Solidarity Economics E-Book

Chris Benner

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 337

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

Traditional economics is built on the assumption of self-interested individuals seeking to maximize personal gain, but that is far from the whole story. Sharing, caring, and a desire to uphold the collective good are also powerful motives. In a world wracked by inequality, social divisions, and ecological destruction, can we build an alternative economics based on cooperation? In this book Chris Benner and Manuel Pastor invite us to imagine a new sort of solidarity economics - an approach grounded in our instincts for connection and community - and in so doing, actually build a more robust and sustainable economy. They argue that our current economy is already deeply dependent on mutuality, but that the inequality and fragmentation created by the status quo undermine this mutuality and with it our economic well-being. They outline the theoretical framing, policy agenda, and social movements that we need to revive solidarity and apply it to whole societies. Solidarity Economics is an essential read for anyone who longs for a fairer economy that can generate prosperity and preserve the planet.

Leseprobe

Contents

Title page

Copyright page

Acknowledgements

1 Reimagining Our Economy

2 Solidarity and Prosperity

3 Solidarity and Innovation

4 Solidarity and Social Support

5 Solidarity and the Planet

6 Solidarity and Social Change

Index

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Contents

1 Reimagining Our Economy

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Solidarity Economics

Why Mutuality and Movements Matter

Chris Benner

Manuel Pastor

polity

Copyright page

Copyright © Chris Benner and Manuel Pastor 2021

The right of Chris Benner and Manuel Pastor to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2021 by Polity Press

This work is also available in an Open Access edition, which is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.

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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4407-3

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4408-0 (pb)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Benner, Chris, author. | Pastor, Manuel, 1956- author.

Title: Solidarity economics : why mutuality and movements matter / Chris Benner, Manuel Pastor.

Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references. | Summary: “How mutualist, caring economies can be both more just and more innovative”-- Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021011277 (print) | LCCN 2021011278 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509544073 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509544080 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509544097 (epub) | ISBN 9781509549733 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Mutualism. | Solidarity. | Economics--Sociological aspects.

Classification: LCC HD2961 .B425 2021 (print) | LCC HD2961 (ebook) | DDC 334--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021011277

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021011278

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Acknowledgements

It may not be surprising that a book on why mutuality and movements matter has relied significantly on mutuality and movements. We are indebted to so many we have met on our respective journeys of political and personal growth, from the progressive movements of the Bay Area and industrial working-class communities of Los Angeles, to the anti-racist and anti-imperialist struggles in South Africa and Latin America, to the regional equity proponents looking to scale up across the country, to our more recent work with multi-racial movements for racial, economic, and environmental justice in California and across the US. We write a bit about this journey in the book and acknowledge the many hundreds of both activists and academics in that trajectory who have shaped our thinking.

Over the last several years, a host of movement-building organizations have given their time and lent their perspectives to this project. These have included: Advancement Project California, Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, American Leadership Forum, California Budget & Policy Center, California Calls, Central California Legal Services, Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy, Communities for a Better Environment, Community Development Technologies at Los Angeles Trade-Technical College (CD Tech), Economic Analysis and Research Network at Economic Policy Institute, Economic Security Project, Faith in the Valley, Fresno Metro Ministry, Fresno State Office of Community and Economic Development, Grassroots Policy Project, Insight Center for Community Economic Development, LA AFL-CIO, Leadership for Urban Renewal Network (now Inclusive Action), Leap Forward Project at the Othering & Belonging Institute (formerly Haas Institute at UC Berkeley), Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, National Employment Law Project, Occidental College’s Urban and Environmental Policy Institute, PICO California, San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research (SPUR), SEIU Local 2015, Social Change Institute of South LA’s Community Health Councils, The Fund for Santa Barbara, UC Berkeley Labor Center, UC Davis Center for Regional Change, UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, UNITE HERE, United Farm Workers, and Working Partnerships USA.

A number of research staff and students at the USC’s Equity Research Institute (ERI) were important thought partners throughout the development of the manuscript, and contributed important parts of it. Thanks to Vanessa Carter, who was one of the first to suggest (and then insist on) a book and helped to envision this broader project. She, along with Ashley K. Thomas, Jesi Harris, and Ben Toney, were integral to developing the manuscript. Each spurred, challenged, and grew our thinking; it’s not always easy to push back on tenured professors, but they did so with grace, wisdom, and boldness, and with an eye to making sure this work embraced aspirations for the liberation of all, but especially those receiving the most harm from racialized capitalism.

