Money, money everywhere and not a drop to drink

Water, wealth uncreation and turning the means of life into financial assets

The scandal of Thames Water – £14 billion in debt and seemingly incapable of fixing leaks or avoiding untreated sewage being pumped into rivers – says so much about our allegedly democratic political system.

The Conservatives, naturally, want renationalisation – should it become unavoidable – to be a strictly temporary stop-gap before, as with insolvent banks after the 2008 crisis, water is returned to the good hands of the private sector.

But the other team, Labour, are also against permanent nationalisation. In fact, together with the water industry, they are racking their brains to come up with plausible alternatives to it.

Such an absurd situation, at a time when large pluralities of voters, including Conservative ones, want the water ‘industry’ to be taken back into public hands, is perhaps more understandable in the light of the last New Labour government’s intimate ties to the water companies.

Ruth Kelly, for example, former cabinet minister under both Blair and Brown, is head of Water UK, the trade association for the water companies and naturally regards nationalisation as anathema. Angela Smith, former Labour MP and one of the founders of (Don’t) Change UK, vehemently opposed Labour’s previous policy, under Corbyn, of renationalising water. She was quietly readmitted to the Labour party last year. Ian Pearson, former New Labour environment minister is a non-exec director of Thames Water, the UK’s biggest water company, which also employed the ex-Labour cabinet minister and one time Trotskyist, Gus Macdonald, as its  European advisor between 2006 and 2016.

Such an elite consensus is symptomatic of the British oligarchy which masquerades, less and less convincingly with every month that goes by, as a model democracy. The Conservatives are obviously in favour of the continuation of privately-run water – it was Thatcher who privatised it in 1989. But the opposition Labour party is so well ensconced in the (fraying) order of things, that it is just as ideologically opposed to a change in the status quo. Notwithstanding obvious errors like the Brexit referendum, which released so many exorcised ghosts from the closet, British ‘democracy’ is about persuading the public to acquiesce in a state of affairs they dislike more and more as time passes.

But if the water ‘industry’ illustrates the hollowness of democratic decision-making, it also exposes something fundamentally rotten in the way we approach our economy as a whole. The water companies are, it has been reported, collectively in debt to the tune of £65 billion, up from nothing when they were privatised. “The staggering combined debt pile built up by the UK’s 12 water companies means that huge swathes of cash are being spent on interest payments,” fumed the Daily Mail a few weeks’ ago, “money that could be spent cleaning up polluted rivers or fixing leaky pipes.”

But no-one seems to ask why they are in debt. It can’t have been to fund infrastructure investment as the sewage-tainted rivers and seas and unplugged leaks wouldn’t exist if the infrastructure was properly maintained, let alone upgraded. The real reason is both more prosaic and depressing. Deliberately placing companies in debt, in order to extract money from them, is a core part of the strategy of their immensely wealthy owners.

The technical term for this is a ‘leveraged buyout’. The idea goes back to the 1960s but really only took off in the 1980s and ’90s. One American writer on “asset-manager capitalism” describes it thus:

[Traders realized] they could buy a company with borrowed money, using the company’s assets as collateral for the loan. They then transferred the debt to the company, which in effect had to pay for its own hijacking, and eventually sold it for a tidy profit.

The root of Thames Water’s debt affliction stems from the time it was bought by Australian asset manager Macquarie in exactly such a leveraged buyout in 2006. According to Money Week magazine, “by the time it was sold again in 2017 its debt had ballooned from £3.4bn to £10.8bn”.

Incidentally, Macquarie’s interest in the UK’s Water ‘industry’ has not abated. In 2021 it completed a “debt investment” in Anglian Water and acquired a majority stake in Southern Water.

According to American economist Michael Hudson, asset managers and ‘activist shareholders’ now look upon companies generally as “cash cows”. Rather than “plowing [sic] profits back into the corporation to expand the business by new long-term investment, research and development,” he argues, “the company is urged to pay out its earnings as dividends and buy back its stock to bid up its price.”

Share buybacks, illegal until the Thatcher and Reagan eras, have become routine for corporations. Among UK water companies, the owners of South West Water and Yorkshire Water have both initiated share buybacks. The effect of a firm buying back some of its own shares is to reduce their overall number, thus increasing the earnings per share that shareholders receive. However, there is a cost. The money used could have been deployed to invest in the business or, in the case of water companies, modernise infrastructure or reduce bills. According to one critique, “By systematically draining capital from America’s public companies, the habit … corrupts the underpinnings of corporate capitalism itself.”

