I post this piece of hippie anti-capitalism out of personal appreciation for the agonizing nights that petty-bourgeois disillusionment with commodity relations can consume. Not quite the agony of most working class folks for whom disillusionment with commodity relations manifests as desperation with the means of life denied. Cash -- the ultimate and universal commodity -- remains more than ever before, not less, existential, i.e. the means of life, for the overwhelming majority of working people performing occupations other than primitive agriculture. We are bound by commodity relations as never before, not only in our own nation, but to peoples from all over the world, to the creators and consumers of the values (services and products ) required for our survival -- and who share the hope of a path to prosperity for billions of souls. Capitalism, as an economic system, is NOT REALLY A CHOICE. It came into being when a sufficient social surplus, technical base and human capital combined to make it possible for markets -- and production for the purpose of exchange -- to steadily replace and overcome more primitive feudal relations. To escape capitalism, commodities must be superseded by free or very cheaply provided requirements for life: food, shelter, clothing, education, health care, transportation, etc. Services and intangibles are poor commodities (lousy stores of value) and will no doubt thrive in the absence of commercial markets -- they already do in limited areas (e.g. open source software, non-profits, etc). But the commodity problem can only be partially solved at our present level of culture and technology. Not a few "socialist revolutions" have found that economies cannot be commanded to move beyond what is objectively possible with a given historical context. This is especially true of the division of labor. Ordering farmers to make steel in their backyard out of patriotic enthusiasm does not work. That solution, for now, is social democracy (part socialism, part capitalism) -- but freed of its chief historical defect -- nationalism. Working people all over the world must find the paths of global cooperation and integration that lift all boats. There is no other way. Nature will teach us that -- either benevolently, or harshly -- that part is our choice.
Have a good holiday
John
Capitalism Is Not the Only Choice
We have opportunities every day to build economies that lift each other up and spread joy.
Penn Loh posted Nov 14, 2017
Since the breakup of the Soviet bloc and China's turn toward free markets, many economists have pronounced an "end of history," where capitalism reigns supreme as the ultimate form of economy. Perhaps "there is no alternative" to a globalized neoliberal economy, as former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher often said. Indeed, free markets in which individuals compete to get what they can while they can are glorified in popular culture through reality shows such as Shark Tank.
So, are we trapped in capitalism? While many of us may want a new economy where people and planet are prioritized over profit, we remain skeptical that another world is really possible. We make some progress locally but then feel powerless to affect national and global forces. Too often "the economy" is equated with markets where corporations compete to make profits for the wealthiest 1 percent and the rest work for a wage or salary (or don't make money at all). Work itself is seen as legitimate only if it legally generates income. Value is measured only in money terms, based on what people are willing to pay in the market. The capitalist mindset also separates economy from society and nature, as if it exists apart from people, communities, government, and our planet. Economy is its own machine, fueled by profit and competition.But many of us in the 99 percent are not feeling so happy or secure about this economy's results. Many are working harder and longer just to maintain housing and keep food on the table. Even the college-educated are mired in student debt, keeping the American Dream beyond their grasp. And then there are those who have never been served well by this economy. African Americans were liberated from enslavement only to be largely shut out of "free" market opportunities. Immigrants continue to work in the shadows. Women still earn only about three-quarters of what men make for the same work.
When everything that we label "economic" is assumed to be capitalist—transactional and market-driven—then it is no wonder that we run short on imagination.
Redefining economy beyond capitalism
To escape this "capitalocentrism," we need to broaden the definition of economy beyond capitalism. What if, instead, economy is all the ways that we meet our material needs and care for each other? And what if it's not a singular thing? Then we would see that beneath the official capitalist economy are all sorts of thriving non-capitalist economies, where there may not be a profit motive or market exchange. They include tasks that we do every day. We care for our children and elderly; we cook and clean for ourselves and each other; we grow food; we provide emotional support to friends. These are all ways of meeting our material needs and caring for each other.
