
One of the main premises of the book is that there was a time when human cultures lived without any kind of hierarchy — hierarchy being the primary enemy for Bookchin. Such a state, he suggests, pre-dated any form of patriarchy, government or political organisations. It is difficult, of course, to verify if such a state of affairs really did ever exist — and, as Bookchin himself points out — when we look at ancient cultures, or today’s ‘organic cultures’, to use Bookchin’s term, we do so through a lens of our own cultural prejudice.
Some specific observations of the book are particularly striking and relevant to the discussions in this book. These are described in the sections below.
Pleasure
Bookchin draws a clear parallel between Hobbes and Freud. For Hobbes, of course, a life lived in a state of nature will inevitably be ‘nasty, brutish and short’. So, for him, nature is discounted as a source of pleasure. With Freud, pleasure is something from which we are cut off at birth. We must try to wrest pleasure from life through control. Control in the form of human culture and civilisation is the alternative — and, more certain — form of pleasure, via the subjugation of nature. Bookchin argues that, by contrast, nature is our only source of pleasure — albeit pleasures that are somewhat random and opportunistic.
Government/Bureaucracy
Bookchin traces the rise of hierarchy and increasing state control through various historic stages. He identifies ‘shame’ as operational in ‘organic’ cultures, which keeps people committed to a community where mutual caring for everyone, whatever their needs, is the norm. Bookchin references contemporary communities where this lifestyle still seems to function well. What is critical, he suggests, is the small size of the community, such that people know each other enough to feel shame if they step out of line. The distinction between shame and guilt, from Bookchin’s perspective, is not entirely clear. One might have considered guilt as the feeling we get from actually committing a misdemeanour, whilst shame is the idea that we are flawed in our character. However, it looks like Bookchin takes guilt to mean the concern over moral precepts (ie. a more abstract concern). The increasing abstraction of personal ethics is a factor in what Bookchin considers to be the insidious rise of state control (cf. Foucalt). Bookchin’s point is that guilt/shame is now an abstraction of the negative feeling into a general oppression, whereas once these feelings served a purpose, and could be resolved, within small communities.
The ‘progression’ from an ‘organic’ culture to our current consumer capitalism has its first step in the suppression of women — in particular, by identifying nature as female and then looking to subdue and dominate her. Patriotism, in turn, gave rise to more organised control.
Bookchin points out that a bureaucracy may exist separately from any kind of political, religious, or state hierarchy — simply as a means of organising complex processes within a developed culture. Whilst there are vestiges of this in many contemporary cultures, it is not the norm. For the most part, state, monarchy and bureaucracy are inextricably mixed up.
Reason/Truth
In looking at ‘reason’, Bookchin identifies ‘objective reason’ and what might be called ‘executive reason’. (Objective reason seems to be roughly equivalent to an ‘essentialist’ or a ‘transcendental idealist’ view of the world, whilst executive reason is what philosophy would normally call ‘pragmatism’.) He identifies objective reason to include philosophy, morality and transcendent value. He suggests however that all objective reason has been reduced to the executive. (So, in a more normal description, we could say that Bookchin suggests we reduce all knowledge to pragmatism — we only view the world in terms of how it is best explained in order to realise human projects.) The executive reason Bookchin divides into technics and science. Following his concerns about the abstraction of values, this again seems to be a rather contradictory stance.
Justice and Equality
Bookchin’s thoughts on these matters take a bit of unravelling. Bookchin points out that no-one is really ‘equal’. The concept, for him, is pure abstraction, tied in with the objectification of morals, described above. ‘Organic’ cultures, Bookchin suggests, respond to people according to their individual needs. Bookchin contrasts this notion of an ‘equality’ of the ‘unequal’ with the idea — so often unconsciously accepted — that we are all equal under the law. At first take, the latter does just seem simple and obvious. But taking a closer look at all forms of ‘equal’ treatment — and laws that try to enforce this — they become somewhat awkward and suspect. By Bookchin’s lights it is hierarchy, state control and big government that try to enforce equality in all things because this goes hand in hand with de-basing the individual into a mere statistic — a number — easily replaced by a similar anonymous non-person.
