If you think of capitalism as the global entanglement of everything financial and economic, then for sure, it feels like a pretty wild dream to imagine that we could disentangle it all and establish something different.
It is a pretty wild dream because the entanglement includes some 350 million businesses, 100 million corporations, 75,000 multinational corporations, 25,000 banks, 3,000 billionaires, millions of investors and shareholders, two million economists, and all the bond markets, commodities markets, futures markets, stock exchanges, global trade, and a thousand other things. Amazon alone sells 600 million different products.
These things operate together in a market economy that is extraordinarily effective in the delivery of goods and services – as long as we ignore the harm imposed along the way to nature, workers, and communities, and the way it is causing the climate crisis, which could derail our entire existence on this small, beautiful planet.
But capitalism is not that entanglement.
Except for the billionaires, there is nothing in that paragraph that is inherently capitalist. Each of those items could flourish in a kind, green, cooperative economy.
So what is inherently capitalist?
When we look at the long stretch of history, captured so richly and magnificently in Sven Beckert’s Capitalism – A Global History (Penguin, 2025), one thing stands clear. It is that capitalism was created by and is driven by the agency of people who are uniquely selfish in their desire to accumulate capital. In pursuit of this goal, they seek to dominate every political system that allows it and kowtow to any that doesn’t. And nothing is off the table. Historically, capitalists have been able to accommodate slavery, conquest, colonialism, fascism, Nazism, democracy, and even communism.
One of the truths that emerges from Beckert’s book is that capitalists have always depended on governments to support and enable their activities, so ending capitalism also requires ending the multiple ways governments provide that support.
Capitalists have no real ideology, except to claim that they have one through ‘free market economics’, or the ‘laws of economics’, which provide a persuasive smokescreen for their selfishness. Their ideology is simply personal gain through the accumulation of capital, while ignoring the social and ecological costs.
These things are not true of most business owners, whose primary concern is to provide a product or service their customers want to buy, and whose secondary concern is to generate a profit.
By ‘capitalism’ I do not mean markets, trade, entrepreneurship, and business. I mean the specific ways in which capitalists use whatever economic system they are in to maximize capital accumulation, while ignoring human, social, and ecological realities.
Ending capitalism does not require closing down the market economy or taking 350 million private businesses into public ownership. So what does it require?
Believe that it is possible
First, it requires us to believe it is possible. Ever since Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press, enabling people to think for themselves, people have been standing up to say NO to oppression, NO to the rule of kings and priests, and NO to feudalism, slavery, and exploitation.
For 300,000 years, our ancestors managed to live cooperatively, suppressing those who tried to dominate. With the coming of food surpluses, however, some families began to accumulate wealth they did not want to share, and over time, they insisted that their children should inherit their wealth and titles, as the anthropologists Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus reveal in The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire. In this way, they ended 300,000 years of cooperation and ushered in 5,000 years of kings, conquests, and cruelty.
Wealthy, self-important people always want to dominate. It is second nature to them. They think they are better than the rest of us, that they are entitled to rule over us. When the printing press enabled people to think for themselves, however, the pushback began.
In 1648, the English cut the head off their king, beginning their long stumble towards democracy. In 1789, the French cut the head off their king, beginning their stumble towards the same goal. In 1848, people all across Europe rose up to challenge their kings and rulers. In 1917, the Russians overthrew their Tsars, but in their stumbling, they fell into a pit of communist cruelty, remaining there until 1989.
Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, working people dreamt of the day when they would no longer be subject to cruelty, exploitation, poverty and oppression. To this end, they created trade unions, workers’ cooperatives, retail cooperatives, public banks, community banks, cooperative insurance companies, and so much more. They also created democracies. For the first time in 5,000 years, they had the ability to remove a bad government without chopping its leaders’ heads off.