For many, these economies, which foster solidarity and are rooted in values of democracy and justice rather than maximizing profit, are invisible or not recognized as "economic"; they are merely how we go about our lives. Capitalist thinking blinds us to these economic activities, some of which make survival possible and life meaningful. These non-capitalist ways also add up to a significant portion of all economic activity. Economist Nancy Folbre from University of Massachusetts Amherst estimates that unpaid domestic work (historically considered "women's work") was equal to 26 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product in 2010.
Recognizing these diverse economies allows us to see that there are choices to be made.
Broadening the definition of economy also puts people back into the system and empowers us. Economy is not just something that happens to us, a sea in which we swim or sink. Rather we are all part of multiple economies, some in which we are the main actors—such as our household economies—and others in which we are the extras—such as venture capital markets.
Recognizing these diverse economies and lifting the veil of capitalocentrism allows us to see that there are choices to be made, ethics and values to be considered. For example, I might pay more for lettuce from a local farmer who grows sustainably rather than from a distant supplier that exploits farm workers and uses pesticides. These choices are not only made as consumers, but also as workers, producers, and neighbors, and through policies that set the rules necessary for any economy to function. Do I work for a for-profit owned by shareholders or for a worker-owned cooperative, nonprofit, or B corporation? Should public land be used for luxury condos or for affordable housing? These questions open space for all of us to participate in shaping our world and the economic futures of the 99 percent.
Solidarity is rising
Across the U.S., from Jackson, Mississippi, to Oakland, California; in rural Kentucky and on Navajo-Hopi lands; and throughout Massachusetts' biggest cities, it is often poor communities and communities of color that are building solidarity economies around these questions. This is not new. In fact, this is where solidarity economics—collective strategies for survival—have been innovated out of necessity. Think mutual aid, community organizing, self-help, and cooperatives of all kinds. These practices have been embedded in Black liberation movements, the early labor movement, and many other progressive movements in the U.S.
Old Window Workshop trainee Shaniqua Dobbins carries a window panel from a historic building in downtown Springfield, Massachusetts.
The desire for deep, transformational change—for the multitude of solidarity economies to add up to something—comes not just from those who are dissatisfied, but even more so from communities that are simply struggling to survive. Dreams of a decent life and a fair shake come from those making Black Lives Matter, from immigrant workers making poverty wages, from ex-prisoners locked out of the mainstream economy, from tenants barely able to make rent, and from communities being displaced to make way for the 1 percent.
Springfield is Massachusetts' third-largest city, and here the Wellspring initiative is building a network of worker-owned cooperatives to create local jobs and build wealth for low-income and unemployed residents. Inspired by the Cleveland Evergreen Cooperatives, which has built a network of worker-owned businesses to provide goods and services to the region's anchor institutions, Wellspring was founded in 2011 to try to capture some of the $1.5 billion spent by its own anchor institutions, such as Baystate Health and University of Massachusetts Amherst. One study showed anchors procure less than 10 percent from local businesses.
Solidarity economics is more than just cooperatives. It is a social justice movement.
Its first cooperative, Wellspring Upholstery, was launched in 2013 and now has seven workers. Wellspring Upholstery was the first business to be developed, in part because a successful 25-year-old upholstery training program run by the county prison could provide trained workers. Wellspring's second cooperative is Old Windows Workshop, a women-owned window restoration business. A main goal of this business, according to production manager Nannette Bowie, is to allow "the flexibility of a working mom to take care of your family responsibilities and keep a full-time job."
Wellspring raised almost $1 million to start its third business, a commercial greenhouse, which will produce lettuce, greens, and herbs for the local schools and anchor institutions. Construction began during the summer. With several businesses underway, Wellspring is demonstrating viable models they hope will inspire others and grow the job base and wealth-building opportunities for low-income and unemployed residents.
