What would a radical, anticapitalist model look like? To begin with, the model won’t be a single, unified narrative of change. It will be comprised of thousands of stories, all with their own unique visions for a better world. These alternative stories, though they aren’t usually loud enough to be picked up by the corporate media, already exist and are being told by more and more people. As part of the Ear to the Ground Project, longtime organizers and activists NTanya Lee and Steve Williams traveled all around the United States interviewing organizers fighting to make the world better—a world where oppression and poverty have no place. They found a myriad of collective projects, some new and some old, run by dedicated activists and organizers.1
This collective vision consists of projects with different immediate goals and philosophies. Some groups fight for environmental justice, while others fight for immigrant rights. Some groups want to organize fast food workers into unions, while others want to get high-stakes testing out of their children’s schools. Some groups fight against domestic violence, while others fight for the civil rights of ex-offenders and prisoners. The passions and goals of these groups are formed by the passions and goals of the people who fight in them.
All these projects and ideas are different, to be sure. But the really transformative ones have core features in common that set them apart from projects and ideas that don’t go beyond merely refining the system.
The first feature setting them apart is their emphasis on democracy, both as a means and as an end. Moving from a profit-driven to a human needs–driven society requires that the institutions we participate in and the places we spend our time (schools, workplaces, communities) be transformed into places where participants have a real voice in how they’re run and what their purpose is. The United States is formally a democracy, and most citizens enjoy rights that people in many other countries do not enjoy, but both political parties preach a nearly identical program that channels benefits to elites while demanding that poor and working class people in the United States and abroad shoulder the costs of neoliberal capitalism.
Real democracy is possible only if we apply it to other spheres of life, including the workplaces and institutions we depend on. Workplaces should be owned and managed as cooperatives—places where workers control the business, distribute its surplus equally among themselves, and make decisions about their work-lives democratically. Banks, financial institutions, and the internet (institutions that are now essential to all people and businesses) should be transformed into public utilities. Educational policies should reflect the collective decisions of parents, teachers, and administrators. These types of projects will require us to radically rethink, and broaden, our definition of democracy. This may be a daunting task, but it’s worth remembering that the democratic rights that we do enjoy were not handed down from the state or given to us by business, but are rather the product of centuries of struggle from below. This struggle must be expanded beyond the formal trappings of the electoral system, because a collective vision is simply not possible without everyone’s voice.
The second principle that the radical, anticapitalist projects share is de-commodification. The history of capitalism has been characterized by both the transformation of more and more aspects of people’s lives into commodities and the reshaping of our expectations, values, and norms to align with the needs of business. A fundamental component of any transformative vision is the fight to take back our lives from capitalist markets—to say that things like our health, our desire to learn, and have a roof over our heads should not be subject to our ability to pay. These things should be a right, not a commodity. Every time something is transformed from a right into a commodity the power of the profit motive to dictate our lives is increased. Conversely, whenever our collective projects remove things from the sphere of capitalist markets, we weaken the grip that capital has over our lives. If people aren’t worried about losing their home or having no health insurance for their kids, they will be much more willing to stand up to their bosses and fight for projects to increase democracy. Social movements have long fought to de-commodify aspects of our lives and have, for short periods of time, succeeded. But our biggest mistake has been to settle for means-tested benefits—social gains that benefit only certain sectors of the population based on factors like income or occupational status. These benefits foment ill will among those who don’t qualify for them and are easy political targets. The contrast between the dismantling of the US welfare system in the 1990s and the resistance, despite repeated attacks, to the elimination of Social Security is illustrative: Historically, welfare programs were available only to the poorest (and most stigmatized) members of society, excluding working-class and lower-middle-class households struggling to get by. Conservative opponents of welfare exploited this disparity, stoking anger among those getting no support toward those receiving (meager) state support. In contrast, Social Security is a benefit enjoyed by nearly everyone: only 4 percent of the population is excluded from receiving Social Security benefits, and 87 percent of Americans want to preserve Social Security for future generations. Creating the space to radically de-commodify our lives will require that social gains such as free higher education, single-payer universal health care, and a minimum basic income be made available to everyone regardless of their income.
The immediate goals of projects and ideas that embrace the principles of democratization and de-commodification may vary, but their long-term goal is always to make people’s everyday lives better. To achieve these goals, groups and projects must emphasize a final principle: redistribution. The top 20 percent of households control nearly 90 percent of all wealth in the United States, while the super-elite (the top 0.1 percent) control more than 20 percent of all wealth. People in power of course downplay inequality. They say that just because a few people are extravagantly wealthy doesn’t mean the rest of us can’t be rich as well. And it is not only people in power who say this. Americans cherish their belief in meritocracy. They believe that if you work hard your circumstances and wealth won’t determine your chances of success. This may hold for a small sample of the population, but at a systemic level it is patently false. Extreme concentration of wealth, enabled by tax laws favoring the rich, inhibits democracy and de-commodification in a fundamental way, starving the public treasury and eliminating the means to provide a good life for everyone. Since wealth creation is a collective process, a wealth tax would provide a way for wealth to be shared collectively, while a robust public treasury could ensure that the rights of all people to housing, food, health, education, and a clean environment are met.
