In June, I shared my thoughts on how we can end capitalism, and build for ourselves in its place a kind, green, cooperative economy. This invites the obvious question: how?
We need to do so because capitalism is driving our world to chaos and collapse. Its selfish obsession with maximizing financial gain is the primary cause of the climate crisis, the biodiversity crisis, the housing crisis, the inequality crisis, and a whole lot more.
Ending capitalism will not solve all our problems, but it is a necessary beginning. The root of our problems, as this writer sees things, is simple human selfishness. President Trump ticks the box for all seven forms of selfishness, which is why so many people find him repulsive.
- The selfishness of capitalists.
- The selfishness of leaders when power goes to their head.
- The selfishness of neoclassical economics, and the policies that result.
- The selfishness of people who use nationality, gender, ethnicity, class, caste, or power to dominate others.
- The selfishness of most people’s assumed supremacy over nature.
- The selfishness of our excessive material consumption.
- The selfishness of psychopaths, criminals, bullies, and jerks.
Today, I’m just addressing the selfishness of capitalism. The rest will have to wait. I apologize that this is a long essay, but it’s a complex matter.
Introduction
“To survive, we must transform and even end the failed system of capitalism that now threatens to collapse Earth’s life support systems, and with them, human civilization. We must replace that economic system with one that respects boundaries and limits, one that nurtures biological abundance and diversity; one that delivers social and economic justice.”
– Ann Pettifor, author of The Global Casino: How Wall Street Gambles with People and Planet
For centuries, most people have mistakenly believed that capitalism was an economic system, and if we wanted to end it we would have to replace it with a different system. It’s for this reason, as someone once said, that “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” It becomes a mindlock that paralyzes constructive thought.
Breaking the lock requires two keys. The first is to understand that capitalism is not in fact an economic system: it is a cultural system, based on the primacy of selfishness and greed, which are expressed in the economy in a variety of ways, all of which can be changed and have indeed already been changed in tens of thousands of non-capitalist economic initiatives, from workers cooperatives to public banks.
The second key is to understand that we can have a free market without it being capitalist, and we can have exciting, entrepreneurial, competitive businesses without them being capitalist. Just look at the world’s 11,000 B Corps, at Mondragon’s cooperative success story, or at Finland, where 20% of the economy is explicitly cooperative, and most businesses operate with a cooperative approach to business and life.
I realize that I am wading into deep waters here. We are talking about changing a core component of the world’s economic operating system, which has dominated since feudal times. But it need not be that big a deal. We can have a well-governed market economy without capitalism. We can have science, technology, innovation and creativity without capitalism. We can have money and trade without capitalism. The world will not collapse if we end capitalism. It will be a happier, more secure, more resilient place. In most communities, most businesses are already contributing to a kind, cooperative economy. Not yet green, but not inherently capitalist, either.
Just to be clear, here are my definitions:
- A capitalist is a someone whose top priority is to accumulate capital, regardless of the harm that this causes to nature, workers, consumers, and/or communities.
- Capitalism is the system that enables this form of selfishness.
What capitalism brings to the table is not an essential part of the economy. It’s a selfish parasitic intrusion, giving people permission to maximize their capital gains regardless of the cost to communities, workers, or nature – to be parasites, in other words, feeding on the economy at the expense of others. Monopolies, private equity, share buybacks, regulatory capture, political capture, tax evasion, shell companies – these are all parasitic capitalist behaviors.
It is this is that we need to change. We need to rid our economy of its capitalist parasite and change the governing algorithm from selfishness to kindness – and because of the threat to democracy, the climate, and nature, we need to do it within ten years. But how? This is the question this essay addresses. There will be plenty of work to build a new ecological civilization once the parasite has been removed, but as long as it’s active, capitalists will continue to sabotage our efforts to build a better world.
My thinking tells me we can rid ourselves of the capitalist parasite by means of five simultaneous strategies. The key will be building the shared belief that we can do this.
Here’s my theory of change:
1. If many people engage in community education that causes the majority of people to become inspired by the vision of a kind, green, cooperative economy, and a new ecological civilization; and
2. If many people work to build community wealth locally where they live, creating a social solidarity economy, a wellbeing economy, a care-centered economy, a doughnut economy; and
3. If many people engage in community organizing, encouraging others to join one of the many movements for change, organizing together, protesting together, and working to elect politicians whose goal it is to remove the capitalist parasite and build a flourishing ecological civilization; and
4. If many candidates win elections and participate in progressive governments that will work to build a kind, green, cooperative economy, and to neutralize capitalism’s core mechanisms; and
5. If nations form global alliances to work together to achieve these essential goals;
Then we will be able to end capitalism, and build in its place a kind, green, cooperative economy.