Technology
Government, state and hierarchies are also technologies, according to Bookchin. In looking at threats to the natural ecology of the planet, we often focus on advanced human technology — development — as the culprit. But Bookchin argues that monarchy, state, government and their related bureaucracies are antecedent to the rise of mechanical technology. An ecological community is not achievable unless concerns over the misuse of technology go hand in hand with changes to the mechanisms of government.
Freedom
Bookchin identifies two types of freedom — ‘freedom from’ and ‘freedom to’. Our culture tends to emphasise the former over the latter. As such, the state seeks to ‘protect’ us from attack on person or property by other people and other nations — even to protect us from nature. When it comes to other freedoms however — the freedom of self-expression, to organise our own affairs, to find pleasure in work — things are a bit more ambivalent. Whilst seeming to promise these freedoms to the individual, the state tends to stamp on any expression of freedom that might undermine its authority.
The Commons
It is interesting to note that references to ‘a commons’ seems to be a conflicted stance for Bookchin. To describe some aspect of nature as commons is, for him, already implicitly commodifying the natural world. There may be fairer or less fair ways of dealing out what humans take from nature, but in a sense, for Bookchin, it is all exploitation.
Ecological Society
Realising an ecological society is Bookchin’s chief aim, and he expresses this mainly in terms of harmony with nature. He sees nature as enlivened, ensouled and enchanted. Whilst he advances various ideas in support of this view of nature, he admits that it is very much contrary to the prevailing scientific, materialist view of dead matter and the development of life just being about increased complexity. Consciousness itself is seen as only an epi-phenomenon. Bookchin refers to such views as ‘scientism’.
Utopia
Along with his view of nature as an enchanted realm, Bookchin also sees a process at work — a long-term aim in evolution, which might be described as self-actualisation. He seems to regard this as self-evident. He looks to James Lovelock’s Gaia theory to partly endorse this view. Along with beauty, creativity and imagination — all worthy aims for human culture — Bookchin also suggests that humanity, as the self-conscious aspect of nature, has a duty to help nature towards self-fulfilment. He does not offer any concrete examples of how this may be achieved. Despite his own criticism of abstract moralising, he seems to offer a very abstract notion of what an ‘ecological society’ might mean.
Bookchin discusses some rather dubious versions of utopia from other thinkers, including Charles Fourier. These are definitely ‘libertine’ in style and give no indications of where the abundant provisions that these utopias seem to enjoy may come from.
We could ask if Bookchin’s views are in any way realisable. As with many utopian views, the problem of scale seems to be evident in his discussions. Even if we accept what he says of ‘organic cultures’ at face value, these are very small-scale compared to industrialised societies. Could Bookchin’s ‘organic’ culture operate on that kind of scale? There appears to be no attempt to address this point. Whilst an anarchist, Bookchin does, at least, accept that a certain level of bureaucracy is necessary for the functioning of society. We have touched on this earlier. The trick would be to separate these necessary functions of government from all aspects of control and somehow still achieve a decision-making process that allows everyone a say. The premise of Bookchin’s views, along with most far-left thinkers, is that everyone possesses a level of personal autonomy, and, given the opportunity, would take sensible responsibility for governing their own lives. Communities would be peaceful, active, social and creative. All worthy aims, but as we have explored in the book, such a situation is not a given, straight from a point where current government arrangements are dismantled. At the very least, there would have to be some kind of peaceful transition to the free society that Bookchin envisages.
Bookchin’s contempt for hierarchy may itself be questioned. For one thing, he sets great store by looking at the process of evolution in nature, and sees this a drive towards more complex and more ‘self-actualised’ being. But, of course, such a view of nature itself implies a hierarchy. If hierarchy is innate in nature, then why would we not also wish to emulate this aspect of nature, since we are being encouraged to emulate nature in other ways? Communities that attempt what Bookchin proposes — in terms of being free of hierarchy — often run into the problem of developing a 'covert' hierarchy instead. Perhaps this is just something intrinsic to human nature — there will always be the leaders and the led. Or perhaps — as, no doubt, Bookchin would have suggested — this is just a carry-over from millennia of dominance and could fade away as society learns new ways. (Bookchin unfortunately refers to people becoming ‘empowered’, which partly speaks against his own ethos — but we can assume he would prefer the ‘power-with’ and power-to’ relations that I have explored in the book.) To be fair though, in other works Bookchin acknowledges the need for hierarchy in governance systems in order to realise a good society — what he calls confederalism.
