🎀 Highlights
“It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” wrote Mark Fisher in his 2009 book Capitalist Realism.
Many young people today are breaking the trance and challenging the system—supporting positive alternatives, like worker cooperatives, public ownership of water and electricity, B Corporations, impact investments, community loan funds, co-housing, community land trusts, and other models of a democratic economy.
we’re losing ground faster than we’re gaining it. We can see this in the ways in which the “gig economy” is replacing the once-stable employee relationship; in the high cost of living that is miring families in debt as they try to pay for housing, college, and retirement; and in our crumbling health care system, which is increasingly becoming a tool for private equity to suck wealth out of the the hands of ordinary people and into those of the already wealthy.
half of Americans—across generations and races—believe capitalism is headed in the wrong direction. This suggests we are at an important moment,
half of Americans—across generations and races—believe capitalism is headed in the wrong direction.
We need to help each other recognize how our own mindset helps hold the system in place, and thus how a change of our collective mind could itself be the foundation of deep change.
We begin to change the system when we change our minds.
We Can Change the System by Denying Its Legitimacy
Why did apartheid fall? Because it lost moral legitimacy when people around the world denounced it as white supremacist, illegitimately favoring white people over people of color. Second,
Why did apartheid fall? Because it lost moral legitimacy when people around the world denounced it as white supremacist, illegitimately favoring white people over people of color.
We need to challenge the system paradigm, which I call wealth supremacy—the bias that institutionalizes infinite extraction of wealth for the wealthy, even as it means stagnation or losses for the rest of us.
We see it in how a rising stock market is equated with a successful economy, even as the rising profits that drive stock prices often come from mass layoffs that feed the bottom line.
This in turn drives a disaffected working class into the arms of the hard right, damaging democracy.Â
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We see it in the way Exxon Mobil’s stock price climbed 80 percent in 2022, as it followed the accepted norms of corporate governance (maximize gains to shareholders), even as those norms led to forests burning and cities flooding.
we have permitted an economic system based on a directly contrary principle: that the wealthy matter more than the rest of us.
our economy exists to serve the wealthy, to allow them to extract limitless, maximum amounts from the rest of us, and from the planet.
Wealth Grows Through Extracting From the Rest of Us
triggered by bankers trying to squeeze as much as possible
The subprime mortgage crisis of 2008 was triggered by bankers trying to squeeze as much as possible from families with the fewest resources. Today, the homes foreclosed a decade ago are being bought up by private equity companies who raise rents and skimp on maintenance to advance earnings for shareholders. As a result, housing is increasingly unaffordable
The subprime mortgage crisis of 2008 was triggered by bankers trying to squeeze as much as possible from families with the fewest resources. Today, the homes foreclosed a decade ago are being bought up by private equity companies who raise rents and skimp on maintenance to advance earnings for shareholders.
We valorize so-called investing and the way it “creates wealth,” as if wealth can be created out of nothing. But much “investing” is really extraction; it’s a form of taking that undermines the resilience of families and communities.
We’re not connecting the dots yet. When big tech firms’ share prices are lofty, we don’t conclude that this is linked to a post-truth society or the corruption of democracy.
When we hear about the rising number of billionaires, we don’t think about the opioid crisis or local firms shut out by chains.
This squeezing of ordinary people is what economists call “financialization.”
We need to see that the problem of too much financial wealth in too few hands is as much of an emergency as the climate crisis. Indeed, it is linked to the climate crisis.
Let’s help each other understand that financialization is more than a collection of obscure charts in academic papers. It’s a force in our society—an extractive force of unprecedented power and unimaginable size, creating devastating effects: precarity, monopolies, and the capture of democracy.
Where we begin to transform this system is in our own minds. This is where we stop accepting it as legitimate.
Where we begin to transform this system is in our own minds. This is where we stop accepting it as legitimate. This is where the system begins to lose its grip. This is where we begin to win.
Adapted from Wealth Supremacy: How the Extractive Economy and the Biased Rules of Capitalism Drive Today’s Crises (Berrett-Koehler, 2023).