As thoroughly outlined in Chaps. 1 to 3, from the sixteenth century onward, one economic system became decisive in shaping the global socioeconomic order, specifically capitalism.

From a historical point of view, capitalism could be indicated as the economic system that, from the sixteenth centuryFootnote 1 onward, emerged out of the relics of feudalism, the latter itself being the system that, at the decline of the Western Roman Empire, had succeeded the Roman slave economy.

The Roman slave economy was strongly agrarian, with production centers taking the form of large domains or estates dedicated to the manufacture of numerous agricultural (and derivative) products, and where labor was mainly performed by slaves. This implied that the economic capital gains derived from such units of production accrued exclusively to the owners of these domains or lands, and that the labor-producing people themselves were owned by these large landowners. Inherently, this led to a dichotomy within society between the elite of (free) landowners and the rest of the population of the Roman empire who generally had slave status. In addition to these two, from a socioeconomic point of view two most important classes, there were of course other population groups, such as soldiers and priests (where the military, after completing a mostly lengthy career in the army, and provided that they survived, were in many cases rewarded with a piece of land, so that they too became part of the class of landowners).

With the demise of the Western Roman Empire came a certain change in this system, albeit not very fundamental in terms of socioeconomic arrangement. In the early Middle Ages, (economic) production remained largely agricultural and was still mainly provided by large estates or domains (which were often the continuation of Roman predecessors). What was new was that the influence of Germanic society structures grafted onto these, resulting in the system of feudalism. Here, the ownership of land or property came into the hands of a feudal lord and the population of such land or property became serfs. A new element in this was that the feudal lord of such a fief was, as a rule, himself the serf of a higher level of authority, ascending to the king of the Germanic realm within which the fief was located.

However, what interests us here above all is the relationship between the serfs at the bottom of the hierarchical ladder and the domain lord to whom they were conscripted. As a rule, these serfs were peasants who acquired a right to use part of their feudal lord's land. Legally, these serfs were not slaves, although their hands and feet were tied to their feudal lord by the bond of feudality. This status of serfs at the bottom of the soci(et)al ladder was, moreover, the status enjoyed by most of the European population.

On the land assigned to him, a serf (together with his extended family) could operate a farm that enabled him to earn a living. The compensation for the right of use granted on the land took the form of a series of obligations, including a duty to transfer part of the agricultural production to the feudal lord, in addition to a duty to meet special requests from the latter. In exchange, besides being able to exploit the assigned piece of land, the serf also enjoyed the protection of his feudal lord.

The economy organized based on this feudal system had with the Roman system in common that it was oriented toward agricultural production, which was intended, in main order, to meet the own (food and other) needs of local communities. Consequently, efficiently run Roman and feudal domains were largely self-sufficient, both for the benefit of the employed population, and of the elite of landowners.

Within these fiefs, only limited (barter) trade occurred, for example in the context of annual fairs during which agricultural surpluses, in addition to certain craft products, were traded across the domain boundaries.Footnote 2

It is hence obvious that in these early feudal systems, trade and the associated monetary transactions did not play a major role. Nevertheless, the feudal Middle Ages also witnessed a class society, with landowners and serfs as the most important classes from a socioeconomic point of view.

In the realm of ideas, it was primarily the teachings of the Catholic Church that were of a nature to help perpetuate this system, with numerous ecclesiastical rules (including the ecclesiastical prohibition of interest) opposing wealth accumulation as an end in itself, which helped ensure that, especially in the first half of the Middle Ages, merchants and money changers, for example, continued to play a limited role only.

On the margins, the side note is appropriate here that these fledgling, feudal societies conformed, to some extent, to the Platonic ideal of small agrarian communities that were largely self-sustaining and within which trade and monetary transactions played a limited role, on the understanding that Plato presumably would have shuddered at the feudal class division (to the extent that he himself was more in favor of varying land ownership among free citizens).Footnote 3

As the Middle Ages progressed, this gradually changed, with emerging cities becoming a hotbed where merchants and craftsmen settled in order, gradually, to break away from feudal structures. This led to the development of specialized professions of increasingly free people (with the understanding that they in turn organized themselves into merchant associations, such as guilds, which brought with them new, appropriate forms of unfreedom).

This, in turn, was accompanied by the production of increasingly specialized luxury goods that were not so much made for the own use of the producers—such as a given feudal domain or estate—but were instead essentially intended to be traded. Such production of (luxury) goods mainly intended for trade initially occurred both in the traditional, feudal domains, and in the lap of workshops set up by the merchants or artisans themselves.

