Revisiting Some Building Blocks of Contemporary Capitalism that Center Selfishness

Abstract

Once the insight is reached that the economic principles on which capitalism is based are by no means laws of nature, but rather mainly the result of value choices that have been made as of the fifteenth to sixteenth century (cf. Chap. 1), a logical step is to subject some of the building blocks of the prevailing, capitalist socio-economic order to an ethical examination.

2.1 General

2.1.1 Historical Perspective

Once the insight is reached that the economic principles on which capitalism is based are by no means laws of nature, but rather mainly the result of value choices that have been made as of the fifteenth to sixteenth century (cf. Chap. 1), a logical step is to subject some of the building blocks of the prevailing, capitalist socio-economic order to an ethical examination.

This, at the very least, gives rise to a great deal of wonder about the many pitfalls into which humanity seems to have fallen in working out the prevailing, capitalist socio-economic order, even raising the question how still to get out of this swamp constructed by the human mind.

Earlier we raised the idea that human nature, including human conscience, is constantly faced with choices between acting selfishly or acting altruistically.¹ This applies both at an individual level and at the level of collective action, in other words, at the level of the ordering of society, including its socio-economic dimension.

Historians have pointed out that this dichotomy in human nature began to play a particular role in the transition from nomadic societies to sedentary societies, perhaps not coincidentally also the period in which the disciplines of religion and philosophy emerged and began to consider related ethical issues.²

Indeed, within prehistoric, nomadic (tribal) societies, economic processes were (presumably) quite simple. These economic processes—especially food gathering through hunting, fishing, and picking fruits and crops that nature had to offer, in addition to providing elementary forms of shelter—were aimed in main order at fulfilling everyone’s elementary life needs and did not yet exhibit the complex character of the economies that emerged once human societies evolved into more sedentary societal models.

With the advent of the latter, also came the ingredients that started to complicate things greatly, including: (1) agriculture, including the problem of crop preservation; (2) the emergence of cities; (3) the intensification of (barter) trade—including the emergence of indirect barter, relying on the use of money; (4) the need for the construction of roads; (5) the need for (written) records concerning commercial transactions (e.g., to keep track of the associated agreements); (6) the need for more administration; (7) the emergence of (elementary) legal systems; (8) the need for systems of policing; (9) taxation; (10) a breeding ground for more and more specialization, and so on—in short, the ingredients of what have gradually come to constitute modern societies.³

In this approach, the caesura brought about by the industrial revolution at the end of the eighteenth, or the beginning of the nineteenth century may have been more of a technological nature than caused by fundamental, soci(et)al innovations. On the contrary, it seems that the processes of soci(et)al organization have rather been characterized by a gradual evolution, whose early starting point is located in the period when our distant ancestors began to abandon their nomadic lifestyle in favor of more sedentary models of living together.

A further consequence of this turnaround has been that, with the (then) new sedentary lifestyle, the desire for property accumulation also begun to make its appearance.

One can easily imagine that (extreme) accumulation of property, in itinerant tribes, encountered a variety of practical obstacles, if only the fact that, especially in moneyless societies, a lot of property is not convenient when one has to constantly move from one area to another (with, presumably, the main exception being herds of cattle).

This also explains why in the fledgling, nomadic societies, socio-economic organization could still proceed quite easily and remained devoid of the numerous shortcomings that characterize contemporary societies.

With this gradual abandonment of the nomadic lifestyle, the foundation for the development of numerous socio-economic ordering processes was laid that were to a growing extent situated in the realm of the aforementioned freedom of choice between egoism and altruism.

Perhaps no socio-economic ordering process has been more affected by this reality than the use of money itself.⁴ Indeed, the use of money (and everything else that it has enabled) seems to have lent itself pre-eminently to selfish (value) choices, which helps explain why already in Classical Antiquity prominent philosophers and religious leaders warned against its possible disastrous consequences. (Cf. already the observations in Sect. 1.2, as well as those in Sect. 2.2.2 hereafter.)

However, this has also been the case for various other organizational methods of capitalist societies that began to crystallize from the late fifteenth century onward—including the method of hiring other people’s labor against a remuneration in money and the rediscovery of the corporate contract as a method of shaping the newly emerging enterprises—where it seems that all these methods were aligned, to an ever-increasing degree, with a value choice for ever more selfishness and greed in socio-economic relations.

2.1.2 Further Research Methodology

In the following Sects. 2.2–2.7 some of the main socio-economic ordering methods will be (re)examined more closely in their ethical dimension, with one of the central research questions being how and why they have lent themselves to increasingly selfish and greedy behavior.

This investigation will successively address the following central building blocks of capitalism:⁵

• 1. The credit system and banking model prevalent since the late Middle Ages.

• 2. The capitalist enterprise and employment models.

• 3. The so-called (free) market principle.

• 4. Intellectual rights.

• 5. Inheritance law.

2.2 Credit and Banking as Methods of Wealth Accumulation

2.2.1 Problem Statement

It remains one of the most bizarre—and perhaps even disturbing—phenomena how attached humanity remains to the prevailing money creation and banking system.

This is all the more surprising given that the creation of this current money creation system—and by extension the monetary system based on it—has been due more to a historical confluence of random circumstances, and above all to a great deal of ‘trial’ and even more ‘error’, than that it has been the result of a well-thought-out concept in which sufficient attention would have been paid to the interests at stake.⁶

This implies, put another way, that humanity is saddled with a monetary system that, rather than being logically conceived, came about organically—through trial and error.

Equally perplexing is the extent to which the prevailing monetary system is inherently unjust and that most of humanity seems to ask few questions about it, notwithstanding the fact that the collectivity of humanity must suffer the many consequences of this inherently unjust system on a (literally) daily basis.

2.2.2 Philosophers of Classical Antiquity

As already mentioned, in a more distant past, the use of money still did cause some ethical debate.

For example, Plato warned, in a generic sense, of the possible negative consequences of the use of money and of an economy based on such use of money. His warning was that as money-based barter would gain importance, there would be a division in society between an elite group of wealthy people who would take control and the rest of the population who would matter all the less as they held less wealth.⁷

One can hardly get rid of the impression that this model of society, still held up by Plato as a future picture of doom, has now, worldwide, become a reality.

In a similar vein, Aristotle paid attention to the problem of credit, which he grafted onto a simple but, in our opinion, still entirely convincing idea of justice.⁸ In particular, in Aristotle’s approach, an injustice occurs when one person has (or obtains) more of what is good and/or experiences less of what is bad, at the cost of another person having less of what is good and/or experiences more of what is bad.

Applied to the question of money, any economic system is unjust if it leads to a greater accumulation of money (hence, of wealth) for some and to a lesser allocation of money (or wealth) to others, or to a greater degree of poverty for others. And it is precisely in this regard that capitalism bears witness to the most extreme degrees of injustice, a statement which we shall explain further throughout this book. (Cf. in particular Sect. 3.3.)

Already early in the history of philosophy this insight led to the realization that (the classical form of) credit (then still based on pre-existing savings) was ethically dubious, since the mere fact that someone has been able to save (more) money and is therefore able to extend credit to someone who has not been able to save money, but faces a need for which credit should be taken, demonstrates an inherent injustice.⁹

It is even more striking that, in later times, precisely this credit mechanism—be it no longer in main order based on pre-existing savings, but on new money creation by the private banking system (cf. Sect. 2.2.5)—has become one of the most central methods of money creation, and by extension one of the main building blocks of capitalist societies.

For Aristotle, this injustice should not be further accumulated through credit against interest, which explains why Aristotle sided against charging interest. The main arguments goes that it would be unjust that one who is fortunate (both in the literal, and figurative sense of the word) could continue to enrich himself at the unfortunate’s expense.

Partly based on this Aristotelian doctrine,¹⁰ for a long period in history various philosophical and religious currents opposed the idea of interest-reimbursed credit (where, on the other hand, since the era of capitalism, this practice has become considered evident, more so, has come to constitute one of the main building blocks of the capitalist order).

2.2.3 The Gospel of Jesus Christ

In the gospel(s) of Jesus Christ, an approach that opposed (mechanisms of) money-gathering was pushed even further.

Christ’s teachings call for a radical attitude of altruism in which the rich within society must, simply put, be willing to share their fortunes with the poor, rather than using these as a method of acquiring even more wealth.

This attitude was not just about the prohibition of interest levying—which, in terms of soci(et)al impact, was at the time still rather limited—but, on the contrary, implied a call for the redistribution of wealth, by which, to the extent that this call would have been consistently followed (which, of course—and regretfully—has not been the case), the distinctions between rich and poor would, gradually, have disappeared altogether.

The radical nature of this message is such that it is preferably discarded by modern, so-called Christians, and, in any case, hardly ever lived up to, except by a few of the ethical purity of say, a St. Francis of Assisi who himself saw no other way than a literal application of this gospel message and therefore gave away his riches and opted for a life of (evangelical) poverty).¹¹

We shall return to this theme in this book, when we shall test certain of the characteristics of capitalism against the ethical thought of Jesus Christ.

2.2.4 Evolution in the Middle Ages

In the remainder of Church history, one may observe that the radical message of Jesus Christ was reduced to the Church’s own promulgation of the (Aristotelian) prohibition of interest levying, which for ±a millennium, would remain a (more or less) official Church teaching.¹²

Based on the teachings of Christ, various church fathers and saints also continued to call for a temperate lifestyle afterward, though there have undoubtedly been at least as many church ministers who (have) lived the opposite lifestyle.

