“Let’s abolish capitalism and replace it with something nicer” ran a famous jokey banner at a London demonstration. The gag reflects the apparent impotence of protestors to change anything very much.
Not many people are speaking up publicly for “business as usual” right now. But business as usual is more or less what we see reported on the evening news and in particular in the financial pages. Some modest and potentially fruitful attempts at reform are mooted. But on the whole inertia rules the day.
Capitalism. Big word. Meaningless to most people, who probably rarely stop to reflect that they are living in a “capitalist system”. (I am reminded of Monsieur Jourdain, Moliere’s “bourgeois gentilhomme”, who is delighted to discover he has been speaking prose all his life – “Par ma foi! Il y a plus de quarante ans que je dis de la prose sans que j’en susse rien…”)
Perhaps this is one of the reasons why the current debate on capitalism has failed to penetrate popular consciousness all that much. All three of the UK’s main party leaders have now made speeches on the topic (here, here and here), with each adopting his own particular angle and tone. But the voters, so far, seem mainly to have shrugged and carried on without being meaningfully engaged.
If politicians and campaigners want to get through to people, they should probably stop talking about “capitalism”. “Business” is a more familiar term, but that is also only part of the story. The point being missed is that we are really talking about a “quality of life” issue here: how we live and work today.
That is where the dissatisfaction and anxiety lie. As Channel Four News’ Faisal Islam showed in this post, supported by Resolution Foundation data, life is simply getting a lot harder for large sections of society. The deal doesn’t seem to work any more. It’s all getting a lot more expensive. Our own prospects are not improving. Our children’s future looks difficult.
And in Europe, where since the war we have grown up with certain fixed assumptions about what we should expect from life, this change in fortunes is proving quite shattering. When the new Italian pensions minister cried at a recent press conference as she explained the changes the government was going to introduce it summed up the shock many people are experiencing.
Don’t wait for “business”, collectively, to change things. But leaders – including business leaders – should be speaking up and reassessing our priorities. How do we want to live? What really matters? What does the word “career” mean in the global era? What sort of future are we building?
We should not be squeamish about discussing our quality of life – or the lack of it. The politician who engages most convincingly in this area will clean up. That, presumably, is a prize worth fighting for.
