It is usually women who are seen as addicted to romance - the myth of the tall dark handsome stranger who will carry them away to everlasting happiness. Perhaps the best service the late Princess of Wales performed for women was that she definitively exposed this myth as a dangerous sham.

But in fact it is clear, not just from the Mills and Boon portions of Tim Hazledine's recent book (Taking New Zealand Seriously, Otago University Press 1998) but from the entire works of opponents such as David Green and Charles Murray, that it is usually men who show true devotion to another romance - the social and economic romance of capitalism. They cling loyally to it in the face of all the evidence that it too is a sham.

I am going to talk now about the history of capitalism I know best. It stems from what Doris Lessing (for example in her Canopus in Argos series) calls the North-West Fringes, those predominantly Anglo-Celtic regions which gave birth to capitalism as we know it today. But I am acutely aware that behind that history, and making it possible, stands the savage exploitation of what these fringes were pleased to call their empires.

The early nineteenth century brought two romantic movements - one in literature, the other in economics. The capitalist socio-economic romance came in four forms - and Marx subscribed to at least two of them.

First, there was the iron romance of industrialism itself, as vast machines began to stamp tons of what capitalists called "raw material" into new shapes for human use and profit.

Secondly, there was the blood and guts romance of masculine working class labour, locked into a complex love-hate relationship with coal and steel and the men who owned it - and virtually owned the workers too. If you have seen the films "Brassed Off" and "The Full Monty", you will know that those owners were clever enough to make sure that an entire way of life was bound up with the pits and the works. The romance was strong enough to mask the sordid reality. That is why (despite the absence of choice in taking it on) the loss of this literally killing work was so devastating.

Thirdly, there was - and still is - the endless romance of consumption. Its premise is that desires for goods are infinite, and that people - particularly women - inevitably do and should act to satisfy those desires as fully as they can. In fact, capitalism deliberately set up this romance, just as it did the romance of labour. In John Kenneth Galbraith's words, it set out to "create the wants it seeks to satisfy". The general director of General Motors' Research Labs, Charles Kettering, summed up the mission of business as "the organised creation of dissatisfaction" (Schor, 1991, pp.119-120).

These forms of romance provided the essential underpinning for what has turned out to be the most enduring capitalist myth of all: the intoxicating romance of investment. One of the great appeals of this magic wand was that it appeared to work regardless of birth or title. Money could conjure up more money almost overnight - and just as quickly make it vanish again.

Like Frankenstein's monster, the machines, the mass production and consumption they made possible, and the money they made all took on a life of their own. Instead of being merely the means to the human end of a better life - whatever that is taken to mean - they became the end itself. But they also contained the seeds of their own destruction.

First to crumble was the romance of industrialism. In this country it never reached full bloom, so we have been spared the rusting hulks and bleak wastelands it has left behind elsewhere - and much of the toll it continues to take today(see, for example, "Paying a Price for Polluters", Time, 23 November 1998). Hard on its heels went the romance of male labour, as the mines and factories closed. Where did the jobs go? In American cities, inspectors are finding 19th century style sweatshops where young immigrant girls as young as twelve work instead of going to school. A million to a million and a half immigrant farmworker children - some as young as three and four years - are at work in American fields (Schor, 1991, p.27). Many have moved to what are quaintly called "emerging markets" - but massive unemployment is now emerging there too. Thousands have simply disappeared. The apparent "fall in unemployment" here in the latest figures, for example, is due not to more jobs (in fact, 12,400 full-time jobs and 800 part-time jobs were lost in the year ending September 1998) but to more people leaving the labour market altogether, making them invisible in terms of employment.

That leaves only investment. Thanks in part to the global reach of new information technologies, which annihilate time and distance and other human limitations, capitalism is coming to reign supreme in ways which have not previously been possible. Incredible riches are being built up - accompanied by equally incredible poverty.

But what we are seeing now is not an aberration. It is the apotheosis of capitalism. The whole point - the only point - of all this economic activity is to increase the returns on financial capital. This cannot be done fast enough by traditional types of investment - partly because they are too inflexible, long-term and unwieldy. Instead vast sums rove around the world seeking the most profitable temporary home.

The drive to privatise superannuation has added hugely to this pool of mobile capital. There is now excess productive capacity in every traditional major industry. Yet share prices are a greater multiple of earnings than ever before. Even so, it is becoming more and more difficult to find investments that return enough, fast enough. Two humanly destructive consequences are the surge in mergers and buy-outs, and the increase in gambling on various forms of "futures" - including national currencies.

Another strategy for dealing with the problem of finding lucrative havens for capital is to shift investment to forms of production which are so necessary to human existence that they should instead be seen as aspects of reproduction - that is, the maintenance and production of human beings. In an urban society, everyone must use water, sewage, energy, communications and roads; and everyone needs education and health care and social security of some kind. So it makes perfect sense for capital to seek to transform all these into areas for private investment - or at the very least, into parodies of private companies. This is the last frontier for profit - the essentials of life in the 21st century.

