Translator: Leonardo Silva Reviewer: Maricene Crus
Who has the money and the power, and why?
Now, when we think of the word "community,"
I'm going to guess that money and power
are not the first things that spring to mind exactly.
But I'm a PhD student in Political Economy,
which means I study the ways
in which economics and politics interact with each other.
And I wanted to be here today under the theme of "community"
because, actually, economy is all about community.
We don't usually think of economy as community at all.
We usually think of economy as something really mechanical,
like it's a big machine that we're all stuck inside of,
or a system that's just running along according to its own laws
and that, even if we don't particularly like our economy,
our capitalist economy,
there isn't really much that we can do about it.
But what I've learned in my research
is that this image of the economy as a big machine,
that's not really accurate at all.
It's much more useful to think of economy as community.
So, "community" is one of these really nice and cuddly words
and people use it quite a lot,
but what does it actually mean?
So I looked at a few different definitions.
There are quite different definitions of the word out there, right?
I think most of them basically say that a community
is a group of people with shared beliefs and attitudes,
which is really vague, as far as definitions go,
but I think that that's OK, we can work with that.
So, here is the interesting thing:
if you take a critical look at capitalist economy,
you find that underneath the rules and the laws that govern it,
underneath these things that we call economic science,
is a set of shared beliefs and attitudes.
The other thing we don't often realize
is that there is not just one economy in our society,
but many different economies.
Capitalism, that's the economy we usually notice ourselves belonging to,
but most of us, we're members of other economic communities too.
What do I mean by this?
Well, let me first explain what I mean by capitalist economic communities,
and then, hopefully, the rest will make sense after that.
So, I would say that there are three things
that distinguish capitalism from other types of economy.
They are: profit,
the distinction between the owner and the wage workers of a company
and competition.
So, profit, first of all,
it's an idea that I think most of us are quite familiar with.
It's the idea that the reason why you do things
is to make more money for yourself,
the reason why capitalist companies exist is to make more money for their owners.
That's the be-all and end-all of everything they do.
Everything that they choose to do
is just a means to the end of getting more money.
So, this idea that business should be, or even has to be, for profit,
much modeled and theorized in economic science,
is based on a belief about human nature.
It assumes that humans are inherently lazy
or inherently reluctant to give up their time and energy,
unless it's going to benefit them with more money in the future.
A belief about human nature.
Not science.
And we can ask ourselves whether we share this belief;
whether we really think that it's true
that the thing that motivates us to do difficult things in life
is to get more money for ourselves.
And we can ask ourselves,
"Why do so many people in this country,
about a third of the population, according to government statistics,
work for free as volunteers, at least once a month?"
And at least half of the British population,
they give away free money to causes that they find worthy.
The second thing:
the distinction between the owner and the wage workers of a company.
Say that I work for a high-street coffee shop, for example.
I'm working behind the till, I make coffee, that's my job,
and I earn minimum wage.
And today happens to be an unusually busy day
and there's a long queue of people waiting impatiently to be served by me
and I'm trying to make them as many coffees as I can,
trying to get through this queue,
making lattes and flat whites and whatnot
and trying to, you know, get through this queue of impatient people.
And at the end of the day,
a long and stressful day for me,
the cafe that I work for
has managed to make quite a lot more money than usual.
Now, who is it that gets that extra money?
Well, as a worker, it's not me, is it?
Who is it that decides what color the wall of the cafe should be,
where I work all day?
Or which exact hours my shift should be?
Well, it's not me.
It's the owner who decides that,
and it's the owner who gets the extra money from my hard work.
So this idea that companies need to be privately owned,
that's also based on an assumption about human nature.
It's based on the belief
that people with money will not be willing to invest that money,
unless they can have complete ownership
and complete say of that company themselves.
Again, a belief about human nature, that we can decide whether we agree with.
I mean, you should be aware that about 100 million people in the world right now
work for companies that are owned by the workers together,
not by a separate owner.
I'm just saying.
Final thing then: competition.
Because in a capitalist economy,
all companies are constantly trying to grow
and they're trying to get bigger and bigger
and get more and more market share and more and more money,
and there's no point at which a capitalist economy has grown enough.
