Capitalism

An interview with Nancy Fraser on the role of marginalised groups in protests, the problems of Zuccotti Park and neoliberalism’s impact on environmentalism.

Capitalism gives rise to an attitude that dehumanises us, because it turns us into competitive animals. We fail to realise that capitalism is an inherently exploitative system, where most of the power will always reside in the hands of the rich. But there is a way around this…

For many people it seems easier to imagine the end of the world, or even the end of capitalism, than to imagine the end of growth. To break this spell of growth, we bring you some of the policy proposals that are derived from the theory of degrowth.

Paul Mason, economics correspondent for the UK’s Channel Four news, argues in his new book Post-Capitalism that capitalism is failing and will be replaced by a new system. Everyone should read this provocative and inspiring account of how, if we want to, we can transform our present economy to one based on sharing, democracy and participation.

While providing valuable insights about the development of our economic system over time, Thomas Piketty’s work on capital suffers from a critical flaw: like so many economic frameworks, it ignores the limits of the finite resources of our planet – the fact that our ecological capital is rapidly running out. A new unit of measurement which takes this into account is urgently needed.

If the Green movement is to change the status quo, it will have to change too. The interrelationship between the plundering of the earth and the exploitation of people requires a much more principled and more consistent struggle against the capitalist system than we have seen in recent decades.

Was Marx an environmental activist before the term even existed? According to John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett, he was. They claim the work of Karl Marx offers an insight into the relationship between the current ecological crisis and the historical crisis of capitalism.

Inequality is back on the agenda. French economist Thomas Piketty has drawn attention to it again with his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, and that is a good thing. Green and Left-wing parties are drooling over the book, but I have heard few suggestions as to how we should fundamentally tackle that inequality. To do that, we need an idea from a completely different world.

What do the Greens think about the current fatigue with representative democracy?

There are parallels between the Europe of 1914 and that of 2014. Today’s divisions are the result of economic inequality and a crisis of democracy. The answer lies in social policy and in an anti-nationalist repolitisation of Europe.