9.1 General

After more than two (= industrial capitalism) to four (= mercantile and industrial capitalism combined) centuries of capitalism, the balance sheet is far from rosy, at least for those who, averse to ideology, are willing to take a sober and honest look at what capitalism has brought about.

On the plus side is the fact that capitalism has brought relative prosperity to a (limited) part of the world, especially then in the so-called Western world.

On the minus side, capitalism has created many serious, societal and other problems that go unsolved under the dictates of capitalism itself.

Among the main of these problems are:

  1. (1)

    The fact that capitalism, as a system of socioeconomic ordering, proceeds entirely unplanned, leaving socioeconomic processes as much as possible to the free market, ergo to the game of free contracting, with the result that the resources of the planet and much of humanity, are engaged in a merciless process of production for the sake of production (and of consumption for the sake of consumption), in addition to in an equally merciless competition.

  2. (2)

    The fact that, as a result, the world is caught up in an unprecedented environmental problem which manifests itself in countless areas, including climate change.

  3. (3)

    The fact that capitalism has led to a system of exploitation of the great masses by a small elite of entrepreneurs (including bankers), in addition to the fact that this has created a dichotomy between rich and poor (which, moreover, under impetus of economic neoliberalism, is even more pronounced to the extent that previous methods of correction to unbridled capitalism are systematically abandoned). This is true both in the relationship between countries and within national boundaries.

In recent times, the foregoing has led to the understanding that capitalism is a system that provides the top 1% of the world’s population with very great wealth, the top 15% of the world's population—more or less corresponding to the Western population—with relative prosperity, and the rest of the world’s population, with relative to extreme poverty. Capitalism, in addition, has, increasingly, come at the expense of the well-being of the Earth itself.

Driven by economic neoliberalism, these intrinsic characteristics of capitalism have, over the course of the past half century, been magnified even further, with virtually all the socioeconomic and legal mechanisms that help shape the socioeconomic order being transformed to such an extent that they have come to emphasize even more these peculiarities of capitalism.

This turns capitalism in the broad sense—including the legal order that helps define the appearance of capitalism—into a system that quasi-unilaterally serves the interests of a small group within society, especially those of the class of entrepreneurs (including the bankers), at the expense of all other interests, including those of the Earth itself and of the rest of the global population.

It is, furthermore, obvious that such a system relies on an extremely utilitarian view of mankind, within the framework of which most of humanity exists only to contribute to the economic system, and in which (as good as all) other dimensions of human existence have been pushed entirely into the background.

Finally, this awareness has been present for an exceedingly long time. Thus, in earlier times, the warning, for example from the mouths of historical figures such as Plato and Jesus Christ, sounded that mankind should beware of letting economic interests take precedence over other values. In more recent times, human scientists such as Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, among many others in various fields of the human sciences, no longer formulated a warning, but pointed out the harsh reality of man's place within the capitalist order.

Still, virtually nothing has been done with all these insights. On the contrary, the implementation of the ideology of economic neoliberalism has magnified matters even further, while, worldwide, the many national governments and international organizations that adhere to this ideology continue to pretend that nothing is wrong with it.

As a result, over the past decades, the many problems of capitalism—which we ourselves have been addressing for some timeFootnote 1—have been magnified beyond all rational proportions: (1) Environmental pollution (resulting in climate change) is continuing apace and is now also making itself felt in the socioeconomic context in many areas (with phenomena such as hunger, floods and drought, the latter even already compelling large parts of countries’ populations to migrate); (2) the mountains of debt of countries, both private and public, are growing steadily; (3) the polarization between rich and poor continues in the same vein; (4) hunger and poverty continue to prevail; …

One of the few bright spots seems to be that an increasing proportion of humanity is increasingly fed up with capitalism. However, for now this manifests itself mainly in the form of a number of rather confused symptoms, such as, for example, the fact that in the United States of America, as of 2021, massive numbers of people have voluntarily resigned from jobs of which they no longer see the point, in addition to occasional protest demonstrations taking place here and there, but with no real alternatives in sight, except for proposals for change formulated in academic circles.

The wait is for a translation of this growing awareness that things cannot continue like this into a sufficiently broad—and, hopefully, international—political movement that could bring about the necessary changes.