Politicians aside, many British people are outraged that these predatory capitalist practices are being used to degrade a vital public service such as water provision, without which life would be unbearably hard. But the uncomfortable fact is that such predatory practices are degrading capitalism as well.

The peril of damaging the delicate flower of ‘wealth creation’ is invariably raised whenever the idea of public ownership or more regulation or taxation is mooted. Sir Keir of Starmer-land, leader of something called ‘the Labour party’, says that ‘wealth creation’ and economic growth must happen first if money is to become available for public services.  But today’s financial managers, in the water industry or elsewhere, aren’t doing anything to create wealth. Instead, by stopping infrastructure or capital investment from occurring, they’re destroying it – to no-one’s benefit but their own.

And this is before the fact that they invariably avoid paying any tax on their ‘wealth creating’ activities is brought into the equation. Because water firms – and many other companies – are drowning in debt, they pay very little tax on their “special dividend payments”. Thames Water, for example, admits it doesn’t currently pay any corporation tax “because of the Government’s Capital Allowances scheme and the impact of our interest costs”.

We have been lulled into accepting the fiction that wealth creation is synonymous with rich people doing whatever it takes to become even richer – that a high share price is a sign of economic vigour  – when, in reality, their labyrinthine money-making schemes can be its utter antithesis.

Arguments contesting the duplicitous concept of wealth creation have generally taken the form of arguing that other people – workers, entrepreneurs or consumers – are doing the real work of creating wealth. The owners, by contrast, do very little, apart from becoming legally entitled to receive it after it has been generated. This is what Marxists call (surplus) value. But even one takes the highly dubious wealth creation ruse at purely face value, it involves the creation of jobs and products or services by someone. How are we to react if, in fact, no value is being created, besides the ‘wealth effect’, the translation of capital gains made in the stock market into luxury consumption?

At this point someone will be sure to pipe up about pension funds. They loom large among the investors in water companies (and electricity firms), either as clients of the private equity investment firms that own them, or as partners in consortia that run water companies directly. For example, the Universities Superannuation Scheme (for academics in the UK) and the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System both own large stakes in Thames Water.

But pension funds are as desperate for ‘yield’ as anyone else, in order to pay for the pensions of current and future retirees. They illustrate the absurd quid pro quo we have got ourselves into – that we must accept sewage being pumped into rivers and seas, and bills that keep rising while tax is avoided, in order to ensure barely adequate occupational pensions for thousands of ordinary people.

This is not a choice we should be forced to make. As should be obvious since the financial crisis, the stock market is not, despite superficial appearances and the best efforts of governments through ‘quantitative easing’, an eternally bountiful cash cow – either for money managers or pension funds. The old pension system in the UK – a better basic pension and an occupational (SERPS) scheme – both based on the pay-as-you-go principle offered more stability than endlessly trying to squeeze as much as possible from unwilling companies or privatised utilities that neglect their primary functions in favour of making money.

Still there is something archetypal about water. Along with energy, health services, ports, nursing homes, waste management, car parks, telecommunications etc., it is a real asset with a guaranteed cash flow that makes it irresistibly attractive to asset managers. This is, according to one author, “a society in which the key physical systems supporting social life and its reproduction—so-called ‘real assets’—are increasingly owned by institutional investors [pension funds, insurance companies, university endowments] specifically through the mediation of dedicated asset managers [the plunderers] and their investment funds.”

However, it seems peculiarly odious that water, so basic to the preservation of life, is treated in this manner. One of the first things acts of a Corbyn-led Labour government would have been to renationalise water, while his successor is brainstorming ways to head off the threat of that common sense option being taken. Nothing else illustrates quite so starkly which side they are on.

 

Addendum: Last week ITV broadcast a programme called 'Dirty Water – what went wrong', an investigation into why there were more than 300,000 sewage spills in England & Wales last year. But the programme shied away from the real reason things have gone horribly wrong – privatisation. Specifically a system in which asset managers buy water companies by placing them in debt and then get them to pay for the privilege of being bought out – in the process sacrificing the basic function they are supposed to have, which is to ensure clean water. The programme suggested that bills would have to rise to pay for the investment in infrastructure that will have to take place to avoid the mass contamination of water in the future. But bills have already increased by 40% in real terms since privatisation, with the result of sewage being pumped into rivers & seas across the country. So where has all the money gone?  You don't need me to tell you.

