Sunday 18th January

It started with individual merchants, but somewhere around five hundred years ago the idea grew of individual wealthy people investing in successful merchants.  This was around the same time that debt really began to be established as an industry too, so it was suddenly possible to borrow a large sum of money and invest it in someone else’s labour and make a lot more money.  For a while that worked and European countries economies really grew; what was less understood that this was on the backs of slavery and stealing raw materials from the colonies.  The worst company indulging in this practice was The East India Company, which ran roughshod over the rights of poor indigenous people everywhere, and which no British Government dared question.  Then came America and the idea that with all this land (which was unfortunately occupied by Native Americans, but never mind) every American could live and prosper….well that idea didn’t last long.  Capitalism soon took hold there and became even more ruthless.  Now we have Russia, China and India where the extremes of Capitalism make our homegrown companies appear almost Socialist.

The trouble with Capitalism is that it is built on Greed, but Greed that has no limits, and is expected to have none and is presumed to make more and more profit year on year.  And this is achieved either by swallowing up smaller enterprises or by being even more ruthless in extracting raw materials and turning them into things we didn’t know we wanted, or seeking a cheaper workforce to do the donkey work.  And now we have Globalisation, where corporations are so big and spread over so many countries that Governments dare not offend them or even pass laws which may attempt to curtail their worst excesses.  We see the rolling back of “red tape”, the successive cutting of Corporation Tax, the hidden incentives for them to invest becoming the major objectives of Ministers, not the well being of their workers or indeed our own consumers.   And so democracy goes out of the window, these behemoths are completely undemocratic, being run by small teams of ridiculously highly paid individuals whose only motive is to enrich both themselves and their shareholders and Governments which  dare not object to them poisoning us (with sugar and chemicals in our food or through pollution) or blasting shale gas from under our feet or paying us lower and lower real wages.

I used to think that Capitalism would eat itself; that it would Roboticise and do without workers at all and that soon there would be no-one to buy their products.   But we are a long way from that and Capitalism keeps finding more ways to suck even more out of the planet and its hungry populations.  The gap between rich (and believe me, we here in the West are still moderately rich) and the poor is growing daily and something has got to give at some point.  I am just not sure what and when will break this evil cycle of Greed.