How Do You Talk to Your Kid About Capitalism?

“Why do you even have to work and make money?”

This is what my son asked me the other day walking to school. He was annoyed because I said that, no I cannot pick him up super early from after care because I have meetings and such and I have to work. And then he unloaded this question on me.

I started answering with “well, in order to pay for our mortgage and our food, Daddy and I need to make money to pay for it all.” And that is when my wannabe-anti-capitalist brain started glitching because I momentarily went down an existential rabbit hole wondering yeah, why DO we have to work to make money just to live?

I then pivoted and was like “listen, it shouldn’t be this way. We shouldn’t have to work our butts off just to pay for the things we have a right, but sadly this is the way it is. A lot of people have to work multiple jobs and only just have barely enough for food and shelter.” I then went down a monologue about our privilege and that makes it necessary for us to fight for fairness and justice and access to all these rights. I even think I said something about the “haves” and the “have-nots” and how capitalism is built on inequality. After taking a breath, I stopped and looked at him as he had, of course, gone silent, but I wasn’t sure if it was the I’m-thinking-silent or will-she-just-stop-talking-silent. I was pretty sure it was the latter.

“Do you want me to keep talking about this?” I asked. He half-heartedly nodded and I kind of scaled it back and said, “let’s see if I can find something online to explain this to you.”

There’s something about having to explain something to a child about everyday life that illuminates all that is messed up about our society. Because how is a system that is built for some people to have way, way, way more than a whole other set of people considered “the best?”

I grew up in the 80s and 90s essentially revering capitalism. At least in the sense that I completely internalized that it was the only right system. Socialism was a bad word and anarchy was considered chaos. I retained this idea until grad school—although it faltered quite a bit when I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Malawi but didn’t have any idea of an alternative to capitalism. I studied international education policy in what would turn out to be a pretty progressive program at University of Maryland. In my first semester, I was reading America Beyond Capitalism by Gar Alperovitz and my mind was blown.

The premise of the book wasn’t necessarily about taking down all the corporations, it was about strengthening public society. Alperovitz quotes Robert Putnam is one of the leading researchers on civic participation and grassroots democracy:

“Municipal institutions constitute the strength of free nations. Town meetings are to liberty what primary schools are to science; they bring it within the people’s reach, they teach men how to use and enjoy it.”

Today as we see not only how these public institutions of public parks, libraries, museums, community centers, and all of the public spaces that make our communities places we want to live in, are directly under attack, this feels obvious. And I think it’s become much clearer as of late how the way capitalism has progressed in this country has done so in complete opposition to democracy and democratic values despite what the Right wants to tell you.

But I remember in the late-aughts, 27 year-old grad student me who just discovered democratic socialism telling my mom that I was reading a book called American Beyond Capitalism and how much I loved it and she gave an audible gasp as if we couldn’t question capitalism. I think her response (which would be quite different now I think) illuminated how capitalism was considered almost holy and still is by so many and that it was synonymous with democracy.

Alperovitz offers the opposite analysis: capitalism, particularly as we let it be carried out today, runs counter to democratic values we hold dear. Throughout the book, he showcases various alternatives to the type of free market capitalism that drives our economy today such as a general decentralization of government to be much more community-focused and community-minded, investing in community cooperatives versus multinational corporations, and collective ownership of goods.

All things we have clearly moved farther and farther away from as evidenced by the sheer amount of wealth billionaires hoard and the trend towards fascism, made possible because of the decline of our democratic engagement.

So this brings me to the question posed at the top: how do I explain capitalism to my son? I started looking up videos to explain it to help me explain it to Finch thinking I wasn’t exactly capable of making it interesting, but what I found felt so skewed in the Capitalism-is-our-savior direction (I’m going to skip over which ones I actually came upon because I started writing about it and I could’ve just done that all day, so I’ll spare you my diatribe). And I also realized that I was had built the idea of capitalism up in my head so much that it became this complicated mess of evil in my mind that the first thing I was inclined to do was spit out all the things I hate about it but also that I’m complicit in it and then there goes my brain!

So, I decided to just pause, breathe, and just go back to the actual definition to really think about it and the very reasons I’m opposed to it beyond the fact that “it implies there are rich and there are poor and there’s no equality.”

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) defines it as such: “Capitalism is often thought of as an economic system in which private actors own and control property in accord with their interests, and demand and supply freely set prices in markets in a way that can serve the best interests of society…The essential feature of capitalism is the motive to make a profit.”

The red flags in that definition to me are “private actors,” “own and control,” and “motive to make profit.” It’s all built on this myth that we are all just individuals making our own decisions for ourselves and that will be better for everyone. And also that “motive to make profit” feels so strange by itself because it bodes the question: “make profit for what, exactly?” It broadly says states that it’s meant to “serve the best interests of society.” What does that even mean? It’s like in the show, Silicon Valley, when they constantly bring up the trope that they are “making the world a better place.” Complete and utter bullshit, even written into the definition.

Overall, the definition completely ignores the fact that everything is interconnected and all we need is an idea and we can start our own business, that we can just start anything we want from scratch. Yet no one has ever built anything from scratch. The people who built their wealth in America built it on land that was stolen and plundered from Indigenous peoples who they attempted to erase off the planet. Many of the richest people on the planet built their current wealth from the wealth of their parents. In some very rare cases, people built their wealth because of some generous people who gave them opportunities that they might not have had otherwise (like a college grant). And yet those people still built wealth because someone else helped them. The whole idea that a truly individual person exists is a myth. A harmful one at that.

So what it comes down to talking to my eight-year-old about capitalism is not just explaining what capitalism is, but to describe what it is not and why. What I’ve landed on is that we can’t credit just ourselves for where we are today. We are reliant on other people, we are reliant on our communities, we are reliant on one another to live a happy and healthy life. It’s not about what you can produce that is “valuable” other people, it’s that you are an active participant in your community. A world that I want is not about production but participation. An “economy” (which I also have to figure out how to explain) should be built on connectedness and the principle that everyone deserves to have all their basic needs met. If we start from there, we can ask the question, does capitalism help do that? No, I don’t think it does.

In that vein, I’m curious how others have described capitalism and economics and other types of social organization to their kids. And do you have good resources you can share?

Also, I’ve written about this topic in this ways before. If you want some similar stories about capitalism and other ways of organizing oneself, here are a few to check out.

Do We Have the Creativity to Think Beyond Capitalism?

Capitalism Wants You to Drown Your Sorrows in Shopping

In Defense of Anarchy