Do We Have the Creativity to Think Beyond Capitalism?
Prior to enrolling in an international education policy (IEP) master’s program at The University of Maryland in 2008, I talked to a PhD student in the program who had also been a Peace Corps Volunteer like myself. “It’s a fairly radical program,” she told me. I don’t know if I really understood what she meant by “radical.” But what I knew after having returned from Malawi as a Peace Corps Volunteer a couple years before was that the experience made me question everything I knew about international development and the United States’ role in it. When that PhD student told me the program was “radical,” I supposed that it would present alternatives to that.
My hypothesis was, indeed, true. What I didn’t know and was pleasantly surprised by, was that this field of “comparative education” that I found myself in wasn’t just questioning international development, rather the current economic system altogether. In one of the first classes I took in the program was taught by the IEP program’s director, Steve Klees. When he introduced himself and the course, “Introduction to Political Economy” (or something along those lines) he noted that in his long career he realized it was better to juts be pretty open about his views and politics that revolve questioning the status quo. The approach and lessons in that course can best be summarized through the approach in one of the texts we read: American Beyond Capitalism: Reclaiming Our Wealth, Our Liberty, and Our Democracy by Gar Alperovitz. To distill the book down, what Alperovitz argues is that our society’s reliance on capitalism has been anything but democratic and that it must and can be radically changed through what he called the building of “democracy with a little d.” Meaning, community-based, community-oriented, local democracy. He says this to encapsulate his foundational argument:
“Is it possible to have Democracy with a Big D in a system as a whole if you do not have real democracy with a small d at the level where people live, work, and raise families in their local communities? If the answer is no, then a necessary if not sufficient condition of rebuilding democracy in general is to get to work locally.”
The book goes on to present examples of what small-d democracy looks like through worker’s cooperatives and participatory democratic decision-making processes that go much deeper than the representative democracy that doesn’t seem to be working so well for us these days. It was a way of organizing that didn’t involve growth and didn’t assume inequality. And the recently-returned-RPCV-and-recovering-idealist I was at that time ate it up. It blew my mind that there could be anything other than capitalism. I hadn’t ever considered that possible or even a question.
I remember my parents visiting while I was reading America Beyond Capitalism for class and describing what was so cool about it. But what sticks out for me was my mom’s reaction to the title. “Beyond capitalism?!” she exclaimed with the tone of “how could there be anything else?” Even though this was around 15 years ago, the moment stands out to me because it was that moment where it occurred to me how deeply the idea of capitalism is not only wound into our system, but into our psyches. My mom’s reaction was probably what most people around me would’ve had. We’ve come to assume that capitalism is akin to the air we breathe. That’s when I realized that I didn’t have to believe that capitalism was the end-all-be-all. That’s when I began to identify as a democratic socialist. But most of all, that’s the period of time that opened me up to different social systems altogether.
It seems the questioning of capitalism and the general seeping of anti-capitalism captures the zeitgeist of this era. This realization of mine was on the eve (more or less) of the Occupy Wall Street movement when anti-capitalism was everywhere. It seemed that gradually the critiques of capitalism became more and more common and maybe even a bit mainstream.
Noel King, co-host and editorial director of the Vox podcast, Today, Explained observed this conversation in relation to her role as an economics reporter when she and her colleagues never once said the term “capitalism” on air. Yet, she realized that everyone else but economics reporters were saying it. And they were not evoking the term in glowing ways. She observed that anti-capitalism had become a lot more common, particularly among Millennials and Gen Z. So she did what any good podcast reporter does and created a series on all of these questions around capitalism called “Blame Capitalism.”
I happened upon the third episode of the four-part series in a post-holiday boost of energy as I cleansed my house of everything Christmas. I put on the radio while de-ornamenting the tree and was treated to King’s reporting and reflections that took me back to me-circa-2008 and early questioning of all things capitalism (the series ran every Friday in September and just out of luck, my local station was playing it that deep cleaning night). The series goes into the history of capitalism, the evolution of the system, and the evolving discontent from both the left and the right. King distills down the reasons why so many people have become discontent with capitalism to these factors: “inequality, bad wages, and what we’ve done to our environment for growth.” And so, she goes into the potential alternatives to capitalism in the form of degrowth, to which the last episode of the series is dedicated.
She asked economics professor Wendy Carlin what “ism” might capitalism be replaced with.
“The thing really is we need a new ‘ism’ because we have new problems,” she responds–King audibly gasping at this response. “Each of the ‘isms’ kind of emerges to deal with the problems of the preceding one. Now we have the problems with inequality, with the climate crisis. And we need to have a livable planet and that needs to be put together into a coherent economic system if we’re going to meet those challenges.”
What’s striking–one in which King’s surprised response to Carlin’s note about a new “ism”–is that this takes an exceptional amount of creativity. The fact that the solution to all the problems capitalism has created might not even exist, yet feels almost impossible to comprehend in the day-to-day. There might be a solution that we don’t even know about. Holy shit…mind blown. I don’t know why that didn’t occur to me until I heard Carlin say that.
The idea of a completely new way of living and thinking could solve what we’re dealing with is super exciting, but also exceptionally daunting. Even though I critique capitalism and identify more as an anarchism-curious democratic socialist, I still willingly participate in capitalism and can’t figure out another way to live in this society we’ve built. Of course, I’m only one person and it will take a whole society shift for change to really happen. And who knows if that shift will come because we, as a society commit ourselves to a better world or if a new system is forced onto us as capitalism crashes around us. Yet we should understand that life beyond capitalism is inevitable. And we should also know that we can make it happen before someone, an authoritarian namely, swoops in to create their own system.
“We should be thinking about capitalism as a temporary phase in history,” ecological economist Tim Jackson says in the degrowth episode of Today, Explained. “All phases in history are temporary. We know that everything changes, no social system lasts forever. And actually I think that is a very good basis for thinking about what might happen after capitalism.”
Alas, I’m not sure the series ended with concrete answers, rather leaving the listener with a lot more questions, because we’re still as a society trying to figure that out. There really isn’t one answer and there are a lot of innovative, creative people like Tim Jackson, who are thinking about what the world could look like beyond capitalism. There are people like Gar Alperovitz that are writing about the non-capitalist ways of being that already exist in this world. What I do know is that all of us need to release ourselves from the mental hold that capitalism has on us. I’m not saying we must extricate ourselves fully from the system, per se. Rather, what we can do is realize that it’s not the only way and that we need to take the first step to think about what could be better and possible. Maybe it’s socialism, maybe it’s anarchism, or maybe it’s a whole new “ism” altogether.