Abstract
A few years ago, I spent a long afternoon sitting by the sidewalk in Hannibal, Missouri, Mark Twain’s boyhood town, with a sign: “Talk to me about capitalism – free lemonade.” The only people to speak to me were an older couple. He said “Hi!” and she said, emphatically, “we LIKE capitalism!” If I’d asked her (I was slow to respond and she kept walking), what capitalism means to her and what makes her like it so much, what would she have said? I can’t know. She might have referred to private property and high living standards. But after years of asking this question of people across the U.S. and receiving similar responses, I’m pretty sure she mostly would have talked about democracy and individual freedom. For many people in this country—“capitalism” is much more than an economic system and also not a description of how we produce and distribute goods and services. We don’t talk about—and most people can’t describe—the basic mechanics of capitalism as economy, even at the level of what “capital” is or why profit is different than a paycheck. People have heard of “Wall Street” but don’t know there are markets for capital. They don’t know what the Federal Reserve does. Generally, “capitalism” is understood as a monolithic fusion of politics, personal finances, and culture that somehow broadly and deeply reflects who “we” are as a nation, while also “protecting” us from ever-present “threats.” It is a bulwark more inviolable than the floodgates along the Mississippi River, an assertion of values and a defense—against not only “socialism” and “communism” but also almost any social force perceived as dangerous or wrong.
Now, I could set up my lemonade stand in Amherst, Massachusetts, and have a mirror experience. There, a passerby might say, “screw capitalism!” yet have just as murky an understanding of how capitalism works as her Hannibal counterpart. For the Amherst passerby, “capitalism” would also be a bulwark—but one to be breached, not buttressed. She would likely invoke consumerism, patriarchy, racism, and climate destruction, rather than individual freedom and high standards of living, but would probably, similarly, talk about democracy. Still, she’d be unequipped to talk about capitalism as an economic systems. In the U.S. values and identities are intertwined with popular notions of capitalism, both on the left and the right, but these notions have little to do with the mechanisms of production, appropriation, and consumption.
Without greater clarity about those mechanics, the oversight of the economy by a democratic society is impossible. This is why we need books like Adler’s (2019) The 99 Percent Economy: How Democratic Socialism Can Overcome the Crises of Capitalism. It’s a skillful effort to explain what a capitalist economy actually is in concise, non-jargony language. Most books about capitalism are written for an audience already attached to either the “we LIKE it” or the “screw it” version. 1 Adler doesn’t assume his reader is a fellow traveler; he characterizes the book as an argument and builds his case carefully. In the first half, he describes how capitalism works—and fails. His description of “six crises” (economic irrationality, workplace disempowerment, unresponsive government, environmental unsustainability, social disintegration, and international conflict), highlights how they follow from capitalism’s “root causes,” including: private enterprise, production for profit, an ethos of individualism and the separation of the economic and political spheres. Adler explains modern capitalism’s “growing interdependence” and how the progressive socialization of capitalist production creates the potential for “fruits” we are deprived of enjoying (p. 57). This part of the book isn’t meant to be Capitalism 101 and isn’t a comprehensive introduction. But Adler’s attention to spelling out the “basic features of the capitalist economic system” (p. 57) helps to fill the knowledge void. It would be great as part of a discussion group that included the Hannibal and Amherst women, along with diverse cousins and strangers from across town.
Having laid this groundwork, Adler’s review and dismissal of reformist options is a bridge to his proposals for why democratic socialism is desirable and how it could be organized. Here, even if his methodical argument had kept the Hannibal woman reading, he risks losing her. Because how can anything “socialist” be OK?! How could it not lead to “Venezuela” breadlines and dissolution? 2 Adler’s approach to this challenge reflects his business school-based research. Drawing on his familiarity with what he terms “high road firms,” he characterizes managerial practices at U.S. corporate icons such as Kaiser Permanente and Toyota as models for “collaborative” strategizing, innovating, learning, and working. These citations might reassure the Hannibal woman. At the same time, the flattering references might cause the Amherst woman to pull her hair out, thinking “yes, we need proximate management models, but, really, Toyota?! What about the extensive work on non-corporate democratic management (Bollier et al., 2012 is just one example)? Aren’t there important lessons from Cuba, Nicaragua, Kerala, and Vietnam?”
