“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.” — Ursula K. Le Guin
Oligarchy and capitalism are literally burning up our world. A small few dozen people hold decision-making that impact the entire world. Some of that is locked behind “fiduciary responsibility,” but even the number of those holding stocks in corporations has been skewing wildly. I don’t think I need to sell my audience on all this, so I’ll just leave this point here. The question is: “what can we do differently?”
I think of this in three phases, which are all deeply linked to each other: how do we take hoarded wealth away from those who have it; how do we redistribute in a way that responsibly shifts, rather than all-out collapses, our existing systems; and what does living in the new world look like? There’s a bonus question of how to prevent future hoarding from happening embedded in each of these.
Socialism has some of this. I’d agree the Soviets had it the most right to date. Anarchism warns us away from hoarding power, and wealth as power. Ostrom talks about how there is a third, secret option that is neither markets nor surveillance for allocating resources. Pikkety talks about how we’re well past every other threshold for violent revolution based on inequality. And so what would it look like for us to throw off these chains and do something more care-full, more labor-forward, more “no war but the class war“? Can we do it with minimal suffering incurred, and a more stable outcome?
Margaret Killjoy made this great chart
I don’t think I have all the answers. I also believe that solidarity is born out of shared work, and shared work begins with being in conversation with each other. So join me on Sept 11 for a salon on what wealth redistribution might look like.
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