And that is why we see capitalist companies
behaving towards each other in a very aggressive way,
trying to kill each other off.
And that is why almost everywhere you go in this country,
all the high streets look exactly the same.
So, celebrating competition,
that's also based on an assumption about human nature.
It's based on the idea that people are too lazy to do anything very well,
unless there are other people that are fighting against you.
Again, a belief that we can ask ourselves whether we share.
Do we really think it's the case
that comparing ourselves against others and competing against others
is what gets us out of bed in the morning
or what energizes us in life to do difficult things?
So those are other three main distinguishing features of capitalism.
When someone says they're an anti-capitalist,
they generally mean that they're opposed to these three things.
So what kind of economic community then would not be about profit,
would not distinguish between the owners and the workers
and would not be about competition?
Well, there are loads of them, of course, as many as we could imagine.
And some of them we already know from experience:
when we do unpaid housework at home, for example,
or when we share some sweets with a friend without asking for money for it in return,
or when we volunteer for a charity.
And some of the alternatives to capitalism,
some of them notorious ones, like authoritarian socialism, for example,
they're not very nice either.
So I'm not saying everything that is not capitalism
is automatically wonderful and great.
But there are other alternatives.
A much better alternative is the cooperative movement,
and especially the nonprofit cooperative movement,
because co-ops can organize without this division between the owner and the workers
because they're the same people.
In a workers co-op, it's the workers who own the company together.
Or in a consumer co-op, it's the consumers;
or in a cooperative bank, it's the people who hold accounts in the bank;
or in a housing co-op, it's the residents who live there
who own the company together and make decisions.
In the world right now,
there are about a billion people who are members of a co-op of some kind.
And as I said before, about 100 million of those are workers in workers co-ops.
Now, that's quite a lot of people.
And there are many small co-ops, but there are also many really big ones.
There are co-ops with tens of thousands of members,
all making decisions together.
So, there's a belief in the cooperative movement as well.
There's a belief about democratic decision-making,
similar to the belief that most of us already have
when it comes to governmental politics and the state and all that.
Most of us think
that democratic decision-making is better than having an authoritarian dictator.
So, the cooperative movement has the same belief applied to the world of business:
a belief that people are able to make decisions together.
You also get co-ops that are nonprofit.
I used to work for a co-op like that before starting my PhD.
It was a cafe,
and the aim of our business was simply to provide good food and drink,
in a nice environment,
for as low a price as possible.
And if we ever made any extra money, we would just lower our prices.
That cafe is still going and still thriving, by the way.
And in the UK, there are few tens of thousands of companies
that are nonprofit.
I'm not talking about charities, but businesses that are nonprofit.
A more specific number is really difficult to find
because it's difficult to know exactly what a business is
and exactly what profit is,
but a few tens of thousands,
which is not some staggeringly huge number,
but it does speak to the fact that some people,
and not a small number of people,
are already willing to invest their money
into a company that is never going to make them rich.
So, instead of having beliefs about making more money for themselves,
these people, they're interested in something else.
Finally, competition.
Cooperatives can organize together, instead of competing against each other.
They can share money,
they can help new co-ops that are starting up
or they can help old ones that have difficulties -
like if there's a break-in or a fire or something.
Big things and small things.
And there are already several organizations in the UK
that do this today.
The biggest one is called Co-operatives UK,
and there's a nonprofit network, Radical Routes,
and several others as well.
I've been out to interview
some of the people in those organizations for my research
and what they tell me is they're not interested
in being on top of other people, looking down on other people,
but they have a drive to do something together with others.
So, what I'm saying is that we should think of economy,
and capitalist economy,
not as a system or a machine,
but as community.
And there are many other economic communities out there,
and in here,
apart from capitalism.
And what we have to do as citizens,
and as citizens who have the breathing space
to be even thinking about these things,
is we have to choose
which economic communities we really want to be part of;
which economic communities we want to work for,
spend our money in,
invest our savings into;
which economic communities
we really want to dedicate our time on this Earth to.
Thank you.
(Applause)