Wellspring Upholstery Cooperative worker-owners "Joel" Carlos Orria-Fontanez, Evan Cohen, Tina Pepper, Gary Roby, and Jose Serrano in their workshop.
Wellspring is just one example of solidarity economies that are emerging in Massachusetts. In Worcester, the state's second-largest city, the Solidarity and Green Economy Alliance is cultivating their own ecology of more than a dozen cooperatives. Some are matching resident skills to meet community needs, such as landscaping, soil remediation, honey production, and urban agriculture. Others are providing services to movement organizations, such as translation, video production, and bookkeeping. In Boston's Roxbury and Dorchester neighborhoods, a food solidarity economy is emerging, which includes a community land trust, urban farms and a greenhouse, a kitchen incubator, a consumer food co-op, and a worker-owned organics recycling company. And Latinx residents of East Boston have formed the Center for Cooperative Development and Solidarity. Concerned about rapid gentrification, the group began exploring how economic alternatives could help them stay in East Boston. They are supporting startup cooperatives in child care, sewing, and cleaning. The Boston Ujima Project was just officially launched in September to build a community capital fund where a participatory budgeting process is used to make investments in local businesses.
Consciousness, power, and economy
Yet solidarity economics is more than just cooperatives. It is a social justice movement. It is shifting our consciousness not only to uncover root causes, but also to expand our vision of what is possible, and to inspire dreams of the world as it could be. It is building power, not just to resist and reform the injustices and unsustainabilities produced by current systems, but ultimately to control democratically and govern political and economic resources to sustain people and the planet. And it is creating economic alternatives and prototypes for producing, exchanging, consuming, and investing in ways that are more just, sustainable, and democratic.
If we want to transform and go beyond capitalism, then we must confront it in all three of these dimensions: consciousness, power, and economy.
We do not have the luxury of creating solidarity economies in a vacuum. That means that we have to put them into practice now at home and in our own communities, no matter how small the scale. At the same time, we can work with others to build larger solidarity alternatives and do the hard work of reforming the political, economic, and ideological systems that are making life so difficult for so many.
Everyone can put solidarity values into practice—to live in solidarity—starting in whatever ways we can. And that is the transformative power of solidarity economics, that it doesn't have to scale up only by building larger and larger organizations and systems. It can scale up by many people in many places pursuing economics of social justice. It will require taking back government to dismantle the systems that privilege capitalism and to redirect public resources toward solidarity economies. We can all begin by spreading the word, sharing our radical imagination of the world that we want to live in.
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John Case
Harpers Ferry, WV
The Winners and Losers Radio Show
ATHENS – The Anglosphere's political atmosphere is thick with bourgeois outrage. In the United States, the so-called liberal establishment is convinced it was robbed by an insurgency of "deplorables" weaponized by Vladimir Putin's hackers and Facebook's sinister inner workings. In Britain, too, an incensed bourgeoisie are pinching themselves that support for leaving the European Union in favor of an inglorious isolation remains undented, despite a process that can only be described as a dog's Brexit.
In 2016, the year of both Brexit and Trump, two pieces of data, dutifully neglected by the shrewdest of establishment analysts, told the story. In the United States, more than half of American families did not qualify, according to Federal Reserve data, to take out a loan that would allow them to buy the cheapest car for sale (the Nissan Versa sedan, priced at $12,825). Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, over 40% of families relied on either credit or food banks to feed themselves and cover basic needs.The range of analysis is staggering. The rise of militant parochialism on both sides of the Atlantic is being investigated from every angle imaginable: psychoanalytically, culturally, anthropologically, aesthetically, and of course in terms of identity politics. The only angle that is left largely unexplored is the one that holds the key to understanding what is going on: the unceasing class war unleashed upon the poor since the late 1970s.
William of Ockham, the fourteenth-century British philosopher, famously postulated that, when bamboozled in the face of competing explanations, we ought to opt for the one with the fewest assumptions and the greatest simplicity. For all the deftness of establishment commentators in the US and Britain, they seem to have neglected this principle.