What are the Capitalists’ Core Mechanisms?
Capitalists use various mechanisms to increase their wealth, almost always at the expense of others and of nature. Few people know what the mechanisms are, but most people know in their guts that something devious and malevolent is going on. If we are to end capitalism, we must know what the core mechanisms are, so that each can be neutralized. Here are twelve of them. I’m sure there are more.
1. The belief that capitalism is the best and only way to run an economy
This belief has become so widespread that most people assume that if you want to end capitalism you must be a communist, so totally have they bought into the belief that it’s the only kind of economy that works. They assume that their home, their job, the wonders of technology, and the gazillion things they can buy on Amazon are all the result of capitalism. In reality,
- We can have a free-market economy that is not capitalist;
- We can have private businesses that are not capitalist;
- We can have technological innovation in an economy that is not capitalist.
When you look at capitalism’s history over a thousand years, as Sven Beckert has done so thoroughly in Capitalism: A Global History, it becomes clear that capitalism is not an economic system at all. It is a cultural imposition. It is a quest by uniquely selfish people – aka ‘capitalists’ – to dominate the economy. Capitalists are people who seek power and status through the accumulation of capital, and use that power to rig the system to their advantage.
They are helped in their endeavor by neoclassical economists who have bought into the false belief that economics is a science, and that a free-market capitalist economy will deliver the best results for everyone as long as the government doesn’t interfere. It’s palpable nonsense, but it creates an impressive smokescreen for what’s really going on, which is simple selfishness.
The capitalists are also helped by their control of the media, with many radio stations, TV stations, newspapers and social media platforms being owned and controlled by billionaires.
How can we neutralize this mechanism? In general, by persistently explaining that capitalism is not the real economy, that it’s a parasitic imposition on the economy, and by inspiring people with the vision of a kind, green, cooperative economy in which all can flourish, including nature.
Specifically, by urging legislators to break up the big media monopolies and regulate the social media and AI platforms, so that they do not become super-spreaders of lies and deceptions, and the public good can be served.
2. Capitalism’s Legal Powers
The second core mechanism is the belief, written into law in many countries, that corporations must act to maximize shareholder returns above all other calls on their profits, regardless of the cost to nature, the climate, communities, or workers.
In Ecocide: Kill the Corporation Before It Kills Us, David Whyte, Professor of Socio-Legal Studies at the University of Liverpool, argues that we won’t be able to end the climate and biodiversity crises until we end the legal powers that corporations use to wreck the world. Corporations are granted life in perpetuity. They never die unless they are killed by some form of state intervention, or by a legal procedure to liquidate them. In law, they are deemed to be ‘persons’, but without any of the responsibilities we ordinary mortals carry. These privileges enable their executives and shareholders to mask the ownership of their assets, hide their wealth, create subsidiaries to avoid legal liability, and enjoy immunity when they should rightly be before the courts and potentially going to jail.
In America, the claim that corporations are ‘persons’ originated in legal headnote to a Supreme Court case in 1886 known as Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co.. The headnote had no legal value – it was a court reporter’s deliberately deceptive description of the case – but it was extrapolated into an imagined Supreme Court ruling that corporations were persons, which has been cited in every legal textbook, encyclopedia and Supreme Court case since. Thom Hartmaan tells the story well in Who Killed the American Dream? The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told.
At the heart of the matter lies the question of judicial blame, and the avoidance of blame. By any semblance of common sense, blame should only be attached where there is agency. A tree cannot be blamed if it falls on someone. A corporation is a legal entity. It has no agency. It is the executives, directors, investors, and their advisors who should carry the responsibility for their deeds and misdeeds, not the corporation.
To neutralize capitalism’s legal powers, legislators need to do two things. First, they need to write a new social purpose charter in which a business would state its social purpose and commit to the pursuit of that purpose, be it making marmalade or microchips, plus a few other public good clauses. For companies that adopt the charter there would be rewards: a 2% lower rate of corporation tax, a 2% lower rate of interest on loans, and priority access to government contracts. After a transition period of ten years, the new charter would become mandatory. Companies that did not adopt it would lose their license to operate.