In Barcelona today, there are over 5,000 non-capitalist social-purpose economic organizations. In Quebec, there are 11,200. In Kerala, India, there are 317,400 Kudumbashree groups, in which women decide the future of their villages and neighbourhood economies. In Mondragon, Spain, the Basque people have built an entire network of cooperatives, many in manufacturing. None of these initiatives is capitalist, even though they exist within a capitalist economy. They have been created by people whose ethics are cooperation and kindness, not selfishness and greed, yet they still express creativity, initiative, innovation, and risk-taking.
We need to know with 100% confidence that it is possible to replace it with a people-centred cooperative economy, in which we also cooperate with Nature.
Our work is not to despair, but to pick up our courage and complete the journey our ancestors started. This is unlikely to be an overnight achievement. More likely, it will be a thousand changes, transforming our economies step by step, business by business, bank by bank, community by community – but with effort, inspiration, and collective support, we could achieve it within ten years.
Choose a clear purpose
For most capitalists, their purpose is to maximize their personal wealth. To make this politically palatable, they cover it with the claim that they are increasing GDP, from which everyone will benefit. The claim is nonsense. Every car crash, every divorce and every rainforest destroyed increases GDP.
How should we choose our collective purpose? A government that was elected by fair proportional voting might establish four or five regional Citizens’ Assemblies, each with 50 people chosen by lottery. They would meet over three weekends to listen to different experts and decide what they thought should be the nation’s priorities for the next 25 years. Their recommendations would be shared in a multiple-choice referendum, and everyone would be invited to vote.
I doubt that “increasing GDP” would make the list. It is more likely that we’d see goals such as “End poverty”, “Ensure there are jobs for all”, “Make life affordable”, “Tackle the climate crisis”, “Build a green cooperative market economy”, “Help our young people”, and “Build a new ecological civilization”.
The chosen goals would then inform policymaking during the government’s time in office.
Build community wealth
The third thing ending capitalism requires is that we roll up our sleeves where we live and build community wealth. Community wealth is a huge basket of riches – it includes everything from public libraries to chess clubs and green space.
In the economy, it includes cooperatives, public banks, community banks, benefit corporations, social enterprises, employee-owned businesses, community currencies, the community ownership of assets, housing cooperatives, cooperatively owned mobile home parks, community investments, community development corporations, and the firm rejection of private equity’s incursions. Increasingly, cities like Preston, Lancashire (UK) and Cleveland, Ohio, are bringing the pieces together to weave the fabric of local economic cooperation. The region of Emilia-Romagna, in northern Italy, has been doing it for over a century. In Finland, cooperatives account for 20% of GDP and much more of Gross National Happiness.
To make these things the norm, our governments should do as Scotland has done with its Community Wealth Building Act, approved unanimously by the Scottish Parliament in February 2026. The Act requires that every local government and public body in Scotland develop an action plan to support the generation, circulation, and retention of wealth in the local economy, strengthen local ownership, use procurement as a local economic engine, support good jobs and fair wages, align capital with community agency and benefit, and treat land and buildings as shared assets. In this way, villages and towns can retool the everyday mechanics of their economies so that value circulates locally, instead of being extracted by capitalist investors.
In the first of our ten years, we will need to learn what community wealth is, write Community Wealth Building Acts, and get the legislation passed.
Invite every business to adopt a social purpose charter
The next thing we need to do is to neutralize the belief that a corporation’s only duty is to its shareholders, the selfish DNA of capitalism.
For most businesses, the primary goal of their owners and workers is to make or deliver a product or service people will want, be it a tavern that sells ale or a factory that makes cars. Other goals may include not harming nature and treating their workers well. Making a profit is not the only thing that matters.
In the first of our ten years, we need to legislate an Act that will invite every business to adopt a Social Purpose Charter in which it would state its social purpose and commit to a range of other things, including annual reporting on steps to reduce its impacts on nature and the climate, support for labour unions, the inclusion of women and workers on its board, a commitment pay taxes fairly, and various other things.
The urgency of the polycrisis means that signing on cannot be voluntary. We need every business to adopt a meaningful purpose and to behave with decency, as most businesses already do. To enable this, we need a ten-year transition.
