In the early 1990’s Francis Fukuyama wrote about the fall of the Berlin Wall as signifying the “end of history”. Fukuyama ‘s point was simply that history had climaxed with liberal capitalism. Leaving aside the largely “academic debate “ that surrounded Fukuyama’s claim, the fact is that we have now sort of reached a point where there has to be a significant “rupture” with the way we have lived and created history. The scale of the challenges we face highlight the need for such a “rupture”:
•The banking meltdown triggered the most severe economic crisis since the Great Depression.The impact of this crisis just on unemployment and public sector signifies need for structural changes.
•Greenhouse gas concentrations are reaching levels where runaway climate change becomes more and more difficult to avoid. In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report – a synthesis of peer-reviewed research on climate change, its causes and effects (including socio-economic consequences) involving over 2500 scientists worldwide – stated that if fossil fuels continued to be burnt at the current rate, global average surface temperatures could rise by 4°C by the end of the century, with an uncertainty range of 2.4–6.4°C. While this implies emissions need to be reduced dramatically and immediately, there is growing evidence that even a rise of 2˚C – the widely accepted maximum ‘safe’ level – could be catastrophic for ecosystems, humans and economies.The 2°C target has been widely accepted as the guiding principle for many climate change policies – for example, it has been the EU negotiating position at climate change talks since 1996.
•Peak oil may be far closer than we think and there is little preparedness for the energy crisis that lurks just around the corner.
•Inequality between countries, as well as within countries, is reaching new highs.
•Life satisfaction even in the most developed countries is at best stagnant, and even declining in some. Overwork for many combines with widespread worklessness for others. Set alongside those who have far more than they need are those who do not have enough. Falling social mobility sees these patterns repeated from one generation to the next, while unsustainable levels of debt affect all parts of society. As real incomes have fallen, many have had to take on debt to fund the essentials of life. For the more affluent, status-driven consumerism, often fuelled by debt, is the norm.
•Ill Health, and especially mental health levels are rising
•Educational attainment levels continuing to show a stubborn failure rate that leaves between 2 and 3 out of 10 young people leaving secondary schools with no or very low educational attainments.
•Demographic shifts in terms of ageing population and a “Jilted Generation” facing a totally different future to ones that their parents secured for themselves in terms of job security, easy access to money, pensions, and access to housing.This in turn has created a high “switching off” from mainstream political parties within this age group. For the “European project”, this is really potentially more destructive than the current “euro crisis”.
The list of challenges could be added to but I hope I have highlighted enough “evidence based “indicators that substantiate the need for a “rupture”.
I reckon a significant minority of people would agree with the scale of the challenges that we face and the need for “radical” or “fast” change. The problem inevitably would be that we would then end up caught up in the traditional political discourse which every where has been the same “left and right” dichotomy as to what we need to do to deal with the above challenges.
I have grown up in an environment at home, school and work where the traditional political discourse has set/created the dominant paradigm within which policy responses at EU, National, Regional and sub-regional levels have been framed.
What I am saying is that we cannot address effectively any of the above challenges unless we also change the political discourse. Does it make sense to speak of socialism in contrast to capitalism? These have been the pillars around which we had political discourse for at least the last 150 years. Of course the theoretical underpinning of the two pillars has different roots, however the practice is not significantly different in terms of outcomes relating to the challenges above. The mainsteam political parties have long ceased to be located in anywhere but the “middle ground”. Those that have remained rooted inside their respective pillars have suffered the fate of “marginalisation “.
But for me the need to reconfigure the political discourse goes deeper than just the useless cut and thrust of political parties. For the majority of people, and particularly young people, the lack of alternatives to capitalism is no longer an issue. Hence the steep decline in political party membership, particularly of political youth groups.
Alongside this acceptance of capitalism as the “only game in town” what we are dealing with now, however, is a deeper, far more pervasive, sense of exhaustion, of cultural and political sterility.
Yet alongside this there is also the clear evidence that people want to have greater control and say in developing policies and responses to the challenges we face.Alvin Toffler speaks of the rise of prosumers.The current generation of twentysomethings are searching for purpose in life to help shape their citizenship.
The government has little to do with this, after all the 1950s are long gone. Back then, purpose was something governed by denominational or political segregation.
Your views on humanity and the world were shaped inside your own 'pillar' in life - morals and values that provided a compass for and meaning to the bourgeois life. For a long time, religion still fulfilled a dominant role in society, particularly as a cultural force: the modern socialist and liberal movements were still indebted to their Christian heritages. Basically the 'pillars' were well organised 'purpose-providing machines'; citizens didn't have to a thing themselves.