Most recently, a set of movement colleagues came together to review an early version of the manuscript. They mercifully gave us strong and clear feedback about what we were getting right – and wrong. Thank you to Angela Glover Blackwell (PolicyLink), Richard Healy (Grassroots Policy Project), Emily Kawano (US Solidarity Economy Network), Tammy Bang Luu (Grassroots Policy Project), Jennifer Martinez (PICO California), Solana Rice (Liberation in a Generation), and Felicia Wong (Roosevelt Institute). They rightly pushed us to be bolder, to go further in centering Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities and women, to be more specific, defined, and tangible in our articulation of solidarity economics, and more. We also thank the three anonymous reviewers solicited by Polity Press and the detailed feedback of our editor George Owers – their comments helped us tremendously in sharpening our argument and thinking.

This book anchors a larger project on solidarity economics that is a joint effort of USC ERI, UC Santa Cruz’s Institute for Social Transformation (IST), and the Everett Program for Technology and Social Change. At ERI, our gratitude to research director Jennifer Ito for her assistance on fundraising and project management, to Edward Muña, Arpita Sharma, and Gladys Malibiran for spearheading the communications efforts, to Lauren Perez and Emma Yudelevitch for event coordination and production, to Ashley K. Thomas for furthering innovative dissemination efforts, and to Eunice Velarde Flores, Jamie Flores, and Rhonda Ortiz for handling grants, contracts, and schedules.

At UC Santa Cruz, our gratitude to: IST assistant director Mykell Discipulo, for coordinating funding, contracts, and administrative activities of the project, including coordinating with Made By Super, who designed our website (www.solidarityeconomics.org); to Andrea Limas, Assistant Director of Social Science Communications, who helped with website design and communications; to staff, fellows, and students of the Everett Program – Neguin Anvari, Morgan Bishop, Mo Dick, Edward Estrada, Dylan Hoage, Emmanuel Nevarez, Golnoush Pak, and Katie Roper – for maintaining the website, building out website content, and contributing to our communication strategies; and to Sue Grasso (IST) for handling contracts, payments, and more.

We would also like to thank the funders who have made this work possible. The Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) provided seed funding when the project was still a vague idea, and this helped us develop our thoughts and secure further funding. This project was also supported in part by grants from SEIU, The James Irvine Foundation, the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, and the Open Society Foundations.

Thanks also to those by our sides and those in our sights. First, thanks to our respective partners, Gwynn Benner and Betsy Hamilton, for their patience in tolerating long hours and days devoted to this book, all too often on weekends and week-long writing retreats, and for their belief in the work we do. And, finally, thanks to our teachers and mentors, Samuel Bowles, Manuel Castells, Carmen Diana Deere, AnnaLee Saxenian, and Richard Walker; what we offer here is what we learned from our movement allies but it is also what we learned from you.

1Reimagining Our Economy

Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu. (I am because we are.)

Ubuntu philosophy

In 1776, thirteen colonies at war with Great Britain declared their independence, launching the United States of America and the creation of a new system of government based on what is now the world’s oldest continuously active constitution. That same year, Scottish philosopher Adam Smith completed his decade-long inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations, publishing a book that is considered the first modern work of economics and one whose key principles remain central to the discipline to this day.1

There was a curious belief at the heart of both of these newly founded systems: people are selfish, but it is possible to channel that selfishness to produce publicly beneficial effects. This is most clear in Smith’s belief that a free market would channel self-interested pursuits into societally optimal outcomes. The Founding Fathers also suggested that democracy might yield order out of selfish leadership impulses: if those in power across top government institutions found themselves restrained by a system of checks and balances, the people would be able to flourish.2

There was also a stark blindness at the heart of both perspectives. Smith, who actually had a strong belief in the importance of a shared morality for maintaining social order, held that self-interested people make markets but failed to see how markets would also make self-interested people, and so erode those moral sentiments.3 Meanwhile, the Founding Fathers were just that: a group of white property-owners who failed to see their privilege and who talked of liberty while cementing in place systems of racism and patriarchy, who conceived of checks and balances but excluded the majority of people from the democracy they set up.

