Brussels (AFP)

To enrich oneself, to have access to a better comfort, to work to be able to consume. Yes, but with what consequences? The "Museum of Capitalism", designed by a group of students from Belgium, moved to Brussels to question the economic system that dominates the world.

The traveling exhibition is hosted until 13 September in the former Brussels Stock Exchange, "a symbolic place" to address this theme, according to the organizers.

This palace with neoclassical columns, right in the city center, was deserted more than 20 years ago by stockbrokers and is now managed by the city.

It is the new municipality PS-Ecolo (elected end of 2018) who proposed to the Museum of Capitalism to invest this summer for a month, to enjoy greater visibility over an area of ​​3,000 m2.

The exhibition, which has already welcomed 15,000 visitors in five other Belgian cities since 2014, is "a teaching tool to question the society in which we live," says AFP Célimène Bernard, a member of the collective.

"We do not carry a truth, we do not say what capitalism (...) we want to bring questions and popularize a theme that sometimes can seem pretty vague," says this former Sciences- Po Lille (France), who has joined about fifteen students, mainly from the Catholic University of Louvain (UCL), in French-speaking Belgium.

- "Thousands of alternatives" -

At the entrance of the exhibition is displayed a definition that raises the debate: "Capitalism is a system characterized by the requirement of accumulation of profit through private property".

Certainly it can be synonymous with material comfort, with leisure and travel, emancipation and social climbing. "American-style" successes are evoked, such as that of Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft.

But the system has its "limits", it is emphasized in a specially dedicated room.

The argument is that wealth is very unequally distributed, overconsumption depletes natural resources, and the interests of multinationals often go on behind the banner of the common good.

In the end, the visitor stomped on a sentence of the anti-globalization political scientist Susan George claiming that "there are thousands of alternatives" to capitalism.

This is the entrance to the last of the four halls, the largest, devoted to "alternatives". Under the vault of the Palace of the Stock Exchange, associations were invited to present their initiatives in the fields of finance or local food for example.

The exhibition, at free price, is open every day except Tuesday, from 14:00 to 19:00. Thematic evenings with debates and film screening are available upon registration (https://museeducapitalisme.org/).

© 2019 AFP