Society: Time to Reboot?

So: Capitalism has snapped, and the world - and specifically most Communists - has given up on Communism.

A little melodramatic? Well, at the very least, capitalism’s been shown to be astonishingly vulnerable as a way of doing that thing called society. After all, it wasn’t just a single sector, but merely a small part of one sector, that ripped up many of the world’s economies like out of date cheque books.

And what about the vast and growing inequality we blithely accept is part of how we live? Someone said to me recently, ‘The great myth of Capitalism is that wealth filters down from the top.’ It simply doesn’t, he added, just so that we were in no doubt.

Worse, western democracies should be in firm possession of the moral high ground at the moment, staring down at nascent North African democracies with a collective self-satisfied grin. But of course we’re not at all, because our governments have consistently propped up rank dictators solely to retain access to oil. Too late now to champion democracy in the region: it’s not so much happened without us, as happened in spite of us.

So what about communism? Well, quite apart from the fact that in practice – in the way it chose to treat its people – it was indistinguishable from fascism, we now have the world’s largest Communist nation glutting itself on bling and fat automobiles. So even they aren’t convinced. And who would be convinced by a system so lacking in self-confidence that in practice it typically tries to control how people think, and certainly what they say?

Apologists may say we’ve haven’t properly tried Communism; perhaps their pin-striped equivalents will say the same of Capitalism. But it strikes me we’ve tried both enough to know.

So where’s the new system? More to the point, where are the growers of new systems? Where are the thinkers we need now, now we’ve apparently tried everything else, and failed?

If the question is how to organise ourselves to the best advantage of the maximum number (which is probably as ambitious as it gets, at least to start with; Utopia can follow on later once we’ve got the hang of things), who’s considering this?

Personally, I wouldn’t know where to start, but then again there was probably a bloke in Croydon thinking the same thing just as Adam Smith and Karl Marx got their heads down. But where are today’s Smith and Marx?

And will they learn from the failures of previous systems?

Marx

                                                                Smith

                                                  Bloke from Croydon