Second, legislators need to write into law a clear statement that since a corporation is not a person, and has no agency, it has no constitutional rights. In America, the principle that only humans can be endowed with constitutional rights is being promoted by Move to Amend, supported by 750 organizations, 700 municipalities and 8 states, and by Progressive Democrats of America, Public Citizen, and other organizations. Together, they are promoting a bill before Congress and an amendment to the constitution.
If the executives or directors are found guilty of committing a crime while working for a corporation, they should be punished, just like other criminals. In addition to personal punishment, a corporation might be required to issue shares to be held in trust for the workers and communities where it operates, rising if need be to 51% control.
3. The Suppression of Governments
Capitalism’s third core mechanism is the spurious claim that governments should not interfere in the economy. They justify this by the economists’ claim that theirs is a science, and the assumption that a free-market economy will always reach equilibrium as long as the government doesn’t interfere.
The same argument is used to support deregulation, which is mighty convenient for a banker who wants to gamble with other people’s money, a car company that wants to sell dangerously large SUVs, or a farming corporation that wants to continue using carcinogenic pesticides. It’s also the justification that’s used whenever a government imposes budget cuts (aka ‘austerity’), rather than raise taxes on the rich.
Economics is not a science. That’s a fabulation that was invented in the 19th century to burnish the reputation of economists. The Great Depression of the 1930s demonstrated quite clearly that a free market will not always reach equilibrium, unless it’s the eery equilibrium of nobody working and no money circulating.
To neutralize this mechanism, journalists, politicians, economists, and cabinet ministers need to understand that a nation that controls its central bank and prints its own currency can never run out of money. The constraints on government spending are not money. They are the availability of material resources such as timber, cement, or energy, and of people who are looking for work. If new money is put into circulation when either of these is not available, inflation will result.
This means that a government that controls its own currency does not need be held hostage to the bond markets and afraid of the capitalists’ powers, because its central bank, having the power to create the nation’s money, can buy or sell bonds to stabilise the market. A government budget is not like a household budget. The central bank advances money to the government. The government spends it on roads, public healthcare, education, and overseas wars, and reclaims it in the form of taxes. When it hesitates to raise taxes, it issues bonds. If this description of how fiscal arrangements work is new to you, as it was to me, until I grasped it, I recommend the work of Richard Murphy, the British chartered accountant and author.
4. Private Equity Investments
Private equity is capitalism’s fourth core mechanism. Firms like Blackstone, with $1.3 trillion of people’s assets under its management, have infiltrated their way into every corner of modern life, using debt to leverage their way to the control of homes, water companies, energy companies, commercial buildings, rental apartments, veterinary clinics, hospital services, nursing homes, retirement homes, fire brigade software – anything where they can squeeze out a dollar at someone else’s expense and get a 15% return. For a clear description of private equity at work, I recommend Hettie O’Brien’s The Asset Class: How Private Equity Turned Capitalism Against Itself.
To neutralize this mechanism, legislators need to require every private equity firm that takes over another asset to guarantee its debts; scrap the carried interest tax loophole that the industry uses to avoid paying taxes; and require private equity firms to disclose full information about their funds and the companies they own.
5. Share Buybacks
The fifth core mechanism involves share buybacks. Since the 1980s, activist shareholders have been demanding that profits be used to buy back a company’s shares, since this increases their value by creating scarcity. This was forbidden in America in 1934, since it was deemed a form of stock manipulation and a possible cause of the 1929 crash, and it remained illegal until 1982. During those years, a company would invest its profits in research, productivity improvements, training, and improved pay and benefits for its workers before paying dividends to its shareholders.
In 1981, just 2% of America’s corporate profits were spent on stock buybacks. By 2018 that had risen to 68%. To persuade managers to support the change their pay structure was changed – by 2018, 85% of their pay was in stock incentives. Between 2009 and 2022 American corporations spent $7.3 trillion on share buy-backs, rather than invest in their own businesses. An analysis of 22 major American companies, including McDonald’s, Walmart, and Starbucks, found that they were spending five times more on stock buybacks than on paying their workers more. To find money for the buybacks, many companies took on more debt and implemented mass layoffs, euphemistically described as ‘downsizing’.
To neutralize this mechanism, the economist William Lazonick recommends that legislators restore the ban on stock buybacks, prohibit activist shareholders from serving on company boards, stop paying CEOs in stocks, and require boards to include representatives for workers and the public interest. They could also prohibit compulsory layoffs from any company that receives taxpayer support, allowing only voluntary layoffs, as Les Leopold, Executive Director of the Labor Institute, recommends.
