Beyond Money: A new way of imagining "capital."

The word "capital" has normally been taken to refer to available money, or--more precisely, "Wealth in the form of money or assets, taken as a sign of the financial strength of an individual, organization, or nation, and assumed to be available for development or investment." (from the Business Dictionary)

 By this common definition, capital is inherently rooted in our global market economy, which I call "glomart" for short. But that money-based economy is completely incompatible with Gaia, our biological support system, since it depends on the infinite growth of production and consumption of commodities--which is impossible on a finite planet.  Money itself is just arithmetic, after all--an abstract transform of information about the marginal value of commodities. Hence, without commodities, you cannot have money--and without money, you cannot have commodities. In order to have a "commodity" you need to put a (physical or abstract) boundary around something in order to sell it on a market.

But such boundaries inevitably isolate that entity from its context, and all of the relationships that sustain it, and that it, in turn, sustains.  This is why, historically, we decided that human beings could not be commodities.  The Civil War marks our nation's final decision on this matter--the point at which we recognized, legally, that a person's autonomous rights as a human being supersede his or her commodity value to a plantation owner.  Likewise, the National Park System arose in recognition that certain places had too much intrinsic (non-monetary) value to our culture to be reduced to commodities for the market. When something is too sacred to be traded, it is no longer a commodity; no longer a form of "capital" in the usual sense of the word.

But there is a big problem with this "usual sense of the word." The sole object of any business enterprise is to increase its store of capital--of money and/or the commodities that can be traded for money. And money--or capital--is a zero sum game: if one person has it, the other does not. So the object of business--of Glomart--throughout the world is to build their capital base by transforming nature into commodities as rapidly as possible: land into real estate; diverse and fertile prairies into monocultural farms; forests into board-feet; potentially valuable minerals into mined and manufactured goods; oceans into fisheries and fisheries into fishmarkets and restaurants; fossil fuels into cheap energy resources that power all of the above. The net consequence, of course, is the ongoing destruction of our biological support system, coupled with the commodification of everything--and increased isolation of everyone.

Is there a better way of thinking about capital?  Fortunately, yes. Recently, thanks to Toby Hemenway and other Permaculturists, I came across an eye-opening article called "Eight Forms of Capital" by Ethan Roland and Gregory Landua. Based on systems theory--conceived in terms of pools and flows--the article lays out a revised, more comprehensive definition of "capital" as any and all resources, both material and immaterial, that can be traded within a community or between them or combined ("complexed" in their lexicon) into other, more complex resources. The Eight Forms of Capital, which I have arranged holarchically, from simplest to most complex, are as follows:

1. Material Capital: Nonliving physical objects or materials which can be combined or transformed into useful tools or commodities. (Zero-sum and inherently degenerative--i.e. subject to the Second Law of Thermodynamics)
2. Living (or biological) Capital: Animals, plants, microbes, fresh water, and topsoil. This kind of capital can be regenerative if wisely and prudently used, stored, and nurtured. But it is still partly zero sum--at any given moment, what one person eats or drinks cannot belong to or benefit another person (other than a mother's nursing child) as well. This is why there is competition for food and water in many parts of the world. (But it can, and does, benefit the microbes in our intestines and elsewhere that are part of our bodies' symbiotic matrix). Living capital can often, of course, be transformed into material capital as well (e.g. wood). These two--material and living capital--form the foundation of any economy or ecosystem, human or otherwise. The next four forms of capital pertain to individual human beings. 
3. Experiential Capital: The practical knowledge and skills we gain from our lived experience. These can include practical skills like housekeeping, carpentry or gardening, and can be "complexed" to form higher-level skills, such as engineering or architecture. It can be Positive Sum, in that the more experience you have, the more benefit you can bring to a community through solving their problems and teaching others what you know.
4. Intellectual Capital: This is what people go to college for; to gain the theoretical knowledge and thinking skills necessary to make wise decisions, to gain employment, and to collaborate with others on projects. Depending on the field of interest, it is generally combined with experiential capital to one degree or another. 
5. Social Capital: This refers to the "people skills" we acquire through collaborating with and socializing with others. It is likewise Positive-Sum, in that the more Social Capital you acquire, the broader your influence becomes on others, and the more you can accomplish collaboratively.
6. Spiritual Capital: This is the most abstract, least quantifiable form of capital. The Buddhists have codified it in their concept of Karma, which refers to the net consequences of any intentional action on both the inner (self) and outer (world) realms of experience. In Buddhist epistemology, Karma (spiritual capital) can be conceived as a kind of balance sheet, which transcends individual lives, and shapes our day-to-day experience.  The good news is, moreover, that Karma, (both individual and collective, past and present) while it determines the context in which we take any action, does not predetermine the action itself. Through mind training, we can learn to identify and expose the karmic roots of any thought, feeling, or impulse that arises, evaluate it accordingly, and then make a free choice as to whether to increase our karmic debt by indulging dysfunctional impulses--or pay off an installment of it by acting at that moment with wisdom and compassion.  And it is by such training--both in formal meditation and in mindful living--that we accumulate spiritual capital, manifested as loving kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity. And so, like experiential, social, and intellectual capital, spiritual capital is a positive-sum game: the more we have, the more others benefit as well. The last two forms of capital are collective, rather than individual, in that they acquire value only through group interaction:  
7. Financial Capital: No need for further comment on this, which has generally been considered the only form of capital. Money is, of course, useful as an abstract medium for trade--that is why it was invented. But since it is simply arithmetic, it has two insurmountable problems. For one, it is inherently zero-sum: if one person has it, others do not.  On a finite planet, the logic of money is exactly that of a monopoly game, and a monopoly game has only one possible outcome: the winner(s) own everything, and the losers own nothing, and owe the winners rent for their houses and hotels. That is rapidly becoming a model of the world we live in today; a world where a handful of billionaires own everything, and all the rest of us work for them, are in debt to them, or have been abandoned (or imprisoned) by them to lives of poverty, homelessness, and destitution.  The other problem is that money must grow, or else it loses its value. And the only way to "grow" money is to turn everything else into it--that is, turn nature into commodities, citizens into consumers, and communities into "markets"--until the Earth herself is denuded of life and polluted to death.  Still, in our world, we all need money to survive. But the more we can rely on the other forms of capital, the less money we will need to lead happy, fulfilling lives. 
8. Cultural Capital: The last kind of "capital" we can accumulate and trade on collectively is that bestowed upon us by our respective cultural heritages and practices. It refers, according to Roland and Landua, to "the shared internal and external processes of a community – the works of art and theater, the songs that every child learns, the ability to come together in celebration of the harvest or for a religious holiday." These days, most people acquire their cultural capital from absorption in mass media culture--which has increasingly become their only common cultural currency.  Since most mass media simply reinforce the dysfunctional cultural premises of Glomart--(More is always better; To be is to buy)--people also adhere to fragmented and mutually hostile subcultures, whether they are churches, synagogues, mosques, football fan clubs, street gangs, or right-wing hate groups on the internet. But diverse cultural capital within communities can still be a fertile and useful resource for diversifying and enriching our experience (as in Mexican or Thai restaurants, Tai Chi and Yoga classes, community theatre, etc.)

If we can learn and teach people how to think more broadly about these various different forms of capital available to us, we will go a long way toward emancipating ourselves from the tyranny of Glomart, and the inner tyranny of predicating our self-worth solely on the size of our cars and houses and stock portfolios. The best way to grow our own spiritual, social, experiential, intellectual, and even cultural capital is to devote our lives to various forms of learning, teaching, healing, and creating.