liberatory

How Capitalism Works: Liberatory

What would it mean to overcome or transform this? What have movements imagined, attempted, and built?

See the pedagogy document for what this lens does across all themes. The school does not resolve the disagreements among traditions. It puts them in front of the room and lets the room think.

Anchor questions

• If capitalism was made, can it be unmade? What would have to change for it to end?
• Reform or revolution: can capitalism be gradually improved out of existence, or does it have to be broken? What is the evidence for each view?
• Who plans an economy without a market, and how? Who owns a market economy without capitalists?
• What has actually been tried, and what did those experiments teach, including where they failed?
• What would you want a post-capitalist life to feel like, day to day?

Materials

Free unless marked otherwise. This lens deliberately gathers positions that disagree with each other.

Programmatic and strategic writings

• Karl Marx (1818 to 1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820 to 1895), The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848). The founding programmatic text on capitalism’s dynamism, its self-undermining tendencies, and the case for the working class to abolish class society. Short, essential, endlessly debated. Free: marxists.org
• Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875). Marx’s most concrete sketch of post-capitalist transition, the lower and higher phases of communism and “from each according to ability, to each according to need.” Central to any planning-versus-market debate. Free: marxists.org
• Rosa Luxemburg (1871 to 1919), Reform or Revolution (1900). The classic statement of why capitalism cannot be gradually reformed out of existence. The anchor text for the reform-and-revolution debate within the socialist tradition. Free: marxists.org

The anarchist alternative

• Peter Kropotkin (1842 to 1921), The Conquest of Bread (1892). The foundational anarchist-communist vision of a society organized around need and mutual aid rather than wages and markets. Warm, concrete, and readable. Free: theanarchistlibrary.org
• Rudolf Rocker (1873 to 1958), Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice (1938). The definitive introduction to the anarchist and syndicalist strategy of transforming society through the labor movement itself: direct action, the general strike, and workers’ self-management. Free: theanarchistlibrary.org
• Murray Bookchin (1921 to 2006), Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971). Essays arguing that modern technology makes possible a free, ecological, non-hierarchical society. A bridge between the anarchist tradition and the ecological politics of Theme 8. Free: theanarchistlibrary.org

Accounts and models of alternatives

• Paul Cockshott (b. 1952) and Allin Cottrell, Towards a New Socialism (1993). The leading modern case for democratic economic planning using computation and labor-time accounting. The key text on the planning side of the market-socialism-versus-planning debate. Free PDF: users.wfu.edu (PDF)
• Erik Olin Wright (1947 to 2019), How to Be an Anticapitalist in the Twenty-First Century (2019). A clear map of anticapitalist strategies, smashing, taming, escaping, and eroding capitalism, and a vision of “real utopias.” An outstanding contemporary synthesis for framing the whole debate. Free to borrow: archive.org

Debates and disagreements

The school holds the disagreements among traditions open. Placed side by side, these texts stage the argument the room should have.

• Gilles Dauvé (b. 1947) and François Martin, Eclipse and Re-emergence of the Communist Movement (1974, revised 1997). The most influential English-language introduction to communization theory, a critique of both social democracy and Leninism that rethinks revolution as the immediate abolition of wage labor and commodity exchange. Set against Cockshott and Cottrell’s planning model, it sharpens the disagreement over what “after capitalism” even means. Free PDF: files.libcom.org
• Luxemburg (reform versus revolution), Kropotkin and Rocker (anarchist self-management), Cockshott and Cottrell (democratic planning), and Dauvé (communization) do not agree. Wright’s typology above is a useful map for holding all of them in view at once.

Video

• “A Future Beyond Capitalism? Socialism Explained” (Second Thought, c. 2020). Roughly 13 minutes, about 1.84 million views. Clears up the Marxism, socialism, and communism confusion and sketches alternatives. Good for a “what could replace it?” session. youtube.com/watch?v=hactcmhVS1w
• “How Degrowth Can Save the World” (Andrewism, Andrew Sage, c. 2023). Roughly 30 minutes, about 176,000 views. A solarpunk-anarchist video essay tying capitalism, growth, and ecology together and proposing degrowth and the commons. The anarchist voice in video form. youtube.com/watch?v=oQrI2GBvn5Q
• The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism (George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison, 2024). Roughly 50 minutes, about 209,000 views. A full-length documentary critique of neoliberal capitalism with an explicit call for alternatives. A strong closing screening. youtube.com/watch?v=gR4eSEetKP0

Status

This lens has a developed first pass for this theme. Resources continue to be added as the project grows. Contributions welcome, especially accounts of experiments that have been tried and what they taught.