What is in any case clear here is that the ruling political elites themselves show little or no willingness to initiate such a change, but on the contrary, crisis after crisis, continue to resort mainly to the same neoliberal recipes that do not solve the many problems caused by capitalism, but only make them worse.Footnote 2

To this end, it is all the more striking to note the insistence on socioeconomic organizational mechanisms that, by now, have remained virtually the same for over four centuries, including: (1) The model of private money creation that has placed the power to determine the ins and outs of the economy largely in the hands of the private banking sector; (2) The post-feudal social model of employment in which, on the basis of a perverse work ethic, the great masses have been reduced to the work cattle of the economic and political elites (where it has already been pointed out by certain authors that this system amounts to a new feudal system); (3) The primacy of the economy, as the political guideline for all economic and other policies, both at national and international levels; (4) A legal organization increasingly geared to serve only the interests of the entrepreneurial class (including the bankers), the most characteristic examples being the principle that all socioeconomic organization should be based on private contracting, in addition to the model of company/corporate law that serves to channel, as far as possible, the capital gains generated by the economy to the wealthy entrepreneurial class; and (5) A corresponding taxation system that places the burden of financing public action as much as possible on the low and middle classes (and as little as possible on the rich, entrepreneurial class and their enterprises themselves).

Obviously, such a system is no longer sustainable; at the very least, humanity and the Earth deserve much better.

Moreover, if we contrast the stagnation of the socioeconomic mechanisms that together have shaped capitalism since the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries with the incredible technological developments that occurred since then, the question remains why human intelligence, which has proved capable of such technological progress, has been so reluctant to work in parallel on better—and, above all, both more equitable and sustainable—systems of organization of society itself.

Still, there is much to be gained by looking for alternatives, which we shall try to illustrate below with an exercise in thinking about a potential future for man within the new monetary—and by extension: economic—order we have been advocating in our work since 2015,Footnote 3 which could take shape from the therein proposed NMWO. (Cf. Chaps. 4–7)

9.2 Possibilities of Our Newly Proposed Money Creation System

As already explained in the previous chapters (cf. especially Chap. 7), one of the worst consequences of capitalism for the individual (who does not belong to the wealthy entrepreneurial classes) is the complete dependence on employment by the entrepreneurial sector (besides other sectors of societal life which have become derivative of it).

Indeed, anyone who wants to survive in capitalist societies must have a sufficient income to support them. In accordance with the principles and working methods of capitalism, there are only two major methods of having such an income. Moreover, it turns out that these two major methods each correspond to one of the two social classes into which capitalism has divided humanity, although in theory both methods of acquiring an income are accessible to everyone (i.e., to members of both classes).

The first of these methods is the acquisition of income by what, in a generic sense, could be described as the hiring out of one’s own labor. This is the method most accessible to the great masses, ergo to the class of the employed.

After more than four centuries of capitalism, the bulk of humanity has become completely dependent on this first method, even to the extent that for many, living has become synonymous with having to chronically rent out one's labor—or, phrased differently, to work –, on the understanding, however, that there are great differences between countries. Indeed, as a function of various factors—the common denominator being the extent to which the forces of democracy have succeeded, or failed, in implementing and preserving aspects of the welfare state model—there are countries in which the income from employment allows a relative prosperity, which the entrepreneurial class in turn tolerates for both political (= soci(et)al peace) and economic (= providing the population with sufficient purchasing power) reasons. However, there are also many countries in which the average income from employment is kept low, with the result that a substantial proportion of the world's employed population keeps balancing on the poverty line (and in many cases even falls below it).

The second of these methods is the acquisition of entrepreneurial income, which legally translates as income from capital (or investments). Here, the entire logic of the capitalist economic system is to channel the bulk of economic capital gains to such (initial or subsequent) capital providers of the entrepreneurial system. Mindful of the principles of capitalism, this second method of income generation is primarily one open to the class of entrepreneurs.