However, this is no longer the case and it is evident that the new genrations "gave up" because the system no longer met their needs. The system consists of standard ingredients, fixed people, a fixed caste, with standard procedures and rituals, and this means that 80% of the decisions have basically been taken in advance. This makes achieving real change by participating in institutions difficult. In other words, it's not surprising that young people can’t be bothered to vote any more.
This trend is part of what essentially is the decay of our party political model of representative democracy. Political parties have declining membership. The bird watchers society in the UK has more members than all the UK political parties combined. The same decline in membership is very evident(particularly in EU15 countries). In other words we are electing our leaders from a smaller and smaller pool of people. Our “political class” has in fact diminished to such a state that the very quality of what emerges from within is self evident in the leaders that emerge.
For me however, it is hard to conclude anything other than that the current model just isn’t working.
I watched a film called “The Age of Stupid”, (it’s a more “viewer friendly “version of the “Inconvenient Truth ) and one of the projections based on good proven modelling shows that for everyone to live at the current European average level of consumption, we would need more than double the biocapacity actually available – the equivalent of 2.1 planet Earths – to sustain us. If everyone consumed at the US rate, we would require nearly five. Of course neither of these is a viable option. Of course that means consumption in the developed world must be cut back to preserve the ecosystem
The economic model that has dominated most of the world since 1945 has failed spectacularly. If the theories of self-correcting and efficient markets had been right, the events of the last 28 months could never have occurred. But they clearly did. What we have seen is not just a temporary malfunctioning of the model but its failure on its own terms. Instead of endless, stable growth and high and rising incomes equitably shared, we have had inequity, volatility and crises. These are not anomalies, but a natural and increasingly severe expression of the ‘normal’ functioning of the system. As even Alan Greenspan, former Chair of the US Federal Bank, was forced to admit, there was ‘a flaw … in the model that defines how the world works’.”
While there is a clear case for poor countries growing their economies to improve living standards, increasing consumption further in developed countries is not sustainable or justifiable. In fact, developed countries need to do the exact opposite.
The challenge we know face is to first accept the reality of capitalism and as such put an end to the discourse of left and right. It is about constructing a capitalism that has a local and global paradigm at its heart.
For example within such a paradigm the environmental and economic crises are not separate but interconnected events. It is the high levels of debt-fuelled consumption in developed countries that have landed us with dangerously high concentrations of CO2 and put pressure on ecosystem resources. Astonishingly, this is precisely the path that politicians are trying to return us to. Many of the measures hastily put in place at the start of the recession – VAT reductions and the car scrappage scheme, for example – were specifically designed to kick-start consumption.
Similarly , within such a paradigm there has to be a recognition that promises of “trickle-down”, have been a myth. What we have seen is that the model has seen huge inequalities develop within and between countries.
Research conducted by the New Economics Foundation showed just how unevenly the proceeds of growth are shared out. For every $100 worth of growth, only $0.60 contributes to reducing poverty for the more than one billion people living on less than a $1 a day.
As stark as these inequalities are on a global scale, we should not ignore inequality within countries. And the UK has one of the highest rates in the developed world. The richest 20 per cent have seven times the income of the poorest 20 per cent. One in three children grows up in relative poverty. All this makes for a profoundly unequal society, which matters from a social justice perspective but also because, as Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett demonstrate in The Spirit Level, less equal societies have poorer outcomes in nearly every social domain.(vi) And this holds true for people across the income spectrum. So while those on low incomes obviously have a disproportionate share of the poor outcomes, a middle-class person living in a country with high inequality will, for example, have a lower life expectancy than someone of the same socio-economic status in a more equal society.
In summary, we are faced with an unavoidable challenge. A limited form of flourishing through material success has kept our economies going for half a century or more. But it is completely unsustainable and is now undermining the conditions for a shared prosperity. This materialistic vision of prosperity has to be dismantled.
Our obsession with growth and our relentless pursuit of a global system which creates ever greater dependency on it has put us on the road to perdition. This confronts us with an artificial and unnecessary choice between the moral imperative of poverty eradication and the practical necessity of environmental sustainability. We need policies aimed directly at reducing poverty and ensuring environmental sustainability, leaving growth as a by-product. That means a new global economic system which will allow, foster and support such policies at the national level.
At the end there will be the rewards: The rewards from these changes are likely to be significant. A less materialistic society will be a happier one. A more equal society will be a less anxious one. Greater attention to community and to participation in the life of society will reduce the loneliness and anomie that has undermined wellbeing in the modern economy. Enhanced investment in public goods will provide lasting returns to the nation’s prosperity.
