The title of this post seems counter-intuitive. Common sense tells us that battling successfully against the consequences of the financial crisis, capitalism is more alive than ever, thriving in India and China, making states tremble on their foundations. Yet I dare to say that, against this common sense and in line with Marxists, anarchists, socialists of all kinds and other anti-system movements, capitalism as we know it, i.e a socio-economic system based on the ownership and accumulation of capital, is showing its last moments of life. Yet I don’t affirm its decease for the reasons that these other ideological movements assume i.e. capitalism is failing, but because thanks to both its success and its deficiencies, it’s letting way to a new system that, like capitalism itself and contrary to communism or I would even say (paradoxically) anarchism, doesn’t need to be imposed for its popular acceptance, for it feeds from a characteristic that makes us human. In capitalism it was greed, in compartism it’s generosity.
Yochai Benkler, one of the gurus of collaborative networks thinking, has a book called The Wealth of Networks , in where he tells us about how information technologies allows the emergence of networked collaboration that may have important economic and social consequences. Based on Benkler’s ideas, TED Talks tag videos with Gordon Brown, Jonathan Zittrain, Anupam Mishra, David Logan and others with the theme The Rise of Collaboration. One of these videos shows Harvard Professor Jonathan Zittrain giving examples of The Web as random act of kindness. It is this socio-economic and cultural change towards a world based on collaboration and sharing, facilitated by the Internet, which is at the base of the emergence of compartism, the ideology of generosity.
Compartism, from the latin verb compartire (to share), is based on the idea that we are better off when we share, and not when we accumulate as in capitalism. In his book We-Think: Mass innovation not mass production Charles Leadbeater says that
In the 20th century we were identified by what we owned; in the 21st century we will also be defined by how we share and what we give away.
This is what in a nutshell compartism is about. The Internet has broken old barriers that did not allow us to collaborate, but instead brought us towards individual competition for property of limited resources. Today, we have a new environment – determined by technology, politics, culture and environmental issues – and new tools that give collaboration, sharing and giving away a new role and become instrumental in being successful as individuals and as a whole. Winners are not those that work with capitalist rules of accumulation and greed, but with sharing and generosity. As it was with capitalism, this new ideology of compartism materializes as a need for our future and not only an ideal construction of a few. But don’t be fooled by the generous ideal of compartism, for a compartist society won’t be an egalitarian society, for those that will know and share better than others will have an advantage, which they will certainly use. How fair this future society will be, will still mainly depend on our actions and not only on our ideology.
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