Almost a century ago, a book was published that everyone should have read — but unfortunately most people, especially Americans, haven’t. The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi. Now, this essay isn’t really about that book — but it’s opposite. So let me crudely summarize it. Markets becoming the main institutions of society in the industrial age transformed every aspect of life, from relationships to culture to work, and not always in good ways. The great transformation to capitalism…by way of inequality, by way of consumerism, through turning life into a kind of futile contest of cruelty and materialism and acquisitiveness…that unleashed narcissism, selfishness, egotism, short-termism, greed, fear, vanity, anger, envy, emptiness, despair…which tore societies apart in historic ways.

Now, you don’t have to look very hard to see Polanyi…nailed it. A lot of the newfound criticism of capitalism you read these days originated with Polanyi — read it, it’s a truly great book. Selfishness, greed, rage, envy, despair, societies fracturing — doesn’t all that sum up the world right about now?

I think that we need another Great Transformation today. A Great Transformation beyond, through, above. Beyond capitalism — but more than just “capitalism” in the naive American sense. Beyond its values of greed, exploitation, abusiveness, selfishness, fear, hate, materialism. Beyond its life-defining ideas of “work” and “jobs” and “corporations.” Beyond its life-shaping motives of “profit” and “GDP.” Beyond it’s life-molding aspirations of shallow, hollow consumerism and addictive wealth-seeking that have led, mostly, to depression, emptiness, isolation, ignorance, and destabilization. To lives more full of meaning, grace, belonging, happiness, wealth, sanity, truth, defiance…on a planet rich with life…teeming with possibility…for every being on it…from an insect to a reef to a river to you and me.

I know that sounds fluffy. But I don’t mean this in a simplistic or merely idealistic way. I mean it in a razor-sharp one. The biggest ratio in the global economy is the relationship between investment and consumption. Right about now…it’s completely, totally backwards…and that’s why everything’s going to hell, from climate change to mass extinction to surging neofascism (Bear with me, because I’ll be dry to begin with, but I want you to really understand all this — and then I’ll zoom out.)

Investment needs to replace consumption as the driver of global economic growth. Right now, investment is about 20% of global GDP. That means probably about 70& to 80% of global economic activity is consumption. (As a result, “capital formation”, or how much new capital we’re creating, is stuck at almost precisely the same level — 20%.) Are you horrified a little bit? You should be? That means just twenty cents of every dollar or euro you spend…go to…replenshing and nourishing forests, oceans, rivers, school, universities, hospitals, democracy, civilization, the planet, life on it…all the things that really matter. The other 80 cent in every dollar or euro are how the rich became ultra rich…by chewing up everything that matters…and turning it into “money.” Hence, the world is going to hell. The ratio needs to flip, from 80% global consumption and just a meagre 20% investment, to something much more like 20% global consumption and 80% investment. And that means reimagining everything — everything.

…Or at least the ratio needs to equalize at a more sane level. Because even those numbers badly, badly, understate the case. Let me explain.

Why do we need to replace consumption with investment as the driver of the global economy? Take a look around. The planet’s dying. So is life on it. And it’s taking democracy and civilization with it. Climate change and mass extinction are forms of exploitation and inequality — but so are middle classes are imploding in rich countries, like America and Britain, while struggling everywhere else. As a result, democracy is collapsing into fascism, from India to China to America to Brazil and beyond. It should be eminently clear to anyone capable of thinking about the world that we are overconsuming in ways so severe they are literally beginning to cause the collapse of our civilization now.

What are we overconsuming? What aren’t we? The oceans, reefs, forests, air, water. The basic elements of life itself. The insects and bees are dying off. We’re in the midst of history’s first human-made mass extinction and climate catastrophe. We are consuming the planet, and life on it, to death…quite literally.

And we are also overconsuming ourselves to death. What else are we overconsuming? We’re consuming away our own health, happiness, sanity, truth, courage, dignity, self-respect. Because most of we consume to begin with is junk. Junk media, junk food, junk TV. Fakebook and WhatsCrap and Juul and whatnot that make us dumber, meaner, lonelier, angrier, sicker. We’re overconsuming nonsense, prevarication, and sheer stupidity — and as a result, nation after nation is turning into a country of idiots. I’m looking at you, America — where people are happy to let kids be slaughtered at school, as long as they get cheap Netflix and Amazon deliveries. What the?

Let me put all that more precisely. We are overconsuming…literally everything in the world…because we’ve bought into the seductive myth that we’re apex predators — a result of a kind of shallow, convenient Nietzscheanism at the heart of American thinking — we’re the ubermensch, at least some of us, and the planet and all life and everything on it are essentially our slaves, to abuse and exploit. But the sharks don’t eat all the fish in the sea. The lions don’t rip down the trees and burn them. The forest doesn’t grow hoping to drown the oceans. Only we do those things. And that brings me back to Polanyi.