For nearly 250 years now, our major economic and political institutions have been built on the assumption of self-interested individuals and the continued systemic marginalization of disenfranchised groups. And while there have been some clear economic and social gains in that time, usually because of groups challenging exclusion, we have reached a point where our fundamental economic structures are driving unprecedented inequality, social divisions, and ecological destruction, amidst a politics of polarization, fragmentation, and alienation.

Can’t we do better? After all, we know that people also act out of caring, sharing, and interest in the collective good. Can we build a better economy out of that sense of mutuality? After all, we know in our own lives that teams and communities perform better when everyone feels connected. What would it take for us to transform our economy and politics to put that in place? After all, we know that change does not take place without struggle, or in the words of Frederick Douglass: “Power concedes nothing without a demand.”4

For us (and many others!), focusing on our mutuality has descriptive, normative, and prescriptive dimensions. We say descriptive because, as we will show throughout the book, it is precisely those places in our economy where we have collaboration, cooperation, and limits to inequality that we also have greater prosperity, innovation, and economic dynamism. We say normative because we believe that if we were to build our economic and political institutions with an eye to expanding our sense of connection and interdependence, we could have an even stronger economy and greater societal well-being. And we say prescriptive because we are not naïve about change: we know that creating an economy that values everyone will require disrupting the power of those who benefit from the current state of affairs.

Part of that fight will be about the very way we think and talk about our economy. Traditional economics would have us believe that selfishness and the market itself are natural, that alternatives are unsustainable (or blasphemous), and that we should settle for the current levels of rampant unfairness because there is no better alternative. We beg to differ. Like the popular legend sometimes attributed to the Cherokee Nation, if we have two wolves inside of us – one self-interested and one that cares for others – then the wolf we feed is the one that thrives.

Both our actual economy and our economic theory and narrative have been feeding the wrong part of ourselves. It is time for a new approach: solidarity economics.

Such a solidarity economics has three basic premises. The first is that it is our economy, not the economy – it is not an abstract set of rules given by God or nature but the result of our relationships, sometimes reflecting power and sometimes reflecting our mutuality. The second is that we actually do better when we work and act together – while traditional economics would have us believe that selfishness is useful for generating economic progress, mutuality is, in fact, key to our collective economic well-being. And the third is that since some people do benefit from current arrangements, social movements are crucial – we will only move to a better system if we are willing to band together and act in political as well as economic solidarity.

Transformations

We live in a transformational moment. The year 2020 brought us an historic pandemic, the worst economic recession since the Great Depression, record-breaking temperatures, and an extraordinary surge in demands to come to terms with systemic racism. As daunting as these challenges are, they have also created the opportunity for a fundamental reimagining and restructuring of our economy, with the potential to finally come to terms with the consistent reproduction of wealth disparities and racial inequity.

For young people in America – the most racially diverse generation in our history – these issues are especially salient. This was the second major economic collapse in their early work lives, separated by just barely one decade, and the pattern has compounded the sense that the system itself is broken. For those most vulnerable in the US, the dysfunction has long been clear. With COVID-19 spreading, many low-wage and less educated workers lost their jobs and found themselves scrambling to pay rent to unforgiving landlords. Others contracted a life-threatening illness because their employers refused to provide adequate masking and social distancing, believing that human pain was just one more cost of doing business.

Indeed, the pattern of illness, death, and economic precarity has been deeply etched by racial and gender divides. Age-adjusted infection and death rates have been significantly higher for African Americans, Native Americans, Pacific Islanders, and Latinos. Continued occupational segregation has resulted in women and people of color suffering disproportionately from concentrated job loss, while also finding themselves over represented in the riskiest and least secure forms of work. Black Americans, lacking an adequate safety cushion due to long-standing racial wealth gaps, have struggled to pay bills. Immigrant Americans have been largely abandoned by a society that valued their labor but then decided to withhold aid if a family member happened to lack legal status.

