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The History of Capitalism in four Minutes

My Presentation at the Presentation Zen Studio in Paris

Maybe we can change the world by making sure that there will be less capitalism and more capitalists, in the future.

Welcome again, today I am going to talk about politics. You know, whenever we watch a beautiful painting of Botticelli or Picasso or listen to a wonderful symphony of Mozart or Tchaikovsky, we do feel that there is another world behind this one, waiting for us. We feel that we all should and could live differently, with more love and freedom and happiness in our daily life. But then we have to attend a business meeting or present data, and the feeling is gone, and everything around us is once again just symbols, efficiency and profit.

We all here are story tellers in an era of advanced capitalism, and, correct me if I am wrong, we all try to heal a capitalism—that has spun out of control—from within, from inside its core, the heart of capitalism, its stories. But can we? 

Let me start with a simple number and the story behind it: 32 million. Do you have an idea what this number stands for? No? Well, it’s the number of people on this planet who have at least one million Dollars in their bank account. Imagine the whole population of Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark, Switzerland and some minor countries consisting exclusively of millionaires, which, by the way, might not be far from the truth. (Laughter) That’s more or less the size of it. 32 million. Sounds like a huge number, right?

But as big as it sounds, these 32 million people are just 0,7 % of the world’s population. So, after all, these millionaires and billionaires are just a „entité négligeable“, as the french say, right?

Well, no, they are not, actually, because these 0,7 % of world’s population do possess and control 41 % of all the riches on this planet. This is astonishing, right? And the question is: how did we get here, to such an incredible state of inequality?

I think that in order to understand this, we have to do a short trip backwards into the history of mankind, into our common history, because we will find an interesting mechanism at work there, a mechanism that is not greed, by the way.

I think that looking closely at the heart of world’s history as well as capitalism you will find a fateful dynamic: forced accumulation. In my eyes we can interpret world’s history as a global accumulation race where nations which produced „successful ideologies“ managed to accumulate faster —conquering those nations which were not able to accumulate so fast. But how did this fateful process start in the first place?

When our ancestors, the hunters and gatherers, first settled down, they became farmers, and for the first time there was something like a surplus to stow away and distribute. At first, the new farmers shared the surplus equallynamongnthemselves, but then a few respected members of the community who had a special talent—weather forecast maybe or just the ability to count—became history‘s first CEOs. And like true CEOs, they began to demand a bigger part of the surplus for their services, and if they spent it wisely, which they did, they could now buy votes and pay a bard to sing the glory of their family and ask the first artists to make a sculpture to their liking. Thus they were able to create an ideology that established themselves and their families as „natural rulers“. In a time when a generation lasted maybe ten to twenty years, it was easy to become leaders by „divine right“ and implement an early kind of monarchy, toppling equality in the process.

But that’s not all: the better the ideology of the first rulers „worked“, the sooner they were able to establish central rule and forced accumulation in their communities. „Taxes“ now were used to raise armies and fleets and to wage war against other centers of power, nearby. The ability to accumulate faster than the monarchs became thus a precondition to survive as a tribe or nation. Ironically, it was the communities that stayed more egalitarian and human that succumbed first to the more cynical and brutal ones. A process that is still going on, today, in world‘s politics as well as in global business.

You might put in that this is a positive development, after all, because it might produce one day in the future a single, utopian „world-state“, thus ending all wars and the forced accumulation necessary to finance them. The problem with this assumption is that it doesn’t take into account the crucial role that ideology plays in enabling forced accumulation. Our politics, our economy, our culture and therefore our media, our language and our stories all went through this ideology, they are still this ideology.

So, what can we do to reform capitalism from within, combat this terrible inequality that reigns on this planet and fight the ideology that backs it? How can we change the situation of those 2000 million people who must live by less than 2 $ a day?

First of all, we have to reverse the accumulation process. Those nations, companies and individuals who have piled up billions must be forced to cooperate and to share: through international treaties and, yes, international taxes. (Applause) And we as citizens have to back up those parties and governments here in Europe and overseas that are willing to negotiate that kind of deal.

Second, we must limit further accumulation, that is, we must limit mergers between big corporations, especially in the financial sector, if we do not want to wake up in world with only three car firms, two computer companies and one food conglomerate.

And third, and most important for us consultants in communications, we have to think hard about the media we use and about how we use them, in order to make sure that we utilize them to free people from the zombie of endless accumulation instead of helping perpetuating its miserable life.

And so, at the end of this presentation, I am going to say it, once again: maybe we need less capitalism and more capitalists in order to change this world to the better. Together.