The Elephant And The Flea by Charles Handy

Author:Charles Handy [Handy, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2008-09-03T14:00:00+00:00

6

THE VARIETIES OF CAPITALISM

I USED TO think that capitalism was a dirty word. That was until I found myself earning my living as part of its system. Most of us don’t think of ourselves as capitalists, but if we are living and working almost anywhere in the world today we have implicitly accepted its underlying set of beliefs. As I look forward to the future I cannot ignore the possible consequences of what has become the real religion of the Western world, and increasingly of the East as well.

Francis Fukuyama, the American social historian, once said that every society would eventually end up with a combination of liberal democracy and free market capitalism. He called this The End Of History. His book was not a triumphalist thesis – he wasn’t all that excited by what would emerge at the end of the day. Democratic governments, for one thing, would always want to try and give the people what they wanted in order to be re-elected, even if it was not what was best for their long-term interests. He described the inhabitants of future societies as akin to dogs lying on their backs in the sun waiting to be tickled. Focus group politics we would call it today.

I do not share Fukuyama’s sense of historical inevitability about either democracy or capitalism. The danger is that the flaws in the capitalist system may be its undoing, leaving us with something much worse. I used to worry that democracy would destroy capitalism, because of the inequalities that capitalism seems to produce, returning us to a dirigiste socialism or a dictatorship of the poor, but now I worry that capitalism may make political democracy redundant, as people find that the market gives them more power than a vote. In twenty years’ time we should know which way it is going. My hope is that we can do something about the flaws in capitalism before then, although I am not optimistic.

My views on capitalism have been largely shaped by my experiences of three very different places – Singapore, America and Kerala in India – as well, of course, of Britain and Europe. Capitalism, I became aware, is not the same around the world. One question is whether the differences will remain or whether one brand of capitalism, the American one, will become so powerful that it will overwhelm the rest. If so, will it enrich the poor of the world or impoverish them even further? May it, perhaps, overwhelm us as individuals, distorting our values and priorities, or is it, as some would believe, the only path to freedom? Are liberty and equality ever reconcilable, or do we need the intervening fraternity – that French trinity of virtues that society still finds so elusive? I have lived and worked in a variety of capitalist cultures all my life but still have no clear answers to these crucial questions, yet if we do not find an answer the whole world of both elephants and fleas may come tumbling down.

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