Small C Capitalism by Russell C.J. Duffy

Common sense has been hi-jacked by coin counters. The human spirit is being crushed by excel spread sheet experts. Artisans have been usurped by administrators. Businesses debased by bookkeepers. Accountants and auditors adulate at the altar of commercial avarice. Being big is best but being biggest is better.

Communism collapsed under the constraints of central control. It was a system that ran against human nature. It made no allowance for ambition; it paid scant regard to individuals championing collectivism over character. Capitalism constantly crashes concerning is itself less with the beings that created it concentrating instead on its core function that of profit and loss and less with heart and soul.

“The companies that survive longest are the one's that work out what they uniquely can give to the world not just growth or money but their excellence, their respect for others, or their ability to make people happy. Some call those things a soul." – Robert Handy

The machine is now the master, its mendicants merely members of the mainframe. Hayek was wrong. Capitalism should work for the workforce. It was designed to initiate greater freedoms not grant remote control. Allowing the tail to wag the dog serves only the fleas who feast on its labours. Nor is the machine of capitalism a symbiotic entity. It is a tool that serves society or at least that was the intention. Allowing it to flex then fade, grow then die like a beast of burden in some industrialised jungle, effectively letting it reap the seeds it has sown impacts on those that engaged its engines in the first place. The serfs serve forced to run a servile life on the wheel of industry.

Sometimes it feels that the horse we have employed to pull our carriage runs where it will without paying any heed to where we try to steer it.

Too often political parties’ kow-tow to the whims of business ignoring the desires of the people they have been elected to represent. The C of their capitalism is large and harsh when what is needed is a soft c, a round c, a small c that regards the community as much as it does the market place. No intelligent individual wants revolution but the revolving doors of the system we live with keep spinning. Recession precedes growth, bust follows boom - ad nausea. Capitalism is good but good is not good enough.

We need to get back to where we started. We need to return capital to the pockets of all but without collective government control. The big C’s of Communism and Capitalism both employ this method, The latter less than the former but far more than is required. We need entrepreneurs not empires. We need to recognise talent then let it earn its own rewards. We need to recall when small was better than big then re-establish this ethos. We need to have communities that control their own lives rather than continue to consort with corporates whose collectivistic ideal is killing the communities that created them in the first place.

We need small c capitalism in the form of co-operatives; small c capitalism in property ownership; cooperation alongside competition not the crushing of communities by corporations; the return of apprenticeships and of artisans. Small c capitalism is big C common sense.

Originally published on Russell C.J. Duffy's blog - http://fishywords.blogspot.co.uk/