Under liberal—and later in time, neoliberal—ideologies, every individual, in theory, has the choice between the two methods. This theoretical freedom of choice even constitutes the true tome of the liberal idea of freedom. Thus, anyone is free to go into business (and assume the associated entrepreneurial risk), or to choose employment in a subordinate capacity. It is also in this area that the meritocratic attitude of this ideological framework of thought makes itself felt: it is thereby believed that the best in society (in terms of intelligence, manpower, perseverance, and so on) will opt for entrepreneurship and in this way exercise their beneficial effect on the world, while the less fortunate will also benefit from these efforts because they will be employed by the business world, in exchange for a fixed wage that will give them access to the wealth thus created by the business world (i.e., the so-called trickle-down economics).

After (more than) four centuries of capitalism and almost half a century of implementation of economic neoliberalism, pretty much the entire economic and legal system, worldwide, is aligned with this framework of thought, resulting in a socioeconomic order that is essentially not much better than its historical predecessors (notably feudalism, besides earlier civilizations based on models of legal slavery).

What is fundamentally wrong with this model of reasoning, however, is that within it there is no consideration at all the probability lottery of life itself. The latter implies that it is not so much individual merits that determine a person’s life chances, but rather their birth. As a result, in most cases, it is not ‘the best’—whatever this term may mean—who find their way to becoming entrepreneurs—ergo to become one of those who exploit the rest of humanity and the Earth itself –, but rather those for whom this path is paved because of their birth in a wealthy family, which, in the inherently competitive race of capitalism, most determines the later course of life.

A second false—and possibly even more questionable—premise on which capitalism is based is that there must be ever more economic growth, ergo ever more production and ever more consumption, a premise on which the entire capitalist model is based and which, in turn, also explains why everything on Earth—natural resources, as well as the class of people employed—must contribute to it, at any cost.

The alternative model of money creation that we have already proposed in some of our earlier workFootnote 4 could help provide a way out of both of these false premises and the resulting fundamental problems capitalism has created, which in itself is not surprising to the extent that the prevailing capitalist system of money creation is one of the most essential mechanisms underpinning capitalism and thus in co-determining the various problems into which capitalism has plunged the world.

Our newly proposed model of money creation could be useful primarily for underpinning a smaller-scale economy, in which, unlike capitalism, economic growth for the sake of growth, production for the sake of production, and consumption for the sake of consumption, would no longer constitute central objectives of monetary and economic policy, but rather sustainability and a sufficient awareness of the limitations of the planet.Footnote 5

Incidentally, the latter, as aforementioned, is not even an utterly new realization. Already in 1972, the Club of Rome formulated exactly a similar message in its report Limits to Growth, albeit said report has since then completely been ignored by the ruling classes of entrepreneurs and the politicians they appoint. (Cf. Sect. 3.1.4.2.)

Under our newly proposed monetary model, money creation could henceforth take place to help achieve this objective of a more modest and more sustainable economy.

It is obvious that this would also have an immediate impact on employment.

For instance, in the transition to more modest and sustainable economies, employment policies could finally be adapted to technological progress. Indeed, already in the 1930s Keynes formulated the observation that, due to technological progress, working hours for the average person would become less (up to 15 h/workweek).Footnote 6 In a recent past, the physicist Hawking also expressed a similar viewpoint.Footnote 7

According to the opinions expressed by these two leading scientists in their respective, scientific disciplines, the fruits of technological progress should benefit everyone and not, as under prevailing capitalism, translate only into ever greater entrepreneurial profits for the benefit of the ruling, economic classes.

Also notable is the large span of time that has elapsed between the time each of the two prominent academics formulated their opinion, specifically Keynes in the 1930s and Hawking in 2016, which immediately implies that over a period of nearly a century, the issues have remained the same, with no significant, policy efforts to do anything about them.

Indeed, little or nothing has so far been done, both at the level of policy making and at the level of socioeconomic practices, to translate technological progress into a corresponding, general reduction in working hours. On the contrary, under the impetus of economic neoliberalism, the opposite has happened: where, for example, in the recent past working arrangements have been made more flexible, this has mainly led to arrangements that allow employers to employ people in a more flexible manner (for example, in terms of personnel status, working hours, possibility of dismissal, and so on), but there is generally no greater flexibility for the benefit of the employed themselves. Another example concerns the fact that, under economic neoliberal policies, throughout the Western world, the retirement age is being systematically raised and the opportunities to stop working early are, in a similar vein, being systematically reduced.

