Postcapitalism defined

What is the most important thing you need to drive change? – People’s minds of course. Now this blog is unfortunately written by a totally unimportant and uninfluential student, but still: grab people’s attention, and change is possible. To do that, you need a cool word and a headline: postcapitalism.

Postcapitalism is the search for better accounting measures, a balance score card that takes into account the future, not discounts it. It is the study of the social system in a holistic approach that takes into account happiness of people, behavioral and psychological constants of the human species and asks the classical question “how can we meet people’s needs when faced with limited resources” the other way round: how can we use limited resources (the given) with people’s needs (the goal) for the long run? The answer to the first question was classically “by discounting the future – i.e. by borrowing from the future, or, equivalently, transferring costs into the future”. Further, postcapitalism asks: “what do people really need?” – I can hear the outcry – how am I to know? Well, if put slightly different, and with more charisma, this question has had resounding success in Obama’s “Audacity and hope”. Last but not least, I ask: how can policy and the economic setup be used to guide but not determine mass action, how can we achieve a social system that leaves free choices among the (then politically/systemically) preselected paths into the future that are sustainable? – A question I’ve adapted from Richard Thaler of course.

Arguably our biggest problem is how to get the private sector business to identify climate change as a business opportunity and adapt its business models accordingly?. One of the no-brainers here is that business awareness needs to coevolve with consumer awareness, otherwise nothing’s going to change, because nobody is going to buy stuff.

Think of it as a new technology to be introduced: usually you have a few early adopters who pay a lot of money for the latest cool stuff. Only later the full disruptiveness of a new technology becomes apparent once it reaches the critical level where mass market delivery starts. Think of postcapitalism as the mindset that is going to save humanity the fate of the vikings who lived in Greenland: their culture simply contained no paradigms, no ideas, no words for coping with the problems they encountered. They failed.

Here’s the thing: early adopters work at greenpeace (no money) or in silicon valley (far away), but in Germany we don’t have a scene that would identify itself as dedicated supporters of change: students apply for work at Daimler and Bosch – the author included.

What is the most important social change that postcapitalism has to address? The major environmental impact comes from those hyperconsuming one billion at the top of the pyramid as well as those some three billion people at the lower end of the pyramid. And by hyperconsumption, I’m not talking about the ultra-rich, but really about everyone in the western world. Sustainable life will require profound changes in social structure: less rich, less poor, a well rounded belly in the middle of the global middle class. Population growth is a problem? Strengthen women’s rights globally, introduce birth control (yeah, of course it’s not part of western culture, but the Chinese could do it, so could we!). You can’t grow enough food? Stop eating meat more than once a week and the problem dissolves. You’re Japanese? Stop eating so much fish – and get your government to sign treaties that protect oceanic life.

Both groups – the rich and the poor – have little in common. But wait: there was that story about the early adopters and the mass market part? Think of all those Indians who want to buy a Tata car. Combine a Tata car with betterplace.com and you have a mobility revolution on your hands.

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