In any case, one of the consequences of this ecclesiastical teaching has been that, during the first half of the Middle Ages, no banking system was established in the Western world, although there were several professions that engaged in money trading, such as money changers and goldsmiths.

From the late Middle Ages, however, credit gradually started to be viewed differently as a valid source of wealth gathering, especially then in commercial practice where more and more methods were developed to circumvent the still prevailing ecclesiastical interest prohibition. This evolution was itself accompanied by the gradual emergence of a (pre)banking class.

When credit became detached from savings and grafted onto the issuance of newly created paper money, the fences came completely down. Such lending, based on the issuance of (private) paper money created out of thin air by the emerging private bankers—which itself relied on ever-decreasing reserves of cash in precious metals—was increasingly assumed to yield interest.

This immediately also set the tenor of the late pre-capitalist economies, in which not only credit based on (pre-existing) savings, but also credit based on newly created paper money—in other words, on private money creation itself—could provide a valid source of income, and therefore of wealth, for certain private market players.

Anyone who still doubts the importance of this historical shift in the ethical view of credit (and the accumulation of wealth that credit at interest made possible) is invited to delve into the history of the banking family of the House of Fugger, a German banking family¹³ which in the sixteenth century very quickly became the richest family in the world and whose accumulation of wealth relied, to an ever-increasing extent, on credit at interest.¹⁴ The wealth of this lineage at that time came close to the wealth of modern figures such as Jeff Bezos (the founder of the Amazon empire) and Elon Musk (the founder of the Tesla empire), with the same ethical reflections applying as to what special things these people are doing, or have been doing, to deserve such an extreme accumulation of wealth in a world where so many others suffer poverty.

Whatever the case, in the context of the above-mentioned evolutions, a new ethic came into force whereby it was gradually accepted that the fledgling banking houses could grant credit at a rate of interest that was considered justifiable in relation to the commercial risk taken.¹⁵

All this, moreover, was increasingly validated by new currents in religion and philosophy, which in turn produced a major caesura in the way wealth-gathering was perceived in these newly arising schools of thought. In (certain currents within) Protestantism, especially Calvinism, even the message started to emerge that wealth-gathering was evidence of Christian diligence (with then, around the corner, lurking the opposing view that poverty was a punishment from God).

As we shall discuss further (cf. Sect. 7.1.1.2.6), this excusal of wealth accumulation, in turn, provided a great boost to capitalism and its values. How this could still be reconciled with the gospel’s message of the poverty of Christ Himself, however, remains an unresolved and perhaps unsolvable mystery to this day.

2.2.5 Lending in Capitalism

In (certain currents of) eighteenth-century rationalism, the condoning of the economic processes that bring great wealth to some and great misery to others was rationalized even further.

Leading the way was undoubtedly the Scottish moral philosopher Adam Smith, whose writings¹⁶ have been crucial in justifying the practices that would eventually culminate in (industrial) capitalism, including the capitalist monetary and financial system still in force today itself. In addition, this author co-founded economic science as an independent discipline (whereas before in history, the study of socio-economic processes, to the extent that it took place at all, had rather been the subject of other scientific disciplines, such as philosophy, theology, and law).

The in this manner newly developing economic system of capitalism came to rely on an increasingly central role of money creation.

As early as 1962, Erich Fromm wrote the following:¹⁷

The need for money is therefore the real need created by the modern economy, and the only need which it creates. The quantity of money becomes increasingly its only important quality. Just as it reduces every entity to its abstraction, so it reduces itself in its own development to a quantitative entity. Excess and immoderation become its true standard. This is shown subjectively, partly in the fact that the expansion of production and of needs becomes an ingenious and always calculating subservience to inhuman, depraved, unnatural, and imaginary appetites.

Indeed, in the centuries that followed, private credit would ever more grow in importance, even to the extent that today’s economy may be rightly characterized as a credit economy (in which credit—and, by extension, the banking apparatus’ conceived systems of repackaging the resulting claims positions—has become one of the central sources of wealth accumulation for the ruling economic classes).

For the operation of the monetary system itself, this implied that private bankers began to partake in money creation (where, previously, money creation based on coinage in precious metals had, as a rule, remained in the hands of (local) authorities). With this, credit by the banking sector gradually became one of the main engines of the capitalist economy.

A further consequence of this evolution has been that, particularly among economists and policy makers, there is scarcely any awareness that credit implies leverage. The latter finds its explanation in the fact that every credit obliges the borrower to have, at the agreed times, sufficient money at his disposal to repay the credit.

For anyone other than states (and certain other public entities),¹⁸ this implies a need to engage in (economic) activities from which a sufficient income may be generated that should enable the borrower to repay the credit (as a rule, enhanced with the agreed upon interest payments)—or, alternatively, to have access to new credit to repay previously drawn credit, which, of course, shifts the challenge of repayment even further into the future than initially agreed upon.¹⁹

In other words, from (the end of) sixteenth century onward, credit (relying on private money creation) evolved into the whip that drives the capitalist economy, which also helps explain capitalism’s focus on economic growth. Indeed, since credit must be repaid (and, under the dictates of capitalism, enterprises in addition must make as much profit as possible), this system started requiring the production of ever more (types of) goods and services that guarantee smooth sales from which an income may be derived that, at the very least, suffices for repaying said credit.

Dutch economist Ad Broere has aptly expressed the problematic nature of the prevailing money creation system as follows.

After three to four centuries of having this money creation system, some 90% of all money and property is now in the hands of the richest 1% of the world.²⁰

According to Broere, this evolution of ever-increasing wealth accumulation in hands of a small minority of the people started in the seventeenth century, amongst others because of the then developing private money creation system. For Broere, this began with the first bankers: these lent self-created money to kings and the nobility, with labor performing people as collateral. The latter was because labor performing people were, increasingly, subjected to the levying of taxes that then flowed back to the bankers as repayment of the loans of the kings and nobility. According to Broere, this is, to a large extent, still the case today. The wealth bankers accumulated over time was then invested in ships, railroads, gold, oil, and diamonds. As a result, a small group of rich people gained an enormous grip on the world economy. This, moreover, all happened behind the scenes: no one can prove how rich people that gathered their fortunes through banking and money creation activities—and later in history through the various financial investment techniques that were based om them—really are. Still according to Broere, during the twentieth century, this group of people started to exercise influence on politics and economics, through large institutions such as the World Bank, the UN, and the EU, which are all extremely heavily influenced by the lobby of these rich people.²¹

As a result, the current financial system is unfavorable for most humanity. Broere gives the following example: “Suppose you want to buy a house. For this, you need money. If you do not have money, you have to borrow it and pay it off with interest. The joke is that the money you borrow at the time you sign your contract does not exist! If you take out a three-ton mortgage, that amount is entered into the computer at minus. The bank then has a claim on you, so the bank has that money in the plus and the house is collateral until you pay it off. You work your ass off for years to give value to money – what wasn’t there and wasn’t worth anything to begin with. Banks create money out of nothing and they earn from the interest rates of those created loans.”²² (Own translation.)

Simply put, the ever since prevailing capitalist models of money creation, by definition, have as a result that the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer.²³

The fact that the entire global economy has been based on this capitalist money creation system also helps explain why capitalism is a system of production for the sake of production, but also of consumption for the sake of consumption.

As a result, instead of devoting itself to the development of a just economic system that ensures that every human being on earth may lead a dignified existence, capitalism evolved into a system that is highly dedicated to the production of all kinds of (in many cases intrinsically useless) goods, in addition to all kinds of (in even more cases, also useless) services, which do not contribute to guaranteeing a dignified existence for everyone, but rather to wealth accumulation for the benefit of the few, besides to the satisfaction of all kinds of artificially created needs of the upper echelons of the world’s population.²⁴

2.2.6 The Rationality of the Prevailing Money Creation Model, Relying on Private Credit, Persistently Questioned

In the previous Sect. 2.2.5, it has been demonstrated that, introduced from the late Middle Ages onwards—and still in force today—the prevailing capitalist private money creation model has helped set in motion an evolution towards an economic system that requires ever more economic growth and, in addition, became increasingly geared towards pointless economic production and consumption.

A calculation of what part of the capitalist economy is at present devoted to the production and marketing of goods that do not correspond to the intention of ensuring a decent existence to every human being, but rather to the intention of selling intrinsically useless goods and services (especially to the richer strata of the world’s population)—and thus, in other words, how many raw materials and manpower are wasted on such intrinsically useless production and service—does not appear to be available (nor does it seem that mainstream economists bother to establish such calculations).²⁵

Indeed, anyone who even dared to raise these issues during past decades risked being met with a tirade from the established (neoliberal) establishment, as under the dictates of economic neoliberalism, any call for a more planned economy has become utterly taboo and, on the contrary, more than ever, the dictate prevails that this kind of issues should be left, exclusively, to the play of the free market itself, on which anyone should be free to develop any economic activity, however much it is aimed at production and services that are intrinsically of no use—and in some cases even harmful—and where one does, moreover, not want to perceive that the depletion of resources and the use of man power that this requires, at the very least from an ethical point of view, would be much better used for the construction of a just society based on a fair distribution of the wealth that can be extracted from the Earth’s resources through human labor.

In all this, the continuing role of the private banking system should in no way be underestimated, since in capitalism it is here that decisions are made on who gets access to newly created money and for what reasons.

Consequently, in today’s societies, the game of economics can, to a large extent, be traced back to decisions on whether or not to grant credit that are taken daily in the boardrooms (or directorate organs) of private, commercial banks, whereby it can only be noted that the many (quasi-cyclical) crises that periodically characterize this type of credit economy have so far failed to bring about any tempering in this regard. On the contrary, it seems that after each crisis of the financial system, things get worse, which most probably finds its explanation in the fact that such (financial) crises are mostly fought by resorting to the methods that cause them.

