Stuff: Goodbye Marx, hello doughnuts - a new image for a better world

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Writing from prison in 1930, Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci defined his era as an interregnum – literally, a period between rulers – and argued: “The old is dying and the new cannot be born.”

Intellectually, we could say the same of our age. The market-driven, hyper-individualist certainties of the last four decades are crumbling. The political project of leaving individual consumers to “buy” public services, and getting government “out of the way”, has not, in the developed world, delivered greater stability, lower inequality or even enhanced economic growth.

Its legacy has instead been an ever-growing number of financial crises, culminating in the GFC; wider disparities between rich and poor; weaker economic growth than in the postwar period; and of course the wholesale degradation of the planet, most obvious in the creeping devastation of climate change.

By widening economic disparities, and thus leaving many poorer communities stranded, hyper-individualism has also contributed to the vicious, reactionary populism convulsing the globe. Even if it can boast some wins, like cheaper consumer goods and wider market choices, the above failings still constitute a hefty charge sheet.

Yet while this intellectual edifice has crumbled, nothing concrete has risen in its place. Why so? Partly because there is no one predominant figure to lay the foundations. In the past, social democrats could rely on John Maynard Keynes, libertarians on Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman, and Marxists on, well, Marx.

Today’s absence of an intellectual prophet is no bad thing: such figures invite over-simplification, and represent a single point of failure. But without them, the future can be harder to discern, leaving us to patch together a new paradigm from a disparate band of thinkers.

Among this multiplicity, it often feels like the best new thinking is based, explicitly or not, on the image of the circle. British thinker Kate Raworth, for instance, uses the metaphor of a doughnut to symbolise the end goal of economics. The hole in the middle represents a failure to develop sufficiently, leaving basic human needs unmet; outside the doughnut is ecological overshoot, harming the planet; in between, the body of the doughnut itself is the safe space, a point of balance where human needs are met but the planet is preserved.

Another concept rapidly gaining ground is the circular economy – the subject of a major report earlier this week – which aims to ensure products are reused (passed around between users in a circle, as it were) rather than thrown away.

Why does the circular image hold such power? For one thing, it symbolises the connectedness implicit in the very functioning of nature: think of the classic cycle of water running off mountains into the sea, evaporating upwards, condensing into clouds, and precipitating back down onto the mountains. Circular metaphors ground us in regenerative, restorative thinking.

They also emphasise equality: at King Arthur’s mythical round table, everyone was equally placed, because the table could have no “head”. Circles are balanced, stable, harmonious. And in this harried world – its jobs ever-more precarious, its climate ever-more fragile – who couldn’t use a bit more harmony, stability and balance?

Circularity can have negative connotations: think circular arguments, or people going around in circles. But one can easily draw, rising up from a circle, a spiral, one that lifts towards ever-greater opportunity and more flourishing lives.

The world needs, for instance, to create a positive, self-reinforcing spiral between greater economic equality and enhanced democratic participation. If more people feel included in their society, they are more likely to vote, which in turn orients politics towards enhancing equality, and so the spiral rises. (Too many countries, currently, are on a self-reinforcing downward spiral of widening disparity and declining political engagement.)

Upward spirals encourage us to think about exchanges – whether in markets, communities or public services – that are mutually enhancing, exchanges in which the participants uplift each other’s dignity and personal development, in a positively escalating reciprocity.

Combined, the circle and the spiral provide both stability and dynamism, security and growth. It’s an optimistic image for a century that, for all its turmoil, holds extraordinary potential. The developed world learned last century how enhanced material prosperity, and widespread access to public health and welfare, can transform human well-being; now we just need to deliver those goods without simultaneously trashing the planet.

We can already see, in this century, the potential for increased education and technological creativity to further transform our lives; now we just need to ensure those forces benefit everyone, and not only the top 1%. Equality, harmony, balance.

All this is abstract, of course, and hard to translate into the everyday. Any prime minister suddenly spouting the language of spiral politics would be swiftly derided. But still these are images that can underpin a new paradigm, helping us make better sense of this century, and this world.