But there is a catch, and it is this: if everyone needs these things, then as they are turned more and more into free-market commodities, what happens to those who can't afford to pay? You can get by, just, with cheap and inferior food. But you cannot get by with cheap and inferior housing or power or transport. In one Birmingham tower block, 70 percent of the tenants had their water cut off last year when they failed to pay the private company which owns it (Alliance kit on water privatisation, 1997).

Here, an endless parade of people are had up for persistently driving cars which break every rule in the book - but which they cannot afford to license or mend or replace. In both rural and urban areas of New Zealand, families are trying to survive without piped water or electricity, and in some cases without housing. In these circumstances, health and education rapidly break down too.

Capital demands that people produce and consume only on its own terms. As Claus Offe wrote in a recent (1995) paper, the central notion is that "one can share in the commodities and values of life only if one has successfully marketed one's own labour." In other words, each individual must earn enough from the market to buy everything they need to live - as well as to support any unavoidably dependent members of their own family.

But the blunt fact is that capital does not need much labour any more. In 1989 the companies involved in the Business Roundtable represented 77% of New Zealand stock market value, excluding private companies such as Fay Richwhite. But they employed only about 11% of all NZ employees. In 1995 the world's largest 200 corporations recorded sales worth 28% of the world's total economic activity. But they provided jobs for only 0.75% of the world's workforce.

Juliet Schor (1991, p.40) makes the point well: "Capitalist systems do not operate in order to provide employment. Their guiding principle is the pursuit of profitability. If profitability results in high employment, that is a happy coincidence for those who want jobs. If it does not, bottom-line oriented companies will not take it upon themselves to hire those their plans have left behind."

There is no evidence that capitalist production will ever again conjure up enough jobs, with a good enough spread of wages, to provide anything like what we have come to see as a decent standard of living for all - let alone put back the social pattern of the "family wage-earner".

But the true believers are unable to let go of this last vestige of the labour romance. The "good job" has become the Holy Grail of our time. As Claus Offe (1995) puts it, "The more unlikely it becomes that every adult will be able to find and keep a secure, satisfying and well-paying job, the more frantic and aggressive the competition becomes - between generations, sexes, ethnic groups - for this `supreme good'." Our government has such faith in the virtues of paid work that yesterday [1 October] it began forcing the sick and the unemployed into a bizarre kind of Clayton's job - the job you have to do when you don't have a job - as if this would somehow magically result in more market employment.

Unless the romances of productive labour and endless consumption are dispelled, the romance of investment will continue to hold sway. How can we break the enchanter's spell? I think there are only two realistic places for Western societies to look. One is environmentalism. The other is feminism.

It has always been difficult for women to join the ranks of the true believers. It is not just that our lives have an awkward way of giving the lie to romance of every kind - particularly the romance of productive labour. Capitalism has never really found a satisfactory place for us. We do not fit the traditional male worker mould, because it was never designed for us. In fact it was based on getting our shadow labour thrown in. Yet we know from experience that we cannot rely either on men or on capital to deliver the so-called "family wage".

Unpaid work represents one of the few genuine challenges to capitalist logic. It makes no rational sense at all. But so resistant has romance been to reality that capitalism still scarcely admits that unpaid work even exists - let alone that it rivals paid work in size and scope; that paid work could not exist without it; and that it endures regardless of what is happening to paid work.

Those who do most of the unpaid work are women (see Else, 1996). So it is not surprising that women tend to be the heretics in the capitalist belief system. Not all women, of course - any more than all men are committed believers. But women are the largest group who can genuinely envisage another way of life - one which does not depend absolutely on paid market work, but uses the material abundance now possible as a means, not an end in itself.

Perhaps we would do well to stop talking about ethics and social justice, and consider instead the sheer unworkability of capitalism as we now know it. Larger and larger multinationals are producing more and more goods, with fewer and fewer people, to meet less and less real needs, at higher and higher environmental and human cost.

The United Nations estimates (Human Development Report 1997/8) that the additional cost of achieving and maintaining universal access to basic education for all, basic health care for all, reproductive health care for all women, adequate food for all, and safe water and sanitation for all is roughly $40 billion a year. That is a lot of money. But it is just 4 percent of the combined wealth of the world's richest 225 individuals.

Capitalism today makes no sense. It is only the ideological power of romance, coupled of course with the functional power of money, that enables the system to survive. A central part of that ideological power is most men's inability to imagine what on earth they would ever find to do, in a world which did not centre on paid work and production.

So I will end by saying yet again what I and thousands of other women have been saying for many years now. Humans must have both bread and roses. As well as the necessities of life, and a share of its luxuries, they must have meaningful activity and a sense of belonging.

But there is no shortage of any of these goods in the world. There is only a shortage of jobs, along with a glut of production for profit. The sooner we reject the fantasy that market jobs are the answer and that untrammelled private investment will somehow create them, the sooner we may be able to start building a much more down-to-earth, equitable, sustainable way of life.

The Hikoi of Hope was a remarkable demonstration that the romance is at last coming to an end. I was proud to stand before Parliament yesterday and join a complete cross section of 8000 ordinary New Zealanders in telling the truth: that after 200 years, enough really is enough.

Ó 1998 Anne Else

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