A hungry planet is an angry planet: Has capitalism failed?

In truth, winning the US presidential election and then the Senate ultimately depended on a tactical decision of grassroots activists to concentrate on mobilising disaffected would-be non-voters to vote out Trump. If Biden’s presidency is to mark a new beginning for democracy it needs to start with introspection and a new path away from an unregulated system of economy and state-surrender to the markets that has deepened misery for billions and imperilled our planet.

If we don’t grasp this nettle now an even bleaker future lies ahead.

To encourage us it’s worth recalling how, in 1989, lifelong communist Joe Slovo put on his big-girl underpants and wrote a reflection on socialism that required a deep and difficult introspection. The article, Has Socialism Failed?, was published in 1990. Five years later, just before his death on 6 January 1995, he told journalist Philip van Niekerk: “I was wrong and I am ashamed of some of the traps I was led into.”

In the context of Slovo’s ruminations, there was still an “iron curtain” across the world but the so-called socialist states faced an economic crisis and a revolt that could no longer be denied, denounced as counter-revolutionary or parried away with excuses.

In the late 1970s, strikes that shook the Lenin shipyards in Gdańsk in Poland, led by an independent trade union movement, Solidarity, and future Polish leader Lech Wałęsa had led to workers winning the right to strike. That propelled a great unravelling that culminated in the collapse of the USSR – much as the legalisation of black trade unions after the 1973 Durban strikes and the Wiehahn Commission contributed to apartheid’s demise.

For decades, Slovo and the SACP had tried to maintain that this was a counter-revolutionary movement, but events ripped the mask off this lie.

In China, the Communist Party massacred students on Tiananmen Square. In Berlin, citizens pulled down the wall. Across Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union there were rebellions. The mood of the time, and the crisis of belief it caused among socialists, are well captured in a poem by Linton Kwesi Johnson, Mi Revalueshanary fren, which after recounting the collapse of various East European dictatorships presciently foretold that apartheid too “will ‘av to go”.

It did. In 1994.

But in the capitals of the West the collapse of undemocratic socialism (Stalinism) was read as the triumph of its opposite, free-market capitalism. It was a victory that added rocket fuel to the likes of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and US President Ronald Reagan who, infected with the ideas of neoliberal capitalism developed by economists such as Milton Friedman and the Chicago school, already considered themselves on a historic mission to usher in a new era of capitalism.

In the great contest between isms, it seemed as if the one based on private ownership and the diktat of the market had won. Most famously, Francis Fukuyama declared it “the end of history”.

 Fast forward = Fast backward

Fast forward 30-plus years and things look very different.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union capitalism has been without a rival competitor. It has had a 30-year free ride and chance to prove itself to its discontents. Yet economic and social crisis is once more the order of the day. Britain is in its worst recession yet. The US has become a showcase for inequality and the anger that marginalisation based on race and/or class breeds. Europe is flailing.

Aided and abetted by Covid-19, there is rebellion and disintegration across the world.

Bringing it home, even before Covid-19 South Africa’s economy was at an impasse – distorted, unequal, unable to create jobs, exclusionary. In the early 1990s, remember how billboards proclaimed “Free enterprise is Working!”

It’s hard to believe that now.

South Africa prides itself on robust dialogue. After all, what would have happened if bogeymen like Slovo and comrades, seeing the writing on the wall, hadn’t opened their doors to discussion with big business? And yet in South Africa we look in vain for a business leader of stature or an advocate of free-market capitalism with the gravitas of Slovo to now look their own deep-held convictions in the eye and start a genuine debate by asking: Has capitalism failed?

All things being equal, it would have required someone like Friedman – “the twentieth century’s most prominent advocate of free markets” – to ask this question. But since he is no longer with us it ought to be undertaken by one of his disciples. Next week the great and bad will gather in Davos again, but while the agenda will contain much hand wringing about the crisis of inequality, it’s unlikely that any leaders from business will question the rogue operating system, or suggest measures needed to align economic outcomes with values of dignity and human rights.

In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, although we seem to avoid the C-word, only flat-earthers (there are many) should dispute that the capitalist economic system, and the governments that depend on it for taxes, employment creation and innovation, are in crisis.

Our economies are in tatters and there is little certainty about how, when and even if we will exit this crisis. However, much as Covid-19 has exacerbated this crisis and laid bare class inequalities that have been widening over the past 30 years, it was a tinderbox before a virus came along to light the fuse.

As historian Adam Tooze points out, quoting Larry Summers, at the heart of the world economy is a “balance of financial terror”.

In South Africa, the evidence is before us in the unemployed men and women on every street corner. Despite hollow promises about economic recovery plans there is no reason to believe that anyone in business or government has fathomed a way out. Instead, politicians continue to repeat discredited mantras about debt and the “bloated public service” – digging us deeper into our holes.

I am raising these issues not for purposes of agitation, but because these questions need to move to centre stage and because economic accountability is as important as political accountability. It’s de rigueur to focus on the corruption of the political elites, but when is the same favour going to be extended to the economic elites?

 A hungry planet is an angry planet

If you want an empirical analysis of the state of human civilisation aka 2021, the July 2020 final report of Philip Alston, reflecting on his tenure as United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, is a good place to find shocking facts to digest:

• “700 million people are living on under $1.90 a day”;


• “Between 1990 and 2015, the number of people living under the World Bank’s poverty line in sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East rose by 140 million”;


• “Between 1980 and 2016 the top 1% captured 27% of total real income growth, and in 2017 captured 82% of new wealth”;


• “According to the World bank, the Covid-19 pandemic will erase all poverty-alleviation progress over the past three years, and will push 176 million people into poverty at the $3.20 poverty line”;


• In 2015, multinationals shifted an estimated 40% of their profits to tax havens and global corporate tax rates have fallen from an average of 40.38% in 1980 to 24.18% in 2019.

• “Heal the divisions of the past and establish a society based on democratic values, social justice and fundamental human rights;


• “Lay the foundations for a democratic and open society in which government is based on the will of the people and every citizen is equally protected by law;


• “Improve the quality of life of all citizens and free the potential of each person.”