In parallel, it appears that many of the jobs, amount to so-called ‘bullshit jobs’, which has been masterfully demonstrated by David Graeber in his book bearing the same title.Footnote 8 In this book, it is argued that the majority of jobs within the ‘neoliberalized’ (especially Western) world lack all meaning, which is not illogical to the extent that an ever-increasing part of the production of goods and services is aimed only at the satisfaction of artificially created needs. In recent decades, this has been evident, for example, in all kinds of jobs that involve coaching, training, evaluation, and similar forms of purported support for other forms of employment, in which recent graduates often come to explain to people with years of experience why they are doing their jobs wrong and how this can be remedied, albeit that, for people who still have jobs with substance, this usually leads to a great deal of additional administration and other formalities (such as attending compulsory, content-free training courses).Footnote 9

Into the same slither fits the endless meeting culture that has afflicted a substantial portion of the employed over the past few decades, whereby—how could it be otherwise—a market of services to learn to meet more efficiently has already emerged (by thus having to meet even more).

All of this, of course, fits into the view of man that has emerged since Calvinism that man exists primarily, or even solely, to work, with this view of man meanwhile—after its adoption in the economic theories that grew out of the Enlightenment schools—having gained passage around the world.

Considering the foregoing, it becomes even more interesting to read that in earlier societies that relied on hunting and fishing, people on average only had to spend a few hours a day working and were quite content with this (cf. Sect. 2.1). In contrast, today’s neoliberal world expects people to spend most of the day (and life) doing their job(s), and most people are not happy about this (cf. Sect. 7.1.3.2.3).

With that, the question becomes what the hell we—i.e., humanity as a whole—have all been doing in allowing such a disastrous socioeconomic order to take shape.Footnote 10

It is in this debate that the question of universal income belongs. (Cf. already in Sect. 5.2.2) Indeed, to the extent that there would be a push for more reasonable employment models, there will at the same time be a need for a universal income to ensure that everyone, in a dignified manner, will be able to provide for their livelihood (albeit that a perhaps even more utopian alternative might be to push for moneyless societies).

Such a universal basic income could, moreover, allow people to use their labor for the benefit of society in a more rational way than merely for fear of not being able to earn a living otherwise.

Under such a new approach, the meaning of jobs could be improved drastically, which should normally translate into a greater degree of job satisfaction. This could, for instance, take more account of a need for sufficient variety, where flexibility, in other words, would play to the benefit of people (rather than to the mere benefit of the rich classes). Indeed, why not evolve towards an economic model in which people who want to, could change jobs more quickly according to evolving interests and skills?

Moreover, as also argued in our previous work,Footnote 11 future methods of labor organization could also take greater account of the findings of biological and medical science, such as the insight that human beings go through life cycles, with the result that there are certain phases in human life in which human beings can be more productive than during other phases of life. These insights could translate into more humane career paths than those currently prevalent under prevailing capitalist models of exploitation, where one can observe that more and more people are unable to cope with the high expectations of the over-competitive free-market system (except, perhaps, by resorting to addictive drugs provided by the overly profit-oriented pharmaceutical industry, including all types of antidepressants, stimulants and tranquilizers, or even illegal drugs).

It is obvious that all this will require a very delicate balancing act to ensure that such an economy, to be created under the proposed NMWO, will not only be sustainable, but at the same time also sufficiently powerful to provide for everyone's livelihood.

The latter will require relying on an apt delineation of the public domain and the private domain, whereby the newly established socioeconomic mechanisms, including a universal basic income, which will together define the new public domain, should not be allowed to hinder the sufficiently free operation of the market in the sectors that will remain in the private domain.

As advocated earlier in this book (cf. Chap. 5), the new public domain could include, in addition to general government operation, the following matters: (1) Care (in the broad sense of the word); (2) Education; (3) Energy, and (4) Infrastructure. The intention would be for the operation of all these sectors to be borne entirely from the periodic allocations that the NMWO will grant to its member states, so that these sectors (1) will acquire a fully public character; (2) will be characterized by a service that is free and accessible to all on an equal footing, and (3) will boast (very large) employment in the bosom of government.Footnote 12

9.3 Towards a New Balance Between Employment and Other Life Dimensions

For those who do not belong to the wealthy classes, life in current-capitalist societies is anything but an easy or pleasant task.