That the revolt against the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery would inspire mass protest is perhaps unsurprising; the evidence of racism was already there to see in the way the COVID-19 crisis was playing out. But this also came on top of three and a half years of a Trump Administration seeking to provide racist and xenophobic targets for people’s sense of economic and political dislocation, even as America moved closer and closer to its destiny as a nation where no single ethnic group comprises the majority. With the scars so deep and the pain so searing, a new world is both possible and longing to be born.

Looking Back to Look Forward

But what will that world look like and what will be its economic underpinnings? How will we move beyond a system that has literally led many to their death and left others to a life of suffering? Can mutuality and solidarity become the basis for social reorganization, a new respect for the planet, and a more vibrant and inclusive economy?

The time for such big questions is now. History brings important turning points when the nature of our economy, the constellation of power, and the narrative that frames our politics are all up for grabs.5 Consider the Great Depression and how the New Deal of the 1930s ushered in an increased role for government, helped labor rebalance its relationship to capital, and provided broad social welfare programs, including unemployment insurance and social security. The importance of the public sector in stirring recovery was drilled home by both the experience of the war, and then the long post-war boom.

Alongside these important public policy developments was an economic story to help provide justification or rationale. This emergent Keynesian framework, unlike previous economic philosophies, accepted the possibility of inadequate demand on the macro side, as evidenced in our boom-and-bust cycles, and explained how a set of simple tools could pull an economy out of the ditch. It was not always the most elegant theory – subsequent economic theoreticians used more compelling equations – but it neatly legitimized an approach that sought to quell the self-interested tensions between business and workers by emphasizing growth and stability.6

But a key factor hobbled the long-term transformational possibilities: racism. This is an old American story. From the earliest days of the nation-to-be, notions of white superiority were key to taking Native land and enslaving Africans – that is, stealing land and stealing labor to amass capital – but they also proved useful to preserving elite power by dividing poor and working-class communities. For example, during the early colonial period, there was no concept called whiteness, and people of European descent were known by their country of origin.7 This began to shift after a 1675 rebellion against the Virginia colonial government led by Nathaniel Bacon and involving both white and Black indentured and formerly indentured servants, as well as still enslaved Africans. The colonial elite soon found a racial wedge – providing social advantages to poor whites while strengthening slave codes – and used these meager “wages of whiteness” to derail multiracial connections across class.8

Such a strategy was echoed in the supposedly inclusive New Deal, as putting together a political coalition that would secure the support of Southern Democrats led to policies that largely froze out Black, Indigenous, Asian, and Latino communities. Domestic work and agriculture were left off-limits for union promotion, labor enforcement, and social benefits, and the post-war wealth-building for a nascent middle class was racially constrained by restrictive and discriminatory practices in labor, government, and real estate markets. The New Deal was a limited deal – and that presented its own limitations. White workers may have won in a relative sense, but that threatened the political cohesion necessary to sustain more fundamental actions that could have truly rebalanced class power.

The limits of the Keynesian framework and the capital–labor accord for ensuring economic prosperity became clear in the 1970s. The explosion of unemployment and inflation – considered to be opposite poles of the assumed macroeconomic trade-off – led economists to look elsewhere for solutions. US corporations, facing increasing international pressure from new competitors, began a long march to disrupt the successful post-war pact that had guaranteed at least some workers a share of prosperity. The Civil Rights and Black and Brown power movements of the 1960s and 1970s signaled that others wanted their own seats on the economic bandwagon, triggering a retrenchment of social programs and the launch of a “war on drugs” targeting “hippies” and Black people that was championed by President Nixon and then expanded in the Reagan Administration.

Neoliberalism to the Rescue?

With the world shaking, Keynesian theory buckled. The neoliberal turn of the 1980s, resplendent under Thatcher in England, Reagan in the US, and the International Monetary Fund in the developing world, was on its surface about expanding markets, deregulating industries, and reducing government spending. But underpinning it was a surge of capital against labor and a resurrection of traditional (albeit reconfigured) economic thinking. With regulations curtailed, public sectors trimmed, and globalization let loose to prowl, financial capital came to dominate, real wages stagnated, and wealth accumulated in fewer and fewer hands. All along the way, the new arrangements were justified as reflecting the power of markets to shape a more benevolent destiny.