6. Monopolies
Capitalism’s sixth core mechanism is monopolies, which arise whenever a company corners the market by buying up competitors or driving them out of business. An oligopoly happens when companies collude to control prices, as the world’s oil companies appear to do.
The billionaire Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal, has said, “If you’re starting a company, you always want to aim for a monopoly and avoid competition. Competition is for losers.” Between 2019 and 2022 the Walmart family’s fortune grew by $96 million a day, thanks to their monopolistic control over America’s increasingly impoverished farmers and suppliers. Shared among their 2.3 million workers, who earn an average $13 an hour and are prohibited from forming a union, each could have received $87,000. By 2024, the Walmart family’s wealth had reached $350 billion. Matt Stoller, author of Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy, cites research estimating that in America, because of monopolistic and oligopolist practices, the average household is losing $5,000 a year that would have remained in their pockets if companies had to compete in the normal way. Intellectual property and patent rights are another way in which corporations protect monopolies and limit innovation. The economist Dean Baker has estimated that such protections cost America $1 trillion a year in increased prices. That’s $3,000 per person. These estimates, which probably overlap, illustrate the economic cost of restricting competition.
Between 1940 and 1980 anti-trust law was used to break up monopolies, but the capitalists’ lobbyists and tame politicians put an end to that. To neutralize this mechanism, legislators need to do the obvious: restore the use of anti-trust law to break up monopolies and oligopolies. They also need to address trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights.
7. The Banks’ Freedom to Create Money
Capitalism’s seventh core mechanism concerns money, and the way it is created by private banks. Bankers create money as loans at the click of a button, with minimal oversight as to what the loans are for. They call it “investing”, but when you can create money so easily all sorts of crazy things can happen. A bank can expand its assets twenty-fold and lend them out at 5% to mortgage-holders or 25% to credit card holders. This is why they generate such enormous profits. Around the world there are some 220,000 financial institutions. The top 1,000 take in profits of around $1 trillion a year.
In The Paradox of Debt, Richard Vague makes the valuable distinction between Type 1 debt, which is invested in something new, and Type 2 debt, which is used to buy an existing asset such as a business, real estate, or stocks. Since 1983, Type 1 debt has more or less tracked the growth of GDP, but Type 2 debt has grown far faster – by 2020 it represented 70% of all private investment. A growing proportion of the proceeds of real-world production is being hijacked by parasitic financial players.
The big banks are still lending to oil and gas companies to help them expand their use of fossil fuels, pouring fuel on the climate crisis. Since the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement the world’s 60 largest banks have created $5.5 trillion to lend to the fossil fuel industry, profiting at the expense of future generations. In most instances, lending to an oil company today, knowing that it will make the climate crisis worse, should be as unthinkable as it would have been for a British, Canadian or American bank to lend money to a company selling tanks to the Nazis in the 1940s. With the exception of ethical investments, the global financial industry has entirely lost its moral compass.
The solution is for legislators to develop a sustainable investment taxonomy, classifying different classes of investments as green for good, amber for neutral, and red for dangerous, and to ban investments in red activities. Simple as that. We should not allow people to invest in projects that are destroying both civilization and nature.
8. Free Trade
Moving on, capitalism’s next core mechanism is not trade as such, but unregulated trade, which carries the presumption that buying and selling anything is fine and good, including speculative commodities trading that forces up the price of grain and causes million to starve, the sale of soy or cattle whose production required the levelling of tropical rainforests, or the sale of goods made by enslaved workers. In London, 50% of food commodity traders are financial players who have no interest in food whatsoever – just profit. In Chicago, it’s 75%.
In response, legislators need to work with like-minded colleagues in other nations to create a Fair-Trade Zone in which participating nations would use tariffs and quotas to raise trade to higher ethical, labor and environmental standards. This would cause harmful goods to cost more without impacting the price of goods that were produced fairly and sustainably. A Fair-Trade Zone with these rules could become effective as soon as the 50th nation ratified its charter. Our future legislators will also need to ensure that trade negotiations are opened to the light of day, and cease being such secretive cabals of lawyers and bureaucrats.
9. The Global Casino
Capitalism’s ninth core mechanism is the unregulated flow of capital across borders. In The Global Casino: How Wall Street Gambles with People and Planet, Ann Pettifor reveals how the world’s financial system has become a casino in which $217 trillion is being gambled on financial assets and kept out of reach of taxation, rather than being invested in anything useful. The winners are the capitalists. The losers are everyone else, including the workers, taxpayers, democracy, nature, and the climate. The system is out of control, allowing capitalists to move money across borders without encountering any oversight, hindrance, or taxation. Oliver Bullough tells the same story in Moneyland: Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule the World, and How to Take It Back.
