Capitalism has not failed

 No matter what Extinction Rebellion or even the Pope may say, capitalism has not failed. It has brought human civilisation to its current high pitch of development. It has been and continues to be a driving force through virtually all civilisations since man discovered the benefits of the exchange of commodities. It even flourished underground in supposedly socialist states.

What has failed is civil society (in the end, us as voters) in curbing its excesses and regulating it. The warnings of Adam Smith have not been heeded, that the state was in danger of capture by merchant elites.

According to an article by Paul Sagar on Aeon's web pages,

The context of Smith’s intervention in The Wealth of Nations was what he called ‘the mercantile system’. By this Smith meant the network of monopolies that characterised the economic affairs of early modern Europe. Under such arrangements, private companies lobbied governments for the right to operate exclusive trade routes, or to be the only importers or exporters of goods, while closed guilds controlled the flow of products and employment within domestic markets. As a result, Smith argued, ordinary people were forced to accept inflated prices for shoddy goods, and their employment was at the mercy of cabals of bosses. Smith saw this as a monstrous affront to liberty, and a pernicious restriction on the capacity of each nation to increase its collective wealth. Yet the mercantile system benefited the merchant elites, who had worked hard to keep it in place. Smith pulled no punches in his assessment of the bosses as working against the interests of the public. As he put it in The Wealth of Nations: ‘People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.’

Up until the cementing of universal suffrage in democracies in the twentieth century, the barons of industry needed to lobby powerful chief ministers and appointed officials. They now have to buy representatives to achieve their aims or, in the latest twist, buy votes via social media.

Their aim was and is to concentrate capital in the hands of as few people as possible, to the detriment of common humanity. In this they are almost as inimical to the power of market capitalism as the most totalitarian socialist state. 

We need genuinely to "drain the swamp" - not of public servants of integrity, but of placemen and lobby groups which have embedded themselves in the government machine. We need transparency and fairness of elections overseen by a genuinely impartial Electoral Commission with genuine power of enforcement. That should produce governments prepared to lead in the public interest.