Neoliberalism also provided a convenient cloak for preying on the fears of racial inclusion in white America. It seems no coincidence that in his 1980s campaign for the presidency, Ronald Reagan gave a landmark speech on “states’ rights” just seven miles from Philadelphia, Mississippi – a place where three Civil Rights workers were famously slain in 1964 for their efforts to register Black voters. Reagan’s broader argument for cutting taxes, downsizing the government, and unleashing the market was stoked by racist imagery, including tales of “welfare queens” that evoked the image of Black women burdening white taxpayers. And many white Americans, who were quite willing to benefit from government support for education, housing, union­ization, and the other social benefits in the post-war period that were largely responsible for facilitating their ascent to the middle class, supported this shrinking of government social spending when confronted with the notion of extending these benefits to others.9

In short, neoliberal theory may have stressed the liberating power of markets to raise all boats, including imagining the ability of the market to compete away employment discrimination, but its political triumph in America was drenched in a racist vision that we needed to shrink the state so that one group of Americans could retain privilege. Of course, the group really retaining privilege were not all whites but the wealthy, with the top 1 percent of earners seeing their share of national income more than double between 1979 and 2007.10 Worker productivity rose by nearly 55 percent even as hourly compensation budged up a scant 4 percent over the same period.11

The Great Recession of the late 2000s was prompted by these stark disparities: the wealthy were so well-off that they turned to increasingly speculative financial instruments, while many others were so financially strained that they turned to subprime loans to capture the disappearing promise of homeownership. Racism was once again in the mix: when the first homeowners to be wiped out were mostly Black and Latino, it was easy for many Americans to think the damage would be cordoned off. The resulting crash could have been a major turning point: markets were failing, workers were stressing, and assets were disappearing. The election of a Black president flipped the script, signaling that maybe, just maybe, the old racist dog whistles would come up short. It seemed a promising time to put a dagger in the heart of neoliberal thinking.

But ideas take time to die and be reborn, and the tepid laundry-list policy response of the Obama Administration did little to launch a new economic narrative or restore faith in the power of the government to address the challenges. The Tea Party phenomenon, fueled by dollars from the Koch brothers and amplified by growing conservative media, cleverly played on old racial resentments about who would benefit from government intervention and portrayed the market as a protector rather than a threat to working-class well-being.

With that opportunity to transform America’s political economy frittered away, the subsequent election of Donald Trump heralded the perfect (and hopefully last) toxic combination of modern neoliberalism and old-fashioned racism. With a gigantic tax cut passed in 2017 that disproportionately benefitted the top 1 percent, gone was any pretense that neoliberalism and conservative economic policy were anything but coddling the rich, providing crumbs to the middle, and starving the poor.12 And with the Trumpian embrace of neo-Nazi protestors in Charlottesville and later of white supremacist insurrectionists at the US Capitol, gone too was any pretense that racist politics was not much more than a conscious strategy to divide working people and facilitate a white coalition that would act against its long-term economic interests.

With an economy shattered by COVID-19, America the object of global ridicule for its pandemic mismanagement, and protests against the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and so many more raging in the streets, an opportunity has been opened to create a different narrative, theory, and policy program. While the initial response has been the election of an historically moderate and establishment-oriented Joe Biden, what are the possibilities for something more bold and transformative? Can we learn from the limitations and racist mistakes of the past to craft a better response this time around? And can we go beyond a long list of policies and instead offer a compelling and coherent vision?

We think so. The COVID-19 crisis actually provides a powerful opportunity because the fundamental lessons of the pandemic are easy to see. First, we protect ourselves when we protect others – and so mutuality is important. Second, what was thought to be an equal-opportunity disease is actually a differential killer when unleashed against a pre-existing landscape of racism and inequality – and so we must center racial equity. Third, the work that is truly essential is not done by highly paid managers but by those in the care economy – but they will only be protected when movements rise to represent their interests.

Alternatives

The transformational opportunity we now face is not tied just to the conditions of the pandemic: worries about the future of work, the shrinkage of the social safety net, and the viability of the planet have been floating in the political ether for some time. One response to these economic uncertainties has been an emerging right-wing xenophobic populism in countries across the globe, prompting progressive policy makers and civic leaders to look for strategies that can calm nerves, build community across race, and propel us to a more prosperous and sustainable future.

