School of Life: "How To Reform Capitalism" - a book review

The School of Life essay How To Reform Capitalism, (available at The School of Life shop) , is worth a read for anyone engaged in the commercial world but who wonders about its values. Most of us then.

Here’s the blurb:

The main argument of the book is a simple but powerful one. It is that capitalism as practised so far has been good at getting the things it set out to do – but it set out with too little ambition. It’s not so much the tackiness and emptiness of brand communications that are the bane of modern life – though they are a bit – it’s that we haven’t yet created big markets in the things that actually meet the emotional needs of modern life.

I love this critique of the emptiness of much of business culture, in a chapter wonderfully entitled The Depression of the Business Community:

The book sets out six depressive beliefs that pervade business culture:

• customers will never care about workers

• customers have low appetites that can’t be improved

• the only way to sell is through deception

• you can only make big money from the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid

• you can’t afford to care about the psychology of your staff

• the only legitimate role for surplus wealth is philanthropic donation (not, for example reinvestment in the people involved in the business).

So does this imply an anti-capitalist, or Marxist point of view? Well, no.

I verge towards the left these days, but I’ve never been attracted to Marxism. While I admire the passion for fairness that runs through it, it’s always struck me as based on misconceptions about what makes people tick. A communist utopia wouldn’t actually make people more fulfilled or happy. People have their own ideas, ambitions and needs; they have their own dreams for life. In a Marxist system, innovative ideas get their head if someone in authority agrees with them, but otherwise get stuck somewhere in a Kafkaesque maze. I heard a probably apocryphal story of a Russian official visiting London in the Soviet era and marvelling at the lack of queues for milk. “Who’s the minister in charge of milk distribution?” he is reputed to have asked.

The idealism of the far left also suffers from a belief in the perfectability of humans. It is a dangerous thing to believe in, no less so after reading Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens and Homo Deus (Harari Q&A in The Guardian  ) – in which he posits that a growing ability to make ‘software improvements’ to ourselves may lead ultimately to a transhumanist future, in which our minds no longer reside in our bodies. To see what that could be like, and to get rather freaked out, watch Charlie Brooker’s brilliant Black Mirror episode San Junipero (The Atlantic on Black Mirror’s San Junipero ).

But it’s not as if capitalism is exactly pulling up trees at the moment either. Which is why I was interested to read How To Reform Capitalism. It’s not a book about economics, but a book about what a better society might look like. It takes as read, as I do, that commercial and consumer life is realistically always going to be part of what we’re dealing with. But it proposes a shift in the way we think about it.

We have used it as a system for satisfying our physical needs, through feeding and clothing ourselves and providing (sometimes) a roof over our heads. We then wonder why capitalism does not satisfy us spiritually, why we are unhappy; why its leading brands sell things that don’t really matter to us that much and don’t make life better. And here, rather than despairing and decrying capitalism as inevitably a force to destroy happiness, The School of Life sees the potential for its future improvement. Why not imagine a capitalism in the future in which more enlightened consumers buy products that meet needs towards the top of Maslow’s pyramid – that fulfil them spiritually (Maslow used Jung’s term “self-actualisation” for this)? As the final sentence on the book says:

It imagines a future Times Square no longer advertising Coke or Nike but:

This is what cathedrals once did. Is it so absurd to imagine a future age in which human activity focusses on meaning and purpose again? The bigger things of life – real meaning and purpose – are still exciting to think about; they move us when they fleetingly come to our attention. It’s just that our experience of them these days tends to be scatterfire. Churches brought focus on the deeper point of life (while unfortunately providing some misleading guidance on that). In the secular age, we connect with these deeper feelings  through a hundred splinters: a charity donation, a moving experience watching a film, a look in your child’s eye. The individual moments are satisfying but the whole is deeply unsatisfying, because we lack the help we need to join them up into coherence. It goes against received wisdom to suggest that a future commercial world might be a place that helps put this jigsaw of purpose together for people, rather than offering them pointless objects to buy in a moral wasteland. But actually, why not?

This is not, importantly, an anti-commercial book. For example, it praises advertising for identifying what really motivates people and for talking to our core needs and desires. It’s just that the products offered by that advertising – perfumes, clothes, cars – are unfit for purpose. What is needed, argues the School of Life, is not better advertising but better products:

It’s not about minimising capitalism but extending it to our “unattended needs”.

I can’t treat myself to a new sofa now, so I’ll have to come at solving this “feeling deeply ill at ease with life” thing from a different angle …

I suspect they are onto something. I see a generational shift in what people expect from life, a greater insistence on living lives that are worthwhile and have meaning. There is an impatience with the soulless. It’s not just because getting by has got harder for most of us since the Crash or that material comfort has been ruled out as a solution. I think it started long before that, actually in my generation that entered the workforce in the 90s. We were appalled by – but felt powerless against – long hours working culture and drear in the workplace. Slowly, people more bold and inventive than me redesigned old workplaces, created new exciting ones, shifted attitudes and expectations. But it’s been more gentle evolution than paradigm shift so far.

My cohort has now hit 50. While I “stepped sideways” into the freelance life ten years ago – a whole other story – my peers are now business decision-makers. They are a generation that is open to change but won’t do it on their own (we Generation X people are just too cynical). What is bringing a tectonic shift in business culture is Generation Y people coming through - with Z to come (Harvard Business Review on Generation X, Y & Z ). These are generations for whom finding meaning and a deeper satisfaction in life are important. Perhaps Generation X are unlikely FW de Klerks, wising up to the iniquities we inherited then administered, and stepping aside in semi-disgrace to let others take a fairer and kinder capitalism forward?

Generation X, my generation, is not heroic – it does think the old world is rubbish, it is just too shaped by it and beholden to it to overturn it completely. It is just easier for us to carry on with our heart not in it.

But generational generalisations are always a bit broad brush, aren’t they – and the truth is, there is an optimistic, thoughtful wing of Generation X, which the School of Life’s mission and values exemplify. Here maybe is how my generation offers something for the Ys and Zs. But we have left them the heavy lifting.