Moreover, this fact is all the truer the poorer one is, both at the level of countries, and within countries themselves, at the level of their rich and poor populations.

At the level of actual people, this implies that those who belong to the low classes of poor countries are almost certain to spend their lives in poverty, no matter how hard these people work. Those who belong to the low classes of richer countries have it somewhat better, albeit that the degree to which such richer countries have aligned their policies with the ideology of economic neoliberalism seems to be directly proportional to the wretchedness of the living conditions of the low, social classes in these countries as well.

This immediately raises fundamental questions about the meritocracy principle that, going back to seventeenth century Calvinism, economic neoliberalism continues to uphold. Indeed, reality shows that, within the capitalist socioeconomic order, social, vertical mobility occurs only to a limited extent and that, on the contrary, people continue to function in the class to which they belong. This also implies that those who are born into a lower class will usually have to perform (extremely hard) labor all their lives, without ever gaining a better living standard for themselves.

What is even worse, if possible, is that within capitalism, there is not much other room for other things that matter in a human life, such as friendships, a balanced family life, participation in volunteer work or, for those who seek it, attention to the spiritual dimension of life.

All this has, of course, been touched upon several times before, for example by Herbert Marcuse who indicated man as a one-dimensional human being, or, more recently, by academic psychologist Paul Verhaeghe who, in his book ‘De neoliberale waanzin - Flexibel, efficiënt en gestoord’ (2011),Footnote 13 has painted a grim picture of a (literally) sickening performance society, in which, in the Western world, an unprecedentedly large number of people suffer from severe psychological problems caused by the pressures created by neoliberal principles (in which any human being has become subservient to the goal of making the financial elites of capitalist societies as rich as possible).

In a similar vein, anthropologist Rik Pinxten has argued that the (alleged) success of the neoliberal model is primarily one of interaction with an increasing degree of inequality, in which the modal human being is stripped of anything even remotely valuable and interesting, including one’s ethical, aesthetic and political dimensions. According to Pinxten, this has resulted in an ever-expanding devaluation of life quality in which, in the end, only the economic sphere remains, and people themselves are degraded to being mere producers or consumers (and, in the latter case, laborers at the service of economic production).Footnote 14

In the new monetary system and new socioeconomic models that we advocate, based upon, amongst others, a universal basic income and new models of employment (cf. in the previous Chaps. 4–7), these other dimensions of life could be increasingly addressed. An ideal goal could be to drastically shorten work weeks—for example, to a maximum of three working days and 15 h per work week (Cf. already Keynes)—and to model people’s degree of employment as a function of the human life cycle.Footnote 15 (Cf. already in Chap. 8)

The coherence of our proposals is evident: the lower level of employment will obviously have to be accompanied by reduced levels of production, and especially by a reduced level of production of intrinsically meaningless products (cf. the so-called ‘created wants’), as well as by a reduced level of provision of intrinsically meaningless services (cf. the so-called ‘bullshit jobs’).

All this comes down to a rationalization of the model of production for the sake of production (and consumption for the sake of consumption). In turn, such a downsizing of the economy to more reasonable proportions will naturally have repercussions on the size of entrepreneurial profits, which presupposes that the historically ever-expanding greed of the wealthy classes would be reduced to reasonable proportions.

In other words, any alternative approach of establishing a new socioeconomic order should be sufficiently holistic. The reason for this is that the processes and methods that make up capitalism have themselves emerged organically and interrelatedly, implying that an alternative approach will also require such sufficient coherence.

For the world's rich (= the top 1% of the global population), this will mean that they will have to settle for less wealth (and less polarization between rich and poor).

For the average Western man (= the top 15% of the global population), this will mainly require a surrender in terms of (pointless) consumption, with the upside that people belonging to this top 15% will henceforth be much less exploited by the economic system as well.

For the average person belonging to a poor country (= the bottom-85%), the main advantage could be that a true socioeconomic buildup will be able to take place, with which hopefully parts of the injustice of centuries of colonialism, slavery, and post-colonial exploitative practices, will be finally righted.