The experience of England is not unique. In the book Our Lives in their Portfolios, author Brett Christophers relates how private equity companies have acquired water systems across cities in America with the result that bills have skyrocketed while the systems themselves have been left in a terrible state. In England & Wales all but three of the water companies in England & Wales have been removed from the stock market by private equity firms.

The incidents are not exceptions, says Christophers. "Rather, they are the more or less inevitable upshot of core features of the model by which asset-managers society operates. They are, in short, a feature not a bug".

I look forward to a TV programme about that.

What about the workers? Jeremy Corbyn and the private sector

Here's a disturbing fact. In May’s UK General Election, if only workers in the private sector had been allowed to vote, the Conservatives wouldn’t have just scraped a majority, they would have absolutely romped home. Labour got a paltry 26% of the vote (and the Tories 43%). How is this possible for a party that was created, at the start of the last century, as a party of private sector workers? And will the Blairite nemesis, Jeremy Corbyn, be able do anything about it?

To understand Labour’s steady diminution on this issue and the fact people manage to maintain a straight face when the Conservatives now present themselves as a ‘workers’ party’, you have to look at history and the Labour party’s gradual surrender to the forces of corporate Britain and the inexorable decline of organised labour.

A brief of history of Labour and work

When Labour was formed in 1900 it was as a political party representing the interests of trade unions - with a socialist wing attached. Given that Britain at the time was a resolutely industrial society, trade unions could justifiably claim to represent something approaching a majority of society. The socialist wing of the Labour Party became dominant with the adoption of the party’s Clause 4 constitution committing it to ‘common ownership’ in 1918. The fact that the Labour party was officially socialist did not mean that it was about to institute socialism. In the late 1920s and early ‘30s when it finally got it hands on power of some sort, Labour was spectacularly conservative, supporting austerity and welfare cuts. But there was nevertheless an assumption that the current autocratic organisation of private sector work (there wasn’t a public sector to speak of at the time) was living on borrowed time.

It was only after the Second World War, when Labour was elected with a massive majority, its so-called ‘High Noon’, that the party could make the kind of society it desired a reality and change the character of work in the private sector. Writing in 1947 the American political scientist, Robert Dahl, said there were two contradictory schools of economic thought about which way Labour should go: “one advocating central control of the economy in the hands of the state, and the other advocating workers’ control, where “workers will no longer be merely passive victims of the productive process, but direct participants in the control of productive enterprises”. The Labour government decisively choose the first option: industry was controlled by civil servants and appointed managers. Ownership may have changed but the new organisation merely mimicked the old, autocratic form of private sector organisation. In archive footage from the film, The Spirit of ’45, one miner laments that the ‘same tyrants’ remained in charge after nationalisation.

Though few realised it at the time, the roots of the Labour party’s alienation from private sector workers were laid here. But for a long time Labour’s model of nationalisation held sway. For 30 years the economy was resolutely mixed; even the travel agent Thomas Cook was in state hands. The interests of workers were thought to be sufficiently represented by strong trade unions, either in the now much larger public sector or the private sector.

This changed utterly with the arrival of Margaret Thatcher. The power of trade unions was destroyed and state industries privatised. In retrospect, talk of a property-owning democracy now feels like a transparent fraud, but Thatcher drove a tank through the mixed economy, post-war consensus - helped enormously by fact that the City of London, media magnates and other owners of private sector capital backed her the hilt.

The reaction of Labour was first to resist this new dispensation, then reluctantly accept some of it (Labour under Neil Kinnock was still in favour of some ‘social ownership), then to wholeheartedly embrace it all under Tony Blair. The Labour Left, of which Jeremy Corbyn was a part, merely defended the old approach from these multiple onslaughts.

New Labour and ‘the big end of town’

Tony Blair’s genius in winning elections was entirely the product of convincing the City of London and media moguls like Murdoch and Richard Desmond that New Labour wouldn’t interfere with their power. Originally interested in Will Hutton’s stakeholder democracy idea for the running of companies, Labour backed down the moment they discovered ‘the big end of town’ didn’t like it. The result was that New Labour’s view of the private sector – a part of the economy employing about two-thirds of society – was entirely determined by the desires and interests of those who owned those companies. Yes, the Labour government made it slightly easier to get trade union recognition, but, in a complete reversal of what the Labour party was originally about, the assumption became entrenched that the interests of the owners of companies and those that worked for them were identical. Both wanted ‘success’ and, in practice, what that entailed was left to the owners to define. To even whisper about nationalisation, or, heaven forbid, workers’ control, was to immediately place yourself beyond the pale.