As a result, trade (and the associated exchange of money) became increasingly important in the second half of the Middle Ages, causing European economies to evolve from purely agrarian economies to economies of mixed agricultural and mercantile character. This evolution was accompanied by a struggle with the underlying legal structures, both with feudalism—from which people settling in cities increasingly wished to evade—and with ecclesiastical commandments and prohibitions (which the emerging class of merchants, increasingly, flouted).

It should in all this be borne in mind that this evolution occurred in practice, not based on economic or political doctrines, but because sections of the population began to advocate ways of life other than those favored by classical feudal and ecclesiastical approaches.

The result of this evolution has been that, in terms of the organization of the socioeconomic order, in addition to the traditional statutes of serfs and (domain) lords, a new group of free(er) citizens emerged who, as the Middle Ages progressed, also claimed an ever-increasing grip on soci(et)al—and later political—developments.Footnote 4

Because these soci(et)al changes relied on very gradual evolutions, rather than on revolutionary upheavals, it is not easy to determine exactly when the feudal models were finally abandoned in favor of the system we refer to in contemporary terms as capitalism, in which large regional differences also played a role.

Thus, in a certain depiction, there is some academic vagueness about a period of pre-capitalism, or pre-capitalist practices, signaling that the feudal system, rather than having suffered from a sudden caesura, gradually flowed into the system we describe in contemporary terms as capitalism.

This gradual transition from feudal to (pre)capitalist societies was accompanied by an increasing use of a legal apparatus that, at the beginning of feudal times, showed barely any relevance, to gradually increasingly determine the appearance of late medieval and pre-capitalist societies, including (1) increasing trade; (2) increasing use of money (including the emergence of models of private money creation); (3) a system of renting out labor in exchange for money (rather than employment on a feudal estate), and (4) an increasing reliance on the company/corporate model as a form of organization for merchant and industrial enterprises.

One can even imagine that in the heyday of feudalism, the average person hardly encountered money and trade. Such an average man was either a serf or a member of the elite of feudal lords and spent (most of) his life on a feudal estate set up to be self-sufficient. The serf and his household lived off the proceeds of their farmstead, part of which was ceded to the feudal lord. For what a serf himself did not produce on his farm, there was limited (barter) trade with other serfs, whether from the same feudal domain or not. The feudal lords themselves could meet their own needs from the portions of the proceeds that their serfs handed over to them.

As more and more luxury goods saw the light of day, trade also increased (with the underlying question of what facilitated what), which in turn led to a class of merchants who specialized in the trade of such luxury goods—which were luxurious either because of, for example, their exotic nature, which implied that they could not be produced locally, or because of the production process required, such as a special skill in craftsmanship.

Around the corner, the notion of created wants came into play, since many of the goods thus traded were not essential to life, such as luxury linens and decorative goods, as well as exotic foodstuffs (spices, for example).

Because the production and trade of such goods, by definition, transcended domain boundaries, this trade itself started to rely, increasingly, on the use of money.

As a result, the rise of commerce in the second half of the Middle Ages was accompanied by an intensification of monetary transactions, which led to the emergence of an increasing number of professions that dealt with monetary transactions (from which modern, private banks grew).Footnote 5 This in turn provided an instrument that further eroded feudality, since such transfers of goods in exchange for money were no longer based on feudal agreements, but instead on monetary transactions.

These evolutions also got accompanied by a breakthrough of hoarding money as a system of wealth accumulation (where before wealth accumulation mainly took the form of land ownership).

This in its own turn provided a further tool of (pre-)capitalism, specifically money use as an increasingly accepted system for the payment of all types of goods and services. As we have explained in detail in previous work, this evolution was in turn accompanied by the emergence of a new type of money creation, in which, in addition to coinage, the creation of which in most cases continued to sort under the authority of (local) lords or sovereigns, privately emitted paper money gradually saw the light of day.

This (private) paper money creation soon provided a major stimulus for further trade expansion (and, therefore, for the resulting, modern-day economic growth model).

Initially, such use of money was mainly situated between merchants themselves, besides between merchants and domain lords. Indeed, to the extent that the production of goods initially still largely occurred in the bosom of feudal domains, it was the feudal lords who received the sums of money in exchange for the manufactured goods (and not the craftsmen who still had the status of being mere serfs).

