GENTLE COMMERCE?

It was fashionable for at least two hundred years to paint trade and commercial activity as an ennobling force for mankind. In the 18^th century, the French philosopher (and aristocrat) Montesquieu, coined the term “gentle commerce” to describe this view. By comparison, the trade of soldiering (then the largest non-agricultural employer after commerce) was seen as wholly degrading, even by those who officered them. The Duke of Wellington, Napoleon’s vanquisher at Waterloo, said of the British soldier, “Our [army] is composed of the scum of the earth - the mere scum of the earth.”  (He did however qualify this statement with the words, “It is only wonderful that we should be able to make so much out of them afterwards.”)

In my view, high capitalism, or, as I now prefer to call it, late-phase capitalism, can be defined as the concentration of ever greater wealth in the hands of what in relative terms are ever fewer individuals. These individuals exert tangible influence on government socio-economic policy. Late-phase capitalism flourishes where there are extremes of greed, egomania, and the psychopathia of total indifference to the material well-being of others. Any advantages that accrue to society at large through commercial activity conducted in a framework of late-phase capitalism are incidental to the primary object of late-phase capitalist endeavour: namely, the pursuit of ever more stratospheric profits for relatively very few beneficiaries. Late-phase capitalism in some regions, such as Russia and China, has already morphed into the formation of klepto-capitalist states. (There are now indications that the same thing may be happening in the US).   

The British - that once nation of shopkeepers - in a relentless pursuit of profit, exercised, via their imperial mission, the art of commercial and human exploitation on a global scale, acquiring enormous expertise at using the many for the primary purposes of bringing advantage to the few. That even so, the many did, to some degree, benefit materially, both in Britain (those who survived the mills, child labour, miner's lung, slum-diseases, transportation to the colonies, judicial execution for poaching food, etc, for long enough to breed another generation of workers) and - through the course of the long march of history - even in the ex-colonies themselves, is not so much inevitable, as extraordinary. That the British workman, for several decades, benefited materially, would not have come about had not the few among their ranks organised and agitated against Capital, building a shared sense of workers’ solidarity, and seeking to find ways of channeling some of the vast profits their labour brought their employers, back into their own communities.

Since the rise of trade unionism in Britain in the 19^th century, and its triumph under various Labour governments during the first three quarters of the 20^th century, Capital has fought back, and today in Britain (as in much of the world) Capital has definitely won the war that it has been fighting against the worker since the start of the industrial revolution in the 18^th century. That economic theory beloved of the capitalists and of the old right regimes they prop up - economic “trickle down” (with material benefits supposedly descending from the rich to the poor) - has since been shown up for the myth that it is: today in Britain (and in much of the western world) there are plentiful statistics which show that the rich are siphoning off even the meagre means of the poor.   

Entire regions of the world have, of course, never participated in the mass social and economic upliftment that capitalism moderated by trade unionism brought to the British working class. In much of the Far East, for example, workers are still horribly exploited by their capitalist employers - not a few of whom are British based, for late-phase capitalism glories in the exporting of manufacture to regions where labour is cheap and unregulated - gutting, in the process, entire districts in Britain of economic viability, and throwing thousands into multi-generational unemployment. In this regard, consider China’s politico-economic evolution: within the space of less than half of my own lifetime, China has evolved from Communist autocracy to capitalist autocracy (but with the rights of the working class only sparsely defined and even less frequently obtained).

But (if you will permit me to digress) if we seek a human activity inherently noble and ennobling, then we could do worse than consider the trade of the contemporary common soldier. Whereas the late-phase capitalist, to succeed, must above all see that his selfish desires are met, his greed is always fed, and his ego indulged, the soldier (who may theoretically lay down his life for his country, but in practice does so for his comrades in the field), displays what is most noble in the human character as he exercises his trade. Little wonder that bravery in times of war speaks more directly to our need to identify with that which is noble and fine in Mankind, than does the pursuit of profit via commercial activity and trade.

The capitalist bubble that its cheerleaders in Britain live in (as if it were still the 1960s, and rising living standards were an inevitable consequence of any form of capitalist endeavour) blinds them to the need to radically restructure both our national and global economic systems. These cheerleaders are unable to recognize that capitalism has evolved (or degressed) since the 1960s (or even since Thatcher’s 1980s, when the foundations of what has since become late-phase capitalism in Britain were first laid down), and is today another animal altogether. Unable to acknowledge that even by its own terms, capitalism in its current form is a failed system - for it no longer delivers the maximum economic reward to the greatest number of people, but instead has become a vehicle (most particularly in the western world) whereby the rich siphon up an ever greater share of the world’s wealth, and the many find economic struggle and hardship an increasing reality - these cheerleaders are deaf to the growing anger of the many against the few. Or if they hear this growling murmur, they dismiss it as being of little consequence. Take just one example: the growing scarcity of housing in Britain, above all, of affordable homes to rent. The alienation of tens of thousands of council houses (via right-to-buy), which began under Thatcher, and continues yet in England (it has been banned in Scotland and Wales), and has seen tens of thousands of ex-council houses fall into the hands of private investors, has fed directly into the creation in Britain of a society so shattered that for many, any sense of identification with regional or district locality has been utterly eradicated (for if you cannot bank on living in the same place for at least the time it takes to get your kids through primary school or secondary school, then you cannot begin to sink roots, and you cannot feel any sense of commitment to society at large). There are signs that Reform UK has begun to understand this: the neo-Labour government in power certainly has not. And if Reform UK can pitch successfully to the many thousands of voters to whom precarity - housing precarity, jobs precarity - are facts of life, it will likely reap an electoral reward. (However, if, having won the next general election, Reform UK then shows itself as hopeless at affecting positive economic and social change as Starmer’s government has been, it too will become a one-term phenomenon).   

The supporters of late-phase capitalism are foolish to dismiss this growing anger among the many. Populist politicians have heard the angry growl of the many, and they promise to deliver the many from economic injustice, and to liberate them from the constraints of a liberal democracy that the many have come to regard merely as a tool employed by the rich to deny them their fair share of the good things of life. And if I believed that one of these populist politicians sincerely meant what he promised, and intended moderating, via regulatory legislation, the worst excesses of late-phase capitalism  (with the proviso that he had not already burdened his party with liberal-left cultural baggage, as have the Greens) then even I, who had thought he would never bother voting again, might consider voting for him. And I am sure there would be many others like me.