Most of the biggest problems we face are systemic. Poverty, environmental degradation, global heating, inequality, malnutrition, the mistreatment of animals, misogyny, homophobia and racism are not discrete difficulties that be fixed in isolation, but problems that emerge from and are embedded in broader societal structures.
So if we want any major change we usually need system change. But what does that mean? Does it mean a change of system: getting rid of the one we have and replacing it with a completely different one? Or does it mean changes to the system: retaining the basic structures but altering how they operate?
In reality, the difference between these two kinds of change is not absolute but one of degree. At one end of the spectrum, we tinker, and the other, we change everything. But there is every gradation of change in between. So when we talk about the contrast between change to and of the system, we’re really referring to what end of the spectrum the changes we have in mind lie.
Importantly, the quality of the change is not always the same as the quantity. Sometimes we can change almost everything but leave the most critical elements in place, and so nothing important is transformed. Think of how many regimes have been toppled, only for the same people who held power before to cling on to it under a totally different constitution. On the other hand, sometimes a tiny change can have outsized effects. My favourite example of such a radical ad hoc—or rad hoc—change is Ingnaz Semmelweis’s realisation that medics needed to wash their hands. Mortality rates plummeted in hospitals even though everything else they did was unchanged.
I’m especially interested in what system change means in relation to the food system, the subject of my book How the World Eats. Last week I talked about food system change at Terra Madre, the biannual gathering of the Slow Food movement in Turin. I was on a panel with Eric Schlosser, the journalist and author of Fast Food Nation, and Elisabetta Recine, president of the Brazilian National Food and Nutrition Security Council and a member of IPES-Food, the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems.
Every informed person with an ounce of objectivity agrees that the food system is in need of systemic change. The most vocal calls for this come from those who collectively identify as being part of a movement made up of people calling for reduction of corporate power, advancement of peasant and other food workers’ rights, and a more agroecological approach to agriculture. Very often, the kind of change called for is of the system, not just to the system. At least, that is what the rhetoric suggests, with its frequent denunciations of capitalism and neo-liberalism. I was confronted with a striking example of this at Terra Madre when in a moment of what seemed to be collective joy the economist Raj Patel succeeded in getting almost all of his audience to declare “I’m an anti-capitalist”.
I was not part of that chorus and I immediately wondered how what I would say the next day on the very same stage would go down. I am squarely in the camp of changing how the system works, not overthrowing it. I also wondered how many people really meant what they shouted out. “Capitalism” is an easy bogeyman to condemn, but it comes in many shapes and forms. Both the Nordic nations and the USA have an essentially capitalist economy but the differences in how they are regulated makes them very different.
As Sclosser pointed out, even the USA is not purely capitalist. He described its system as “corporate socialism” or “monopoly capitalism”, which under Trump has descended into a kleptocracy. “If you look at what crops are being grown, what price they are being sold at, which corporations control which sector of the food economy, none of that is the workings of the free market as Adam Smith would have explained it,” he said.
So when people say they are anti capitalist, what they usually mean is that they are against what gets called neo-liberalism, which combines a professed faith in free markets with tariffs, regulations and tax regimes that systematically favour the interests of big business over society as a whole. The problem is not that we have a free market economy, but that the rules of that market are rigged to benefit large corporations and the rich, not farmers, growers, workers and citizens.
More idealistic folk than I protest that it is fatalistic to believe that nothing can better the system we’ve got. I think it is they who are pessimistic for thinking that the system we have can’t be made considerably better. We underestimate the power of ad hoc, well-designed reforms. Minimum wages, for example, have vastly improved the well being of the worst paid without fundamentally altering the structure of the economy. Welfare payments and national health services have also transformed society, all within the same basic system that existed before.
Nor do I rule out the possibility—hope, even—that we might come up with a viable alternative to a regulated market economy (which I think is a more accurate and less emotive term than capitalism). I’m very happy that serious people are thinking about different forms of political economy but right now no one has any template that looks viable on paper, let alone one that commands widespread support. The few times that capitalism has been overthrown in the last century or so, the results have not exactly been successful.
But my objections to utopian plans to overthrow capitalism are not just based on empirical reasons for thinking it won’t work. Philosophically, I’m inspired by the economist and philosopher Amartya Sena who argued very persuasively that in Western thought in particular, political theory has been dominated by the idea that you must first come up with an idea of what a perfectly just society would look like and then try to get as close to it as possible. Sen argued that this project is doomed because we don’t and never will agree on what perfect justice is. Even if we did, the quickest and most effective way to make progress is to identify the worst injustices and try to remove those. The beauty of this approach is that there is much more agreement about what is egregiously unjust than there is about what is ideally just. For example, almost everyone agrees that anyone who works hard in a rich country should be able to afford a decent standard of living, even as they radically disagree about how to achieve that.
To give just one example of how one well-directed rad hoc change could transform our market economies, many of the worst failings of our current system involve coporations not paying the full social cost of production, and even being subsidised by perverse incentives to operate in harmful ways. They pollute, heat the planet, make people ill, and leave governments to educate their workforce and deal with the health impacts of poor working conditions. These “negative externalities” are wrong even by the principles of orthodox free market economics. As Schlosser showed in Fast Food Nation, if the food industry had to cover the real costs of their operations, cheap food would be much more expensive and good food would be comparatively cheaper.
So how did my call to talk less about overthrowing capitalism and reforming it instead go down at Terra Madre? It’s hard to tell, of course, but it seems to me it was hard to disagree because behind the radical rhetoric, most of what people in the movement actually call for is rad hoc change. Patel, for example, talked about how a shift to agroecolgical farming in Andhra Pradesh resulted in greatest productivity for farmers and fewer input costs for the state. This change not only happened within the existing political order, it actually resulted in the supposed consequence of capitalism that is used as its most common justification: a more efficient market.
I was also able to point to the lastest report by IPES-Food, The New Geopolitics of Food. It concluded “With the right policy choices—including market management, public procurement, and fairer trade arrangements—governments can seize this opportunity to rebuild food systems that are more resilient, more equitable, and better able to ensure food access in an increasingly unstable world.” Again, changes to the system, not of the system.
Invited by another audience member to respond to the suggestion that we should be anti-neoliberalism rather than anti-capitalist, Patel first raised a laugh by addressing the gathering as “comrades” before saying “I agree with all of you”. Reinforcing the point about externalities, he said that for every dollar spent on food, $2.4 of costs on society are generated. “If the food industry were to internalise all those externalities, it wouldn’t exist.” He talked of the “need to critique power” in part by “imagining what it might be like for things to be radically different.” Still, he maintained that “being an anti-capitalist is a wise thing to be. You don’t have to commit to the world that comes after you. You have to commit to dreaming of that.”
I would half agree with that. You can be against something without knowing exactly what should replace it. But until such knowledge comes, you should seek to reform rather than to abolish, lest what rises from the ruins is worse than the edifice torn down.
That’s how I would prefer to interpret the words of the recently deceased founder of Slow Food, Carlo Petrini, which were projected onto the screen behind us: Chi semina utopia, cogliere realtà. Who sows utopia, reaps reality. The metaphor of sowing seems exactly right to me. Let’s dream of the best possible world and do things that might eventually help lead us to it. But let’s not imagine we have the ability and knowledge to design and build this totally perfect system. That kind of utopian thinking is dangerous and detracts us from making practical, actionable changes to our deeply imperfect world that could quickly make it a heck of a lot better.