LET US ASSUME THAT those protesters protesting against the capitalist system outside of St. Pauls are not their solely to enjoy themselves knowing that, unlike London’s homeless, they can vacate their tents at night and go home to a hot shower and warm bed. Let us take them as seriously as the present incumbent of the Canterbury Archbishopric, Rowan Williams does. Let us treat them as rational beings who have it all worked out; let us assume that having diagnosed what they see as a disease - they are somewhat blessed with a well formulated alternative.
This ‘disease’ is the bacillus capitalism. The cure however, has never been articulated. Only slogans have been offered as a justification for their presence outside our prime residence of worship.
What St. Pauls has done to deserve such a presence God only knows. But Rowan Williams, true to form, has sought to legitimise the gathering.
When I challenged capitalism myself as a young man in the 1970s, I offered up the teachings of one Karl Marx as an alternative to the vagaries of the market place. This however proved an insufficient alternative in the countries that turned their backs on capitalism. Having lived in misery for decades the people eventually had to face the fact of human nature and its irredeemable character .
There have been two well tried alternatives to free-market capitalism. Nazism and Communism; and each brought horror, devastation and panic to the last century. Communism was eventually brought to book by the overpowering ability of capitalism to out-evolve communism through its technological development - a development that promised its innovators great wealth. By such an appeal to human nature capitalism eventually rid itself of communism.
There has never been a viable alternative to capitalism that can both allow human nature to flourish, as well as, through its judiciary, to rein in its many excesses. Capitalism and democracy go hand in hand; without one, the other could not function. Which means that those opponents of capitalism currently encamped outside St Pauls and enjoying their publicity, have a considerable challenge to undertake. They have to explain in scholarly detail how they hope to replace a whole economic and social system with one that is immeasurably better.
Slogans are not enough – they just announce their collective infantilism to the world. If they are to be taken as seriously by the world beyond the steps of St. Pauls Cathedral, they must do what far greater intellects than either theirs or mine have tried and failed to do. They must provide a credible and workable root and branch replacements for capitalism.
WHY THE LAST century’s many political isms failed, was because they came fully ‘worked out’ by means of the human brain. Once you start to rationalise a new economic and social order, you are doomed to fail because your first impulse is to change human nature; at first through reason, but in time this ultimately fails; then it is through compunction and the tyranny of the state. This was the lesson that the last century taught us, when ideals replaced even common sense and Marxist and fascist utopian theory took control away from capitalism and ended up with a brutal dystopian reality.
Not that they will or even should listen to advice from me; but nevertheless those young idealists ensconced outside St Pauls should fold up their free market produced, and highly efficient tents, and take their leave of the vicinity (as they have already made the Dean of St Pauls do), and return home to their, in many cases, middle class life styles.
Everyone in the country now knows about them and what they are against. There is little point in continuing with their display of immature protest against an economic system that has, through its somewhat turbulent, and at times unjust evolution, given us the modern capitalist world. A world that, if you look around it with an open mind, does not deserve to be gotten rid of; and if these protesters spent a moment disengaged from their nihilism, and gave thought to how, in every field of human activity, capitalism has worked to our ultimate benefit, then perhaps they may warm to its existence instead of wishing it away – because wishing it away is all that, in the end, they are capable of.
The beauty of capitalism is that it was not the single idea of any single individual. As a system, it evolved and survived with or without any revolutionary input from those scholarly mechanics of 19th and 20th century barbarism.
Human nature describes what we are. We are capable of the greatest acts of sacrifice, as well as the ignobility of cowardice. We are ambitious for ourselves and our families; we want more for our children than we ourselves proved able to achieve; we like to be rewarded for our endeavours, whether we are bankers, company directors or workers on the factory floor.
We need incentives in life because by nature we are ambitious; whether it is promotion and a better standard of living or an increase in wages through an increase in our productivity. Capitalism allows all of these human impulses to work. They are good urges that drive the whole of society, that those campers outside St Pauls wish to erase.
Human nature has been dissected over the centuries by philosophers both ancient and modern without much benefit to humanity. All we have as a species is our very nature and it is a constant battle to find some kind of equilibrium between its worst and best impulses; and capitalism does this. While it will periodically lead us astray, our nature is also the force that has enriched our development through full democracy. It does so because it rewards achievement, and by so doing advances all aspects of our (Western) culture at every level.
Wealth is seen as a dirty word, even amongst those members of the artistic community who have managed under capitalism to accumulate such wealth, yet still stand full square behind the St Pauls’ squatters…as liberal hypocrites!
THOSE GATHERED OUTSIDE of St Pauls are the middle class children of the selfish generation. They are the recipients of their parent’s experience. They have been told to mistrust all authority; even authority based upon the consent of the people. In many cases, their parents and yes, their university lecturers, have motivated their anti-capitalist sentiments.
These poor saplings that have had their growth stunted by such impressionability, have now taken up the mantle of victims. They have sought their martyrdom on the steps of St Pauls, hoping that water canon will be the final sacrifice that will inspire their nihilistic behaviour to be imitated elsewhere.
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