Lateral Economics Required...

I am angrier and more aggressively political now, at sixty-eight, than I have ever been at any other stage of my life. The old truisms relating to age and increasing conservatism certainly don't apply in my case, and I suspect also not in those of a significant number of my generation. Whilst the hippie capitalists who emerged from the 'sixties with their silver spoons now turned to class A consumption rather than elocution, have become masters of the financial universe, those of us from humbler, and probably more radical backgrounds, have continued to rail against the world and all its injustices.

Of course, the post-war world of my growing up was an entirely different place, marked, for the most part, not by the fairytale world of 'Swinging London', but a greyer one of austerity and shortage, alleviated for the majority of us only by the creation of the Welfare State. For this very brief period in our history, there was a chink of light at the end of the very long and dark tunnel of human exploitation in the service of capitalist greed and acquisitiveness: the promise that another way was possible, and that the artifice of class could be wiped from the scoreboard of achievement and attainment for good. In short, that we were becoming a state-assisted meritocracy, where those that had ability and self-determination would be encouraged and nurtured in their success, while those unable to do so would be cared for humanely by the majority: the state.

But capitalism hasn't evolved in the way it seemed it would then, and over the last forty-five years or so, the precepts of monetarism and neoliberal economics have enhanced, rather than eroded, the class structures embedded for centuries in our culture and collective consciousness. It has even had all the rule-books ripped up by its political cronies, who operate hand-in-glove with it, greasing the wheels of profiteering through access and lobbying in return for favours personal or corporate: viz the long list of procurement 'deals', aboard the Covid gravy train, that were sealed behind closed doors and hidden offshore within the onion layers of shell companies and nominee actors. Which leaves most of the population very firmly in the lurch, struggling to make sufficient money to heat or even eat, the niceties of 'lifestyle' alien and unaffordable. From my age and perspective, far from progressing into a fairer future of plenty for all on the assumed upward curve of civilization, this archipelago is regressing into a dark age of the most extreme inequality and barbarity, the like of which would have had Charles Dickens reaching for his quill in revulsion.

The problem is the received wisdom of the naturalness, ubiquity and inevitability of the capitalist system, that the only possible alternative is some form of state totalitarianism: the polarization of politics and economics left and right, with the prevailing view being that any rule that seeks to place limits on the acquisition of wealth, either through taxation, insistence on fiscal probity or otherwise is inherently bad. One simply can't interfere with the markets, old chap. That this tacit assumption is widely held on all sides of political debate demonstrates just how far down the rabbit-hole of fantasy economics we have fallen. We are even now seeing those on the right actively ignoring the climate crisis as if it were yesterday's news: arguing for shale gas, against onshore wind, blithely ignoring tidal power, and proposing that nuclear is a timely fix for it all.

We are now less than ten years away from the point of no return, climatologically speaking. Economically and socially, we could be even closer to the precipice. The stupid thing is, capitalists think they can rise above all of this because of their self-appointed divine right to, and access to, money; which they deludedly believe will somehow shield them from the damage their praxis has wrought on the world. Two things: you can't eat shares or bonds, and desperate people pushed far enough will kill to survive. The solutions are there for the taking, it will just take a lot of readjustment of attitudes and a modicum of state intervention to implement them.

Climate and people don't feature on corporate balance sheets, except as abstract assets and liabilities, to be disposed of expediently. This has to stop: both are central to real-world economics - there is no them and us: society does exist, climate change exists - we are all intrinsic to the whole and the needs of that global entity require tending to, rather than being reduced to algebraic abstraction in the aridity of macroeconomic equations; but unfortunately, as most of us know, time is not on our side...