Freedom, Not Abandonment: The Democratic Case for a Social Market Economy, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D. June 2, 2026

Freedom, Not Abandonment: The Democratic Case for a Social Market Economy

by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

June 2, 2026

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I just finished listening to Clara E. Mattei’s Escape from Capitalism: An Intervention—a great Father’s Day gift, by the way, especially for anyone who enjoys a thoughtful challenge to economic common sense. 

Interestingly, the audiobook is currently available for free on the Barnes & Noble website, which feels delightfully “uncapitalistic.” I have only listened to the audiobook version, but as a non-economist, I found it remarkably accessible. One advantage of listening is that you can slow down the reading speed, giving yourself time to chew on concepts and findings that might otherwise pass by too quickly.

Mattei helps us see that capitalism is not only an economic system; it is a political order that defines freedom in a very narrow way. It tells us we are free when markets are free, even if people lack health care, housing, education, retirement security, or meaningful political voice. 

This is why the concept of a social market economy is useful. It offers a way to reject both market abandonment and caricatures of socialism by insisting on two democratic commitments at once: a social floor beneath everyone and limits on the corporate power that distorts public life. 

In this sense, the struggle for public goods and the struggle against corporate capture are not separate struggles. They are both struggles to make freedom real.

In the U.S., we are often taught to associate capitalism with liberty, opportunity, self-reliance, and prosperity. We are told that markets reward hard work, private enterprise creates abundance, and public goods are either unaffordable or inefficient. Yet for most people, our current economic order increasingly means debt, precarity, unaffordable health care, unaffordable housing, stagnant wages, weakened public schools, and the constant fear of falling behind.

Mattei’s intervention is powerful because she does not treat capitalism as neutral. Capitalism does not simply organize markets; it organizes people’s lives, fears, dependencies, and imaginations. It teaches us that unemployment is natural, poverty is personal failure, inflation must be solved by disciplining workers, and public institutions must always be cut, consolidated, or privatized in the name of fiscal responsibility.

Early in Escape from Capitalism, Mattei grounds this argument in the staggering scale of inequality that capitalism produces and then normalizes. She notes that in the United States, the wealth of the top 1 percent now rivals that of the bottom 90 percent, even as tens of millions of people continue to live in poverty (Mattei, 2026). This is not a small imbalance or temporary distortion. It is a social order in which wealth accumulates upward while insecurity spreads downward.

Mattei also turns our attention globally, showing how capitalism links poverty in one place to wealth accumulation elsewhere. In one vivid example, she discusses Mumbai’s Dharavi, one of the world’s largest informal settlements, where workers generate enormous economic value while much of that value flows away from them and into distant circuits of capital (Mattei, 2026; also see Behal, 2026). The point is not simply that inequality exists. The point is that inequality is organized through systems of ownership, labor, finance, and policy that make deprivation appear natural while making accumulation appear deserved.

This is one of Mattei’s most important insights: the economy is not a machine governed by natural laws. It is made and remade through policy, law, banking, taxation, budgeting, education, and ideology. When we are told, “there is no money,” “there is no alternative,” or “we have no choice,” we should pause. These are rarely neutral statements. More often, they are political decisions disguised as necessity.

Mattei helps us see that capitalism survives not only by extracting labor and wealth, but by making alternatives appear impossible. It narrows our sense of democracy. We may be allowed to vote, but we are not encouraged to ask whether democracy should extend into the economy, the workplace, the university, or the systems that determine whether people have health care, housing, education, food, clean water, and retirement security.

This narrowing of democracy is not only economic. It is political. The same system that concentrates wealth also allows concentrated wealth to shape elections, legislation, courts, universities, and public policy. 

This is where Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission matters so deeply (Supreme Court of the United States, 2010; Weiner, 2025).

If Mattei helps us see how concentrated wealth disciplines economic life,

Citizens United helps us see how concentrated wealth distorts democratic life. The 2010 Supreme Court decision did not simply expand “free speech” to include corporations. It expanded the political power of corporations, wealthy donors, and dark-money networks to influence public life while ordinary people are told that democracy still means one person, one vote.

The logic is painfully familiar. In the economy, corporations are treated as engines of freedom even when people are abandoned to debt, low wages, medical bankruptcy, and insecurity. In politics, corporations and wealthy interests are treated as “speakers” in the democratic process even when their money overwhelms the voices of ordinary citizens. In both cases, power disguises itself as freedom.

Photo Credit: AP Kelleher

That is why Hawaii’s recent effort to challenge the legacy of Citizens United is so important. In 2026, Hawaii enacted a first-of-its-kind law aimed at limiting corporate and dark-money influence in elections by redefining corporations as artificial entities created by the state, rather than natural persons entitled to the same political rights as human beings (Kelleher, 2026). 

I interject here to recommend two documentaries that make these dynamics vivid for students: Kimberly Reed’s Dark Money and CNN’s Deep in the Pockets of Texas. Dark Money examines the influence of untraceable corporate money on elections through the case of Montana and the real-life consequences of the Citizens United decision. 

Deep in the Pockets of Texas, reported by Ed Lavandera, brings the issue home by showing how a small number of wealthy donors have shaped politics in Texas, from school boards and city councils to the state legislature. Both films work especially well in the college classroom because they help students see that campaign finance is not an abstract legal issue; it is a struggle over who gets heard, whose interests count, and whether democracy can survive when money speaks louder than people.

