There is, of course, a difference between using markets as a tool to address issues that are amenable to that approach and using capitalism - which as you say can be cruel - which is a particular political system camouflaged as an economic system.
Thanks! I'm not sure I understand your distinction. To me, capitalism is an economic system based on private ownership and profit -- based on markets. Its critics make great points about exploitation and unfairness (and I certainly believe in "mixed" rather than "unfettered" capitalism). But unless you have a capitalist system, I don't see how markets would be powerful enough to be a tool.
I'm going to shrink your "private ownership and profit" to what I see as the essence of capitalism: domination. Neither makes any sense in a culture where the domination of the land and its inhabitants (human and all our relations) is not the goal. That requires a lot of unpacking, and what I can squeeze in here is seriously incomplete. Its just a hint at the answer.
It helps to start with Adam Smith's "invisible hand. There is evidence that Smith was just looking for a metaphor, not to create an enduring component of capitalist mythology (I don't know if his apologists are right or not), but his metaphor was amazinngly timely in its appeal to the emerging imperialists of his era. They could blame what is an essentially supernatural entity (the invisible hand of the market) for actions that could not otherwise be morally justified. "Its the market. I need these slaves to compete."
Before that, the "hand" of the market was visible and governed by at least implicit rules. Garrett Hardin was wrong about the tragedy of the commons (and some other stuff, too). The commons were heavily regulated. You can find part of that story in some of Antonia Malchik's writing about the law of the forest. By the time of the law of forest, that had diminished to regulation by the divine right of the king (what we all love seeing Robin Hood rebel against, but Robin, at least achetypically, was not an outlaw, he was defending a different system, the commons).
Indigenous economies included "markets" (barter a lot, but also "money" that was truly a medium of exchange, and a lot of reciprocal gifting) because people have resources and needs. The obsidian that's on display at the Hopewell Culture site in Ohio didn't get there from Yellowstone without a series of transactions. But the Shoshonean people who took it to the Knife River (maybe, I am mixing in a little fiction here), got who know what for it. Since it was pre-contact probably hominy, dried squash, tobacco, etc.. I don't know what the Anishanaabe folk who took it to, let's say, the portage of the Chicago River, traded to the ancestors of the Mandan, but something they wanted or knew someone else would want. Pipestone? Native copper? There was commerce a long, long time before there was capitalism, and in many places, it covered a lot of ground. But the goal was the satisfaction of needs within a strong cultural framework, not the dominance of other people and the accumulation of wealth. To the extent we know, all those cultures had mechanisms to mitigate the accumulation of wealth and power. I alway quote Devon Pena saying that {in traditional Chicano culture) "we want our neighbor to do as well as we do."
But those mechanisms were gone from elite European society (they still survived in the countryside and had to be wiped out by the enclosures) by the time Columbus sailed (the Vikings and Basques who briefly touched the New World earlier may have warred with the natives, but would have understood a reciprocal economy and my guess is that they traded more than they fought). One could say that the Christian doctrine of individual salvation got it started (though there's history before that) and then Adam Smith, wittingly or not, provided the mythology of the invisble hand, the way to make us all complicit in imperialism (or at the least not liable for our economic decisions).
This will become a book if I don't wind down, but for now I will try to boil it down to the idea that markets are an ancient tool for the satisfaction of human needs that were co-opted by the imperialists/capitalists (you can't separate those ideas, because there is no way capitalism can endure without expanding markets) or as we often say these days, the colonizers.
What remains is to tie this to the motivations of your clients who want to decarbonize their business, and your idea, which I accept as partly true. The dominance of capitalism leaves plenty of open space (its like a swampy river corridor through a city) so far for individuals to respond in positive ways to what they see. Which is to say from my POV, that we collectively are still moral beings who can cooperate. What we can't see m to do is escape the dominance of domination.
To that end, I close with a book recommendation: Dave Hollander's How Basketball Can Save the World. Hollander proposes that basketball offers an empathetic, cooperative paradigm. Is he right? I don't know, but it is worth reading what he has to say.
What is the system for organizing large populations that is not vulnerable to domination? Stalinism and Maoism and monarchy and anarchist collectives and hippie communes and religious communities (e.g., Rajneeshis) have all had problems. There's much Indigenous wisdom in small-scale, tightly knit, nature-adjacent communities, and I'm all for learning and emulating as much as we can. But I sense a lot of misery in the Mayan and Aztec underclasses, which suggests to me that the urge to dominate is a human (rather than capitalist or European or Christian) weakness, and one that's likely to come out the bigger and more organized a society gets. The framers of market economies -- like the framers of the US Constitution -- tried to harness it for society's advantage. In both cases, the results are far from perfect. But one advantage of markets is that they can respond quickly to changing societal values. And that's the situation I think we face today.