For example, it may be observed that the major systemic crises of the past decades—particularly the severe financial crisis of 2007–2008 and the COVID-19 crisis of 2020–2021—have mainly led to even more credit/money creation, besides to the enhancement of mechanisms that further frame such credit (such as, for example, in recent times, ‘quantitative easing’).

It even seems that credit, other than to private individuals, is no longer granted with an expectation that it will be effectively repaid, but rather relies on a model of refinancing, whereby previous credit is repaid on the basis of new credit. The fact that the credit base—and thus the amount of money brought into circulation—continues to expand in this manner seems to worry few classical economists and neoliberal policymakers.²⁶

The incongruity of all this especially concerns the extent to which ordinary citizens suffer under this capitalist money creation model. For example, because states must finance their interest burden from taxes (and/or from new borrowing),²⁷ which helps explain the high tax burden on members of the low and middle classes, in addition to the extent to which, in neoliberal societies, everyone must stay at work as long as possible in life.²⁸

The question can even be raised whether the long maintenance of low interest rates in the period following the severe financial crisis of 2007–2008 may not also be explained by this.

Indeed, in the financial model of ever-increasing credit sums granted to states and large enterprises, their “survival at all cost” has become more important than the repayment of loans, whereby the large size of the credit positions both allowed and necessitated that the interest rates imposed had to be kept low.

The flip side of the coin has been that during the past decade and a half, saving became a rather pointless activity for ordinary citizens, as under neoliberal monetary policies, savings hardly yielded any interest. This helped completing the neoliberal hostage drama, to the extent that, unlike in a slightly more distant past, no sufficient income could still be generated from regular savings which would have allowed ordinary people to withdraw early from the labor market.

In 2022, there has been a certain reversal in this situation, with various central banks having been forced, under pressure from rising inflation (caused by increases in the prices of energy and food, among other things), to raise central interest rates again (with the side effect that what remained of savings on the part of the lower classes after decades of neoliberal policies could start to yield interest again). (Cf. infra, in Sect. 3.3.2.5.)

More generally, today’s societies, all over the world, have been affected by an increasing financialization, a feature of contemporary capitalism that implies that all soci(et)al interaction has come to rely on the payment of money²⁹ and where much of the involved movement of money relies on continuous credit, ensuring that this system has to be perpetuated.

This has created a society in which virtually nothing is free and virtually everything can—and must—be bought with money. Even spontaneous forms of solidarity—one can think of the natural solidarity that used to characterize family relationships in the distant past, or forms of cohabitation in (village or other) communities—can hardly be considered possible in modern-day capitalist societies.³⁰

In parts of the world, at least for parts of the population, such socio-economic order has brought many luxuries, but fundamentally this model has failed in the construction of a basic just world in which every human being has a reasonable chance of building a dignified existence.

All of this is far from ethically neutral, rather the contrary, which we shall explore in more detail throughout this book.

2.3 The Capitalist Enterprise and Its Labor Relations

2.3.1 The Inherent Class Struggle Created by Capitalism

2.3.1.1 Background

Setting aside the capitalist models of money creation for a moment, we find that entrepreneurial and labor relations within (neoliberal) capitalist societies also fall victim to selfishness and greed.

Already economic liberalism assumed a dichotomy of humanity between entrepreneurs and (mere) laborers. As classical economic liberalism, and later the modern variant of economic neoliberalism, gained an ever-increasing soci(et)al impact, this dichotomy has become increasingly accentuated.

On the one hand, there are the entrepreneurs, proclaimed the great heroes of capitalist societies.

In accordance with the liberal and neoliberal belief systems, it is to these entrepreneurs that society owes all its progress. This explains why as much as possible is allowed to and as little as possible is put in the way of these entrepreneurs, a view that has gradually been translated into the legal fabric of capitalist societies, with as important ingredients: (1) The basic axiom of the (unbridled) pursuit of profit, which is reflected in company/corporate law, (2) The tax leniency enjoyed by entrepreneurs in their various capacities—be it as CEO or major shareholder of a company/corporation that constitutes the traditional, legal vehicle through which businesses are conducted,³¹ (3) The emergence of intellectual rights that largely serve to monopolize production and commercialization processes for the benefit of entrepreneurs (and, in most cases, to the detriment of the average person), in addition to, (4) All manner of techniques of deregulation and liberalization that have plagued the world over the past half century, often with dire consequences.

On the other hand, there is the average human being, especially those who are not entrepreneurs themselves, but forced to make their labor available to the class of entrepreneurs in exchange of a fixed (financial) fee.³²

Under liberal and neoliberal thinking—bearing in mind the already before quoted historical prediction of Plato (cf. Sects. 1.2.3 and 2.2.2)—such an average man who merely puts his labor at the disposal of society is considered a second-class citizen. Since such a person does not ‘undertake’ himself, he is by definition considered lazy, whereby care must be taken to ensure that this laziness does not degenerate too much, a mindset that helps explain the attack that neoliberal doctrine has launched against the building blocks of the welfare states over the past half century, and which, in addition, has been as decisive for shaping socio-economic relations in general.³³

Finally, there is also the government and the people it employs, which under liberal and neoliberal thinking are also considered highly suspect. Systems of mutual solidarity, such as, for example, systems of public service and of social security, are perceived by adherents of economic neoliberal thought as a hindrance to free enterprise. The underlying reasoning being that, if societies owe their progress (purely) to the business sector, governments are money-grubbing machines that produce or accomplish little of use. Certainly when, at least according to this viewpoint, countries are often misled by ideologies that advocate a more equitable distribution of economic prosperity than that which arises under capitalism.

This mindset explains why under economic neoliberalism, governments must be reduced/demolished: on the one hand, the money-consuming systems of mutual solidarity must be ended as much as possible. On the other hand, the only tolerated task of governments is to facilitate the free market itself. And these two aspirations aptly capture what neoliberal thinking expects from governments and why, during the past four to five decades, neoliberal governments all over the world have assisted in enhancing the inherent capitalist division of societies in a class of entrepreneurs and a class of laborers. (Cf. Sects. 1.4 and 1.5.)

2.3.1.2 The Two Main Classes of Capitalism: Entrepreneurs vs. Laborers

In all of this, it must be kept in mind that, since the early rise of capitalism, inherently labor relations within capitalist economies have come to reflect a fundamental conflict of interests.

Indeed, the entrepreneur—or, in this approach, the ‘hirer’ or ‘user’ of someone else’s labor—aims to hire this labor as cheaply as possible. Since whoever makes his labor available to such an entrepreneur does so himself in order to obtain an income by it to provide for his own essential³⁴ and other necessities of life, such a ‘lessor of labor’ has an interest in receiving himself as reasonable an income as possible.

It is this inherent dichotomy—or in more legal terms: conflict of interests—that determines the outlook of capitalist economies and, by extension, societies, in which liberal and neoliberal schools of thought have invariably and consistently sided with the interests of the class of entrepreneurs.³⁵

This coalesces with a model under which any capitalist enterprise’s main—if not only—raison d’être is to make as much profit (ultimately, for the benefit of its capital providers) as possible, which in turn further translates into methods to keep its costs, including distributed compensation to employees, as low as possible.

This has resulted in an essentially selfish-based system of doing business, in which the bulk of the financial returns made by any given enterprise must accrue to a limited number of individuals (particularly the capital providers, but also, for example, the CEO), while the enterprise’s employees must content themselves with the most meager fixed compensation for the labor they provide.

The result of this inherent dichotomy is that the capitalist enterprise-structure provided one of the main building blocks for the inequalities (particularly between rich and poor) that characterize capitalist economies since the dawn of the capitalist era (and even before in pre-capitalist times).

Not coincidentally, wage policy constitutes one of the most thorny concerns of neoliberal thinking, with neoliberal economists continuing to advocate keeping the wages of the working masses as low as possible.³⁶ By contrast, the profits of the entrepreneurs themselves should be as high as possible, which in most cases creates a situation in which those within society who perform the hardest, most difficult and most dangerous labor are compensated the least for it, while those whose role is limited to the initial provision of capital and to the management of an enterprise walk away with the greatest profits from the collective efforts accomplished within the framework of a capitalist enterprise.³⁷

Globally, the examples of Amazon and Tesla are among the most imaginative current illustrations of these principles. Indeed, the Amazon and Tesla empires rely fully on the model of the capitalist enterprise that seeks to minimize the compensation of its personnel in order to maximize the profits flowing to its capital provider(s) and CEO, in the cases of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, literally into the billions of dollars on an annual basis.

However, that same model of business is characteristic of the entire capitalist world, ranging from large to small enterprises, virtually all of which rely on the basic premise that the bulk of the surplus value generated by any enterprise should accrue to its capital providers and (top) manager(s), while the enterprise’s personnel should be content with a fixed remuneration that is kept as low as possible.³⁸

2.3.2 Overriding Nature of the Neoliberal Model of Conducting an Enterprise

The approach dealt with in Sect. 2.3.1 even resonates deeply into the most basic, macroeconomic building blocks of contemporary neoliberal economies, which can be illustrated by the basic objective of the U.S. Federal Reserve that mentions price control and the highest possible employment of the American population in the same breath, thereby elevating the basic twofoldness that characterizes the outlook of capitalist economies into a basic guideline of monetary policy.