However, a reversal began to occur here as well, in which the workmen engaged in the production of the goods being traded were no longer serfs of feudal domains, but people who began to rent out their labor in exchange for money. Exactly what factors brought about this transition is not entirely clear. Perhaps there was a growing part of the population that, for distinct reasons—such as warfare (e.g., soldiers returning from the Crusades), crop failures, the perishing of feudal domains, …—no longer enjoyed a fixed status within the feudal system and felt compelled to earn their livelihood by other means, thus in their own way contributing to the increasing urbanization of European societies. Those settling in urban areas eventually no longer belonged in a feudal domain and were consequently no longer employed in their own homestead, provided to them by a feudal lord, but had to start making a living by other means. It was this part of the population that was increasingly being picked up by, for example, production workshops or early factories belonging to merchants or artisans themselves.

In this way, the non-money-based system of feudal production was gradually replaced by a system of production in which people who made their labor available to a producer received a sum of money as compensation.

These practices established a second important tool of capitalism, especially wage labor, which had already become widespread in large parts of Europe by the sixteenth century.

As the production of goods increasingly served to be traded in exchange for money (rather than as part of the production of self-supporting domains) and the production processes increasingly relied on workers receiving a sum of money in exchange for their labor (rather than on serfs of a feudal domain), and as the demand for goods produced and traded in such a manner increased, the need for large-scale production also grew. This, in turn, was accompanied by a search for suitable legal models, to which we owe the reintroduction and the ever-increasing success of the legal figure of the (capital) company/corporation, because of which the industrial and commercial enterprises that in the course of the sixteenth century left an ever-increasing mark on European societies could henceforth be organized under the company/corporate form.

With this cocktail of legal instruments—trade, the use of money, private money creation, salaried labor, and the company/corporate form—from the sixteenth century onward, socioeconomic organization got, increasingly, underpinned by models that gave birth to capitalism, albeit aspects of the feudal models of organization themselves remained in parallel.

As a result, European societies from the sixteenth century onward, in terms of their socioeconomic organization, took on a mixed appearance: partly (still) feudal and partly (already) capitalist.

With this, European societies evolved from agrarian societies, in which land ownership constituted the main form of wealth (accumulation), to societies that increasingly came to rely on trade in all kinds of luxury goods and on the associated production, and within which money (accumulation) became an increasingly important method of wealth (accumulation).

Subsequent history has been one in which the capitalist forms of organizing the socioeconomic order became even more important—and got further refined—while the remnants of feudalism declined even further in importance, an evolution that would eventually be perpetuated, politically, by the revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. These revolutions would lead, throughout the Western world, to the establishment, at the political level, of so-called bourgeois-liberal states and, at the socioeconomic level, of industrial-capitalist economies.

Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these political and socioeconomic models of society would continue to crystallize, albeit efforts were made, primarily in the political dimension, to increase the participation of parts of the population that were underrepresented in the original bourgeois-liberal state models, including, in general, lower classes of the population, women and minority groups (e.g., ethnic minority groups).

This resulted in a model of state organization that came to be known as liberal democracies, in which every (adult) member of the population can participate through the exercise of a right to vote and through joining political parties in the hope of acquiring a representative political mandate, although in practice it appears that especially the latter is not evident for those belonging to the lower, soci(et)al classes.

In terms of the socioeconomic organization of these bourgeois-liberal societies, however, the enthusiasm to push for models establishing greater equality has been a lot less.

The previous chapters have already explained, from various perspectives, that the mechanisms and methods of capitalism, inherently, create a dichotomy within societies between an elite class of entrepreneurs and bankers (supplemented by a number of professional groups that support their interests, including liberal professions, politicians, … ) and the large masses who have become increasingly dependent for their livelihood on the renting out of their labor for a fixed fee (wage).Footnote 6 Although the latter phenomenon began to occur as early as the sixteenth century, because of the forces of capitalism, this polarization of global societies reached its height especially during the 18th and 19th centuries.

More poignantly, this polarization also occurred in what is known as the North-South relationship, in other words, in the relationship between a limited group of rich to very rich (generally Western) countries and the so-called developing countries.

Indeed, starting with the sixteenth-century conquests by various European countries of overseas territories and the ensuing colonialism, the relationship between these two groups of countries, to a large extent, has been characterized by an attitude of systematic exploitation, in which the entrepreneurial world of various Western countries, has taken license to systematically deprive the group of poor countries of their own natural resources (including, in the period when slavery was still going on, even the population of these countries). Although over the course of the twentieth century this systematic exploitation was increasingly masked, the relationship between these two groups of countries remains to this very day fiercely marked by currently still prevailing (capitalist) models of exploitation.