The slight contradiction in Bookchin’s position is that he eschews regulative values (his contrast of ethics over morals — shame over guilt) but nonetheless seems to advocate the adoption of other regulative values based on a particular view of nature. (What he describes as an ontological view — related to meaning, being and becoming.) One suspects Bookchin would not have regarded this as a contradiction as his value system would all be based on an experience of nature — whether person to person or people to the wider ecology. But his reading of nature suggests otherwise — it suggests the presence of some transcendent value that drives nature towards trying to fulfil self-realisation. It would have been good for Bookchin to have explained how he had arrived at this position.
Despite these criticisms, Bookchin’s work raises many significant issues and remains enormously relevant.
Fawzi Ibrahim — Capitalism Versus Planet Earth
Ibrahim provides a very clear explanation of the workings of capitalism. It is especially interesting to see how he integrates the financial economy into his explanation of how economics works. Ibrahim, also — in my view, correctly — criticises the adoption of ‘natural capital’ by the so-called ecological economists. Herman Daly and Jonathan Porritt come in for especial criticism. Ibrahim points out the flaws in those, like Daly and Porritt, who advocate some kind of adapted capitalism to answer environmental problems.
Regarding natural resources as commodities does not change the system. Setting costs against ‘externalities’, both positive and negative, just adds to the cost of production and these costs ultimately get passed to the consumer. (Ibrahim sees this as a bad outcome, but does not really suggest ways to address the inequality such a situation creates — poorer people being more vulnerable to the price increases than the rich. Rather, he sees this as just an argument for the overthrow of capitalism.) He follows a similar argument for carbon taxes. There is only a passing reference to fee and dividend, which would seem to not face the same issues of penalising the poor, as described above.
Capital is in crisis, according to Ibrahim, because the rate of profit inevitably falls as capital accumulates. There must be continuous growth in order to maintain the rate of profit. He sees no way out of this. So governments become locked into trying to sustain capitalism through such measures as austerity, quantitative easing (printing money) and so on — all of which are, in his view, doomed to ultimately fail. His solution is that growth can only stop if there is no profit; in other words, production with no exchange value — so things have only utility value. Ibrahim does not elaborate too much about what society might be like if such a policy were implemented, except to say that society would be organised around our shared needs for utilities. Ibrahim holds up the UK’s National Health Service as an example of what he has in mind. The NHS obviously has an ‘external’ aim of care-giving and service. In a similar way, Ibrahim seems to be implying that care for the environment would be the concern that would shape how labour and production would be organised in a post-capitalist world. Along with this, he cites certain values that would guide society in the implementation of this project — professionalism and pride in our work as the chief motives — presumably replacing profit.
Ibrahim is rather mocking of the idea that businesses might plough profits back into their work, by way of co-operatives, profit-sharing and so on, so they could sustain themselves without growth. It would need a change in human nature to achieve this — as indeed, Three Miles is suggesting. However, it has to be said that the changes Ibrahim is seeking would seem to require an equally radical change in human nature in order to bring them about.
Jason Brennan — Against Democracy
Brennan is indeed against all forms of democracy, as the title suggests. Part of the reason is, he suggests, most people do not have either the interest or the capacity to make the kinds of the decisions needed in political debate. As such, politics should be left to experts — so he is proposing some kind of meritocracy — although the book does not elaborate too much on this. Brennan reserves particular scorn for the types of deliberative democracy that I have been promoting in this book.