What is possibly even worse is that neoliberal doctrines which, under the guise of ensuring the competitiveness of economies, continue to call for such low compensation for the working masses—and, by extension, for overall labor relations detrimental to the working class—have begun to resonate more and more over the past few decades and started to find application in every possible other relationship in which a person or agency hires someone else’s labor.³⁹

A consequence of this is that, in our time, the so-called Iron Law of the Wages has come to dominate interpersonal relations more than ever, albeit rarely under use of this terminology, but in present times by referring to the term austerity itself.

2.3.3 Preliminary Conclusions

Back in the Middle Ages—long before the breakthrough of capitalism itself—the scholastic Thomas Aquinas surprised the Western world with a plea for fair compensation of labor.

It seems that this Catholic saint was far ahead of his time now that centuries later this (obvious) message still does not seem to have penetrated. On the contrary, people around the world are still employed at the lowest possible wages to maximize corporate profits for the benefit of the few, and such behavior is still validated by a host of neoliberal economists and policy makers who do not perceive any ethical problem with such a course of action.

The question therefore arises as to when the call by many to start working on alternative business models and labor relations aimed at a more equitable distribution of the profits generated by enterprises—ergo the economic surplus values achieved through collective efforts—will finally begin to resonate, enabling an end to the barbarism of capitalism and the promotion of more just models of society.

Admittedly, the issue is related to the various other building blocks of capitalist economies, including, for example, the capitalist money creation system and credit system, in addition to the systems of financing of states and governments, which, however, should not provide an excuse to simply let things continue to languish, but on the contrary calls for a sufficiently holistic approach that we have already advocated in certain of our earlier writings⁴⁰ and whose continuing ethical necessity we wish to further highlight in this book in particular.

We shall return to the capitalist model of enterprise and employment—including a search for alternatives—in more detail in Chap. 7.

2.4 Market Reasoning

2.4.1 General

It is noteworthy that the main building blocks of capitalism—including the model of private money creation already discussed above (cf. Sect. 2.2), the method of employment for remuneration, and the conduct of enterprises under the (capital) company form (cf. Sect. 2.3, besides furthermore Chap. 7)—first emerged (particularly from the end of the fifteenth/beginning of the sixteenth century) in the practice of commerce and enterprise, only to obtain subsequent validation in the realm of ideas much later.

Indeed, the formation of (commercial or mercantile) capitalism had been going on for more or less one and a half to two centuries before there was a growing interest in its methods of operation among religious leaders and (moral) philosophers.

It is equally striking that the first authors to take an interest in this subject matter were leading religious figures—with an early forerunner being the scholastic Thomas Aquinas⁴¹ (albeit instead of validating the early recipes of pre-capitalism, he took the more critical stand that laborers should be paid sufficiently fair wages), and in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, respectively, the founders of European-continental currents of Protestantism, Luther and Calvin.⁴²

However, the systematic discussion of socio-economic processes in literature would gain momentum only from the second half of the eighteenth century onward, mostly resulting in validation of the working methods of capitalism within a framework of thought that came to be known as the school of economic liberalism.

Later, partly on the basis of this school of learning, in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, so-called industrial capitalism reigned supreme, the period 1950–1975 brought a period in which corrections and adjustments to ‘pur sang’ capitalism were sought, which resulted in the breakthrough of welfare states. (Cf. already in Sect. 1.3.)

As already mentioned above, economic neoliberalism itself has sought to put an end to this latter evolution, based upon various arguments, such as arguing that welfare states are simply too costly. Some of the methods to which economic neoliberalism has resorted to achieve this abolition have already been listed in more detail above, in Sect. 1.5, where it has also been pointed out that the modern-day approach of ‘neoliberalizing societies’ has mostly been based on the so-called austerity principle.

In the following sections, we shall try to explain how economic neoliberalism has developed what has become known as free market thinking within that context, and what further impact this has had on the development of socio-economic order itself.

This brings us to the debate pro and contra (more) free market. A particular reason why we shall delve a little deeper into this sub-aspect of contemporary capitalism is that this debate eminently indicates the way in which economic-neoliberal thinking has asserted its impact on the development of contemporary, unbridled capitalism.⁴³

2.4.2 An Expanded Field of Action for Free Market(s)

2.4.2.1 A Double Expansion of the Domain of the Free Market Orchestrated by Economic Neoliberalism

One of the basic outlines of economic neoliberalism—and therefore also one of the central building blocks of contemporary capitalism, also referred to as free market economics—concerns the optimization of free market forces (ultimately for the benefit of the entrepreneurial class and under the classic argument that this class, in its purported pursuit of the upliftment of society, should experience as little hindrance as possible from the rest of humanity, whose only role may be to contribute, through labor and consumption, to the optimal realization of the entrepreneurial class’s goals).

The intent of economic neoliberalism of optimizing free markets is twofold: On the one hand, economic neoliberalism has sought to make the operation of the market as free of regulation as possible, under the goal of avoiding any hindrance of entrepreneurship from (too much) regulatory interference. On the other hand, economic neoliberalism has sought to make the domain of operation of the free market as broad as possible.

In cases where regulation is nonetheless needed, the aim is still to give it, as much as possible, an interpretation aimed at facilitating the free functioning of the market.

This explains, for example, why the rise of economic neoliberalism, in many jurisdictions and in many economic sectors, has led to a wave of deregulation that has mainly been aimed at eliminating, or reducing to a minimum, regulations that had in the past sought to prioritize, or at least protect, certain values other than the interests of the business world (such as, for example, the protection of labor, of the environment, etc.).

However, the same neoliberal aversion to regulatory action⁴⁴ also offers an explanation as to why in capitalist countries it is often allowed for a very long time to manufacture and trade in extremely dangerous goods, in many cases requiring a very serious harm to public health, or some other higher interest, before neoliberal governments are, eventually, nonetheless found willing to curb (or, put another way, regulate) the production of and trade in such goods, at least to some extent.⁴⁵

A modern variation of this aversion to regulatory intervention to protect higher interests is to limit regulatory intervention to an obligation to inform consumers, with the understanding that even such information obligations are, in many cases, deliberately kept extremely limited or abstract.⁴⁶

On the margin, the question also arises whether the increasing attention to the protection of consumer interests in many Western legal systems, approached in this way, is more a method by which neoliberal rulers try to appease their possibly gnawing grievances, or is rather the result of the actions of more left-wing political movements or other interest groups—e.g. consumer organizations—that try to protect ordinary people, at least in their capacity as consumers, to some extent, from the excessive malpractices of certain producers or sellers. One can think, for example, of the principle of responsible lending⁴⁷ in the Consumer Credit Directive⁴⁸ and in the Home Credit Directive. ⁴⁹ Further reference can also be made to far-reaching forms of protection that went to consumers as travelers in the COVID-19 period.

The second of these intentions, namely broadening the scope of the free market, has been legally realized through regulation aimed at shifting activities that in a slightly more distant past were still performed by governments in the public interest, to the private market itself, through various methods of privatization and marketization.⁵⁰

Many former government activities have suffered the latter fate, and in many sectors, this transition is still in full swing today.

The wet dream of a convinced neoliberal is that governments would refrain from providing any good or service that lend itself to earning money on behalf of the entrepreneurial class, whereby in recent decades, through appropriate techniques of liberalization of public services and privatization of public enterprises, various categories of such activities that were previously still part of the public domain have been systematically transferred to the free market.

In the following (in Sect. 2.4.2.2), several examples will be discussed, which will be returned to later in Chap. 3 (from the perspective of the consequences this has brought about), as well as in Chap. 5 (from the perspective of seeking alternatives).

2.4.2.2 Illustrations of Sectors Transferred to the Domain of the Free Market

2.4.2.2.1 Sectors Whose Transfer Has Already Been Largely Accomplished (Job Placement—Vocational Training—Energy)

For those for whom the foregoing would sound somewhat abstract, the following presents a few examples of the broadening domain of the free market since the 1980s, in numerous Western economies.

One of the earliest forms of government involvement in socioeconomics that neoliberal economists and policymakers decided to get rid of, involved job placement.

Indeed, in a somewhat more distant past, the governments of many Western countries considered it a governmental task to ensure that supply and demand in the labor market met smoothly with a view to ensuring optimal and fair employment.

With the rise of economic neoliberalism, this vision was largely abandoned, and the new credo became that, henceforth, job placement had to be organized as a private market activity, i.e., against payment. This led to the emergence of a wide variety private employment agencies which, in their own way, contributed to the ongoing breakdown of the social protection fabric of the working classes since the 1980s.

The fact that in the wake of this liberalization of the employment market and the coinciding privatization of former public employment agencies, the door was left wide open for all manner of abuses, if not least the systematic exploitation of vulnerable workers—with as recent illustration the harrowing abuses uncovered during the COVID-19 crisis in the global meat processing industry⁵¹—is (still) not of a nature to severely alarm the neoliberal policymakers who enacted this transition.

A similar evolution has occurred in the field of vocational training. Here again, in several countries and in a somewhat more distant past, such vocational training was in most cases (still) considered a form of education and was therefore, in main order, organized by the government (generally, through decentralized public services). However, here too, economic neoliberalism has seen its opportunity to put an end to this approach and to transfer vocational training, to a significant extent, to private markets. As a result, in most Western countries, many forms of vocational training have become services offered on the free market. Governments themselves are at best still involved in certain niches of vocational training, for example those that are difficult to commercialize.

