Nerve 22 - Proofing the Future

Capitalism: an economic and political system in which a country’s trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit.

Proofing the Future

Image by John Daly Will capitalism end in one fell swoop? Will it wither and die? Can it be brought to an end through parliamentary democracies or constitutional monarchs? Will it walk away from power and go into exile? One of the problems inherent in an ‘anti-capitalist’ movement is that desire is defined as what we don’t want, rather than what we do. Setting up alternatives can give us a ‘window’ on the society we would like post-capitalism.

Working on the editorial group for the Nerve issue on alternatives to capitalism has felt like a very serious responsibility, more so than any other, as we grapple with austerity and as the woman who masterminded the brutality of free market capitalism and the shock doctrine, is buried with full military honours. I have asked myself what I’m doing and what can we do that will make a difference. It seems to me there is a two pronged approach, that involves protest, and creating positive models for a future society. We need to question if our own actions are just serving to make capitalism more palatable while allowing those who hold power to stay in power. It is a good thing for all of us to try to look closely at the various strategies that we are engaging in as we build alternatives.

Positive projects are happening all across Liverpool but do they foreshadow how the world can operate when we are finally free from the ‘free market’ and financialisation? (‘Financialisation’, my new favourite word, means the presence of profit being syphoned off at every phase of exchange, resulting in wages being driven down and people who already have wealth being able to stockpile more through the owning of stocks and shares.)

So, how do the local initiatives below stack up as alternatives to capitalism?

2Up 2Down (Anfield)

Margaret Thatcher joked that her greatest achievement was Tony Blair, and Blair’s ‘New Labour’ invented the Housing Market Renewal Initiative, also known as Pathfinder. Pathfinder schemes (as with Thatcher’s ‘Right to Buy’) make sure that poor people can’t have affordable housing and put them in debt, because if you’re indebted to the bank you’re not going to go on strike.

With the law of supply and demand, if you have too much of something the price goes down, so it was with terrace houses in Liverpool. The answer then is to remove the supply: compulsory purchase then means that you have no choice but to leave a house that you’ve finished paying for, and take on a new mortgage. Anfield as a community has been decimated by Pathfinder.

It often takes an outsider to be able to disturb the twisted logic of capitalism and inject hope into the areas that have been hit hardest by this scheme. Over the last two and half years, artist Jeanne van Heeswijk, commissioned by Liverpool Biennial, has been working with people from Anfield and Breckfield on a conceptual art piece that takes re-building neighbourhoods and personal/communal agency in social change as the ‘artwork’.

There are two arms of the project: Homebaked Community Bakery and Homebaked Community Land Trust.

Homebaked Community Bakery

Homebaked is in the historic Mitchell’s Bakery, re-opened, opposite Liverpool Football Club (LFC). The project went viral when Homebaked Community Bakery raised over £18K through crowdfunding website Kickstarter. Crowdfunding websites like Kickstarter are based on a lot of people giving a little money to make projects happen. Kickstarter funds creative projects and donors are generally offered incentives. This creates a hybrid form of motivation, where the donor is a consumer.

If we think of capitalism as ‘free markets’ and ‘financialisation’, then creating bread that minimises corporate and shareholder profits is an alternative. However, as Martin Huzzah from Good Neighbour Community Energy has pointed out, populist philanthropy is not actually harmless, because it relies on people accumulating wealth and capital: “Accumulation takes that capital out of the General Economy where it could be doing something useful. When the accumulation period is over the capital is returned to the economy in a calculated giving. That giving back into the economy substantially distorts the economy in favour of the perspectives of the Giver. Not only does that distortion take place but, for the period of accumulation, alternate perspectives are starved of resource.”

There is another way to look at it, though, because although on the surface it may seem like consumer philanthropy, the bakery is in fact situated within a very active global community of LFC supporters. Homebaked could be seen as engaging this wider community with the resident local community in order to subvert the corporatisation of football and the ‘Managed Decline’ of the Anfield area.

