The Sunday News
That money is the root of all evil is a biblical truism that has overtime achieved the status of another cliché. And clichés are notorious for being old and boring yet remain fresh in their truth and relevance.
My reflection today is how exactly money might not be the root of all evil but that the greed that accompanies the search and use for money is.
Colonialism, slavery and imperialism are canonical examples of how some people and some forces can deploy evil in search of the pieces of silver. It was ultimately for money and the wealth and power that it builds that colonisers and enslavers, imperialists and empire-builders, became prepared to practice mass-murder, commit genocide, plunder nature and reduce other human beings to animals.
To blame money as the root of all evil and avoid at looking at the primary evil of those that seek money through crook is to miss the point by a very wide margin. The people of the world from Europe, America, Asia and Africa could have met and encountered each other in harmonious dialogue and exchange of goods and services without the need for conquest and domination of one by another.
It is evil in the search for money and the power that comes with it that led to conquest and domination of some by others. Every day of our lives under the sun there are those that for money and power continue acts of conquest and domination, evil.
Is it really TINA?
It had to be Margaret Thatcher to popularise the slogan TINA (There Is No Alternative). She meant that the market economy is the greatest and the only viable system that works and debate about alternatives should be closed.
Capitalism itself as the economic system that drove colonialism and imperialism has been circulated around by its champions and beneficiaries as the only productive and workable system to which there is actually no alternative.
The evils of capitalism that have included slavery, colonialism and siphoning of resources at the dear of expense to nature and the environment, and exploitation of other people, have been rationalised by use of such excuses as that there is no alternative to it.
The cold and dry truth might be that there are actually many alternatives to an evil system that has seen one percent of the world owning resources and consuming goods and services on behalf of the rest of the global population. Ali Mazrui was onto a great truth when he argued that the world needed to produce like capitalists but consume like communists.
Capitalist production without communist consumption is pure evil. Capitalism is not a natural economic system that was ordained by some god but it is a human contrived system that is an unnatural disaster.
Why capitalism must be decolonised
Over the decades there has been a lot of scholarship and journalism advocating for corporate social responsibility, ethical business, good corporate citizenship and governance, corporate philanthropy and other sweet slogans. Yet the markets have continued to be elevated to the status of gods that must be appeased in order for people and their countries to survive. Like the gods markets lose their temper and vent their wrath so countries and their populations continue to be instructed how to behave politically and economically in order not to anger the temperamental markets that have replaced God in power and importance.
The series of previous global financial crises have proven that business in the world, is too important to be left to business people and organisations. The increasing death of nature that is politely called “climate change” is as a result of extractive capitalism that has polluted nature and the atmosphere to almost beyond repair.
That slavery was long abolished is capitalist propaganda as workers in the wide world continue to work in slavish conditions and earn slavish wages. Mineral resources from under the feet of peasants are daily siphoned by global political and economic elites that are privatising public wealth and nationalising and globalising poverty everywhere.
Private property rights have actually become euphemism for looting and hoarding public resources by global political and economic elites that are actually in all the continents of the world, appear in different skin colours, but are the real colonialists and enslavers of today.
In the centre and the periphery of the world public health systems are collapsing. Education systems are in a condition of rot and other public services are in scarcity. This happens as natural and other public resources are looted and monopolised by political and economic elites in alliance across the globe. In that way economies and polities of the word are still effectively colonised and are captive to vampiric capitalism of the political and economically powerful.
In all these crimes against humanity and genocides it is not money that is the root of all evil but some people. That children are not getting educated and the sick are not getting health care, and are dying in numbers, dying of preventable and treatable diseases, while the powerful eat, constitutes genocides and crimes against humanity.
The joke that one day the poor will have nothing to eat but the rich continues to lose its humour and gain some truth each and every day. Rapacious capitalism, looting and corruption are driving the world to a war of the end of the world. Some social and political analysts have predicted that while present day wars are over oil, minerals and other natural resources wars of the near future will soon be over water. Large parts of the world are presently unable to provide clean water to the common people.
It is not even a joke that the World War III might be a water war. The natural resources of the world are not benefiting the ordinary people of the world but a few politically and economically powerful elites that are driving the world to war. These are the later day enslavers and colonialists that would even ration and package to sell oxygen itself if they can make big money.
There are smart people out there that would argue that capitalism is not the problem but the wrong application of it. They will say the problem is not capitalism but greed, corruption and theft. The truth is that corruption, greed and theft are in the DNA of capitalism that is by its nature a corrupt and evil system.
That is why capitalists can actually use the law and democracy to plunder resources and pillage countries and be called investors, donors, businesses and inventors.
Decolonising money
It is Milton Friedman who once made the dangerous argument that the business of business should only be business.
He meant that profit maximisation should be the responsibility of business not social responsibility. Friedman was drinking from prophets of capitalism such as Adam Smith. Climate change, increasing social inequalities that are leading to war, growing hunger, disease, poverty and anger are teaching humanity that the business of business may not only be business.
Business needs to be responsible for societies, environment and ethical governance.
The coronavirus disease is not only teaching us about the fragility of human life on earth but also the need that the world invests in education, health science research, health care and life at large.
The life and health of the world (human beings, animals, plants, water, soil and air) matters, and it matters that a few should not live at the expense and the death of many. How money is made, how it is owned and kept and what it is used for matters.
Financial value should be accompanied by social values in decolonised business that makes decolonised money that is not the root of all evil.
n Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Gezina, in Pretoria, South Africa. Contacts: [email protected]