A third sector that has experienced similar liberalization and privatization is the energy supply sector. Here again, in a slightly more distant past, it was not unusual for the government to get involved in organizing one or more steps in the production and distribution of various forms of energy. Again, economic neoliberalism has judged otherwise and has in most Western countries pushed for the production, distribution, and/or marketing of energy to be transferred, as much as possible, to private markets. The question of whether this has been advantageous to consumers, who as a result, for example, in many EU countries are confronted with increasingly expensive prices for energy (cf. infra, in Sect. 5.2.5), is one that neoliberal policymakers prefer to avoid as much as possible.⁵²

Further examples are, of course, legion.

2.4.2.2.2 Sectors Whose Transfer to the Free Market Is (Still) Ongoing

2.4.2.2.2.1 General

Gradually, it is to be feared that the few sectors in which government initiative is still predominantly present today, such as health care, education, and social security, will also be systematically subjected to this treatment of transfer to private markets.

Here it can be noted that, for certain sectors, this transfer to the free market is already happening in a gnawing fashion, whereby such transfer is taking place bit by bit (and measure by measure).

2.4.2.2.2.2 The Sectors of Nursing Homes and Hospitals

Sectors that have already undergone a gradual transfer to private markets to a significant extent include the nursing home sector (for the elderly and other categories of dependents) and the hospital sector.

As a result, throughout the Western world, nursing homes for the elderly have already been brought into private hands to a large extent (the most far-reaching example being the United States of America, where there even exist chains of listed companies/corporations operating in the sector of nursing homes and care institutions). This has mainly brought about price increases and a deterioration in the quality of care for the elderly, a fact that was most poignantly demonstrated in the form of extremely high COVID-19 mortality rates during (the initial period of) the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.⁵³

In the hospital sector, the trend of transferring activities to the free market has so far been less pronounced. Instead, economic neoliberalism has primarily hit this sector with all sorts of austerity measures that have had the effect of reducing both the quantity (e.g., the average numbers of available hospital beds) and quality of health care.⁵⁴

Some of the implications of these evolutions will be discussed in more detail in (Chap. 3 of this book, devoted to the outlook of the capitalist lifeworld (Cf. Sect. 3.2.3.4.3.)

2.4.2.2.2.3 The Social Security Sectors

A similar fate has befallen the social security sector.

The model of social security established in several countries in the post-World War II period—these countries usually being referred to as welfare states (cf. Sect. 1.3)—boils down, in general terms, to the governments of these countries setting up (public) institutions or funds that are financed by contributions imposed by law on economically active persons (such as natural persons, as well as legal persons, often in the capacity of employer (entrepreneur), employee or self-employed), and whereby the funds thus collected are earmarked for the payment of certain social benefits to those who are in need of them because of defined objective circumstances, including unemployment, illness or disability, family enlargement, old age, etc.

In practice, such social security systems functioned(ed) as social safety nets that provide especially the lower classes with important support in building a dignified existence. In a certain depiction, it has been suggested that such systems of state-arranged solidarity offer—or offered—a corrective to pur sang capitalism and thereby gave a slightly more human face to capitalist societies than the capitalist principles and instruments themselves allow.⁵⁵

Once more under the impetus of economic neoliberalism, a systematic erosion of these social security systems began in numerous Western countries, especially from the 1980s onward, in most cases under the classical-neoliberal excuse that such systems would not be financially sustainable (which in modern times translates into the need for (more) austerity).

As a result, either far-reaching austerity measures were implemented, or even partial aspects of social security mechanisms were simply discontinued, with the message that citizens may turn to the private market instead (e.g., by taking out private insurance).

However, to the extent that only the more affluent strata of the population and/or the senior staff employed by large enterprises can afford such alternative, private insurance, a two-track policy has been set in motion in various countries, whereby the more affluent citizens can afford the (more expensive) private insurance products and the less fortunate citizens must continue to make do with what is left of (the increasingly eroded) social security systems.⁵⁶ (Cf. furthermore in Sects. 5.2.4 and 5.2.6.)

2.4.2.2.2.4 Education

The final sector cited here facing a gradual transition from public service to the private market is the education sector.

In various jurisdictions, education has not been considered a purely governmental task for some time already, although in the transition from public education to (more) private education, significant differences between distinct jurisdictions and between distinct levels of education can still be observed.

In the most extreme capitalist countries—for example, the United States of America and the United Kingdom—large parts of education are already in private hands, although even there the liberalization and privatization exercise is not yet fully complete.

In other (Western) countries that are still lagging somewhat behind in their liberalization and privatization efforts of education, there is a growing tendency to resort to the austerity recipe, whereby it appears that this neoliberal strategy is aimed at bleeding out education that is still publicly organized and/or financed, so that at some point in time there will be no other way out than to gradually privatize this (sub)sector of the socio-economic order as well.

We shall discuss some of the implications of this in more detail in Chap. 3, devoted to the outlook of the capitalist lifeworld. (Cf. Sect. 3.2.3.4.2.)

2.4.2.2.2.5 Preliminary Conclusions

In the aspiration of economic neoliberalism to transfer as many systems of public service and social protection as possible to private markets, it is to be feared that when the last bastions (referred to in this Sect. 2.4.2.2.2) of what in the past were still (pure) public sectors will have been transferred into private hands, the role of states will even be further reduced to the protection of the interests of the ruling classes, for example, through the organization of services of police and justice on the one hand and the establishment of an army on the other (cf. furthermore in Sect. 5.2.8.

It is moreover to be feared that in such fully neoliberal societies (which will be mostly reduced to free markets), only those who have, or earn, enough money will still have access to all the services concerned, while the rest of the population will no longer have (sufficient) access to most of the goods and services offered on the free market, or at the very least will have to make impossible choices in this regard (cf. below, in Sect. 3.3.2.6.2, on the choice a large part of the elderly population of the United Kingdom faces between starving or freezing to death during the winter of 2022−2023).

Certain features of American and British societies already point in this direction, with a solution to the resulting sense of insecurity among the more affluent citizens being found in the establishment of so-called gated communities in which those who can afford to live there will spend their lives segregated from those who (literally and figuratively) fall outside the margins of such a rampant capitalist system. In the case of the extremely rich, this even takes the form of modern, private fortresses, which may or may not be located in distant, exotic locations.

2.4.3 Artificial Nature of the Arguments Invoked in Support of the Primacy of the Free Market Model

2.4.3.1 General

After having outlined in the previous Sect. 2.4.2 the sectors in which economic neoliberalism has lived up to its intent of expanding the domain of the free market in recent decades, this Sect. 2.4.3 will look at the underlying rationale it has invoked to do so.

2.4.3.2 The Fallacies of Economic Neoliberalism

In the previous Sect. 2.4.2, it has been explained how, spurred on by the ideas of economic neoliberalism, in recent decades more and more soci(et)al activities that were (still) performed by the government in the distant past have been—more or less gradually—transferred to the domain of the free market, under the guise that the government’s continued performance of such tasks would be too expensive and/or too inefficient.

However, it should be clear that the latter constitute false arguments.

Indeed, the transfer of the provision of certain basic needs to the realm of the free market did not (have) the effect of making their production cheaper or more efficient (which is, certainly from the viewpoint of consumers, explicitly not the case in many cases, for example in the case of energy).

One could even hold that the question of the fundability of these forms of services is a so-called fault problem, which brings us back to the realm of the abstractions on which capitalism itself rests, including the working methods of capitalism established from the fifteenth/sixteenth century onward, but above all the value choices made at the time and afterwards.

To understand this properly, it is important to keep in mind what happens in the real world when goods are produced or services are launched., abstracting from the aforementioned fictions on which the capitalist, socio-economic order rests, such as there are, private and public legal entities, companies/corporations, contracting and money itself, with all of these being methods of economic and legal organization of society and/or of allocation of wealth.

In the real world, any production of goods or initiation of services requires, simply put, the use of natural or raw materials and of manpower.

In other words, if we were to imagine a (new) world without the aforementioned (pre-existing) fictions of law and economics, the production of goods or services would constitute primarily a problem of organization and mobilization of material resources and people.

In doing so, in the real, physical world, it makes minor difference in itself which fictions of law and economics shape these processes, implying that it matters little for these processes themselves whether such organization and mobilization of natural resources and people occur in the context of government action, or in the context of the operation of the free market.

To manufacture a certain product, or to launch a certain service, in both cases the required organization and mobilization of resources and people, in the real/physical world, is the same.

This implies that the use of what nature has to offer, such as raw materials or other natural materials (e.g., plants and animals) and the labor power of people, will be the same in both cases.

The rest is essentially fabrication of the human mind. The entire construct of law and economics, in this manner approached, is no more or less than a historically grown figment of the collective imagination, which is another way of saying that the choice of a particular economic model (and the legal system grafted onto it), inherently, is the result of choices of values made in the past.⁵⁷

Furthermore, what these value choices seem to have mainly caused are the motives for (economic) action, whereby from the fifteenth to sixteenth century onwards, people have increasingly been led to believe that selfishness, rather than striving for just societies, would constitute the better motive of human action. And it is precisely this basic premise upon which capitalism was built and, to this day, continues to function.⁵⁸

2.4.3.3 The Free Market as a System that (Always) Puts the Interests of the Rich First

2.4.3.3.1 Problem Statement

One of the main problems with the basic premises outlined in Sect. 2.4.3.2 that underlie contemporary free market reasoning is that, for the user or consumer of services or goods, it does make a substantial difference which premises are chosen as the basis of the socio-economic order, since, in one approach, their financing is borne from collective systems, while in the other approach, it is each private individual who themselves will have to pay the price for the goods or services in question.

