Ideas
Jeff Mowatt

The End of Capitalism ? ... Newsnight on 'responsible capitalism', Prof Eric Hobsbawm (19Jan12)

Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

The End of Capitalism ? 194views 1Like 2CommentsShare on LinkedInShare on FacebookShare on Twitter I read recently that a post capitalist era had begun without us noticing. People-Centered Economic Development (P-CED) began as a concept in 1996 following a paper for the Committee to Reelect the President (US.) That paper examined the need to be prepared for the risk of increased national and global poverty as we enter an information economy sufficiently sophisticated by its nature as to exclude and/or displace an increasing number of workers around the world. The emerging Information Age will provide an unprecedented opportunity for outreach and communication at local community levels by way of the Internet. Given the opportunity to communicate and research global resources, communities will become able to assess their own needs, identify resources to meet those needs, and procure those resources. In that sense, the information economy can work to the advantage of impoverished people in a way never before possible. 'We are at the very beginning of a new type of society and civilization, the Information Age. Historically, this is only the third distinct age of civilization. We lived in an agricultural age for thousands of years, which gave way to the Industrial Revolution and Industrial Age during the last three hundred years. The Industrial Age is now giving way to the Information Revolution, which is giving rise to the Information Age. Understanding this, it is appropriate to be concerned with the impact this transition is having and will continue to have on the lives of all of us. In that it is a fundamental predicate of 'people-centered' economic development that no person is disposable, it follows that close attention be paid to those in the waning Industrial Age who are not equipped and prepared to take active and productive roles in an Information Age. Many, in fact, are scared, angry, and deeply resentful that they are being left out, ignored, effectively disenfranchised, discarded, thrown away as human flotsam in the name of human and social progress. We have only to ask ourselves individually whether or not this is the sort of progress we want, where we accept consciously and intentionally that human progress allows for disposing of other human beings.' The influences included 'Post Capitalist Society' by Peter Drucker and 'Powershift : knowledge, wealth, and violence at the edge of the 21st century; by Alvin Toffler. 'As Alvin Toffler predicted in Power Shift, where once violence and then wealth were dominant forms of power, information is now becoming the dominant power. Those nations with the greatest freedom of information and means of transmitting it have now become the most powerful and influential, and the strongest economically. Toffler also predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union would come about due primarily to its authoritarian control and limiting of information. Unfortunately for Russian citizens, this old habit has continued for them beyond the collapse of the former Soviet Union and will at the least make an interesting case study on the survivability of a once strong nation which still remains committed to limiting and controlling information.' 'By going with the normal flow of free-market enterprise and the emerging replacement of monetary capital with intellectual capital as the dominant form of basic enterprise capitalization, it becomes easier to set up new companies primarily on the basis of invested intellectual capital. (See Post-Capitalist Society, by Peter Drucker). In plain English, socially responsible and forward-thinking companies can be set up quickly and cheaply--and these companies have indefinite potential for earnings and localized, targeted economic development. The initial objective is to develop model enterprises and communities, then implement successful strategies from those models into surrounding communities regionwide or nationwide, as needed.' The paper described a business model which put the needs of community before the interests of shareholders, using profit to deliver a social outcome.

http://www.p-ced.com/1/about/history

The core argument critiqued the creation of money by banks, concluding

'Economics, and indeed human civilization, can only be measured and calibrated in terms of human beings. Everything in economics has to be adjusted for people, first, and abandoning the illusory numerical analyses that inevitably put numbers ahead of people, capitalism ahead of democracy, and degradation ahead of compassion.'

The model was introduced to the UK in 2004 from where it was deployed in Ukraine to deliver a 'Marshall Plan' proposal with the primary focus of placing children in loving family homes.

Today in the Vatican, there's a conversation which is very much people-centered

Here's the late Eric Hobspawn with a similar message about humans becoming a surplus element of production:

Newsnight on 'responsible capitalism', Prof Eric Hobsbawm (19Jan12)