First, let's reclaim the idea of democracy from the lifeless front for corporate rule that it's become, and was always intended to be for the feudal capitalists that 'granted' it to the restless majority to deflect a revolution. Real democracy would demand democratic control of the workplace, with the workforce having the power to sack their management. If someone wants to manage, they have to seek election from the co-operative that controls that company. Once they're elected, their employers would then let them manage for X amount of time, just like Thatcher & Co always articulated. (Watch that knee now, watch it closely... are you saying the only way to oppose the current system is to rigidly insist that absolutely none of their ideas can ever have any validity whatsoever?) If, during that period, the elected management decide (owing to stress related emotional illness) that the entire company budget should be spent not on producing yet more wind turbines, but on a lavish orgy, then an emergency general meeting would be held, and they'd be dismissed / re-elected with a landslide majority. When I say management, we're talking a group of individuals, with sub-units organizing their own departments. The real beauty of this would be seeing that those who most oppose it are the same capitalist voices who constantly reminded us that the Soviet Union was a very bad thing, because it wasn't democratic enough. Watching them trying to explain why more democracy is also a very bad thing when applied to something over which they want exclusive control will create hours of free entertainment for us all.

Secondly, let's make the crucial distinction between the free market and capitalism. Capitalism means the accumulation and control of investment by a wealthy elite. The free market is a system in which those with something to sell compete with each other in a marketplace (an activity that has real positive aspects to it, ie efficiency, avoiding traditional communism, people enjoying the benefits of their labour...). The problem is to prevent one becoming the other. A solution would be to democratise the investment of capital. You can't manufacture a train or start an organic farming co-op without people lending you money to do it. But instead of a small elite controlling the entire economy, let's have a genuine shareholder democracy, with every adult controlling the same number of allocated shares. If someone doesn't want to use them, then they can opt out, and let their local democratic unit administer them. At last! The workers actually controlling the means of production!

But... there would also need to be a limit to company size, or we're back to square one, with a few (democratically controlled) multinationals wielding disproportionate control. An upper limit of one or two thousand, perhaps? A company producing something as complicated as computers or bicycles can work in a legally binding confederation of co-ops, without the possibility of this growing above the maximum size. There could still be a pay scale for those who couldn't possibly undertake more responsibility or productivity without one: they can move up the scale from the legally binding minimum wage, until they hit the legally binding maximum wage. But after that, they're up the creek, as fareveryone else's. The idea of locking the highest wage in a fixed ratio to the lowest wage has always been a nice touch. The pay scales within that company can then go up and down according to its market performance. For anyone not working, there would be a non-humiliating minimum income, paid for through taxes. Whatever this amount is, the minimum wage for someone who does work should be more than this, as an incentive. Anyone doing carework at home will automatically get the minimum wage.

No single one of these ideas will change the world without all the others in place as well, so here's the big one... this legislation has to be global. The same minimum wage across the world, based on the actual amount of labour you perform, and not on the value of your national currency, ie if you pick 435 apples in Ghana or 435 apples in Spain, you get paid enough to buy 3 thingys, wherever you live or whatever the 'value' of your local currency might be. While we're at it, forget the local currency... let's have a single global currency, even if it's just to annoy middle class two-faced hippy 'travellers' who want a cheap holiday in Thailand by exchanging currencies and exerting an artificial economic lever over their fellow human beings... Sorry, that was a bit extreme. Not a single global currency, but different traditional currencies, but none the less with a fixed and equal value in relation to each other. Plus- a radicalised version of the UN or a Global Environmental Court (democratically elected by democratically elected national representatives) that monitors CO2 (etc) levels, and makes periodical rulings on the maximum emissions per person. Enforcing these ruling will ensure a pretty lively world, at any rate. And... if we can still have economic growth within this system, ie if more goods can be produced and exchanged within environmental limits, then why not? As long as there's sustainable economic justice and quality of life, why not? Puritanism?

Most decision making would need to be made on a meaningful scale, one that doesn't exceed the UK model of an MP's constituency? The legal system would be restructured to take crime against the person more seriously than crime against property... A renewed emphasis would be placed on progressive education and social work, to break the chain of brutalisation that turns kids into brutalising citizens and as insisting that their contribution is worth X thousand times more than parents. We're always going to inherit social and psychological casualties from the previous 'administration', so we'll have to have some form of stopgap remedies, until enough generations have passed for the social poisons to dissolve out of the system. All pretty standard Guardian reader stuff...

So... is this (brief!) proposal ideologically unacceptable simply because it doesn't rule out economic growth or management or shareholding or taxes? What would it not achieve in terms of environmental sustainability or social justice that is desirable, and why? And if it isn't radical enough, surely it would be a realistic and practical step in the right direction... one that people could relate to more than the huge mental leap we're asking them to make when we propose a society without any constitutional or economic structures at all. Why not demand the minimum number of changes needed to get us where we want to be, rather than the maximum?

If we don't construct down to earth models of how things could be, then why should people take us seriously when we protest under a set of vague 'anti-capitalist' slogans? If it isn't our responsibility to scrutinise our own political ideas and start developing realistic alternatives to corporate rule capitalism, then whose responsibility is it? Is practical change the real objective, or protecting ideological sacred cows by refusing to compromise a set of purist ideals? Should we just protest, or should we start saying we want this instead, and get our hands dirty in realpolitik? Or is the prospect of trying to create and promote a new, hopeful, workable alternative unpalatable because it would actually be much harder work than simply protesting itself?