From this, the central role of money in free market systems—including the systems of money creation and distribution that have been developed throughout the ages—in addition to the fact that money use inherently creates a dichotomy within societies (cf. already Plato), becomes entirely clear.

Indeed, to have access to any goods or services produced in a free market system by free market players, the consumer or user must have sufficient money to pay the price demanded for them.

This accentuates the aforementioned, fundamental dichotomy within societies that base their economies on such a free market economy, whereby a person’s purchasing power will determine whether and to what goods and services such a person will have access, while this production and trading of goods and services in the free market, for the producer himself, provides a method of making ever more profit (at least if the goods or services offered by a producer find a sufficient market).

The above implies that the richer a person ‘is’ (and, because of their role within society, ‘becomes’), the easier they will have access to goods and services offered on the free market, and the poorer a person is, the less obvious such access will be.

All this explains why, in many supposedly prosperous countries, as the implementation of economic neoliberalism progresses, access to various, even very basic goods and services—for example, medical or dental care—has become less and less self-evident as the organization of this access itself has, increasingly, been withdrawn from the public domain and transferred to private markets.

At the other end of the wealth distribution spectrum, this also explains why the economies of the most extreme, capitalist countries are, increasingly, geared toward the production of highly luxurious goods and services that are aimed purely at the very wealthy strata of the population (a phenomenon for which the term ‘plutonomy’ has in recent times been coined). (Cf. Sect. 3.3.2.4.)

2.4.3.3.2 Illustration Using the Capitalist Money Creation Model

One of the most striking illustrations of the principles outlined in Sect. 2.4.3.3.1 concerns money creation and the systems of distribution of newly created money themselves, which, in a free market system, are to be regarded as services provided by the private banking system, to which other market participants may seek access.

Within the prevailing free market economies, access to newly created money occurs mainly in the context of the lending activity of private banks.

Private banks can create their own money and thus very easily stage their activities (and through this the resulting wealth accumulation for the benefit of their shareholders).

This is demonstrated by their gigantic size, in addition to the great wealth that private banks and their shareholders have managed to acquire within capitalist economies, essentially without ever having had to make much significant effort. Contrary to what neoliberal mythology suggests, this is not so much the result of any expertise or skill (=cf. so-called meritocratic thinking, to which we shall return further, in Sect. 7.1.3.2.1.2), nor has it contributed to beneficial effects for the planet and its people. On the contrary, it is mainly due to the historical coincidence that this sector has succeeded in appropriating money creation to a significant extent (and has managed to perpetuate this to this day).⁵⁹

The second in line for whom access to newly created money is relatively easy are enterprises. Such enterprises that take the company or corporate form, usually, enjoy the legal fictions of legal personality and limitation of liability, which provide a crucial safe haven for non-accountable action within the economic sphere, in addition to an approach in which all profits made by such enterprises accrue, unilaterally, to the class of entrepreneurs, on whose behalf an ever-increasing accumulation of wealth has thus been able to take place since the early beginning of (mercantile) capitalism. (Cf. furthermore in Chap. 7.)

This translates into an economic model in which access to bank credit, ergo to newly created money, is much easier for (large) enterprises than for individuals or small businesses, with in recent times even the monetary system playing its part. It is in this context, for example, that the advance of modern monetary techniques, such as quantitative easing, is taking place, with central banks themselves buying up debt instruments issued by (large) enterprises to support their creditworthiness (and, through this, their access to newly created money).

If we contrast this with states, we notice that the acquisition of financial resources is already a lot more difficult, and all the more so when a state operates on the basis of democratic principles.

Indeed, a state must resort to taxation (or levying similar contributions) for its (basic) financing, which can never be a popular working method. Such taxation has additionally become complicated under neoliberal theorizing, due to a quasi-taboo of taxation of the rich and their enterprises. Indeed, economic neoliberalism assumes that (large) enterprises, and, by extension, the class of wealthy entrepreneurs should be exempted from taxation as much as possible, at the risk that otherwise the whole economic house of cards would collapse (an approach that forms part of the so-called ‘trickle down economics’-theory; cf. furthermore in Sect. 7.1.2.1.2).

This neoliberal approach has led to the fact that, in our times, taxation is in many countries no longer sufficient to bear government financing, forcing states to make up their deficits by taking up credit themselves, with the further consequence that—making abstraction from the role of intermediary financial institutions—states themselves have become heavily dependent on capitalist, private money creation models.

This explains why, under capitalism in general and economic neoliberalism in particular, states have gradually been brought to their knees by the financial sector, which translates into a balance of power in which true (economic) power resides in the hands of the private financial sector and there is hardly any real democracy at play (anymore), except perhaps in matters outside the socio-economic realm (and which essentially do not concern the socio-economic order as such, but rather account to much state intervention in what are essentially private matters of conscience).⁶⁰

The final category of market participants for whom access to newly created money is less evident than for the banking and entrepreneurial sectors is, obviously, the modal citizen. The latter in most cases depends for their livelihood on an income from their labor. As long as what is left of the welfare state model still survives, the latter can still more or less succeed in Western countries (albeit that the application of capitalist employment logic, including the Iron Law of the Wages, has turned the modal, Western man into a slave of capitalism who is condemned to lifelong labor). However, for a large part of the population of developing countries, this model implies that common people must survive on such absurdly low subsistence wages that this amounts to being condemned to a life of poverty (=the so-called ‘condemned to stay poor’-syndrome). (Cf., furthermore, in Sect. 3.3.)

2.4.4 The Flipside of the Coin: The Shrinkage of the Domain of the Public Interest

Not only has economic neoliberalism, in recent decades, pushed worldwide for a continuous broadening of the action domain of the free market(s), but this has, in addition, been accompanied by a narrowing of the domain of the common good.

This, of course, is only logical.

Indeed, within the prevailing capitalist model, not so many systems are conceivable to shape economic activities (including, in a general sense, the provision of goods and services).

The free-market model itself rests on the idea that goods and services should, as much as possible, be produced and/or offered by the private sector in return for payment of a price.⁶¹

Although this model, of course, has its great merits—if not, it would not have become so successful in shaping virtually all economic relations—as mentioned above, one of the fundamental problems of the model is that it helps create a fundamental dichotomy in society between those who do have the financial capacity to afford all possible goods and services generated by the free market, and those for whom this is not the case.

Moreover, driven by economic neoliberalism, the model has been extrapolated to the level of virtually all soci(et)al relations. This has made the model all the more problematic as poorer people within society are denied access to vital goods and services, which is one of the side effects of having implemented economic neoliberalism, especially with regard to former public services that have been brought into the domain of the free market in recent decades.

Still, as has already been clarified above, historically, an equally important, second domain for the provision of goods and services has been thought of, namely the public provision of services.

In this second model of organizing access to goods and/or services, the government of a given territory (=in modern times, the state and its delocalized and decentralized branches) takes it upon itself to make well-defined goods and services available to its general population. This may be done for various motives, including the realization that without such provision, a (too large) part of the population would have no, or insufficient, access to certain, essential goods or services.

The subsequent financing of such goods or services made available through public channels does not occur because the purchaser of the goods or services pays a (market-based) price for them, but is borne from the resources of the government itself which in turn, at least within the capitalist order, draws these from taxes and similar sources of revenue.⁶²

In this way, a solidarity between members of the population of a given state may be established, which helps ensure that everyone, especially the poor, has access to well-defined goods and services considered essential for a dignified existence.

As already explained (cf. Sect. 1.3), this second model of organizing socio-economic activities, especially in the period after World War II until the 1970s, contributed to the development of the welfare state model, giving capitalism, temporarily, a somewhat more human face (at least in the Western world). However, this effect has since then been largely eroded by the implementation of economic neoliberalism (cf. Sect. 1.5), because of which various, formerly public services shifted to the domain of the private, free market. (Cf. the examples cited in Sect. 2.4.2.2.)

In maintaining capitalism—which is not advocated in this book, which rather calls for an alternative socio-economic order that will be explained later on (cf. starting in Chap. 4)—elementary justice would require that, at the very least, a sufficiently broad field of the public domain would remain delineated, rather than, as economic neoliberalism aspires to do, completely eroding the domain of the common good and subsuming the organization of all possible activities into the field of the free market.⁶³

In other words, to give capitalism a more human face again, there should be, at the very least, a restoration of the domain of the common good, which would imply, by definition, bringing back into the public domain the activities that were shifted to the private, free market in the recent past.

However, it may be questioned whether the latter is still feasible, and even whether this model still provides a desirable model of socio-economic order, especially in light of the observation that within capitalist economies (and especially in accordance with monetary and financial systems of the latter), the model of the welfare state itself has never been much more than the prerogative of a part of the world, particularly the West, which on a more global scale grafted itself onto numerous unjust socio-economic mechanisms, for example in the North-South relationship, but also in the East-West relationship.

For this reason, we ourselves advocate a much more radical, alternative approach that we shall explain in Chaps. 4–7.

2.4.5 Ineffectiveness of the Free Market Model as a Sound Economic System

Perhaps the most fundamental problem of the prevailing free market model as driven by unbridled economic neoliberalism (or, put another way: of unbridled, modern-day capitalism⁶⁴) is that it has led to an economy that overshoots its basic goals.

Indeed, under capitalism, over the course of the past centuries, a socio-economic model has emerged that no longer aims to satisfy the basic needs, including housing and food supplies, of all humanity, but to a much greater extent to satisfy all kinds of artificially created needs (=created by the entrepreneurial sector itself) of the top layers of the world’s population, to which the production of a wide variety of intrinsically meaningless products and services is geared.

