1 - What is civil economy?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 August 2023
Summary
[A]t a severe crisis, when lives in multitudes and wealth in masses are at stake, the political economists are helpless – practically mute: no demonstrable solution of the difficulty can be given by them, such as may convince or calm the opposing parties.
– John Ruskin, Unto This Last, 1860We need to begin anew to criticize the capitalism we have created in the past three decades, a period that coincides with the era of globalization and common goods. The beginning of the 1980s marked the close of an energetic time of reflection on economic and political systems. The late 1970s ended (primarily in Europe) an era of just under three centuries characterized by the Industrial Revolution, and an era characterized by schools of thought critical of this new form of production and life, which has been called “capitalism” since Karl Marx’s time. With globalization and the collapse of state socialism, the economy as it manifests itself in present history became a fact of nature, the deep structure of which was no longer discussed. That is not to say that there are no contemporary economists, politicians, or philosophers who criticize our form of capitalism – one need only consider Amartya Sen, Muhammad Yunus or Serge Latouche – but these criticisms as a whole have not yet produced a different narrative of our time. Important innovations have been proposed in both theory and practice, but without either individually or collectively having the strength of thought to narrate a non-capitalist market economy. Sen’s capabilities, Yunus’s social business, Joseph Stiglitz’s and Thomas Piketty’s criticisms of inequality, Vandava Shiva’s “earth-centred economy” and Latouche’s degrowth all differ among themselves, but even if we were able to systematically arrange them in such a way as to make them coherently coexist (not an easy task), we still would not have created an alternative market economy to the current form of capitalism. In truth, we would have to say that we are far from it. We are like the baby in its mother’s womb, so immersed in the liquid that nourishes it that it cannot think that a world beyond might exist; to become aware of the existence of another larger, more marvellous world it must first leave the world that nurtures and sustains it.
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- Civil EconomyAnother Idea of the Market, pp. 3 - 18Publisher: Agenda PublishingPrint publication year: 2016