One of Brennan’s main points is that allowing ordinary people to vote is like allowing anyone to drive, no matter their competence, or past record of failing or dangerous behaviour and accidents. But I would suggest that the claim people should not have an absolute right to vote because a bad decision may harm others is spurious. It is not the same as not being allowed to drive, because of incompetence or danger. The right to express an opinion does not mean that this opinion will become policy (whilst bad drivers are, by contrast, directly responsible for the harm they cause). Brennan equates ‘democracy’ generally with merely the right to vote. Most of his arguments therefore are meaningful only with regard to representative democracy, not the systems that involve greater participation, such as Parapolity, discussed in this book. However, as noted above, he does make criticisms of deliberative democracy as well, although these are based on the criticism that others have brought to the debate, rather than his own research. We might compare these criticisms with James Fishkin’s, When the People Speak — someone who has genuine experience and direct evidence for the effectiveness of deliberative democracy and the competence of ordinary people, when given the opportunity to consider issues with due care and attention.
Having said all that though, it is always good to listen carefully to the voice of dissent. So, I include Brennan’s work here to give an opportunity to consider the arguments that oppose deliberative democracy and Parapolity.
Charles Eisenstein — Sacred Economics
Eisenstein provides an excellent review of what is becoming the widely accepted view of all that is now regarded as commons. This includes land, air and ocean, but also the intellectual commons, imagination, creativity and even time.
Eisenstein argues that a means of exchange of some sort is fundamental to human life. To dismiss economics therefore as somehow irrelevant to ‘higher’ questions of spirituality and philosophy is mistaken, in his view. The title of the book therefore confirms the author’s belief that the way we exchange and trade with each other is worthy of our highest ideals and respect.
A key element of the book is the author’s belief that the capitalist system is on the brink of collapse. As such, there is a certain urgency to the book’s message. Sooner or later, Eisenstein argues, circumstances will force change upon us. The changes we might make now are preparations for a future when free-market economics have ceased to function.
Eisenstein’s chief solution to this is the establishment of a ‘gift economy’. He provides some historic examples of such a system. Like many with a utopian disposition, the past is somewhat idealised by Eisenstein. A 21st century interpretation of what went on (or goes on) in societies that practice gift exchange is not necessarily offering a full understanding — let alone being able to apply that lifestyle to modern industrialised and computerised societies. The examples given of modern gift exchange seem very small-scale compared to the massive systemic change that would be entailed in the collapse of capitalism. Eisenstein is aware of this, and a consistent theme throughout his work is the notion of individuals changing their viewpoint to embrace the view of how the world might function. A momentum can be built up — he hopes — as people change their view of the world and the influence of these changes begins to spread and grow.
Eisenstein points out, quite reasonably, that what constitutes money and the means of exchange and store of value is purely a social construction arrived at by consensus. This observation leads to one of the strongest features of the book — the linking of money to some of the assets that are regarded as commons — in particular, physical commons. Eisenstein’s arguments for this are difficult to follow, but at least the concept seems to offer some hope of protecting nature by creating strong links between the commons and our means of exchange.
Eisenstein argues that our economy functions now by converting the commons into commodity and into money. In order to achieve ecological balance we must reverse this trend — hence linking money to the preservation and flourishing of the commons.
Amongst other ideas in the book, Eisenstein suggests negative interest on capital (to encourage investment), changes to taxation (taxing capital and land and not labour), and Universal Basic Income.
We would probably place Eisenstein ‘left of centre’, although he appears to believe in private property. Sacred Economics does not really address issues around governance, but we could nonetheless regard the world view it promotes as utopian. Along with other forms of utopianism therefore, we might ask the degree to which people are able to change (or have the potential already within them to live differently). Eisenstein seems to think that the end of capitalism that he envisages will force change upon us. However, even without the future unfolding with the demise of capitalism, there is a lot here to encourage changes in the right direction. Eisenstein’s subsequent book — The Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible — follows up on these themes.
Community, for Eisenstein, is only forged when we have a genuine need for one another. Although it seems that all of our needs can be met through money, in fact, he argues, we long for things that money cannot buy. It is through community that such things can be regained. We may quell a bit at some of the assumptions of what constitute a beautiful life for Eisenstein, but it is difficult to argue with the notion that our use of money and materialism need to be brought back into the realm of the sacred and the beautiful.
Meanwhile, people may seem greedy, selfish and uncaring, but it is scarcity (brought about by interest charged on money and by economic rents) that causes this mindset. Changing the way we use money — changing society from one premised on scarcity to one premised on abundance — will, Eisenstein believes, lead to a change in our mindset and initiate a gift ec