Since capitalist production and employment go hand in hand—which is a consequence of the fact that the model of capitalist employment is to the effect that the greatest possible proportion of humanity should be employed in/by enterprises (cf. already in Sect. 2.3, as well as, furthermore, in Chap. 7)—a further consequence of this is that most of the planet’s resources and of the labor efforts of the human species, are not directed toward the creation of a just society in which every human being is assured of a dignified existence, but rather toward the satisfaction of artificial needs and, increasingly, of such artificial needs of the top-1%, the top-10%, or the top-15% of the world’s population.

A second consequence of this is that the production brought forward by an exceptionally large part of the entrepreneurial sector is essentially hardly useful, but rather directed toward goods or services that serve mere goals of meaningless entertainment.

A third consequence of this is that a large part of humanity spends their labor on the production of this kind of senseless goods and services and, consequently, not on efforts that benefit the collective wellbeing of humanity and the planet it inhabits. As a result, a sizable portion of humanity (especially in industrialized countries) is caught up in so-called ‘bullshit jobs’,⁶⁵ rather than making themselves useful to this world and their fellow human beings.

We shall return to this latter feature of capitalism in more detail in Chap. 7.

A fourth consequence or characteristic of such a production for the sake of production-economy, is that the Earth’s natural reserves of resources, and even other living beings, are all depleted to sustain, and even make grow further, such an economy oriented mainly to the dull entertainment of the world’s elites.

Under the dictates of economic neoliberalism itself, all of this is not only tolerated, but even fueled, with the underlying dogma that makes this possible nonetheless remaining that economic processes should be left in the hands of the free market and that, from this, the most ideal society will result.

2.4.6 Preliminary Conclusions

The growth of capitalist economies has been in full swing for several centuries already and during that same period just about every area on Earth has been killed off, with the contemporary manifestation of this being climate change, where one can only conclude that the past half century of neoliberal policy making has only been of a nature to further accelerate these problems inherently caused by capitalism.

We shall return to this in more detail in Sects. 3.1.3 and 3.1.4.

A silver lining to the (both literally and figuratively) dark clouds of capitalist economies is that, in the past few years, there has been a growing awareness, especially then among young people, that things cannot go on like this, an awareness that translates into calls for a more ‘sustainable’ (or durable) economic system as an alternative to the (neoliberal) free market model.

However, so far this realization still does not translate into the concrete elaboration of a truly alternative economy, but for now remains stuck in rather vague political promises and (fledgling) measures, with a strong emphasis on the transition to green energy (which would be less polluting for the environment), in addition to numerous publications in academia, besides from the part of public and private international institutions and organizations (e.g., the United Nations, Oxfam …).

What still seems to be missing is a real willingness to work for alternative economic models, including a willingness to think about how to make the economy smaller again—in other words, to base it on the consumption of fewer raw materials and labor—which calls for a fundamental change in both the goals, and the working methods of the economy.

This will, at the very least, require the disclosure of a number of the myths on which capitalism (and especially economic neoliberalism itself) is based, including at the very least: (1) The blind faith that has been attached, for several centuries already, to the idea that entrusting the power to create new money to the private banking system would be a good thing (quod non), (2) The myth, based in part on said private money creation model, that the economy should grow perpetually, (3) The maintenance of an economic model based on ‘production for the sake of production’ (and thus also on ‘consumption for the sake of consumption’), that has attributed to an economy that excels in meaningless production and service providing, (4) The further idea that the economy has to serve (solely or in capital order) for the accumulation of wealth for the entrepreneurial world (at the expense of all possible other societal interests and values), (5) The idea of trickle-down economics, which condones the aforementioned viewpoint (4) under the argument that a particle of the wealth generated by (and for) the entrepreneurial world is bound to bear down on the rest of humanity, besides (6) The idea that states serve only to facilitate entrepreneurship, ergo the functioning of the free market, rather than to establish equitable models of society.

The question of how to translate this into concrete, alternative operating models will be discussed in more detail in Chaps. 4–7 which can be seen as a trial of searching for solutions by one voice in a debate in which, meanwhile, more and more voices are asserting themselves.

2.5 Capitalism and Competition

In addition to the model of private money creation (cf. Sect. 2.2), the model of employment of the bulk of the population at low wages (cf. Sect. 2.3) and the primacy of the free market (cf. Sect. 2.4), a further defining feature of both capitalism and the ideology of economic neoliberalism, is how much they prioritize so-called (free) competition.

It is indeed an inherent feature of capitalism that it invites all to (mostly pointless) productivity and service, with the underlying intention of thereby becoming as rich as possible.

This is done at the same time by encouraging competition among people as much as possible, on the pretext that this would benefit both the performance of each person and the quality of the goods and services offered on the free market(s), in this manner attributing to the best of conceivable models of organizing society.

Such a viewpoint, obviously, rests on an immature view of human beings, in which the egos of those who participate in the capitalist model the most are fed permanently. “I am the best,” has hereby been proclaimed as the credo that should underlie all human action, rather than opting for a vision of life that would be grounded in the more traditional religious and philosophical doctrines already cited, according to which the true human being is the one who puts their talents and skills at the service of others, ergo of the global community (an idea we also find, for example, in some of the published correspondence of Nobel Prize winner for literature Herman Hesse⁶⁶).

Unfortunately, because of the success of economic-neoliberal ideology, a socio-economic order has thus emanated in which millions, if not billions, of people, all function based on the idea that they are the best, with the result that the socio-economic order has, increasingly, become a clash of egos, in which those who are the most selfish and least altruistic tend to achieve the greatest successes in terms of wealth and power accumulation in the socio-economic sphere.

This should not be surprising, to the extent that such individuals also behave most in accordance with the dictates of capitalism itself and, more recently, in accordance with the ideology of economic neoliberalism (which, as said, aims to make capitalism as unbridled again as possible).⁶⁷

The resulting socio-economic order is one characterized by a merciless spirit of competition that affects every possible stratum of societies, and that characterizes very strongly the entrepreneurial world—including the relationships between people employed there.

As has already been noted above, one of the basic motives for action within the prevailing, capitalist socio-economic sphere is to accumulate as much wealth as possible at any cost, and thereby to thwart the competition as much as possible to prevent it from taking a larger share of the economic pie.

Striving for a fairer world and/or a more sensible economy is at best still the motivation of a few individuals here and there.⁶⁸

All of this has turned capitalism into a system that increasingly encourages selfish actions, which is justified under the guise that if everyone behaves as selfishly as possible within the socio-economic sphere, the most optimal socio-economic order and society will result.

In any case, what economic neoliberalism has succeeded in doing is ensuring that the bulk of the world’s population—particularly, as the case may be, the other 99% or the other 90% or 85% than the top wealthy layers of the global population—can experience more of the ill effects of this system every day (a fact that will be addressed in more detail in Chap. 3).

2.6 Operation of Intellectual Rights

2.6.1 Problem Statement

Probably one of the biggest lies peddled in law concerns the finality of intellectual (property) rights.

Every lawyer by training has been given the explanation: very generally speaking, intellectual rights serve to protect the artist or inventor who realizes a work of art or an invention by providing them with a temporary—ergo, time-limited—monopoly right to its use.

So much for the theoretical underpinnings that justify the model of intellectual property protection. Anyone wishing to read more about this can consult the relevant, intellectual property literature.

The reality, however, is, in most cases, entirely different.

Thus, in the first instance, it appears that inventions are usually made by (real) people (of flesh and blood) employed by an enterprise (which generally takes the legal form of an entity with legal personality, such as, for example, in the Belgian context, a company, corporation, non-profit association, or foundation), or by a government institution or other entity that is co-funded by a government (for example, a university).

In this regard, the employment contract of an employee whose research may lead to inventions often includes clauses based on which the intellectual rights that will be able to be established on the fruits of such research will belong to the entity that employs the inventor (and rather rarely to the person employed or, in other words, to the actual inventor). In such cases, in other words, it is not the individuals who make the inventions in the real world to whom the fruits that intellectual rights intend to secure will belong, but rather the companies, corporations, or other entities that employ such people.

A similar observation applies to the fate of numerous artists when they enter a contract concerning their works of art, which often stipulates a transfer of copyright and/or related rights (in favor of a company, corporation, or similar legal entity). This fate is especially suffered by an artist who does not seek (sufficient) legal advice when signing such an agreement. This explains why the copyrights on numerous artistic works no longer accrue to the original creator of the works, but to a company that has had little or nothing to do with the artistic creation itself, albeit one that has been sufficiently adroit to enrich itself with it by making use of the intellectual, legal framework.⁶⁹

The notion that the enterprises that appropriate intellectual rights to, say, inventions or works of art through such contractual methods, are the engine of progress is not convincing. Reference can in this regard be made to the assessment of Noam Chomsky that within the capitalist world, most research is state driven, and not based on private initiative of funding.⁷⁰

For example, the behavior of the pharmaceutical industry that monopolizes patents on numerous drugs and vaccines through such methods is often justified under the guise that this industry invests heavily in research into the development of new drugs and that without patents, such research would no longer be possible (and, consequently, the development of new drugs would come to a halt).