When speaking to, reading the words and hearing the voices of the people who’ve been involved in Homebaked Community Bakery, one thing comes through loud and clear: the sense of achievement that comes from positive action is powerful. There is a feeling that this community can build something together by cooperating and acting.

Homebaked Community Land Trust (CLT)

Homebaked Community Land Trust is involved in community-led design and development of land and housing.

Most political forms of capitalism work from the premise that state governments operate a certain amount of basic functions without profit: schools, military, police, fire brigades, libraries and parks. In the drive towards free market capitalism, being pushed through as austerity, the state is rapidly selling off these properties and services. David Cameron’s fantasy of the ‘Big Society’ means that volunteerism will replace workers. Lefties of all sorts are in a quandary: let the libraries close or be complicit in the undermining of workers’ jobs. How does a loaf of bread baked by a volunteer function politically?

Chris Tomlinson from Birmingham Bike Foundry, a member of Radical Routes (see note below), says: “I think it is important to make the distinction between mutual aid, and doing what could be waged labour for free, and to be sure that unpaid work is benefiting its intended recipients and not, for instance, generating surplus for a small capitalist, social entrepreneur.” Homebaked Community Bakery is a co-operative with membership open to “Anyone who lives or works or has an interest in North Liverpool can join. Membership costs just £1 (free for unwaged people). This buys you a share in the company. Voting is based on ‘one member one vote’.

CLTs prevent community assets being privatised for corporate profit. They can own land or community assets like pubs, community centres, or libraries, and the land will be democratically controlled. The CLT is run by volunteers and there is something called an ‘asset lock’ which means that nobody will ever be able to profit from the selling of the land. When used for housing it fundamentally destabilises the Thatcherite idea of the housing ladder, where a home is something that you purchase in order to get a bigger and better one. CLTs also intervene in the historic utilisation by white ‘bohemian creatives’ to make ‘undesirable’ neighbourhoods attractive and safe, thereby paving the way for developers and gentrification.

Rose Howey Housing Co-operative

Rose Howey was set up nearly two years ago by L8 residents (and one Wirral boy) as a fully mutual housing co-op, and all members are tenants. It is housing that is democratically controlled by its tenants and is not controlled by a private landlord.

Rose Howey is a member of Radical Routes. It is an example of deploying property ownership to collective and radical ends, through the structured mutual aid of the Radical Routes network. Rose Howey is able to support activist projects such as Migrant Artists Mutual Aid, The Free University of Liverpool and the Liverpool Food Union.

Housing Co-operatives are not an alternative to capitalism. But they can provide secure places to live for those engaged in social change. Almost all of them rely on mortgages and investments (albeit through ethical lenders) and paying interest on borrowed money, which is one of the core concepts of capitalist financial systems.

Workers’ Co-operatives

A workers’ co-op could be defined as a business owned and managed collectively by its workers for their mutual benefit. It’s organised democratically and fairly by (and only by) its members. Workers’ co-ops differ from consumer co-ops, in that they are set up to benefit workers, not consumers. They’re also different from employee-owned businesses (like John Lewis) since these aren’t necessarily democratic and don’t follow co-operative principles and values.
From: ‘How to Set Up a Workers’ Co-op’

Workers controlling businesses may not necessarily be an alternative because it is private ownership, but communities owning land and renting it for community benefit is an alternative.

The issues of profit, labour, and shares are central. When one buys shares in, say, BP, the company makes profit by sourcing labour and resources as cheaply as possible in order to profit from selling them. The profits are then distributed to shareholders who have done nothing to earn these profits other than investing resources either acquired or inherited.

Notes: Radical Routes is a Co-operative and one of the few organisations that facilitate people divesting from high street banks and moving savings to very secure radical projects: Housing Co-operatives for people engaged in Radical Social Change, Workers’ Co-operatives, and Social Centres.

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