Audiences in America will soon be shuffling out of theatres under their own clouds once the Canadian documentary The Corporation hits cities across that country. It's one thing to be reminded that corporations exist solely to generate profit for investors. It's quite another to imagine a practicable world where most human activity is not manipulated by corporations. Scarcely an alternative exists.

Scarce, but not absent. The Bolshevik revolution in Russia was an attempt at one possible alternative: a worker-owned and state-directed economy interested above all else not in profits but in the social well-being of those workers. It failed when those who gained access to the levers of power at the state bureaucracy directed the economy instead to serve their own personal interests.

West European socialism is another alternative with only mixed results there and in Canada to report after a hundred years or so. This stab at restraining the excesses of capitalism proposed to harness the force of greed inside a yoke of tight regulation and high taxation. Constraints force corporations against their will to finance interests other than their investors' profits, but not to the degree that capitalists simply give up.

This idea in practice has required an overbearing state apparatus to design, enact, and enforce an ever-thickening manual of regulations and taxation codes to the degree that, in those economies most influenced by socialism, the state has come to represent much more than half of the whole national economy, thereby choking the rewards of greed off too much and stifling further innovation and marketing.

Europe was also home to another tried and failed alternative to the excesses of private profiteering capitalism, in the name of fascism. Here, the idea was to tie the interests of investors directly to those of the state so that profiteering replaced nationalism and consumption replaced patriotism. The fascist theorists worked with one important insight: the problem with capitalism was always the clash of interests between those who own capital and those who work for the owners. All other alternatives till then sought to modify by force or by coaxing the interests of owners so that they more closely dovetailed with the interests of workers.

But if it's the clash that's to be avoided, who's to say the workers can't be modified instead, by force or by coaxing, to more closely jibe with the interests of owners of capital?

This was the program tried by both later communism and by fascism. It is not necessarily a failed national economic philosophy. Soviet communism might have tripped up simply due to overextension of credit facilities in a misguided rush to keep pace with an always more threatening American military assault. German fascism might have only failed due to a mad leader who used the facilities of a fine militaristic state apparatus to work out some personal demons at the expense of marginalized groups of people.

Fascism by those with self-control has never been convincingly discredited as a workable solution to the clash between capital and labour. A kind of fascism-lite, at least of the more coaxing, less forcing, style, does seem to be working very well in North America and much of Western Europe today, as well as elsewhere in the world.

It is poignant to note also that Chinese communism, more wise and restrained in its response to American militarism, has not only survived, but is today a strong alternative model of development to the underdeveloped world.

When under its first real threat, in the weeks after September 11, leaders of quasi-fascist Western nations explicitly urged citizens to consume goods as a patriotic act. There is a growing, and notably welcomed, literature produced in the West that explicitly identifies corporate profits with nationalist purpose. Certainly leaders of parties enjoying national political power devote themselves without apology to the purpose of nurturing an environment ever more friendly to corporate profiteering, as though that were unquestionably nationalism itself. It is in fact corporatism—or fascism by another name.

But these models, Chinese communism and Western quasi-fascism, have only succeeded so long as the technicians of those systems—the economists—are distracted from noticing smoke in the engine. They can no longer be so distracted, however, since massive chunks of the Antarctic ice shelf began breaking off, huge holes in the previously frozen Arctic ocean have appeared, large gaps in the ozone layer have opened up, unusual storms have begun to occur routinely, and the global temperature is undeniably rising.

Not only has the global environment begun to show signs of collapsing under the weight of the reigning economic models, but the social environment in the West, and throughout the world, has also shown signs of breaking up.

Tensions arising from ever widening gaps between the richest and poorest, both inside nations and between nations, has led to unprecedented expenditures on security, both personal and national. These expenditures are growing large enough to strain the ability of all economic systems to sustain, security being a completely unproductive expenditure generating no self-sustaining return.

These two reigning systems will collapse chiefly because their sails always need a full wind to keep their boats upright. Without an ever spiraling growth in wealth, productivity, and population, these economic systems cannot last, for the simple reason that it is only in growth where real returns on investment (profits over and above inflation and long-term interest rates) can be found. Without real returns, capitalists will not invest, and without capital investment, these two economic models come to a dead halt. Though unrelenting growth is clearly going to break us environmentally and socially, with the present prevailing economic system, we cannot shut growth off without crashing the economy.

It would appear, then, that we are at an end. But the situation is not nearly as dire as it seems. It only looks inescapable because one of the sustaining propagandistic myths of the reigning quasi-fascist economic system in the West (as well as of the system in Chinese communism), is that no alternative economic system remains to be tried.

It's not true. There is at least one alternative economic system that, though old by now, has not ever been honestly tried on a national, or even civilizational, or indeed, global, scale.

It has, however, been tried, and found successful, on a regional scale in some parts of the West. Far from being a word that merely evokes old and bitter farmers and socially dysfunctional apartment buildings, the “co-operative” economic model might just be the West's, and the world's, saving grace.

The qualities of a theoretical national co-operative economic model will be examined in the following issue of The Republic and will be based on readings and a visit by the author to the world's most successful regional co-operative economy, found in the province of Emilia-Romagna, in Italy's north.

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