Timothée Parrique: There Are Alternatives To Capitalism

Sustainable development. Sustainability. Circular economy. Renewable energy. Socially responsible investing. Greentech. Green investment. Green growth. C S R S E G S D G's. These are the kind of words you expect to hear at these kinds of events. These words they're like they're comforting. They're familiar. They're reassuring. They're like the blue pill in the Matrix. They reproduce a deceitful narrative. A tale of easy techno fixes. World-saving philanthropy. And magical market solutions. But there's a problem with this story. It's a scam. Not a flaw. Not a glitch. A scam. And the name of the scam is green capitalism. I know we're not supposed to talk about the E who must not be named. The C word is a mood killer. The conceptual equivalent of a fart at a dinner party. But green capitalism is not a solution. It is a story we tell to avoid changing the system. Now usually I would sugarcoat the message into a sophisticated TED-like talk blending well numbers, pretty slides, and inspiring quotes. I mean, last year I even sung on stage. Not much left I can do. This year I want to do it differently. I want to give you something. How many of you in the room have seen the movie Arrival from 2016? Raise your hand. You guys work too much. Anyway, in the film aliens come to Earth and give humanity a language that can make us control time. This illustrates what linguists call the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. The belief that language shape worldviews. The world you see depends on the words you have. And with the words we have we are incapable of imagining a world beyond capitalism. That's the famous saying we all know. Easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. But there is a way out. You know, it's like these lists you see on the internet. The films you haven't seen but should. Today I want to do this. The words you haven't heard but should. Rare words. Dangerous words. Red pill words. Words we urgently need. Let's start here. I'm going to save us some time and not repeat how bad the ecological situation is. If you're not aware of the deadly cocktail of ecological crises that is currently turning our planet into some kind of Mad Max meets The Walking Dead dystopia that's a problem in itself. If you're not aware of this this is your invitation to catch up. And if you hold a position of power treat it as an urgent one. Because having economic responsibility without environmental sensibility is like driving blindfolded. It never ends well. I won't talk about the what but I'll talk about the why. Behind every single environmental catastrophe there is a corporation a state or some unholy marriage of the two treating nature as an all you can eat buffet. This is not a human nature problem. This is not a humanity problem. It's a powerful minority tries to get richer problem. The situation is simple. A wealthy elite is powering up global corporations and neoliberal states to turbocharge their wealth leaving a trail of social and ecological devastation for the poorest to bear. Privatize the profits. Socialize the costs. That's not a bug. It's a feature. The problem is smaller than we think. Today the richest 20% people globally use 72% of all metals. They cause 63% of all carbon emissions and are responsible for 55% of all biodiversity loss. The richest 38 countries account for 44% of the total overshoot of planetary boundaries. The ecological crisis is not a predicament. It's a beating. A beating and one that is still going on. 30 years of trying to green growth have not delivered much. We treat small sector-specific cuts in greenhouse gases in a few countries as some kind of grand miracle. And we expect that to happen everywhere for everything. This is like expecting everyone to run as fast as Usain Bolt all the time. Reality check. This is not possible. Both for the Usain Bolt thing and also for green growth. We have to choose between saving GDP or saving the planet. And so far we're choosing GDP. We're choosing mocking making money for a few over preserving life overall. And making money making money during an ecological transition is a paradoxical wish like gaining weight during a diet. And yet most companies I see here today are legally structured around the pursuit of profits. Why? Why do you keep such an inconvenient legal structure? If you're a for-profit business you're a fundamentally unfit to navigate the ecological transition. This would be like trusting an alcoholic to keep a bar. Or asking me not to use the word capitalism while giving me a thousand euro every time I do so. Capitalism. Capitalism. Capitalism. A for-profit business tries to make profit. It's the one dirty habit that explain 99% of the mess we're in. This profit or perish attitude has come to redefine our very perception of what is possible. We're often told that protecting nature is impossible. Doesn't mean impossible for real. It's actually pretty easy. It means unprofitable and thus impossible within capitalism. Capitalism is not an agile adapting system. It is stiff and slow. It excels in the art of maximizing profits but fails at pretty much everything else. Here what gets me. We've tried this system for 200 years and it didn't even work. Raise your hand if you would give capitalism five stars. Go on, five stars, the full service, no complaints. Wow. I doubt most people would. Again, privatize the profits, socialize the cost, means a minority ends up with most of the benefits and the majority with most of the cost. So, that's a question we should ponder before rushing to green anything. What's the point of greening a system that doesn't work? It would be absurd to repaint a car with a dead engine. What we need is not a dead economic system. We need one that works. Convivialism, social and solidarity economy, parecon, eco-socialism, commoning, libertarian municipalism, communalism, eco-swaraj, Ubuntu, Sarvodaya, mizarchy, solar punk, corp syndicalism, bio-communism, bio-regionalism. These models exist, but we never hear about them. Capitalism prides itself on offering endless choice, and yet it imposes itself as the only possible economic system. These ideas are neither taught in business schools nor discussed in the media, and that's a shame because they offer the very innovation we need. Growth critical scholars, for example, and activists have spent the last 20 years trying to figure out a way to slow down economic activities in order to get back within planetary boundaries without crashing quality of life. It led them to reinvent more frugal, slower, and happier ways of living. Something that will soon be worth more than Bitcoin and oil shares combined. For decades, producers and consumers have been organizing themselves as not-for-profit cooperatives, putting democratic governance and need satisfaction before money making. This is a concrete utopia. Any for-profit business, any of you, could become a not-for-profit cooperative tomorrow. Putting food at the center and growing it while respecting the rhythms of nature. A farm that feeds people without poisoning the earth. Freeing time from rampant productivism for all the care activities that actually matter. More hours with your friends and family. Fewer hours making someone else rich. Upper and lower limits to wealth. I'm going to repeat that one. Upper upper upper and lower limits to wealth. I mean, that one is just basic ground rules, like at a kindergarten. A new narrative of public wealth against the individualist growth-obsessed mentality of private capital. Instead of a world of nature-intensive technologies controlled by a handful of greedy corporations competing on who will put more cameras on a smartphone, we need technologies that are useful, accessible, and sustainable. Retiring GDP as an indicator of national progress. And retiring profitability as a sign of performance for companies. Using concrete indicators of social utility and ecological sustainability to prioritize what is needed over the majority over what is profitable for a minority. Each of these words is the embryo of an alternative economy. Woven together, they form a new grammar to rethink the very foundation of our economic system. A powerful dialect to sharpen our desire for post-capitalist futures. This is an update for both our critical thinking and our utopian thinking. A kind of radical auto-correct. Now, each time you hear the words growth, business, profitability, GDP, see the small red lines appearing with a suggestion, do you mean post-growth, cooperatives, conviviality, and well-being? This is the economic language of the future. It already exists, it already works. The question is not whether it's possible, but whether you're willing to speak it. And more importantly, whether you're willing to act on it. I came here today to give you words. The question now is, what world will you build with them? >> [applause]