During the transition, every business that adopts the charter would get priority when bidding on government contracts, pay a lower rate of corporation tax, and have access to lower interest rates. After five years, companies that had not adopted the new charter might be denied access to government contracts, and pay a higher rate of corporation tax, and a higher rate of interest on bank loans. By the end of the transition, if a business had not adopted the new charter, it and its subsidiaries would be denied a license to operate.
This will generate enormous resistance from the billionaires and right-wing think tanks, but most people – 72% in America, 82% in the UK – support policies like this. I would guess that 98% of businesses would have no problem adopting a social purpose charter.
It’s the 2% we need to be concerned about. Some companies would resist, litigate, and attempt to evade the rules. They would switch their head offices to other countries, but they would be denied commercial activity in their home country, so the pressure from employees and shareholders would be huge.
The same legislation would apply to businesses that import goods or services. After ten years, they too would need to adopt the new charter.
Build a green cooperative banking system
What about the banks, pension funds and private equity funds? The same rules would apply: ten years to adopt the charter, or lose your license to operate.
Money and banking are too important to be governed by speculation and private accumulation. In a kind, green, cooperative economy, finance would be a public service whose prime purpose would be to support businesses, jobs, community, and ecological recovery.
Successful role models for this include 67,000 credit unions, with $3.8 trillion in assets; 1,000 public banks, holding 20-25% of all global banking assets; members of the Global Alliance for Banking on Values, including Triodos, Banca Etica and 68 others, with $265 billion in assets; and 10,000 cooperative banks, community development banks, and Islamic ethical finance banks. Together, they hold $60-$75 trillion in assets. That’s 30% to 40% of global banking assets, totalling $190 trillion, excluding shadow banks. So clearly, this is possible.
Social purpose banks are just as profitable and more financially resilient than private banks. During the 2008 financial crisis, when the big banks were pleading for a bailout with public money, European cooperative bank assets grew by 10%. Their customer base grew by 14%, and only 7% suffered losses, most of which were made up within two years. No public bailouts were needed. The vast majority of credit unions needed no help, and America’s 7,600 community banks remained the best capitalized, since their managers had not taken excessive risks. Between 2007 and 2010, their assets grew by 10%, and their customers and reserves grew by 14%. Between 2003 and 2010, the average return for cooperative banks was 7.5%, compared to 5.7% for investor-owned banks. What’s not to like?
There are four ways in which we could wean the banks off capitalism. The first is requiring them to adopt the social purpose charter.
The second is to establish a legislated ‘red-amber-green’ taxonomy that would state which investments are encouraged, which require caution, and which are banned. The red category would include investments in fossil fuel extraction, in the large-scale destruction of nature, in industrial cattle ranching linked to deforestation, and in initiatives with appalling labour conditions. Investing in fossil fuels in 2026 should be as unthinkable as it would have been to invest in selling tanks to the Nazis in 1939.
A list of candidates for the red list could be drawn up, and a Citizens Assembly with 50 randomly selected people could recommend what should be on it and what not, removing decision-making from politicians and lobbyists. Pension funds could be required to phase out all their red-listed investments within a year of the list’s publication and to redirect their investments toward climate solutions, affordable housing, ecological restoration, public transit, community wealth creation, and the green economy.
The third way involves the central bank. Central banks are unique institutions. Like regular banks, they have the power to create money and add it to the economy, but they do not add it as a loan. They create it as a gift. Whenever an economy can absorb new money and there are unemployed workers and unused resources, this will not cause inflation.
Central banks could use this power to underwrite loans on the green list, reducing the interest rate to zero or 1%. This would likely include investments in climate solutions, ecological farming, affordable housing, community wealth, and a zero-waste circular economy.
The fourth way is for a government to create climate solutions bonds, nature restoration bonds, and affordable housing bonds, and for the central bank to create the money to buy them, on the premise that these bonds address an emergency that requires such intervention. In this way, money to tackle the climate, biodiversity and housing crises would not need government borrowing.