To neutralize the casino, legislators need to take back control of cross-border capital flows. A partial solution is to impose a tax on financial transactions, throwing sand into the smoothly oiled gears of capital mobility. In the US, a tax of 0.5% on stock trades, 0.1% on bond trades, and 0.005% on derivatives, as Bernie Sanders has proposed, would generate between $180 and $250 billion a year.
A permanent solution, which may become possible once the next financial crash has traumatized enough people, is for nations to craft a new cooperative global financial architecture, including a global reserve currency to replace the dollar, a clearing house to stabilize currencies by balancing imports and exports, transparent reporting requirements, and regulation, taxation, and imposed delays on cross-border capital flows above $50 million.
10. Tax Avoidance
Capitalism’s tenth core mechanism is the myriad methods that wealthy people use to avoid paying taxes, obliging the rest of us to pay more. Their lobbying has ensured that taxes on the rich remain low, that they don’t have to pay inheritance taxes, that secretive trust companies can continue to exist, and that the carried interest rule that allows them to live off borrowed money to avoid paying tax remains in place.
Wealthy people are hiding between $10 and $15 trillion in offshore tax havens, avoiding not just taxation, but prying eyes that want to know where their money came from. These havens include Switzerland, the Cayman Islands, Luxembourg, Jersey, the British Virgin Islands, Bermuda, Singapore, Hong Kong, and various other places. In 2024, thanks to these methods, countries were losing $492 billion a year to tax evasion, nearly half of which was being enabled by the eight nations that voted against a UN tax convention: Australia, Canada, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, the UK, and the US. For every $1 that these nations collect by enabling tax abuse, the rest of the world loses $16.
How can legislators neutralize this mechanism? They need to work together globally to require transparency for all transactions above $10,000, close the tax havens, close the loopholes that multinational corporations use to avoid paying taxes, and agree to a minimum global 25% corporate profits tax. For nations that refuse to participate, countries should apportion a company’s sales to its home location and tax it accordingly, as Canada does for its provinces and Germany for its municipalities. Our future legislators should make it illegal for bankers, lawyers, accountants, and wealth managers to enable tax evasion, making it punishable by prison, fines, and the loss of license to operate.
11. Lobbying
Capitalism’s eleventh core mechanism is constant lobbying in the halls of power to prevent progressive reforms. The American economist Jeffrey Sachs has pointed out that “a hundred million dollars of campaign funding by a lobby group can win a hundred billion of federal outlays and/or tax breaks.”
With this in mind, 12,000 unregulated lobbyists fill the halls of Washington. 30,000 corporate lobbyists work in Brussels. Between 2010 and 2019 oil and gas companies spent €251 million trying to water down climate and clean energy laws. And it works. A study that analyzed the progress of 1,779 political issues over several decades concluded that “the preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.” As a recent example, a powerful farming lobby in Europe has delayed, gutted and overturned some of the most sweeping proposed farming reforms in EU history, including a plan to cut pesticide use in half.
What could legislators do? They could require full transparency for all lobbying meetings. They could impose a ten-year cooling off period before former ministers or politicians can lobby, to close the revolving door. They could impose a lifetime ban on lobbying an agency where you once worked. And where there is a clear yes-or-no decision to be made, they could require that people on either side of the argument have equal lobbying time. If Shell does 1,000 hours of lobbying to open a new offshore drilling site, climate action groups such as Greenpeace or 350.org should be guaranteed the same time.
12. Central banks to the rescue
The twelfth core mechanism – and I’m sure there are more – is that when capitalism’s selfishness runs into the rocks the central banks come to the rescue, giving them the money they need to keep going. Nobody gets punished or goes to jail, and the system keeps rolling along.
In the entire 95 years between 1913 and 2008 the US Federal Reserve created only $847 billion. In 2008 they created a further $600 billion, using it to buy bonds off the troubled banks. By 2011 they had created $2.5 trillion. Most of the money was given to the banks with no conditions, which turned around and lent it to wealthy people, enabling them to buy assets in a rising market. By 2023, the world’s central banks had poured a combined $41 trillion into the global economy. As Christopher Leonard wrote in The Lords of Easy Money: How the Federal Reserve Broke the American Economy, “Fundamentally, we have socialized credit risk. We have forever changed the nature of how our economy functions.”