In the Western countries themselves, the polarization has mainly had an internal effect, with their populations since then divided into two broad classes (with entrepreneurs and bankers at the top, and at the bottom the class of people who depend on providing labor for providing a livelihood).

Just as within the political sphere, efforts have been made within the socioeconomic sphere as well to somewhat reduce the outgrowths of capitalism, with in the Western countries themselves, especially in the period after World War II until the 1970s, the experiment of expanding the model of the welfare state, which, through the installation of public services and social security mechanisms, attempted to give capitalism a more human face, however without abandoning the model of dividing the population into classes itself.

On the merits, capitalism continued to have in common with the earlier feudal system—and with the Roman slave economy that preceded it –, the fact that it relies on a division of humanity into a limited class of rulers and the rest of humanity, the latter class being completely subordinated to the economic interests of the former class.Footnote 7 However, the models also exhibit important points of difference, the main ones being that, in the political-legal sphere, capitalism relies on a legal model in which (most) people are (legally) free, whereas the earlier feudalism and slave economies were based on serfdom, respectively slavery, and, in the economic sphere, capitalism has lent itself much more to economic growth and progress than either of its predecessors, mentioned above.

However, this does not prevent capitalism from creating and sustaining societies characterized by gross inequality and a high degree of unfreedom. Inequality is particularly evident in the fact that the fruits of the economic growth and progress that capitalism has made possible are distributed in a totally unequal and unjust manner among the global population. The unfreedom is especially evident in the fact that the bulk of the world's population is condemned to a perpetual necessity to rent out its labor, which makes living in capitalist societies, synonymous with having to perform labor for life and for external purposes only, in particular to continually increase the wealth of the entrepreneurial and banking classes.

In this sense, within capitalism, the game of domination, while being played somewhat more subtle than under its two predecessors (feudalism and slave economies), is no less problematic.

Perhaps most distressing of all is the fact that over the past centuries capitalism has succeeded in becoming the all-dominant economic system on Earth, so that there are hardly any countries or territories left that are not exposed to its principles, mechanisms, and working methods, to a greater or lesser extent. This has been further facilitated by the governments of numerous countries which, in recent times, have increasingly adopted the recipes of economic neoliberalism, thereby further strengthening the power of capitalism.

A peculiarity of capitalism that should not be underestimated is the extent to which it has succeeded in elevating the pursuit of money to a central, soci(et)al value, if not the only one still in force.

Whereas initially this was still, in main order, the result of practical revolutions (cf. the pre-capitalist practices based on money use and leading to accumulation of monetary wealth), from the seventeenth–eighteenth century onwards, the pursuit of money would become the central, soci(et)al value in the realm of ideas as well, thus completing the break with earlier, more idealistic models of society.

Earlier in this book, the caesura in human thinking about socioeconomic processes and relations that occurred in parallel with the breakthrough of capitalism has been pointed out in more detail already. (Cf. Sects. 1.2 and 2.2)

Indeed, beforehand in history, philosophy and religion had warned against the dominance of the pursuit of money (with the most striking illustration being the message of the Gospel of Jesus Christ that man is faced with the choice between serving the Mammon, or money devil, or serving God, not being able to choose—and serve—both at the same time).

However, as pre-capitalist practices, increasingly, came to define socioeconomic relations, an important turning point started to occur in the realm of ideas as well, with first Calvinism, and later strains within rationalism, increasingly playing the card of the pursuit of money (and less and less the card of organizing societies based on love and friendship, or similar, idealistic notions).

This interplay between evolutions of practice, such as (1) the rise of private money creation by the forerunners of today's private banks, (2) the breakthrough of the leasing of labor for a fixed fee as an alternative to the feudal system, and (3) the breakthrough of the capital company/corporation model as a mechanism for shaping enterprises, with a validation in the realm of ideas of the money pursuit motive as the highest soci(et)al value, would from then on prove crucial in the further breakthrough of capitalism as the dominant economic model.

In doing so, capitalism also became the model of socioeconomic order that pre-eminently succeeded in confirming Plato’s prophecy that, as the use of money would increasingly gain importance within societies, such societies would become increasingly unequal and unjust.

And thus, in post-feudal societies, under the validation of philosophical currents that would eventually evolve into contemporary economic sciences, money accumulation grew to become the most central value, to which all other values were eventually subordinated.