This would require that central banks cease being independent and fall under democratic governance. They could be subverted by Trump-like Presidents or Prime Ministers, but risks like this accompany all democracies. Instead of using interest rates to control inflation, governments would use taxation, adding money to the economy when it is lagging and taking it away when it needs cooling down.
Then there are the shadow banks and non-bank financial institutions, which hold some $250 trillion in assets. They create The Global Casino, as the economist Ann Pettifor calls it. Weaning them off capitalism will require global cooperation, since they are offshore eels, perpetually wriggling out of regulatory nets. Left untouched, they will continue to overwhelm democracies, wielding more power than elected governments. We will need international agreements to prevent capital flight, end tax avoidance, require banking transparency, control speculative finance, and establish ecological standards.
None of this is new. During World War II and in the postwar era, governments routinely directed finance toward national priorities. China used methods like these to achieve unprecedented economic development. The idea that markets alone should decide where investments should go is ethically empty.
End the inequality craziness and the anger it generates
Over the last decade, people in the richest 1% of humanity have captured 50% of all new global wealth. The ten wealthiest people now own more than the poorest three billion people combined. With all that money to spend, the average billionaire’s carbon footprint is a million times greater than the average person’s.
Capitalists love these numbers. It shows that the system is working the way they want it to. In 2019, Warren Buffett had a net worth of $84.4 billion. By 2022, it had risen to $118 billion – a gain of $30 billion in three years, $30 million a day.
In 1979, the average American had to work 30 weeks a year to pay for their house, car, health care, and education. Today, they have to work for 53 weeks. As a result, 50% to 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck with minimal or no savings, but a huge burden of worry and stress. In Britain, the 50 richest families hold more wealth than the entire 34 million people in the poorest half of the country.
If there had been a 2% wealth tax on the 0.001% wealthiest people, starting in 1990, it would have raised £6 billion a year. Invested, by now it would be worth some £325 billion, £11,000 per household.
What could a government with a strong public mandate do to restore justice? We need a New Social Contract because the old one is no longer working. What might it include?
Fair taxation. Wealth taxes, inheritance taxes, and a higher tax rate on incomes above $250,000 a year. Maybe an extreme wealth tax of 100% on incomes over $10 million, sending a signal that extreme wealth is no longer tolerated. At the same time, upping the threshold before you need to pay tax, lifting the burden off lower-income people. Low-income families could also benefit if governments expanded child tax credits, an idea that’s supported in America by a majority of Republicans.
We need to eliminate the tricks wealthy people use to avoid paying taxes, such as leaving their capital intact and borrowing against it for income, writing off the interest as a tax-deductible expense.
Secure Work. A government with a strong public mandate could ensure that everyone who wanted a job had one, and remove the fear that AI is going to take people’s jobs:
- It could guarantee the right to form a union, enabling working people to work together to achieve higher wages and better working conditions.
- It could require larger companies to give their workers 51% of the seats on the board, as in Germany.
- To head off the AI jobs apocalypse, rather than laying off workers, it could require a reduction in working hours to 3 or 4 days a week.
- It could ban compulsory mass lay-offs in any company that received a government contract or support, and require lay-offs to be voluntary, accompanied by a financial package, as Les Leopold has proposed.
- It could ban all lay-offs associated with AI, as a court in China has ordered.
- It could establish an AI Sovereign Wealth Fund, imposing a one-time 50% tax on the stock of OpenAI, Anthropic, and other AI companies, enabling the dollars generated by AI to be used to improve the lives of all, as Bernie Sanders has proposed. His argument is that since AI is built on the knowledge, creativity, conversations, and labour of the American people, they deserve a cut of the profits.
- It could adopt Denmark’s system of ‘flexicurity’, giving employers the flexibility to hire and fire according to their needs, while protecting workers with generous unemployment pay, paid training, and assistance in seeking a new job. Around a fifth of Danish workers lose or change their jobs in any given year, but thanks to flexicurity, most find a new job quickly.