Loath to recognize the intensified class war, they bang on interminably with conspiracy theories about Russian influence, spontaneous bursts of misogyny, the tide of migrants, the rise of the machines, and so on. While all of these fears are highly correlated with the militant parochialism fueling Trump and Brexit, they are only tangential to the deeper cause – class war against the poor – alluded to by the car affordability data in the US and the credit-dependence of much of Britain's population.2
True, some relatively affluent middle-class voters also supported Trump and Brexit. But much of that support rode on the coattails of the fear caused by observing the classes just below theirs plunge into despair and loathing, while their own children's prospects dimmed.
Twenty years ago, the same liberal commentators were cultivating the impossible dream that globalizing financialized capitalism would deliver prosperity for most. At a time when capital was becoming more concentrated on a global scale, and more militant against non-owners of assets, they were declaring the class war over. As the working class was growing in size worldwide, even though its jobs and employment prospects were shrinking in the Anglosphere, these elites behaved as if class were passé.1
The 2008 financial collapse and the subsequent Great Recession buried that dream. Still, liberals ignored the undeniable fact that the gigantic losses incurred by the quasi-criminal financial sector were cynically transferred onto the shoulders of a working class they thought no longer mattered.
For all their self-image as progressives, the elites' readiness to ignore widening class divisions, and to replace it with class-blind identity politics, was the greatest gift to toxic populism. In Britain, the Labour Party (under Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, and Edward Miliband) was too coy even to mention the post-2008 intensification of the class war against the majority, leading to the rise across the Labour heartland of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), with its Brexit parochialism.
Polite society seemed not to give a damn that it had become easier to get into Harvard or Cambridge if you were black than if you were poor. They deliberately ignored that identity politics can be as divisive as apartheid if allowed to act as a lever for overlooking class conflict.
Trump had no compunction to speak clearly about class, and to embrace – however deceitfully – those too poor to buy a car, let alone send their children to Harvard. Brexiteers, too, embraced the "great unwashed," reflected in images of UKIP leader Nigel Farage drinking in pubs with "average blokes." And when large swaths of the working class turned against the establishment's favorite sons and daughters (the Clintons, the Bushes, the Blairs, and the Camerons), endorsing militant parochialism, the commentariat blamed the riffraff's illusions about capitalism.
But it was not illusions about capitalism that led to the discontent that fueled Trump and Brexit. Rather, it is the disillusion with middle-of-the-road politics of the kind that intensified the class war against them.
Predictably, the embrace of the working class by Trump and the Brexiteers was always going to arm them with electoral power that, sooner or later, would be deployed against working-class interests and, of course, minorities – always the penchant of populism in power, from the 1930s to today. Trump has thus used his working-class support to usher in scandalous tax reforms, whose naked ambition is to help the plutocracy while millions of Americans face reduced health coverage and, as the federal budget deficit balloons, higher long-term tax bills.
Similarly, Britain's Tory government, which has espoused Brexit's populist aims, has recently announced another multi-billion-pound reduction in social security, education, and tax credits for the working poor. Those cuts are matched exactly by reductions in corporate and inheritance tax cuts.
Today, establishment opinion-makers, who scornfully rejected the pertinence of social class, have contributed to a political environment in which class politics was never more pertinent, toxic, and less discussed. Speaking on behalf of a ruling class comprising financial experts, bankers, corporate representatives, media owners, and big industry functionaries, they act exactly as if their goal were to deliver the working classes into the grubby hands of the populists and their empty promise of making America and Britain "great again."
The only prospect for civilizing society and detoxifying politics is a new political movement that harnesses on behalf of a new humanism the burning injustice that class war manufactures. Judging by its callous treatment of US Senator Bernie Sanders and Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, the liberal establishment seems to fear such a movement more than it does Trump and Brexit.4