How are we to respond? This merits more space than is appropriate for an essay of this length, but fundamentally, our legislators need to update the mandates of their respective central banks, giving them the responsibility for helping with all crises. This means they could use their power to create money to tackle the housing crisis and the climate crisis, as well as financial crises. In partnership with their democratically elected governments, they could issue credit guidance to direct the flows of investment. They could use the red flag to end investments not only in fossil fuels, but also in dangerous financial instruments. They could require banks that are “too big to fail” to be broken up, to reduce the danger. And more.
Within Ten Years
Big breath. If you have gotten this far, congratulations. That was a lot of policy-heavy stuff, but it’s all essential. It’s easy to criticize capitalism, but if we are to replace it we need to know how it operates, and how to neutralize its core mechanisms.
So let me return to my opening question: How can we end capitalism – and within ten years? Humans can suffer forever, as history so painfully shows, but the harm being done to Earth’s climate and to Nature is potentially civilization-ending. Since 1970, we and our machines have wiped out 73% of the populations of the world’s mammals, birds, fish, and reptiles. It’s not all capitalism’s fault, but capitalist corporations are a big part of it.
The good news is that many voters who are attracted to right-wing parties are equally attracted to progressive economic policies that would end the biliousness of the billionaires and restore hope to communities, and there is strong evidence that a kind, green, cooperative economy can deliver on that score. In Montreal, where work to build a social solidarity economy began in the 1980s, by 2024 the city had 11,200 social purpose organizations that were generating $48 billion annually in sales and supporting 220,000 jobs.
So let me return to the five simultaneous strategies I listed at the top of this essay.
For the first , community education, someone needs to sit down with people like Robert Reich, Kate Raworth, Elizabeth Warren and Thom Hartmann and develop a popular education series tied in with YouTube and social media that could be adapted, promoted and adopted by communities all across the world.
For the second , building community wealth, people who are working locally to make a difference, whether to build more affordable housing or to create new cooperatives, need to sit down together and develop a strategy to unite their work under the banner of community wealth building, and offer training courses that could inspire thousands of new people to become involved.
For the third , community organizing, people who are working in the various movements for change need to cross-pollinate and build supportive bridges to each other, so that people who are active in the climate movement, for instance, realize that they need to support people who are working to end corporate personhood, such as Move to Amend, in America.
For the fourth , which is good people running in elections, being supported in the campaigning, winning, and participating in progressive governments that are committed to end capitalism and build instead a green, kind, cooperative economy, we need progressive thinktanks in every country to do what the Heritage Foundation did for the Trump presidency with Project 2024, laying out the legislative and other agendas for a government with broad public support. Without such an agenda – which must include electoral reforms to safeguard democracy – a new government’s workload will be set by civil servants from the old regime and treasury department economists who are wedded to the selfishness of neoclassical economics.
For the fifth strategy, which is nations forming global alliances, we need a minimum of five:
1. A Global Climate Alliance, consisting of nations that want to see a rapid transition to 100% renewable energy. In Santa Marta, Columbia, in April 2026, the leaders of 57 nations signed an agreement to do just this.
2. A Global Nature Alliance, consisting of nations that want to protect species, restore ecosystems, protect 50% of their land and ocean by 2050, create a circular economy with zero waste, and make ecocide a crime.
3. A Global Socially Responsible Business Alliance, consisting of nations that want to require businesses to adopt a social purpose charter within ten years.
4. A Global Socially Responsible Finance Alliance, consisting of nations that want to implement the various reforms mentioned above and to develop a new global financial architecture that’s beyond capitalism.
5. A Global Socially Responsible Trade Alliance, consisting of nations that want to work together to create a global Fair-Trade Zone.
There’s no doubting that an agenda for change such as this will meet with furious pushback. We will be called scum, communists, socialists, traitors, and who knows what else.
But if we keep our eyes on the prize – a kind, green, cooperative economy – and ensure that 80% of our messaging is about the positive future, and only 20% is criticism of the negative present, we’re going to win people over. It can be done. For the sake of the Earth, our children, and all future generations, is HAS to be done.
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Guy Dauncey is a romantic economist, the author of eleven books on ways to build a fair, ecologically sustainable world. A Fellow of the Findhorn Foundation and the Royal Society for Arts, he founded the Victoria Car Share Cooperative, and co-founded the non-profits Prevent Cancer Now, the BC Sustainable Energy Association, the West Coast Climate Action Network, and the Public Transit Alliance of BC. He lives on Vancouver Island, Canada. His latest book is The Economics of Kindness: A New Ecological Civilization(Palgrave, September 2026).