However, recent research debunks this (neoliberal) myth as well. Indeed, a great deal of research (which can lead to useful drugs or vaccines) is not so much based on private funding by the pharmaceutical industry itself, but on the contrary relies to a much greater extent on public funding, for example by way of publicly funded universities or other centers for research. The private sector is usually not interested in participating into the initial stages of such research—and is only too happy to leave its funding to the government—but only involves itself once it appears that the research lends itself to ‘useful’—ergo profitable—applications. It is only then that private enterprises step in, by, for example, making available the funds necessary for mass production and marketing—both matters that do not constitute the core matter of, say, universities or individual researchers—in exchange for patents, or similar exclusive rights, to at least the useful output of the research in question.⁷¹

In all these cases, the researchers who make the inventions thus very rarely enjoy the financial fruits themselves, except perhaps if they succeed in becoming co-founders of a company (or similar entity) that patents the inventions resulting from such research.⁷²

Moreover, the above also implies that in the multitude of research that ultimately does not result in readily tradable results, the private sector does not even intervene, let alone would it be willing to fund such research (where, of course, in numerous cases, it cannot be known in advance whether research will actually result in profitable applications).

Finally, under the neoliberal policies of recent decades, the arsenal of intellectual rights itself has also become increasingly broad, which helps explain why, since the 1980s, the subject matter of intellectual rights has even become an academic discipline in its own right.

In doing so, the legal protection afforded by such intellectual rights has, in most cases, also become increasingly stringent, with an emphasis on models of protection for the benefit of big business which, of course, far more than individual researchers, is familiar with, and equipped for, lobbying regulators to influence the outcome of such legislative work in their favor.

What persistent injustices all this continues to entail in the context of contemporary, capitalist business practices we shall look at in more detail in Chap. 7, in which we shall also provide some food for thought for possible ways out.

2.6.2 Illustration: Application to COVID-19 Vaccines

What is pointed out in the previous Sect. 2.6.1 can be illustrated by the research conducted by academic researcher Mariana Mazzucato, author of the book ‘The entrepreneurial state - Debunking public vs. private sector myths’.⁷³

On the occasion of the development and commercialization of the COVID-19 vaccines, this author illustrated her previous research findings with reference to the fact that AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine was essentially developed by Oxford University scientists, with the involvement of the pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca itself only dating back to the phases of testing, production, and distribution of the vaccine in question.⁷⁴ Similarly, the development of the mRNA technology, on which Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccines were based, was also primarily the achievement of a small number of academic researchers (including, in particular, the long- in-academia-marginalized Dr. Katalin Kariko).⁷⁵

Furthermore, it appears that, during the COVID-19 pandemic, huge amounts of public money went into the research, development and production of the COVID-19 vaccines, albeit that the commercial fruits of this, in almost all cases, fell into the hands of a few intervening private enterprises.⁷⁶ Thus, by 2020 alone, the six major companies/corporations in the field of COVID-19 vaccine production alone were believed to have received an estimated USD 12 billion in government support, including USD 1.7 billion for the development of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine and USD 2.5 billion for the development of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.⁷⁷

Still according to Mazzucato, the public funds spent on pharmaceutical research and development are generally much more important than the research funded by the private sector itself, in the sense that governments invest mainly in the first—both longest, and riskiest⁷⁸—stages of (health) innovation, ergo in the phase when a tradable product is far from being in sight. Here, the private sector is generally not interested in pharmaceutical research and development in these early stages, because it costs too much money and does not yield short-term profits, only when a clear prospect of making a profit emerges do they jump on board (i.e., when drugs or vaccines are about to be produced and commercialized on the basis of such research).⁷⁹

Moreover, in the case of COVID-19 vaccine development, pre-existing government-funded vaccine research has also been one of the main reasons why pharmaceutical enterprises were able to bring COVID-19 vaccines on the market in record time. For example, as a March 2021 British Industry Council report shows, the rapid development of COVID-19 vaccines would have been unthinkable without government involvement and funding of vaccine research for at least the preceding decade.⁸⁰

Backed by neoliberal governments and their legislators around the world, pharmaceutical (and similar) enterprises nevertheless continue to insist that there is no alternative to the dominant business model of ‘socialization of costs and privatization of profits’ on which their business model relies.

Illustrative in the latter regard is that the arguments made during the COVID-19 pandemic to refute calls for opening up the rights to produce COVID-19 vaccines were exactly the same as those always made by the pharmaceutical industry—as taught in introductory intellectual property rights courses all over the world from the 1980s onward—in particular, that such opening up of the rights to the vaccines would jeopardize research and innovation and that transferring the know-how for the actual product development to others would be too complicated, or simply would not work.

But, as Buranyi⁸¹ rightly pointed out, the COVID-19 vaccines were developed anyway thanks to huge amounts of government funding. Moreover, generic drug and vaccine producers in developing countries have proven repeatedly that they are indeed quite capable of producing large quantities of high-quality drugs and vaccines at a fraction of the cost of what is paid in Western countries, further implying that the patenting of drugs and vaccines is undermining public health, rather than benefiting it.⁸²

It should also be kept in mind that the patent system that allows private industry to monopolize and market medicines and vaccines, even at the time of a global catastrophe and even in cases where they were created based on publicly funded research, is itself only a recent legal figure deliberately created by neoliberal doctrine itself.

In contrast, during World War II, for example, the federal government of the United States of America was still able and willing to force pharmaceutical enterprises to widely share their methods and recipes for developing antibiotics. Similarly, during the global campaign against smallpox several decades ago, the WHO kept an accurate record of all production methods and prescriptions. This allowed the WHO to continuously monitor and evaluate the progress made and share the resulting technology on a global scale.⁸³

Historically, in other words, there have been numerous instances where it was recognized, on a global scale, that there are issues, such as international public health, that are more important than the legal protection of private profits. According to Buranyi,⁸⁴ prior to the rise of the WTO and what this author calls “the proliferation of neoliberal trade agreements,” countries around the world regularly resorted to subjecting the pharmaceutical sector to compulsory licensing (or similar legal methods), which allowed third parties, often local manufacturers, to produce their own drugs or vaccines on payment of a reasonable licensing fee. This practice has been so uncontroversial in the past that Canada has even used it to open up the production of anti-ulcer drugs.⁸⁵

In other words, it can be argued that patents—and thus the legal monopoly on the commercialization of the proceeds of scientific research—have not always been treated with the same sanctity as in contemporary, neoliberal societies.

This observation, by extension, obviously also applies to many other intellectual rights, bearing in mind that their success, to a large extent, goes back to the Washington consensus model, in other words to the systems of implementation of economic-neoliberal ideas. (Cf. Sect. 1.5.2.)

With this, even the field of scientific research has also been turned into one in which selfishness and greed have become dominant values, even though the ideal of uplifting humanity continues to remain a major motivation that drives individual scientists, wherever employed.

2.7 Inheritance Law

Besides the matter of intellectual rights (cf. Sect. 2.6), one of the other underexposed building blocks of capitalism constitutes inheritance law.

Due to a variety of reasons (amongst which historical), Western inheritance law is essentially aimed at perpetuating wealth within families. It ensures that accumulated wealth, across generations, can continue to be passed on to descendants (or other relatives).

Obviously, this mechanism works mainly for those who are wealthy to have goods inherited that way. This implies that this model—like most of the legal building blocks of capitalist/(neo)liberal societies—primarily benefits the higher, social classes, i.e., the class of entrepreneurs (including bankers), and, hardly at all, the lower, social classes, to the extent that people belonging to the latter class(es) will not, as a rule, succeed in accumulating a large fortune, unlike what is the case for the members of the former class.

It should in this regard be borne in mind that the estate of a (wealthy) entrepreneur will often also contain his or her equity portfolio, which de facto means that control and ownership of enterprises, across generations, can remain within the same family.⁸⁶

However, the operation of capitalist inheritance law also asserts itself in other areas.

Thus, members of the upper social classes will be much more inclined to engage in wealth planning, whereby they will pass on, already among the living, the management and/or ownership of (large portions of) their wealth to the next generation(s), whereby this intent will be motivated in part by tax motives (including the avoidance of inheritance tax). Such wealth planning, on the other hand, is less common among members of the lower, social classes, often because they are ignorant of the options available to them or because they cannot afford the expensive consultancy required to achieve such wealth planning, with sufficient expertise.

A further—and perhaps the most important—consequence of this capitalist inheritance law is that it contributes to the great inequality of opportunity that characterizes capitalist societies. Those born to wealthy parents enjoy an advantage in life not only during the period when their parents are still alive (for example, in terms of access to better-quality education, in addition to being generally brought up much more luxuriously, with, among other things, many more opportunities for fulfilment, than members of the lower, social classes), but also from the time of their death. For example, it will be much easier to bring an existing business founded by a parent (or even earlier ancestor) to a great size and profitability, than to have to create a new business from scratch.

We shall return to the importance of this feature of capitalist societies further in Sect. 7.1.3.2.1.2.

2.8 Conclusions

After four centuries of capitalism, capitalist methods of operation have fully crystallized, with the policymakers having aligned their legal systems with the underlying logic of capitalism.

An important turning point in this regard occurred at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, when bourgeois-liberal states were shaped. Within the latter, the interests of the enterprising class(es) in the broad sense of the word—including the historically oldest class of merchants, the sixteenth to eighteenth century breakthrough class of private bankers, and the from the late eighteenth century breakthrough class of industrial entrepreneurs—were promoted above everything else. As a result, during the nineteenth and twentieth century, the classes of industrial entrepreneurs, and later these working in the fields of services, energy, media, communications, and ICT, would become most dominant.

All this time, the capitalist, socio-economic order got established in accordance with the interests of the ruling entrepreneurial class in the broad sense of the word, with only a brief pause in the period 1950–1975 when, at least in a limited part of the world, work was done to build the welfare state model.

What this has entailed in terms of problems for the Earth and humanity, will be discussed in more detail in the following Chap. 3.