Ambitious policy alternatives are proliferating. In the US, plans to eliminate student debt, provide Medicare for all, and invest in a Green New Deal have made their way into the public square. Around the globe, experiments in providing universal basic income, creating opportunities for participatory budgeting, and otherwise crowd-sourcing progressive initiatives are flourishing.13 But are we just looking at a scattered range of policy prescriptions? Or can we develop a common go-to economic “frame” that can provide coherence and consistency for a truly new approach?

Framing the Future

To understand the importance and power of a “frame,” consider the power of the neoliberal perspective.14 Ask a question (How do we ensure housing at all income levels? How do we expand employment? How can we end discrimination? How might we reduce greenhouse gas emissions?) and you get the same answer: free the forces of market competition to find the right price and the problem will be (mostly) solved. Critics of neoliberalism will rightly point to evidence of market imperfections and monopoly power. But the power gained by the consistency of the neoliberal approach and the guiding light it provides to moving forward cannot be denied.

The traditional liberal or progressive alternative has often involved an appeal to the public sector as key to setting the contours for exchange. Questions about securing housing, growing jobs, tackling discrimination, and securing the environment, are the terrain of “the government” that we imagine to be acting in the public interest. Yet the failures of state socialism – and the frequent shortcomings and restrictiveness of social welfare efforts, particularly in the US – have led many to be wary of excess state intervention. Added to the challenge: progressives, particularly those of color, know that state institutions are often captured by the highest bidder and used to reinforce racial and class hierarchies.

Moreover, while government clearly provides a platform for economic success – through education, public investment, environmental protection, and the like – most of our interactions occur in a private economy. In that realm, we need better regulation, to be sure, and we need to have government be a partner to people rather than just corporations. But we also need better norms of business and consumer behavior. In some sense, we need to turn to each other rather than just to the state, to mutuality rather than just enforcement, and to community trust rather than just state mandate.

Of course, the government can be a tool for mutual gain – it is the main way we come together to set the rules of the game and provide public goods. At the same time, when government does do the right thing – hike minimum wages, tackle discrimination, provide housing, or address the climate crisis – it is often because of social movements. When business interests are constrained, it is often through activism – union battles, “fair trade” campaigns, and the like – and not just government dictates. And when alternatives are created to show what is possible – including worker cooperatives and community land trusts – it is often due to energies of community organizers who seek not just to resist the old but to build the new.

This is why we stress throughout this volume the role of both mutuality and movements – that is, of solidarity. A new frame would answer the tough questions – how to ensure housing, provide meaningful employment, and sustain the planet – with answers based on the idea that we do better if we act together, and that we must band together to bend the rules that protect the interests of a few and stand in the way of cooperation of the many.

Solidarities and our Economy

That means that the starting point for an alternative economic frame is the recognition that people are not just individuals, but also members of broader social groups and communities; that people are motivated not just by self-interest, but also by caring for others and a desire for belonging; and that we can and should build our economy not on an embrace of individuality and competition, but rather on a sense of the commons and our shared destiny.

We are clearly not alone in that belief. Referencing the need for a “solidarity economy,” other theorists and activists have eloquently argued for a post-capitalist future in which community and worker ownership is widespread, economic decisions are democratically made, and social welfare replaces profits and the unfettered rules of the market as the guideposts for economic policy. These allies in the journey for an alternative economy point to the limits of current capitalist systems and the possibilities that a different organization of economic life might bring.

But we also want to stress that solidarity actually already exists throughout our current economy. An obvious example is the important role of caring labor, often unpaid, that goes into raising children, taking care of elders, and allowing those of different abilities to realize their highest potential. This is the deepest form of mutuality, it is absolutely essential to our economic and social activities, and yet it goes unrecognized (and, as we note later, undervalued) as the key building block it is.

But we often do not see mutuality even in what is traditionally seen as “the economy” because of the illusions neoliberalism has created – about self-interested individuals, “free markets,” and the need to separate our economy and the government. For example, mutualism can be glimpsed in peer-to-peer productions like Wikipedia and Linux; in collaborative teamwork in workplaces as diverse as manufacturing assembly lines, airlines, and marketing or user-design offices; and in the knowledge commons and information sharing that underpin technological innovations.