If the discussion group gets through Adler’s discussion of democratically oriented management, it has to contend with his most eruptive proposal: public ownership of “society’s main productive resources,” including “equipment, buildings, land, technological know-how” (p. 121). “I knew it: communism!” says the Hannibal woman, clapping the book closed. “Thank heavens!” says the Amherst woman, feeling less grumpy about the high road firm references. In the U.S. narratives of property ownership are deeply connected to values and identity, histories both ignored and claimed, aspirations and achievements embraced and distorted. This is the terrain of consciousness and ideology, not management practices.
Enacting democratic socialism requires an understanding of capitalism’s mechanics and how it produces toxic outcomes. It also requires empirical evidence that more positive alternatives are feasible. But overcoming the crises of capitalism is not primarily a technical or administrative act or intellectual project. Rather, it’s a challenge of the heart, a realm of intense feelings and allegiances that don’t rest on understanding the role of the Federal Reserve. The radical changes Adler outlines require levels of solidarity and conviction that can only come from deeply felt interdependence, an “insurrection of conscience” (Nuñez, 1988), an ethos of love. One example of this solidarity in the U.S. is the Black Lives Matter movement, which taps into humanity and compassion as much as—or more than—programmatic agendas. Adler appreciates the importance of attitudes and feelings. Referring to earlier generations’ disappointment about their inability to create justice and citing Oscar Wilde on the importance of utopias, he describes the book as an effort to “arm us against despair” (p. 7) and is explicit about trying to generate hopefulness. In the last chapter, he summarizes elements of a strategy for “getting there,” by promoting a social and economic Bill of Rights in “four main arenas” (p. 150): politics, workplaces, schools, and communities. However, he gives short shrift to the role of consciousness and to possible mechanisms for a transformative change in attitudes toward capitalism—or socialism.
Addressing capitalism’s crises and advancing democratic socialism require both making lived political economy explicit and accessible and transforming consciousness. These are fundamentally educative—and conjoined—processes. In his discussion of schools, Adler calls for “progressive reforms in curriculum . . .to strengthen humanities and civics education” (p. 154). Decoupling formal education in the United States from technocratic-meritocratic agendas in service of capitalism (Bowles and Gintis, 2011) is critical 3 and needs to extend to business schools (Parker, 2018; Starkey & Tiratsoo, 2007). Globally, however, the record of Italian worker councils (Gramsci, 1921), Freirean culture circles (Freire, 1985), Nordic-style folk schools (including the Highlander Center in Tennessee, an important part of the U.S. struggle for civil rights (Horton, 1990)), and mutual aid groups in Brooklyn (www.southbkmutualaid.com) and Syria (www.freedomforocalan.org) illustrates the transformative effects of education outside of schools that involves reading, talking, listening-and creating - together.
Therefore, to Adler’s list, I would add three categories of actions we need to take in order to be able to move toward radical change in the United States. First, let’s talk about capitalism: about its mechanics and effects in our lives, communities, and planet. Let’s talk about it in primary and secondary schools, in colleges and business schools (Stookey, 2020), but also at family gatherings, work, the mosque, the pub and the barbershop—and even sidewalk lemonade stands. 4 Let’s make its workings familiar and make talking about it a norm. Second, in those same places, let’s talk about possibilities: democratic socialism, communism, cooperatives, local economies, international co-development treaties (Piketty, 2020), and other alternatives to capitalism we can think of. Third, let’s create material conditions that foster imaginative collaborative work that sustainably meets our needs and nurtures solidarity. From mini-grants for youth cooperatives and laundromat libraries to massive expansion and rededication of federal programs such as AmeriCorps (government funded community-based service work) and Community Development Block Grants, from local schools for organizing (Parker, 2018) to people-to-people international trading networks. Let’s make dinner at the neighborhood dining commons and drop our kids off at the collectively run play space. Let’s cultivate love for each other through learning and working side by side.
I wish the woman in Hannibal had sat down for a cup of lemonade, and that the Amherst woman had joined us. We could have had a conversation about capitalism, how we think it works, what we like and don’t like. Maybe we could have met the next week and discussed Adler’s book. We start by talking to each other.
