IFG Programs: Post Capitalism

IFG PROGRAMS: POST CAPITALISM

STEPS TO NEW ECONOMIES OF SUSTAINABILITY, EQUITY, JUSTICE AND PEACE

Is it possible for capitalism to successfully adapt to planetary economic limits from resource depletion, while diminishing global inequities; if not, what comes next? This will become an increasing focus as the current economic model continues to founder on its internal contradictions.

We strongly doubt the continued viability of capitalism and its accompanying doctrines such as hyper economic growth. We feel it is crucial to openly discuss this and propose alternative models. IFG has amassed some of the world’s leading thinkers from a wide variety of disciplines and political perspectives and engaged them in an ongoing strategic conversation, leading up to a proposed series of public events and publications addressing the essential issues of the post capitalist era.

In October, 2008, the IFG became the first major international NGO to convene a global meeting of economists, together with leaders of key NGOs, to galvanize a collaborative effort to raise fundamental questions about the viability of our current economic system: including the primacy of economic growth, and of capitalism itself. It was our organizing premise that unending growth, as the primary goal of an economic system, eventually fails because of the resource limits and the limited carrying capacities of the planet. This has already begun to happen and is reflected in the resource crises we have articulated above, notably energy and water resources, and global climate change. We universally agreed that an economic system based on values of continued growth of resource supply, new markets and expanding supplies of cheap labor is doomed to fail from the outset.

Many of us also concluded that it was necessary to name capitalism by name as the primary economic philosophy which is driven by these false assumptions, and that it was time to question whether it should continue. Until now this has remained a kind of “unthinkable thought,” and certainly an “unspeakable idea,” but the question of viability is crucial. And if it is not viable, what are the alternatives that can lead us forward to a new economy of sustainability, equity, social justice and peace. For two days, dozens of ideas were exposed, and we also had the prior example of IFG’s Manifesto on Global Economic Transitions published two years earlier. The transcripts of this meeting are now being edited and will become a book, and may possibly launch a large public convening. We hope to continue gatherings of this kind so that it may become possible for people to at last imagine another economic context that will not have the pitfalls of the present one.

In doing this kind of work, we are continuing an IFG process that began 15 years ago, when we first convened to discuss another concept: economic globalization, which had not yet been named and discussed fully at that time. The discussion then led to the formation of IFG, and soon after that a series of giant public events culminating in Seattle, and the birth of a more powerful domestic and global movement. We cannot now predict if the capitalism talks will go in that direction, but we will see. In any case it is crucial that the intellectual dimensions of change be part of the programmatic mix, or people will not know why they are seeking one set of changes rather than another, as we once did in a mad rush for Priuses and biofuels.