Capitalism: Greed isn't good and it's killing us

The reason for apocalyptic mass migration may be climate change, writes George Pitcher, but the cause is free markets

What a prophet for our time is Sir David Attenborough. He’s been a voice crying out in our wildernesses for well over half a century, most recently on the apocalyptic prospects of climate change.

In the latest of his oracular visions that I caught, BBC’s A Perfect Planet, he reminded viewers that, for every one degree increase in average global temperatures, one billion people would be forced into unlivable conditions. This will lead to one of the greatest migration crises in human history (and it’s already underway).

“But there is hope,” he intoned. To stop the Sahara Desert’s inexorable march southwards, one billion trees (why always that number?) are being planted across the breadth of Africa as a kind of reverse fire-break.

That is indeed hopeful. But it does seem to treat the symptoms rather than the disease. It’s not hard to spot the cause of, as distinct from the reason for, that projected level of migration from the undeveloped south to the prosperous north of the planet. As ever with investigations, it’s a question of “follow the money”; the attractions of the north are the fruits of unbridled free-market capitalism.

Who is going to pay?

Any banker half-way into his first glass will leap to the defence of free markets at this point, perhaps with a rhetorical rejoinder such as an inquiry as to who or what exactly is going to pay for all those trees across the mid-riff of Africa.

Capitalism may have plundered the Earth’s resources and lit the fire of climate change, it is argued, but only capitalism can fix it too. Well, up to a point, Lord Sugar. The wreckage of neo-liberal free markets is plain to see. Not just that wreaked by climate change and migration (witness the suffocated and drowned), but the leitmotifs of human failure that we witness almost every day.

My friend Simon Jones, a Baptist minister at Spurgeon’s College in South London, posts the story of the firm that runs Napier barracks in Kent, where hundreds of asylum seekers live in appalling conditions in what, in the literal meaning of the term, is a concentration camp, standing to make £1 billion (that number again) over the next 10 years from government contracts.

He writes: “People tell me capitalism is not broken, that it generates wealth for everyone. Well this story nails that lie.” Arguably, too, capitalism has not succeeded while there are still beggars on the streets.

At this point, it’s difficult to resist a well-worn paraphrase of Churchill on democracy, to the effect that capitalism is the worst way to run an economy except for all the other ways. But there must be something seriously wrong with it if a billion people are marching on the restricted space of the European gardens in which it blooms. Capitalism is going to seed.

Victorian poverty was criminal, but it gave us the social gospel

That may be because it’s never really worked anyway. I’m obliged here to the author and Church Commissioner Eve Poole, who identifies “Capitalism’s Toxic Assumptions”: That competition is healthy (no it isn’t - maths proves co-operation yields better outcomes); that Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” of self-interest makes markets work (it’s an optimistic myth and favours greed); that prices in free markets will settle at a natural equilibrium (nonsense that ignores market manipulation, which even central banker Mark Carney nailed in his recent BBC Reith Lectures).

And so it goes on. Poole identifies that capitalism’s seven pillars of wisdom are actually deadly sins. The emperor, in his new clothes, is never so naked as when he loses the shirt off his own back - and capitalism did that in the global financial meltdown of 2008/9 and has never really found its mojo again.

I’m reminded of how, when I observe that the presidency of the Unites States always seems to be bought by the highest financial bidder, I’m asked what I suggest as an alternative (just as the alternative to the British royal family is always claimed by monarchists to be President Philip Green or some such).

Grind your own corn

When I expressed the view that capitalism was now more of a problem than a solution at a business lunch a few years ago, Margaret Heffernan, who has written brilliantly about alternatives to competitive neo-liberal markets, turned on me and said: “Oh don’t be silly, you’re not going to grind your own corn.”

Well, if it goes on like this, I may have to. We all may have to. Unless the way we do capitalism changes radically and soon. And that needs massive political will, as well as a leap of faith.

Which brings me, finally, to religious faith. Eve Poole tells the story in her book of how the biblical figure of Naaman, a hugely powerful figure but also a leper, seeks a cure from the prophet Elisha, who tells him to bathe seven times in the river Jordan. Naaman is outraged at being fobbed off with something so simple. But he is persuaded and is cured. Sometimes solutions are simple.

The Victorians accompanied capitalist enterprise with massive investment in the common good (they also put children up chimneys, preserved the slave trade and presided over criminal abject poverty, but bear with me). Much of this virtue was predicated on Church teaching and a misreading of the the epistles of Paul, that “good works” were the route to heavenly glory (new interpretations of Paul favour grace).

But it did conceive the catholic social gospel, which is the antithesis of the late capitalist imperative to make as much money for oneself as possible and screw everyone else. Indeed, it led in a direct line of descent to the liberation theology of the southern cone, in which economic exploitation of the poor is a sacrilege.

To close, my observation here is that capitalism’s rapacious pace of growth is in inverse proportion to the Church’s decline in post-modern societies. It may be too late for a corrective in the ageing lifetimes of those of us who remain faithful to that social gospel, but we should die trying.

George Pitcher is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.