Why do we engage in these bizarre, ritualistic overconsumption behaviors… addictively, compulsively, obsessively…which are costing us the planet, life on it, and civilization…behaviours that literally no other living thing does, anywhere, ever? Well, the truth is that “we” don’t. Most of the human race is still shatteringly poor. It’s the rich West that has chewed up the world, the planet, and life on it. Why? For status competition. We overconsume stuff because it makes us feel powerful. I have a nicer car than you! But that very idea dates back to slavery. Nobody needs a slave, in the same that nobody needs a pair of designer jeans made by a kid in a tiny sweatshop somewhere that chew up tiny oceans of water and carbon. They do it to show how powerful they are — and they must therefore live in societies that lionize dominance and violence to begin with. The rich West got rich by enslaving and pillaging the world precisely for power’s sake…and it spread the myth that power, money, and acquiring stuff are the only point of life….right back to the world…or at least tried to…to justify it’s own horrific abuses.

(So Polanyi took one of Weber and Durkheim’s key ideas, which came from Marx — that capitalism warps people’s values, and makes them aspire to forever acquire more than everyone else, to show how powerful and superior they are — and explained that when markets came to be dominant institutions of life, then life became a contest for status competition, too. Hence, age-old relationships and values were blown apart. Respect for life? Dignity for the vulnerable? A sense of deeper meaning? Forget it — the only point of life is to have more stuff.)

The myth of overconsumption, of treating the planet, life, civilization, and democracy as a plaything to exploit and abuse, was the promise of America’s system of global capitalism. America used the carrot and the stick to spread its global capitalist economy to every corner of the earth, from India to China to Russia. The stick was war, coup, and installing fascist dictators like Pinochet and Saddam — people it could “do business” with. The carrot was the idea that you’ll be rich, all of you, rich enough to overconsume like us — all you have to do is buy into the glittering capitalist dream.

But it didn’t work out that way. The world isn’t rich. It’s still poor. It’s gotten a little richer, true. But going from a dollar day to five, or two dollars to ten, is hardly the stuff of riches. Even Americans didn’t get rich — the average American dies broke, indebted, a pauper in the promised land. The endgame of overconsumption, and it’s lifestyle of status competition, then, was this. American capitalism — the last half century’s global economy — tore up the planet, life on it, and the world. For what?

For no real reason other than to make the 0.1% of the richest 10% of the world super ultra mega rich. Everyone else is barely getting by, including the rest of that 10%, not to mention the rest of the world. (Just because the Chinese live on ten dollars a day versus five doesn’t mean capitalism was a raging success — when it cost them, too, democracy, the climate, biodiversity, meaning, purpose, truth.) The point of capitalism, then, was what a Polanyi, a Durkheim, a Weber — all great thinkers who acknowledge the truth of Marx’s insights — long pointed out. It made capitalists rich, by increasing capital income. But labour’s share of income never rose at all. The result is the choice of catastrophes facing us all now.

But who exactly is “labour”? Remember when I said that even estimate of global GDP badly understate the need to shift from consumption to investment? That’s because it excludes all the following things. It doesn’t count, for example, how we’ve over consumed reefs, oceans, fish, clean air, soil, trees. It’s just counting manufactured stuff, really. So when the statistics say that global GDP is just 20% or so investment, which means it’s 80% consumption — the truth is that it’s closer to something like 99% consumption, and maybe 1% investment. If, at least, we count nature, democracy, life, and the planet as things we’re “consuming”, too. That also means that to capitalism, economics needs to begin thinking of trees, fish, reefs, even citizens of democracy, not to mention dignity and decency and humanity, as “labour”, too. Those fish and reefs and rivers are doing work, too. So is the person with a sense of decency and civilization. But they’re not getting anything back in return. And that is the point.

So. What does it mean for a global economy to make a great transformation from consumption to investment? It means a thousand revolutions. It means a new world, new ways to live on it, and new values to live by. Ones of dignity, respect, defiance, wisdom, gentleness, and humility. It means nourishing and replenishing instead of exploiting and abusing.

First, it means that huge investments must now be made in replenishing and nourishing all the very things that decades of capitalism — and centuries of slavery and colonialism before that — have brought to the brink of annihilation. Think of a Marshall Plan for the world’s forests, oceans, rivers, reefs, trees, soil. Call it a Global Green New Deal. We don’t have the language for it yet — and that shows us just how badly our thinking is lagging behind what this age needs. But even that’s thinking too small. Imagine a planet where every kid has a college education, three meals a day, a home, an income, safety, and a sense of belonging. What kind of Marshall Plan would that take? Now you see what I mean by flipping the ratio. And maybe also by humility, defiance, and wisdom.