When Ed Miliband lost May’s general election, the idea instantly sprang up amongst the Blairites that a primary reason was that he was anti-business. Yvette ‘Work Capability Assessment’ Cooper recalled going to a CBI conference after the election and being confronted by a businesswoman who told her, ‘You pushed me away. I felt like you did not want my vote. My staff felt the same.’” Note the location and the trademark assumption that that interests of owners of capital and employees were indistinguishable, although only the owner gets to articulate them. Added to this was the specious and, politically dumb, assumption that wealth creation was a gift generously bestowed by the owners of businesses and entrepreneurs.

But though the Labour Left may not have liked these associations or conclusions, it had very little to say about the private sector. This was, now that the trade unions in the private sector had been decimated, decisively ‘enemy territory’. The public sector, however, palpably needed defending, first from the import of private sector techniques under New Labour, and then from austerity. This turn inwards was disastrous. The envy that has underpinned hostility towards benefit claimants stems in part from a perception that private sector workers feel abandoned by an official Left that doesn’t seem remotely interested in them, or their problems. With the desertion of the Left, the private sector is perceived as an homogeneous mass, not the locus of conflicting interests, desires and outright coercion that it is.

All the new thinking about how private sector businesses should be organised has come from outside the Labour party. American economist, Richard Wolff, is trying to forge a social movement in favour of worker self-directed enterprises. In the UK, the authors of the influential book, The Spirit Level, Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson (who have backed Corbyn), advocate the development of workplace democracy, along the lines of the famous Mondragon group of cooperatives, throughout the economy.

The major stumbling block, sturdily erected by New Labour, is that it would be suicidal to focus on anything but the success of private sector companies, for the sake of workers as much as anybody. But the obsession with conflating success with the interests of owners, though deregulation and tax cuts, has led to its complete opposite – an endless financial crisis and insipid economic growth.

Beyond neo-syndicalism

However, before advocating that a Corbyn-led Labour party embraces a neo-syndicalism, it is necessary to remind ourselves that the nature of work has dramatically changed in the last 40 years. In the 1970s, it could be said that workers were still essential to the way production was carried out, and to ignore them was to invite disaster. Workers’ control was possible and, in some places, implicitly happened. Forty years later, the UK is largely a de-industrialised country and workers live with the ever-present threat of abandonment. If they are not necessary to produce profit, they won’t be used. Around 15% of UK workers are now self-employed anyway. Moreover, whereas manual labour was a source of pride and identity, today work is often characterised by just going through the motions to get a wage. According to a 2013 US Gallop survey, seven out of ten workers are ‘actively disengaged’ from their jobs. In Britain, 37 per cent of employees think their jobs are meaningless. Democracy at work won’t alter the fact that many people want to get away from their jobs, to many they are a necessary evil.

This is where an unconditional basic income could come in. A basic income could enable activities unrelated to work but vital for a flourishing society – such child-rearing, caring or artistic pursuits, but also facilitate small-scale economic activity that could breathe life into areas that the conventional corporate economy has left behind. The formation of thousands of cooperatives, social enterprises and other small businesses would become possible if they did not have to maximise profit. Both as an economic strategy and a way for the Labour Left to escape from its public sector ghetto, a basic income could be invaluable.

Re-post: What is wealth creation?

The idea of celebrating ‘wealth creators’ is a constant background hum in our culture. But the noise has been turned up a notch with the UK Labour party’s election defeat and the consequent explanation that the party was too hostile to creators of wealth and entrepreneurs and didn’t understand their motivations (the condensed version is make Richard Branson feel loved)

So I thought it would be a good time to re-post an article about wealth creation from 2012, which was, specifically, a review of David Schweickart’s book, After Capitalism.

In a nutshell, our societies are intent on confusing those who create wealth with those who merely receive it. The point about capitalists, as opposed to entrepreneurs, is that they have an entirely passive role. However, if you make the leap that wealth is created by a combination of labour, ideas (entrepreneurs if you like, another form of labour), backed by investment, private or public, that doesn’t exhaust the problem. Because some economists feel that demand for private capital investment is in terminal decline; that big, capital-intense, labour employing projects don’t generate sufficient returns anymore, so capital is now funnelled in making money from rent (the ownership of assets) or finance. Nothing is created and there is immense potential, as 2008 showed, to destroy wealth in other parts of the economy …

What exactly is capitalism? That might appear a strange question to ask, fifty-plus posts into a blog about, erm, capitalism. But if you’ll forgive the tardiness, this is an inquiry that needs to be pressed.

