Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
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.
Our wants will never be satisfied in a capitalist economy, and the demand for work will never cease. They are both prerequisites for and results of the expansion of capital.
At the heart of both the environmental crisis and the obesity crisis is the capitalist market economy. It is the definition of capitalism that capital is multiplied.
The social order that capital’s apologists defend as inevitable and eternal is “the product of many economic revolutions, of the extinction of a whole series of older formations of social production.” Acceptance of the wages-system as a natural way to live and work did not happen easily.
Prof. Chomsky has long argued that the roots of the climate emergency, and of our failure to deal with it, reach deep into the capitalist economic system.
Between the decline of feudalism and the rise of industrial capitalism, rural society was transformed by the complex of processes that are collectively known as enclosure.
