A decade has passed since the start of the last financial crash. Almost everyone believes that another crisis is looming, but nobody knows where or when it will happen.
Like the drunk who wakes up with a wicked hangover and vows never to drink again, we imagine that the past crisis was the last — or, at least, that it cannot possibly be worse. It is almost certain, nonetheless, that another crisis will occur, with the heavy caveat that nobody knows when or where it will happen. We can only guess.
If we are sure there will be another global crisis, the question arises whether it will be the Big One. Will the next one bring down capitalism? My guess is probably not. Too many people who own vast sums of money have too large a stake in seeing it continue. The rest of us — too proud to beg and too dumb to steal — are inexorably part of capitalism’s march. For better or for worse, it shapes every part of our lives.
And we truly are none the wiser. Adam Smith reminded us centuries ago that capitalism’s division of labour made us all "as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become".
Ending capitalism, by accident or design, rests on a choice between rupture and continuity, and it’s easy to believe that to sustain itself the system would, someday, move underground.
Capitalism has nestled everywhere, settled everywhere and established connections everywhere. The next battle, at least for capitalists, is how to save the system from itself.
To help illustrate the ways in which we are all implicated in the system, let me borrow a literary device used by Roberto Saviano in his book on the trade in cocaine, Zero Zero Zero: Look at Cocaine and All You See Is Powder. Look through Cocaine and You See the World.
On the use of cocaine, Saviano implicates "the professor … the oncologist … the gynaecologist … your brother-in-law … your daughter’s boyfriend … the fishmonger… the gas station attendant … the family … the doorman … your kids’ tutor … your nephew’s piano teacher, the costume designer … the vet who takes care of your cat. The mayor who invited you over for dinner recently. The contractor who built your house … the anchor woman on the evening news.
"But if, after you think about it, you’re still convinced none of these people could possibly snort cocaine, you’re either blind or you’re lying. Or the one who uses it is you."
Voluntarily or involuntarily, we are all complicit in sustaining capitalism. The clothes we wear. The food we eat. Our houses. Our children’s education. The books we read. The highlighter we use to mark those vital passages. The lipstick we wear. The stent in our artery. The bank where we save our money. The medication we buy to loosen that phlegm. The burial policy. The life insurance. The retirement annuity. The satellite TV that is piped into our homes. The microfibre that holds together the shirt of our favourite football team. The cigarettes we smoke. The ATM. Our social media platforms. Our new cellphone.
To paraphrase Saviano on cocaine use, to deny all of this means we’re either blind or we’re deceiving ourselves.
We are, today, in what the French philosopher Alain Badiou described as an openly capitalist state that is unapologetic in its priorities. Ending capitalism, by accident or design, rests on a choice between rupture and continuity, and it’s easy to believe that to sustain itself the system would, someday, move underground.
There are what Peter Fleming of the Case Business School at the City University of London refers to as the "struggling precariat" and "the established salaried", who fantasise about things like individual choice and freedom. Or Arsenal winning the English Premier League.
And then there are the wealthy who have deep interests in shoring up the system and securing their gains. One way to do this is to take capitalism underground, as it were, into cartels of shadow banking and parallel economies where redistribution mechanisms (mainly taxation) and democratic mandates have no authority.
Shadow banking — where money is legally moved within countries or around the globe unregulated — usually exists partially or completely outside regular banking systems. It is probably no surprise that the Bank for International Settlements reported an increase in shadow banking after the 2007/2008 crisis.
This prompted a response by the Group of 20 to reform shadow banking, to make it more transparent.
Whether the next crisis will bring down capitalism as we know it is a moot point. For now, I suggest that we follow the evidence closely. The evidence suggests that capitalism will survive us all.
As Fleming averred, "the evidence points to a major breakdown in the norms that once governed the distribution of wealth, regulated employment and provided space for democratic voice".
• Lagardien is a former executive dean of business and economic sciences at Nelson Mandela University, and has worked in the office of the chief economist of the World Bank as well as the secretariat of the National Planning Commission.
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