While capitalism is a noun that attracts adjectives in abundance (crony capitalism, free-market capitalism, and now the oxymoronic humane capitalism), the noun itself remains largely uninterrogated, an unexamined presence. Everyone is supposed to understand what capitalism is – it’s all around them after all – but it’s remarkable that something so taken for granted is seldom defined. I’m convinced that many people who define themselves as anti-capitalist have only an intuitive sense of what they are against.

Perhaps you can be too close up to something to fully grasp it. Maybe you don’t really know the people you’re closest to.

David Schweickart is an American mathematician and philosopher who published a book in 2002 called After Capitalism. Aside from elucidating an alternative to capitalism, he attempted to define it and describe its consequences. After Capitalism isn’t a howl of outrage against “the system” but a rational effort to go beyond TINA (‘there is no alternative’)

Reviewing Schweickart’s book is therefore a good way to look at capitalism in the cold light of day: To examine what it is (which may be very different from how it is commonly perceived) to look at its faults, to say what’s good about it and what the alternatives to it are. There is, I believe, an unconscious and very prevalent fear, that interfering too deeply in the workings of the mysterious capitalist machine will lead either to the government controlling everything, with lethal consequences for freedom, or, alternatively, plunge us into a technological dark age and anarchistic chaos. Refusing to be awed or intimidated by what is, after all, an economic system that humanity has rejected for the vast majority of its history is a path to confronting those fears. The review will be in three parts.

Here is Schweickart speaking (with others):

Say cheese! The C-word in focus

Schweickart gives a three part definition of capitalism. Firstly, he says, the bulk of the means of production (offices, factories that produce goods and services) must be privately owned, either by corporations or individuals. This was traditionally called by the Left ‘private property’ which is unfortunate, Schweickart says, because it implies that homes, cars and toothbrushes will all be confiscated and “communalised” in any revolutionary change (think of John Lennon’s Imagine). These things were, to someone like Karl Marx, not ‘private property’ but ‘personal property’ and would not be seized by anyone.

Secondly, products are exchanged in a market. “Individual enterprises compete with one another in providing goods and services to consumers, each enterprise trying to make a profit,” says Schweickart. “This competition is the primary determinant of prices.” The state owning all enterprises and deciding that to produce by means of a plan, as in the old Soviet Union, is not capitalism. Neither is it capitalism when the local community owns most of the economy, as with social ecology.

But, says Schweickart, it is an “ideological distortion” to use “market economy” as a synonym for capitalism. They are not the same thing. Enterprises within a market economy can be organised differently. They can be controlled by their workforce. This is significant because, when it comes to imagining a “post-capitalist economy”, Schweickart says it will be populated by worker-controlled firms operating in a “decentralized market economy,” a system he calls “economic democracy”. This is contentious on several levels and I will critically examine Schweickart’s proposals in Part Three.

Lastly, he says, capitalism, to be capitalism, has to be based on wage labour. This means that most people, of working age, have to rent themselves out to others, who own the “means of production”, in order to gain the resources to survive and consume. “It is a crucial characteristic of the institution of wage labour that the goods or services produced do not belong to the workers who produce them,” says Schweickart, “but to those who supply the workers with the means of production.”

It is this reliance on wage labour, says Schweickart, that gives capitalism its susceptibility to crisis, its downturns and booms. Economic health, under capitalism, is based on what Keynes called “effective demand”: the purchasing power of the millions of wage labourers. But this demand is formed from wages or salaries, the consequence of what is negotiated from employers for whom wages are just another cost. If that happens, private investors can lose confidence and companies do not spend the profits they have amassed.

This, says Schweikart, is one of the “central contradictions” of capitalism. An in-built conflict, you might say. “Wages are both a cost of production and an essential source of effective demand,” says. “Capitalist firms are always interested in cutting costs, expanding markets and developing new products. But to the extent that the first of these goals, namely cost cutting, grows in importance relative to the other two, effective consumer demand will tend to be depressed – and hence also those “animal spirits” of investors. This can mean a stagnating economy and rising unemployment, perhaps on a global scale.”

So, if most assets are privately owned, economic exchange takes place in a market, and most people are wage labourers, a society is capitalist.

But, within these parameters there are different kinds of capitalism. The twentieth century had quite a varied palette of capitalisms. Post-war Japan and later, South Korea, were examples of one version where the state directed investment to certain favoured parts of the economy and had a bias towards exports (a type of capitalism the economist Ha-Joon Chang is enamoured by). After the Second World War, Western Europe and the US had for many years a form of managed capitalism, based on collective bargaining and the state ownership of some parts of the economy. West Germany went in less for state ownership and instead practiced ‘co-determination’ – workers were elected to company boards. After 1980, this changed, especially in the US and Britain, in that trade unions were “zapped” and much of what the state did was privatised.

