I wrestled with how to approach this review. On the one hand, The Alternative brings together an appealing range of ways people across the west are imaginatively and determinedly contesting the givens in today’s capitalism. There is an ache for better – for more just ways of organising the way we work and adding more meaning to our lives. You can’t help but applaud Nick Romeo for showing the workable alternatives to capitalism and the moral driver behind them – everything from the way companies are incorporated to how employees are hired, paid and enabled to share in the value they create. There is no need for ordinary workers to be pawns in a system that makes humanity and ethics secondary to the unbending logic of the marketplace and blind, selfish capital.
On the other hand, is it all worth more than a can of beans? How are a collection of disparate, often small scale, if great, initiatives going to grow into a systemic challenge to the way things are currently organised? The Mondragon co-operative movement that Romeo applauds fascinated me as a teenager for all the reasons he sets out. The hope was the virtues he cites – essentially treating workers fairly, decently and with respect – would unleash such increased engagement, productivity and purpose that the good would drive out the bad of its own accord. A more moral economy, retaining the pluralism of capitalism but less of its innate exploitativeness, was there for the having. Well, more than 50 years later Mondragon has grown into one of the top 10 companies in Spain – but has too few emulators even in its own country. This admirable, readable book tries to offer hope. But for all Romeo’s enthusiasm, the question is left hanging. Why so little progress when the case against how so much of the way work and welfare is organised is so strong – and the alternatives so viable?
For example, in his tour of different possibilities he takes us to the Marienthal job guarantee programme in Austria. For those who don’t know, Marienthal was the scene of a social science investigation in the 1930s into the desperate social, psychological and collective depressive consequences of mass unemployment. Today the town is piloting the impact of a universal jobs guarantee for all of its out-of-work citizens. Essentially there is a job for anyone unemployed for more than 12 months – you can even have a hand in designing what it is you will do with your time when you work – and you get paid up to £2,000 a month. People opt to work rather than receive welfare benefit, and there is ample evidence it raises their self-worth whiledelivering a service – care to the elderly or tidier parks – that was not there before. Better still, it costs the state virtually nothing because unemployment benefit is simply transferred to the now employed worker’s pay packet.
Britain did something similar after the financial crisis with the Future Jobs Fund – a grant to employers who offered the long-term unemployed paid work – and with similar success. Britain’s welfare benefits are more paltry than Austria’s so the scope to offer a decent wage that is self-financing is much less, but even so the evaluations were positive. Worthwhile jobs were wished into being, goods and services produced by redeploying welfare benefit as wages. However, it was ideologically scrapped by the coalition government as a classic example of New Labour waste: state initiative was a priori bad; only the private sector should be in the economic driving seat. Tax credits would be given for providing work, rather as Rishi Sunak attempted with the Kickstart programme in the wake of the pandemic. But take-up was abysmal and the various Tory schemes collapsed. The lesson is that a public authority has to lead, to be the paymaster and organise the furnishing of work itself. Yet even in Austria the success of Marienthal has not been copied, and it is unclear whether it will be extended beyond 2024.
So as Romeo takes his reader from one inspiring example to another – from the Purpose economy programme in the US, in which firms are dedicated to delivering greater purpose in perpetuity, to examples of companies paying genuine living wages to their employees to encourage commitment – you are left thinking that while they are all worthwhile, why do these examples not scale into something more? The author is right to assail economics for its obsession with advocating market solutions based on the assumption that selfishness drives individual decision-making and, as such, is value-free. There is a battle in academia, he writes, citing the successful efforts by UCL’s Prof Wendy Carlin to recast economics recognising the complexities of human motivation, the muddiness of most market behaviour and our concerns over ethics. Core, the programme developed by Carlin, whom Romeo rightly lionises, is now part of the curriculum of nearly 400 universities around the world. The economics edifice is shaking, even if it has not yet fallen.
There is less progress over purpose as a driver of business. Around 7,000 B Corps, which commit in their founding constitution to put social goals before profit, now trade in more than 90 countries – there were effectively none 25 years ago – another important gain. But their collective turnover represents no more than 0.1% of global national income.
The Alternative is an expression of hope. But until these ideas are framed by a new economics, a viable political philosophy, a critical mass of thought leaders and of political, economic and social actors , they will remain in the foothills. Romeo has done a service in marshalling our knowledge of the varying contrarian forces abroad – but there is more heavy lifting to make any of this the new normal.
• The Alternative: How to Build a Just Ecconomy by Nick Romeo is published by Basic Books (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