Mutualism also exists in the very underpinnings of a capitalist economy. As economic sociologist Fred Block eloquently argues, each basic market transaction actually involves other-regarding actions as well as self-interest: people only enter market transactions when they have some basic level of trust that the other party is not about to cheat.15 That trust is built in part on legal systems, making clear that markets cannot exist without government.16 But it is also based on the lived experiences of successful previous transactions and social norms that expect people and businesses to act within accepted boundaries that prevent trampling on the rights of others.

Recognizing the ways that mutuality already exists in our economy, and the social and economic costs of ignoring this, can help us build a vision that is large enough to cover and steer a complex modern economy. Cooperatives and alternative economic enterprises are valuable, but we also need to address a private sector that currently contains most of our employers at scale, and will likely play an important role in our economy for some time to come. Because of this, we need to devise systems that can either coax or force better behavior from business as well as from each other.

There is a distinct possibility of doing that now because there is a growing realization among many in the business class – just as in the Great Depression – that the current high levels of inequality and social conflict are corrosive to political and economic stability. We are aware of (albeit somewhat unimpressed by) the Business Roundtable’s 2019 declaration that corporations should serve stakeholders and not just shareholders.17 We will believe this statement of intent when we see the Roundtable turning down a tax cut or supporting a wealth tax. But it is important to acknowledge that the sentiment is there, even if partly because of worries of populist backlash, and that coupling it with people power could tame the worst impulses of capital, fuel grassroots efforts to build post-capitalist alternatives, and make for profound change in the medium term.

Changing the Story

So how can we develop such a major shift in economic thinking and practice? At a basic level, such a change requires three key things.

The first is facts. When challenging dominant paradigms, it can take a long, steady accumulation of research and evidence before people realize that what they believe is no longer accurate. In his well-known book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn makes a distinction between revolutionary science and normal science.18 Rather than simply making scientific progress through incremental accumulation of accepted facts and theories, new paradigms approach problems in ways that are often initially dismissed or ignored. But with sufficient accumulation of evidence and research, these new approaches can then completely replace older conceptions.

A useful example of this involves the research on the minimum wage. For decades, standard economics textbooks taught that raising the minimum wage ultimately hurts poor people, since raising the price of labor would inevitably lead to job loss. But decades of studies have now challenged this understanding: raising wages can lead to lower turnover and thus lower costs of training, higher motivation, and improved efficiencies, as well as greater product demand (since of course workers are also consumers), with all these forces offsetting any pressures for job loss.19 And with more facts in hand, there has been a profound shift within the economics discipline in our understanding of the effects of the minimum wage.

But of course, change comes as much from the heart as the head, and so facts also have to be connected to feelings. Neoliberalism appeals to “common sense”: it connects to our hopes for independence, our observations that markets often work, and our sneaking suspicion that the only way to get ahead is at the expense of others. Such a deeply embedded narrative does its own work; research papers in academic settings countering such obvious wisdom are unlikely to make a big difference in the public square.

The refashioning of such common sense is the work of narrative. In the case of the minimum wage, this was achieved in part through activists developing the notion of a “living wage.” Their basic premise – that if someone is working full-time, they should be paid enough to support their basic needs without public support – resonated deeply in those parts of us that understand the power of mutuality. As a result, the idea of lifting the bottom of the labor market gained widespread support in the 1990s and 2000s, providing a popular context for recognizing and embracing the empirical evidence of the benefits of raising the minimum wage.

Finally, shifting to new paradigms will always threaten some interests who are invested in old ways of thinking and acting – and so change requires force. This could be the force of the ideas and evidence themselves, but it often also requires political action to confront powerful actors and change the rules of the game. It was only when workers and their allies marched in the street and testified in city council meetings that the “Fight for $15” (which we will talk more about in chapter 6) was successful in actually getting minimum wage increases in cities and states across the country.

Force is also about creating institutions and infrastructure that reinforce a new paradigm. We have seen this in the way neoliberal thinking itself was institutionalized. For example, in her book Democracy in Chains, historian Nancy MacLean argues that public choice economics – a version of neoliberal theory that contends that the positive self-interest of market participants should not be overwhelmed by the nefarious self-interest of government bureaucrats – was propped up by the investments in thinkers and think tanks by billionaires who stood to profit from shrinking the state and constraining the will of the people.20