This has morphed into a strange economic constellation where the rich and corporations are subsidised by the taxpayer while the rest of the population is subject to the discipline of free enterprise.

Perhaps this is just an extreme manifestation of a state of affairs that was there all along. “I watched with incredulity as businessmen ran to the government in every crisis, whining for handouts or protection from the very competition that has made this system productive,” wrote one William Sutton, Treasury secretary under US President Richard Nixon in the 1970s.

The point is that real-world capitalism can, and invariably does, radically depart from the textbook “free market” model, but it’s still capitalism.

Love me, I’m a wealth creator

We can see from this definition there is one conspicuous absentee – the “entrepreneur”. In conventional justifications of capitalism, the entrepreneur looms very large indeed, especially during economically tough times. In fact, in conventional explanations, the entrepreneur is capitalism. In the UK, Conservative business minister, Michael Fallon, says we should salute entrepreneurs as “Olympic Champions” who deserve adulation for creating wealth and jobs.

But conservatives are not alone in celebrating the entrepreneur. The left-wing economist Stewart Lansley, author of The Cost of Inequality, differentiates between the deserving and undeserving rich. One of his favourite examples is the industrial designer, James Dyson, who merits his wealth, says Lansley, in contrast to someone like Philip Green who makes money from taking over existing businesses. Dyson creates wealth, says Lansley, but Green merely transfers it to himself.

But Schweickart says both these understandings are ideological distortions. He does not deny that entrepreneurs exist or they merit a reward for their contribution, although frequently they merely copy what has gone before (new coffee shop anyone?) Any society needs people who invent new products or technologies. But what Schweickart does deny is that entrepreneurs are capitalists.

From Marx, Schweickart gets the insight that all wealth derives from labour. “As any economist will confirm,” he says, “unless labour costs are less than the value added by labour, there will be no profit.” So entrepreneurs create something and ethically are entitled to a reward. Workers literally produce goods and services. Managers supervise production. They all contribute something.

But what do capitalists do? The answer, says Schweickart, is very little. They have an entirely passive role. They watch their wealth compound by virtue of the fact that they have quite a lot in the first place. “In a capitalist society, enormous sums are paid to people who do not engage in any entrepreneurial activity or take any significant risk with their capital,” he writes.

As an example consider the National Express Group, which operates buses and trains in the UK. The major shareholders in, and therefore owners of, National Express are the Cosmen family, a Spanish family who “first entered the transport industry, in a horse-and-carriage operation, in 1728”, a hedge fund called Elliot Partners who very persistently pursue very high returns for the immensely rich people who invest in the hedge fund and an investment company called M&G. None of these investors are entrepreneurs.

We are now in the ideological belly of the beast. An entire economic system is justified by virtue of its vital role in creating wealth when it is primarily about the receiving of wealth by a small minority that other people create.

To be a capitalist, says Schweickart, you must own enough productive assets to be able to live comfortably on the income they generate. In the US, he says, and he wrote this in 2002, this comprises about one per cent of the population. Sound familiar?

The investment game

So why does putting money in the capitalist investment game, in normal times, yield results? Why do stock markets, bond markets, investment banks and currency markets produce positive returns? Most pensions are invested on the stock market and charitable foundations derive their income for grants from endowments in shares. “One gets something for nothing because someone else gets nothing for something,” explains Schweickart. “Investment income, the reward to those who have “risked” their money by channeling into financial institutions … is possible only because those who produce the goods and services of society are paid less than their productive contribution. If capitalist distribution were really in accord with the principle of contribution (as is often claimed), the investor would get nothing.”

Two things follow from this. One is that share dividends are, in Schweickart’s words, “a tax on enterprise” and should be abolished and replaced with a capital assets tax. The second is that the real problem is not the stupendous consumption of the very rich but what they do with the money they don’t consume, the money they invest. Control of investment should pass from the capitalist class to society as a whole. He calls it “social control of investment”. I will look at this in detail in part 3.

In the next part, I will examine Schweickart’s take on how far the problems of society, such as environmental degradation, a hollow democracy and poverty, can be laid at capitalism’s door. But I also want to look at the appeal of capitalism and why people are so scared of moving beyond it.

“Most workers, especially those in rich countries, have far more to lose now than just their chains.”