Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
From climate policy to housing and trade, in this piece, author Guy Dauncey imagines how to dismantle capitalism and replace it with a greener, more cooperative alternative for everyone, including nature.
We’re taught that without rigid legal systems society would collapse into chaos. But for most of human history, people relied on communal norms, not codified law, while the rise of written rules, hierarchy, and possessions cleared the way for today’s sixth mass extinction.
Asking if the world grows enough food is the wrong kind of question. It leads to the wrong kind of answer. We don’t need to produce more food. We need to produce more farms: places where communities of living beings can thrive.
In this essay, author Guy Dauncey argues that we can dismantle capitalism without abandoning markets, replacing it with a democratic, cooperative economy that reins in finance and puts people and nature first.
Despite three decades of COP climate talks and a boom in renewables, global emissions continue to rise, rooted in capitalism’s relentless drive to expand energy use. Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations helps explain why renewable energy has grown without pushing fossil fuels out.
Elections and protest movements may shift public attention, but systemic change depends on building resilient economies capable of replacing the structures now driving inequality and social fragmentation. The solidarity economy, an evolving network of post-capitalist worker-driven coalitions, is what we need.
Modern corporations are legally and financially structured to prioritize profit over ecological stability. The result is a system that normalizes environmental destruction while diffusing responsibility across institutions and individuals.
From engineered consumer addiction to environmental destruction, corporate harm is not a failure of the system but its logic. But because corporations exist by public charter, that logic can be rewritten through democratic oversight, time-limited licenses and rules that focus on risks to people and the planet.
Modern economies depend on unpriced ecosystem functions and undervalued care and reproductive labor—essential inputs that are difficult to commodify. This tension helps explain environmental degradation, social strain, and the limits of market systems.
Harrison Brown wrote in 1954 that the most likely outcome of industrial civilization is a return to agrarian civilization. Historian Steven Stoll gives us a glimpse of an agrarian world that existed before the industrial revolution, one that might provide a possible pattern for an agrarian existence in the future.
In other words, information becomes an asset in the service of economic growth—just like our very interactions with one another on social media have been turned into economic activity.
To face the complexities of the 21st century, we must be open to discussing how core elements of modern capitalism were founded upon and created to uphold white Western economic privilege, and still do.
