Capitalism is an evolutionary dead-end

There are times when I wonder if the ascendency of capitalism has trapped the human race in an evolutionary cul-de-sac, at least in terms of the development of political and economic ideas and practice. I look at how our systems have developed over the past 100 years or so and can’t help but wonder whether we are going back in time, rather than forwards.

Could anyone looking into the future in the aftermath of world war two have believed that hunger and poverty would still stalk the globe 60 years later? Would they have anticipated that fighting and conquering the forces of fascism would result in a society that was more unequal in terms of wealth distribution and opportunity? Who would seriously have predicted a situation where obvious benefits to the overall populace such as universal healthcare would be attacked as “communist” and “anti-american” on the other side of Atlantic and besieged by market forces here?

Who would have believed we would be subject to several recessions of increasing severity that would condemn millions of people to unemployment and poverty while the wealthiest individuals remained unscathed? Who, for that matter, would have been able to imagine a situation where the actions of a few reckless and incredibly wealthy individuals would effectively gut the Anglo-Saxon banking system and result in many of the (steadily increasing) poor having to pay for the sins of the few?

Economic madness, yes, but political insanity too. It appears, on current evidence, that the same scenario is likely to play out again further down the line because of the reluctance of the political class to do their job and impose sufficient regulations and standards on those who take huge financial risks in the pursuit of ever-escalating bonuses. People talk of the market being “self-regulating” when what they really mean is “inherently unstable” because the only way in which it regulates itself is through crashes and recessions.

Often when I try to advance the suggestion that the global free-market capitalist orthodoxy that rules most of the planet is a symptom of evolutionary retrenchment, people reply that capitalism rules “because it’s human nature”. Which is my point exactly. If we were evolving, I believe we would have produced a different method of conducting our daily political and economic life by now which would have progressed well beyond a system that is hundreds of years old.

Social democracy and socialism represented differing approaches to political and economic conduct that at least tried to take capitalism beyond the law of the jungle. The fact that both appear to have fallen by the wayside shows, to me at least, that we are in danger of slumping into a state of helpless atrophy that will lead to the eventual collapse of humanity. We need to wake up and develop a higher state of human collaboration and political and economic interaction if we are to have any chance of survival.