I gave the Hollander book to Henry for Christmas and he just gave it back so I could read it. I discovered that he highlighted numerous places. I got started on it this week and am enjoying.
I am not sure we know the system. I do not believe in anything like original sin, but that some people have an urge to dominate seems inarguable. People like George Lakofff attribute that to how they were parented. I think there's truth in that, but its more complex because the context changes how parenting affects folks. I think we can agree that Authoritarian parenting sometimes has contrary results.
The social question is: How do you reward cooperation and suppress the urge for dominance. Indigenous societies did a reasonably good job. Think of the Haudensaunes and Anishanaable myth of the wendigo, think of potlatches, etc. Can you scale it up?
I don't know but I come back to two veins of thought. One comes from John Dewey, John Friedman, Richard Rorty, and others, that we make the goal of society and the motivation for individuals to be learning to cooperate ,more and more effectively. Democracy as a search not for some capital T Truth, but for shared improvement. Idealistic? Yes, but it is what Hollander talks about in this chapter on Cooperation.
And you couple that with the understanding that appropriating our natural heritage for individual benefit is immoral, that John Locke's Enlightenment version of appropriation from nature is not actually enlightened, but was just as helpful to imperialists as the invisible hand when they began to enclose the commons (you have to remember that the European elites had to turn their own countryside into a colony to get capitalism up and running, and they didn't hesitate to use violence to do it).
So then you listen to Henry George, whose approach is really morality, not economics. If you tax away speculative gain, you take away a major avenue to dominance.
Would that work? In theory it does. We have not lost the memory of the commons or how it was managed and the colonizers have to keep suppressing Henry George (I discovered that Mason Gaffney wrote a nearly book length essay on how conventional economists of the Gilded Age actively suppressed Georgist thought). The question is how to get people to see a new possibility.
You're right that markets respond quickly. Do you follow Jess Piper here on Substack? If not, read about her visit to the Trump Store in Branson. MO.
Good for you, John!
There is, of course, a difference between using markets as a tool to address issues that are amenable to that approach and using capitalism - which as you say can be cruel - which is a particular political system camouflaged as an economic system.
Thanks! I'm not sure I understand your distinction. To me, capitalism is an economic system based on private ownership and profit -- based on markets. Its critics make great points about exploitation and unfairness (and I certainly believe in "mixed" rather than "unfettered" capitalism). But unless you have a capitalist system, I don't see how markets would be powerful enough to be a tool.
I'm going to shrink your "private ownership and profit" to what I see as the essence of capitalism: domination. Neither makes any sense in a culture where the domination of the land and its inhabitants (human and all our relations) is not the goal. That requires a lot of unpacking, and what I can squeeze in here is seriously incomplete. Its just a hint at the answer.
It helps to start with Adam Smith's "invisible hand. There is evidence that Smith was just looking for a metaphor, not to create an enduring component of capitalist mythology (I don't know if his apologists are right or not), but his metaphor was amazinngly timely in its appeal to the emerging imperialists of his era. They could blame what is an essentially supernatural entity (the invisible hand of the market) for actions that could not otherwise be morally justified. "Its the market. I need these slaves to compete."
Before that, the "hand" of the market was visible and governed by at least implicit rules. Garrett Hardin was wrong about the tragedy of the commons (and some other stuff, too). The commons were heavily regulated. You can find part of that story in some of Antonia Malchik's writing about the law of the forest. By the time of the law of forest, that had diminished to regulation by the divine right of the king (what we all love seeing Robin Hood rebel against, but Robin, at least achetypically, was not an outlaw, he was defending a different system, the commons).
Indigenous economies included "markets" (barter a lot, but also "money" that was truly a medium of exchange, and a lot of reciprocal gifting) because people have resources and needs. The obsidian that's on display at the Hopewell Culture site in Ohio didn't get there from Yellowstone without a series of transactions. But the Shoshonean people who took it to the Knife River (maybe, I am mixing in a little fiction here), got who know what for it. Since it was pre-contact probably hominy, dried squash, tobacco, etc.. I don't know what the Anishanaabe folk who took it to, let's say, the portage of the Chicago River, traded to the ancestors of the Mandan, but something they wanted or knew someone else would want. Pipestone? Native copper? There was commerce a long, long time before there was capitalism, and in many places, it covered a lot of ground. But the goal was the satisfaction of needs within a strong cultural framework, not the dominance of other people and the accumulation of wealth. To the extent we know, all those cultures had mechanisms to mitigate the accumulation of wealth and power. I alway quote Devon Pena saying that {in traditional Chicano culture) "we want our neighbor to do as well as we do."
