Capitalism

Definition, thesis: cost of capitalism too high

Capitalism needs continuing growth in production and therefore consumption to sustain itself. The
benefits that have accrued in the way of technology and improved standards of living are obvious
and palpable in the rich West. Howerver, the cost is proving too great, especially in damage to the
environment, crippling third-world debt, untenable disparities between rich and poor, and the
destructive effect upon communities of turning people into commodities and social relations into
market transactions.

Examples: human and environmental costs of capitalism

One could eaily quote figures on environmental damage, poverty, waste and third-world
exploitation. Facts about the horrendous loss of rain forest acreage each year, about South Asian
children stitching together, for a few pence a day, the footballs our own children play with, about
famines caused in third-world countries because subsistence agriculture has been replaced by
export crops, are all too familiar. Such considerations forcibly bring home the injustice and
instability of the world economic order, and oblige us to ask not whether but how it should be
changed.

Call for action: human cantered economics

There truly is much to deplore in its effects on the natural and social world and its rank injustice.
They are right to say that something must be done.

To achieve social justice, we need an economics that puts human interests at the centre. Such an
economics would embody principles affirming environmental and cultural protection, economic
justice for individuals and peoples, and regulation of the activities of multinational corporations.

Difficulties in call for actions

Many theories of sustainable, and therefore more restrained and balanced, economic activity have
been offered, but none are likely to be adopted while the current order reaps such rewards for some
and holds out such attractions for many. Any change sufficient to reverse the runaway trends of the
contemporary order would require massive changes in attitudes and practices, so it is hard to see
how it would happen unless some global catastrophe forced it on us.