These three principles don’t constitute a magic formula, nor will such ideas and projects change the system overnight. There are no shortcuts. But there is possibility. In this present moment, characterized by crisis, uncertainty, and anxiety a new spirit of capitalism is being formulated. So far, the loudest voices defining the contours of the new spirit are those of the super-elite. People with money and power are preaching a new spirit of capitalism that absorbs and displaces radical criticisms of the status quo. Sheryl Sandberg, John Mackey, Oprah Winfrey, Bill and Melinda Gates, and others like them are developing a new ideology for why capitalism is the only, and best, system possible.
This doesn’t have to be the case. At the end of the day, for capitalism to function most of us must believe in the system and voluntarily devote our energies to it. But these existing beliefs and norms are not primordial or fixed. They can change and evolve. Collective projects and radical visions can foster new dreams and ideas and different beliefs and norms about how we should organize our lives and society. Instead of thinking about how to fix capitalism, we can start thinking about a different kind of society. We can imagine a world designed for the needs of people instead of profit, and we can get to work building it.
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1NTanya Lee and Steve Williams, “More Than We Imagined: Activists’ Assessments on the Moment and the Way Forward,” Ear to the Ground Pr
oject, eartothegroundproject.org.
Further Reading
In this short book I have drawn on the work of many scholars, distilling their analyses and frameworks to make a straightforward argument. Inevitably, the essence of what makes these works great is lost in such a process, so any reader interested in the topics discussed should turn to the original source material. Below is a condensed list of works that inform the theoretical framework of the book.
On ideology, stories, and society
Luc Boltanski and Eva Chiapello’s The New Spirit of Capitalism is a major source of inspiration for this book and a must-read for anyone interested in capitalism’s remarkable adaptability and longevity. Their book builds on the foundational work of Max Weber, and asks how capitalism evolves in the face of critique. They focus mainly on neoliberal management practices in France, but I have expanded their framework to think about the role of critique, ideology, and adaptation at the level of society.
On the market and the state
Karl Polanyi’s classic, The Great Transformation has shaped my, and many other people’s, thinking about the relationship between the state and the market, and how states create, shape, and sustain capitalist markets. There is also a great deal more recent scholarship that deals with these questions. Greta Krippner unravels the relationship between the state and financial markets during the neoliberal era in her book, Capitalizing on Crisis. Bernard Harcourt approaches the question from a different angle in his examination of free market ideology and punishment in The Illusion of Free Markets. Sam Gindin and Leo Panitch use a wide-angle lens in their book The Making of Global Capitalism to show how the US state has played a central role in creating and sustaining global capitalism.
On nature
The relationship between nature and capitalism has been explored by many authors, though perhaps most fruitfully by Neil Smith in Uneven Development. Smith’s work examines how capitalist society creates not only space, but also nature itself. Erik Swyngdeouw’s work explores similar themes. His article “Impossible Sustainability and the Post-Political Condition,” (appearing in David Gibbs and Rob Krueger’s The Sustainable Development Paradox) is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding the problems with sustainable capitalism.
On capitalism and neoliberalism
The body of literature on both capitalism and neoliberalism is incredibly broad. David Harvey has thought deeply about the fundamental drives of capitalism. In this book I drew from The Enigma of Capital but he has written numerous other great books that cover similar territory. Giovanni Arrighi’s analyses of global capitalism, financialization, power, and hegemony are essential to any study of restructuring over the past three decades (see for example The Long Twentieth Century and Adam Smith in Beijing). Studies of neoliberalism run the gamut from economy to culture. Janice Peck’s book The Age of Oprah is a fascinating window into the culture of neoliberalism and the cult of the individual.
On gender, work, and identity
Kathi Weeks has written a fantastic book dealing with questions of work and feminism: The Problem with Work. This examines the centrality of the work ethic to the feminist project, but also takes on much bigger questions about developing alternatives to dominant work-centric visions of utopia and the power of radical demands to create space for a new utopian vision. Any reader interested in work and labor more specifically should turn to classics like Harry Braverman’s, Labor and Monopoly Capital, Dan Clawson’s The Next Upsurge, Rick Fantasia’s Cultures of Solidarity, and Beverly Silver’s brilliant, Forces of Labor.
Acknowledgments
Even for a short book like this many thanks are in order. Marcos Marino Beiras and Richard Dienst introduced me to political economy and critical theory. Giovanni Arrighi and Beverly Silver patiently elucidated the processes of capitalism, and many of their ideas have found their way here. As mentor and friend Sam Gindin has profoundly shaped my thinking about resisting capital. Japonica Brown-Saracino, Myka Tucker Abramson, and Emilio Sauri all read chapter drafts. Myka helped me hash out my arguments over many cups of coffee, and Emilio and I have spent countless hours debating commodification. Thanks go to Audrea Lim at Verso for her helpful suggestions on the manuscript, Bhaskar Sunkara for his support and enthusiasm, and Remeike Forbes for his lovely cover design. Last but not least, many thanks go to my friends and family—Ellen Whitt and Bryan Nelson for their dedication to justice, Indrani Chatterjee and Susana Domingo-Amestoy for their companionship, and my mother Joan Aschoff for her steadfast support. For Pankaj Mehta, my partner in life, my debts are too great to express in words. I dedicate this book to my daughters Ila and Simi whose passion, energy, and love fill me with hope.
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