In a new book, Marjorie Kelly offers a critique of our biased system that perpetuates wealth accumulation for the privileged few and a path to a new economic paradigm.
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Right! I think that is a result, Chris, of a refusal to let go of the current paradigm. Businesspeople in particular who are holders of the ideology are loath to admit that the paradigm is wrong. So what people are saying, as you know, is, we'll fit ecological benefit and social benefit inside the paradigm. We can have these along with maximum financial gains. We can have win-win. And that is denial. Plain and simple.
In the book I liken this to what happened during colonization in the US. The settling of the West involved what was called “Indian removal.” But that language masked the violence and the atrocities that were part of it. Something similar is happening with institutional investments when we just look at the numbers that come in, and those numbers mask the damage being done on behalf of capital.
Then there's the myth of materiality. Material means something that's corporeal, physical. But in the upside down, Alice in Wonderland world of corporate and financial accounting, something is material if it impacts capital, if it shows up in these ethereal numbers, balance sheets and investment portfolios. If you're going to do something that's will harm capital – like the founder of Theranos lying to her investors —well, that's material. She's going to prison for that.
There’s also the myth of the income statement, which tells us that income to capital must always be increased, and income to labor must always be decreased. We need to challenge this relentless extractive process. We will never get there just by building the positives. The ultimate tool that we have is legitimacy. What brought down apartheid? It was that that regime of apartheid lost legitimacy because it was perceived as white supremacist, illegitimately favoring white people over people of color. When we recognize that the capital extraction system is wealth supremacist, I think that loss of legitimacy could bring the system down, and should.
You devote five chapters to system change in Part III. Talk about how we can reform. How can we define and come up with a new paradigm?This is what I've been working on for 30 years, as a journalist and a theorist and a consultant. I've been working for a more democratic economy. That's the phrase that we use at the Democracy Collaborative. You can call it a well-being economy. You can call it inclusive economy. There's the phrase solidarity economy.
I think most entrepreneurs know that. It's when companies are captured by big capital with publicly traded companies or private equity that they turn to maximization. That's the problem, not profit itself. I make the distinction between profit making and profit maximizing.
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