But those mechanisms were gone from elite European society (they still survived in the countryside and had to be wiped out by the enclosures) by the time Columbus sailed (the Vikings and Basques who briefly touched the New World earlier may have warred with the natives, but would have understood a reciprocal economy and my guess is that they traded more than they fought). One could say that the Christian doctrine of individual salvation got it started (though there's history before that) and then Adam Smith, wittingly or not, provided the mythology of the invisble hand, the way to make us all complicit in imperialism (or at the least not liable for our economic decisions).
This will become a book if I don't wind down, but for now I will try to boil it down to the idea that markets are an ancient tool for the satisfaction of human needs that were co-opted by the imperialists/capitalists (you can't separate those ideas, because there is no way capitalism can endure without expanding markets) or as we often say these days, the colonizers.
What remains is to tie this to the motivations of your clients who want to decarbonize their business, and your idea, which I accept as partly true. The dominance of capitalism leaves plenty of open space (its like a swampy river corridor through a city) so far for individuals to respond in positive ways to what they see. Which is to say from my POV, that we collectively are still moral beings who can cooperate. What we can't see m to do is escape the dominance of domination.
To that end, I close with a book recommendation: Dave Hollander's How Basketball Can Save the World. Hollander proposes that basketball offers an empathetic, cooperative paradigm. Is he right? I don't know, but it is worth reading what he has to say.
That book sounds right up my alley!
What is the system for organizing large populations that is not vulnerable to domination? Stalinism and Maoism and monarchy and anarchist collectives and hippie communes and religious communities (e.g., Rajneeshis) have all had problems. There's much Indigenous wisdom in small-scale, tightly knit, nature-adjacent communities, and I'm all for learning and emulating as much as we can. But I sense a lot of misery in the Mayan and Aztec underclasses, which suggests to me that the urge to dominate is a human (rather than capitalist or European or Christian) weakness, and one that's likely to come out the bigger and more organized a society gets. The framers of market economies -- like the framers of the US Constitution -- tried to harness it for society's advantage. In both cases, the results are far from perfect. But one advantage of markets is that they can respond quickly to changing societal values. And that's the situation I think we face today.
I gave the Hollander book to Henry for Christmas and he just gave it back so I could read it. I discovered that he highlighted numerous places. I got started on it this week and am enjoying.
I am not sure we know the system. I do not believe in anything like original sin, but that some people have an urge to dominate seems inarguable. People like George Lakofff attribute that to how they were parented. I think there's truth in that, but its more complex because the context changes how parenting affects folks. I think we can agree that Authoritarian parenting sometimes has contrary results.
The social question is: How do you reward cooperation and suppress the urge for dominance. Indigenous societies did a reasonably good job. Think of the Haudensaunes and Anishanaable myth of the wendigo, think of potlatches, etc. Can you scale it up?
I don't know but I come back to two veins of thought. One comes from John Dewey, John Friedman, Richard Rorty, and others, that we make the goal of society and the motivation for individuals to be learning to cooperate ,more and more effectively. Democracy as a search not for some capital T Truth, but for shared improvement. Idealistic? Yes, but it is what Hollander talks about in this chapter on Cooperation.
And you couple that with the understanding that appropriating our natural heritage for individual benefit is immoral, that John Locke's Enlightenment version of appropriation from nature is not actually enlightened, but was just as helpful to imperialists as the invisible hand when they began to enclose the commons (you have to remember that the European elites had to turn their own countryside into a colony to get capitalism up and running, and they didn't hesitate to use violence to do it).
So then you listen to Henry George, whose approach is really morality, not economics. If you tax away speculative gain, you take away a major avenue to dominance.
Would that work? In theory it does. We have not lost the memory of the commons or how it was managed and the colonizers have to keep suppressing Henry George (I discovered that Mason Gaffney wrote a nearly book length essay on how conventional economists of the Gilded Age actively suppressed Georgist thought). The question is how to get people to see a new possibility.
You're right that markets respond quickly. Do you follow Jess Piper here on Substack? If not, read about her visit to the Trump Store in Branson. MO.
A great example of how intellect, passion, and courage can align to make the world a better place