Gradually, all interpersonal relations also got based on the exchange of a sum of money (and the associated contractual relations). This evolution was both qualitative (= more and more interpersonal relationships were based on the exchange of a sum of money) and quantitative (= more and more areas on Earth were, increasingly, subjected to this approach).

In addition, all other values were subordinated to the pursuit of money itself, ranging from the relationship to one's fellow man (which finds its expression, among other things, in the hierarchy of values between labor and capital), to the relationship to the entire environment. In one representation, it even reads that all soci(et)al transactions have been reduced to behavior involving the spending of money.Footnote 8

This sacrifice of all other values to the pursuit of money would not be without consequences, albeit that the supporters of capitalism—including the liberal and neoliberal economic schools that support capitalism—themselves have since then largely remained blind to the many problems created by the capitalist, economic model.

In the contemporary context, it has nevertheless become impossible to ignore the fact that capitalism itself fails to provide adequate solutions to the many problems it has created, the main of which are: (1) the spoiling of the environment (with the resulting climate change, the seriousness of which has still not dawned on the adherents of the ideologies that have shaped and continue to sustain capitalism); (2) the unjust socioeconomic order it has shaped (characterized by great inequalities and numerous forms of polarization); (3) the fact that the majority of humanity is unhappy with the high degree of unfreedom and inequality on which capitalism relies, in addition to, in recent times (4) a multitude of economic problems and crises for which no solution is in sight (such as the unusually large debt of both countries and individuals, rising inflation, a severe energy crisis, …).

This realization is not new and has already resulted in past attempts to improve capitalism or replace it with alternative models of organizing the socioeconomic order. Perhaps one of the most valuable attempts to improve capitalism were the attempts made in the period after World War II until the 1970s to create so-called welfare states, which involved the establishment of mechanisms to allow for a more equitable distribution of the wealth created by the economy among the entire population. In addition, the attempts to introduce so-called communism in certain countries testified to a similar intention to provide a real alternative to capitalism.

Both these attempts have largely failed.

Notwithstanding its great merits, from its inception the experiment of the welfare state has been territorially limited to a limited group of countries, especially then in the Western world, so that the (temporary) success of this model has partly grafted itself onto the hood of systems of exploitation of other countries, including especially the developing countries. In addition, economic neoliberalism, (especially) from the 1980s onward, in several of the countries that had adopted the welfare state model, pushed for its (gradual) dismantling.

In a similar vein, the introduction of communism did not happen smoothly either. Instead, it was accompanied by various, appropriate problems and injustices, so that the question arises whether it really achieved better models of society. It is, for instance, typical that in numerous former communist countries, communism eventually had to be abandoned, while in those countries where communism has survived, it is often supported by dictatorial, political regimes.

All this is of a nature to help explain the chaotic situation in which the world currently finds itself, with the key question being how long collective humanity will remain blind to the destructive forces that have emanated from capitalism.

Even the threat of climate change, in addition to the fact that some researchers have in recent times warned that human civilization itself is on the verge of collapse (cf. Chap. 3), still does not seem to be of such a nature as to make the advocacy of alternative models of socioeconomic order, sufficiently serious.

However, it does appear that the issue is becoming increasingly alive, with academia, alongside certain protest movements in various countries, taking the lead, but with the business and policy world itself still not fully convinced of the need for sufficiently drastic action.

In our opinion, the time for patching up certain excesses of capitalism is over. Just the increasingly urgent message from the scientific community that the consequences of climate change are still barely foreseeable, should be enough to start taking the situation seriously and to make the search for alternative socioeconomic order models an absolute priority.

This is already the research approach we have made our own over the past decade, whereby it can be noted that, where one of our early works in this regard (specifically the book: ’De onvrije markt’ (2015))Footnote 9 still led to an admittedly laudatory book review in which we were called (by analogy with John the Baptist) a ‘caller in the desert’,Footnote 10 our research findings can now boast of an ever-increasing resonance.Footnote 11

As for the content of our reform proposals that aspire to reform capitalism to its deepest roots—going back to the model of private money creation and the monetary system based on it –, reference can be made to the previous Chaps. 4 to 7, as well as to our previous work.Footnote 12

Let us hope that these—or similar—proposals will be seized upon with a view to building a new, global model of socioeconomic organization, in which altruism or solidarity, rather than the pursuit of money, will become the central soci(et)al values, along with a genuine concern for the wellbeing of the Earth and all the life forms it contains. How this might allow a new type of society to be built has already been thoroughly discussed throughout Chaps. 4 through 7. In the (Final) Chap. 9. some final conclusions will be drawn based on this discussion.