So imagine that investment was 80% of the global economy, and consumption just 20% — that the ratio flipped. That brings me to the second thing that this great transformation means. Just as Polanyi’s great transformation to consumption flipped all kinds of social relations on their heads, so too will a great transformation back. Every kind of social relation will change. A “job”, a “career”, “work”, a “family”, a “city.” To make the point clear — what is a “country”, exactly, if the world is investing 80% of it’s resources in replenishing the Amazon, the great reefs, the glaciers, the oceans? What’s a successful life, career, role, when it’s not measured by how much material wealth you can pile up to consume — but how much life-giving investment you’ve made?

But wait — who’s going to do all that? That brings me to the third thing a great transformation (back) means. The end of capitalism as a global system. You see, capitalism has failed us because it has said we can consume and we never need to invest much — we just need to exploit, whether it’s trees, fish, oceans, or each other. Exploit, consume, profit, bang, mission accomplished. The problem is that idea has literally destroyed our world and our planet. All to…make the richest .01% of the richest 10% of people in the world ultra mega super rich.

So capitalism is badly obsolete now. Imagine that the ratio’s flipped — now as a world, we’re 80% investment and 20% consumption. What good is capitalism when the point of all life on planet earth, whether yours, mine, or the forests and animals…isn’t just ever more overconsumption? Capitalism only wants profit, that’s all it cares about and all it can maximize — and that is why it has made us over consume to the brink of global catastrophe. But now we’re not just maximizing profit through overconsumption. What are we maximizing? Many things. The tree reaching to the sky. The colors of the reef. The smile on the face of the poor child who has education and food and safety. We’re now in a multidimensional economy, world, planet: it’s not just maximizing one thing, profit, like a broken, mindless robot. It’s growing in many ways, just like a life, a person, an organism. It’s maturing and developing happiness, health, trust, meaning, purpose, sanity.

Well-being is finally expanding now that we’ve now replaced capitalism — that dead, tired industrial age idea, that relic of ages of colonialism and slavery — with an economy that’s not just profit through overconsumption. What I call a eudaemonic paradigm has taken the place of a “hedonic” one — we’re not just like dummies of pleasure and appetite anymore. We’re intelligent, feeling beings, nourishing and caring for the world around us, the planet we live on, life on it, the relations and connections between it. We’ve let capitalism go — and what people sometimes call “a well-being economy” has taken its place.

Who’s going to do all that? We are. Who else did you think was going to do it? But it’s not going to be easy. What’s a “job” when it’s not about selling more pointless junk, but protecting, nourishing, seeding the forests and reefs? What’s a “career”? What’s a “corporation”? What’s a “bank” — a place that gives your money to the 1%, or a place that invests in the planet, life on it, and democracy? What’s a “family”, when we begin to understand that humankind depends crucially on every insect and bee and bit of soil? We’re going to do all that — but as we do it, every last aspect of life, social, cultural, economic, is going to change radically. But we are going to have to be the ones to invent and create all those things and dare to change what’s not working anymore.

Do you see what I mean a little bit? I’ve struggled to express it. The idea of a Great Transformation beyond industrial capitalism, it’s values of age slavery and empire — but not just in some arid statistical sense — one that will radically change our lives and ourselves in every way. Beyond the way that we live, exist, dream, defy, work, touch, need, want, give, take — or maybe, in ways, back to older ones. I think that it’s one so simple it’s hidden in plain sight, just like Polanyi’s. Markets transformed society. Not investment transforms the world. I think that if we don’t do it, our grandkids surely will — and wonder what on earth was wrong with us.

Now, if you want a catch, let me give you one. America’s not going to let the capitalist empire its built go easily. It is already defending capitalism tooth and nail. Probably if you’re American, you feel defensive just reading this, because, well, you’ve been a little brainwashed. How far will America go to defend its broken paradigm — to stop the great transformation (back)? It’s anyone’s guess. It’s spent the last half century making wars to prop up dictators to stop social democracy. Why wouldn’t it bomb China? Nuke Iran? Let the planet go to hell? Americans don’t care about anything much — they say they do, but at the end of the day, sadly, their behavior reveals they are only concerned about themselves. As hedonic beings — vessels of pleasure and power and domination.

America will go crumbling right along with the global capitalist system it built. And so no matter how hard it tries, it can only delay the great transformation beyond. All the wars it fought for capitalism’s sake turned out to be pointless. So will trying to stop the great transformation back.

I suppose the alternative is that we as humankind never make the great transformation beyond. Beyond capitalism, greed, narcissism, selfishness, despair, folly, violence, hate, rage, predatory traps that lead to cycles of collapse — just like we’re in now. Take a hard look at America today. That’s where it’s stuck, and that’s probably where it’s going to stay. Is that where you really want to be as a world? I didn’t think so.

Umair
September 2019