- It could finance locally-organized job guarantees for anyone who has been out of work for a year, as the Austrian town of Marienthal is doing, with positive results, funded by a tax on AI units, as Elizabeth Warren has proposed. In the UK, 72% of people support a job guarantee like this. In the US, it’s 78%. In France, it’s 79%.
Universal Basic Services. A government with a strong public mandate could legislate a goal to achieve Universal Basic Services for all within ten years. Not Basic Income, which would soon disappear due to inflated rents, childcare costs, and so on, but basic services: guaranteed affordable housing, childcare, seniors’ care, transportation, and broadband.
Baby Bonds. A government could use the income from inheritance taxes to give every baby $1,000 every year on its birthday, rising to $2,000 for babies in the poorest families. The funds would sit in an account managed by the Treasury and earn 3% a year. At age 18 or 21, it could be withdrawn for a list of permitted uses. The bonds for a child from a poor family might grow to around $46,000. In Spain, Deputy Prime Minister Yolanda Díaz has proposed something similar, giving every young person €20,000 upon reaching 18.
Debt Resolution. By 2023, household debt in America had reached $16.9 trillion, with proportionally similar sums in Switzerland, Australia, Norway, Canada, South Korea, New Zealand, Sweden, and the UK. In Britain, lower-income people owe the government £16 billion for things like council tax arrears, benefits advances, sanctions, and tax overpayments. Christians Against Poverty found that 93% of its clients with debts had sleepless nights, 74% were scared to open the door, and 49% were scared to leave the house. This is the economics of cruelty, not kindness. What can be done?
A government with a strong popular mandate could cap interest rates and develop formulas to forgive student, medical, and credit card debt. It could finance a Fair Debt Write Down by spending $6 billion to buy $30 billion in chronic debt on the secondary market. This would record the debts of 4.3 million people, who would repay them at 20% of their face value through debt management plans formulated by a non-profit agency. This would return the $6 billion to the government and enable the process to be repeated. Governments could help the advisory agencies that help debtors consolidate their debts. They could pay their costs and create zero-interest loan funds to enable debt consolidation.
Protect nature
The kingfishers, oak trees and hermit crabs will always be collateral damage if their fate is left to capitalist businesses. Since 1970, 73% of the world’s monitored wildlife populations have been lost. What could a government with a strong electoral mandate do to protect nature? Forgive the checklist: it’s the most effective way to cover this. It could:
- Protect far more land and water, pursuing the goal of 30% by 2030 and 50% by 2050.
- Replace GDP with Ecological Civilization Progress as the nation’s measure of progress.
- Engage children in nature education from age 5 onwards.
- Make ecocide – the destruction of nature – a criminal offence.
- Ban investments in red-listed activities.
- End all subsidies for ecologically destructive activities.
- Strengthen enforcement and penalties in existing legislation.
- Require every large company and every landowner with more than 100 acres to report annually on their impact on nature and the climate and the steps they are taking to reduce it.
- Ban the import of products linked to deforestation and other harmful activities.
- Appoint a Commissioner for Nature to review all major legislation and investments.
- Negotiate ecologically oriented trade agreements and remove Investor-State Dispute Settlement clauses that prioritize investors over nature.
- Levy a circular economy tax on all products, falling to zero for those that are fully recyclable. Return the revenue to people as a rebate.
- Work with Indigenous people to protect nature, recognize their rights, laws, and land, and receive their free, prior, and informed consent for major developments that affect their land.
- Create a Nature Restoration Corps for young people who want to restore forests, wetlands, rivers, farmlands and grasslands.
- Reward farmers who reduce farmland pollution and restore ecosystems, and penalize those who don’t.
- Work with local governments to turn urban areas into oases of greenery.
- Create Citizens’ Assemblies to recommend further ways to protect nature.
This post has been edited for length. You can read the piece in full here.