The law is expected to face legal challenges, but its moral and democratic significance is already clear. Hawaii is asking a question the entire country should be asking: Why should entities created by law be allowed to dominate the very democracy that gives them legal existence?

Hawaii’s law matters because democracy cannot build or sustain a social market economy if corporations are permitted to dominate the political system that determines what counts as public policy, public investment, and the public good. Economic inequality becomes political inequality when corporations and billionaires can pour money into elections, shape public narratives, influence legislation, and punish dissent. 

We should not be surprised, then, when public schools are defunded, universities are disciplined, Ethnic Studies is attacked, labor is weakened, and privatization is presented as common sense. These are not isolated developments. They are part of a larger political economy in which concentrated wealth seeks to govern public life.

This is why Mattei’s work matters so deeply for those of us concerned with public education, higher education, Ethnic Studies, Mexican American Studies, gender studies, democracy, and the future of Texas. 

The attack on public goods is not separate from the attack on knowledge. The dismantling of diversity, equity, and inclusion offices; the consolidation or weakening of fields of study; the narrowing of curricula; and the privatization of education are all part of a broader political economy. They tell us that what belongs to the public must be reduced, managed, disciplined, or sold off.

Mattei gives us a language for naming this. Capitalism does not only exploit labor; it also narrows democracy. It tells us that education must serve the market rather than the public. It tells universities to behave like corporations, students to think of themselves as consumers, faculty to produce measurable outcomes rather than cultivate critical thought, and communities to treat their histories, languages, and ways of knowing as luxuries rather than foundations for democratic life.

This is precisely why Ethnic Studies is so threatening to authoritarian and market-driven forms of governance. Ethnic Studies teaches that people are not merely workers, consumers, taxpayers, or data points. It teaches that communities have histories, memories, struggles, epistemologies, and claims on the future. It teaches that democracy is not only about procedure; it is also about power, belonging, recognition, and repair.

Capitalism depends on organized forgetting. It asks us to forget colonization, slavery, segregation, land theft, labor exploitation, gendered violence, and the long histories of resistance that made democracy more real. It asks us to forget that public education itself emerged from struggle. It asks us to forget that the weekend, child labor laws, public schools, civil rights protections, bilingual education, voting rights, and workplace protections were not gifts from the wealthy. They were won by organized people.

At the same time, we need language that invites rather than alienates readers. In the United States, the word “socialism” often evokes fears of expropriation, state control, or the denial of individual differences and aspirations. Those associations are real, even when historically incomplete or politically exaggerated. For many readers, the word can shut down conversation before it begins.

So perhaps a more helpful way to speak is in terms of a social market economy: an economy that preserves individual freedom, entrepreneurship, private initiative, and personal ambition, but refuses to abandon people to economic ruin. A social market economy recognizes that freedom is hollow if losing a job, getting sick, aging, having a child, attending college, or needing housing can push a person or family into crisis.

A social market economy, understood through the lens of a caring economy, does not abolish markets or individuality; it insists that markets be regulated and oriented toward the human needs—health, education, housing, care, safety, and democratic voice—that make freedom real. 

This is not merely a semantic move; it is a conceptual shift that refuses both market fundamentalism and caricatures of socialism, opening political imagination beyond the false choice between market abandonment and state control, toward a democratic economic arrangement in which individual freedom is strengthened—not weakened—by a social floor beneath everyone.

This is where Amartya Sen, Nobel laureate in economics, helps complete the argument. If Mattei shows how capitalism narrows freedom and Citizens United shows how corporate power distorts democracy, Sen gives us a fuller language for what freedom actually requires. 

In Development as Freedom, Sen argues that genuine development should be measured not simply by income or market growth, but by the expansion of people’s real freedoms—their actual capabilities to live lives they have reason to value (Sen, 1999). His argument is important because he rejects the narrow idea that freedom is only “freedom from government.” Freedom also requires positive social conditions. A person who is formally “free” but lacks health care, schooling, food, housing, safety, or political voice is not meaningfully free.

That distinction matters. Public health care, public education, affordable housing, child care, and retirement security should not be dismissed as charity, dependency, or government overreach. They are collective investments in human capability. They expand the range of real choices available to people and make it possible for individuals and communities to participate more fully in economic, civic, cultural, and democratic life.

A society with a strong social floor does not eliminate individuality. It makes individuality more meaningful. People can take risks, start businesses, pursue education, care for family members, change jobs, create art, or speak politically when they are not living one emergency away from collapse. A welfare system that prevents people from hitting rock bottom economically is not the enemy of freedom. It is one of freedom’s preconditions.

But this requires more than social programs. It requires democracy protected from corporate capture. A social market economy cannot flourish if the political system itself is flooded with corporate and dark money. Public goods require public power. Public power requires democratic accountability. And democratic accountability requires that human beings—not corporations, artificial entities, or billionaire-funded networks—remain at the center of political life.

These questions are urgent in Texas. We are living through a moment in which public officials claim to defend freedom while constraining what can be taught, studied, named, or debated. They claim to protect taxpayers while redirecting public resources toward privatization. They claim to promote excellence while undermining the very programs that help historically excluded students see themselves as knowledge producers, leaders, and authors of the future.

When public institutions are weakened, communities lose democratic capacity. When curricula are narrowed, students lose historical memory. When universities are disciplined by political power, faculty lose academic freedom. When public goods are privatized, ordinary people lose access to the resources that make meaningful freedom possible. And when corporate money dominates elections, the people most harmed by these decisions have the least power to stop them.

For Texas, this is especially consequential. Our state’s future is diverse, multilingual, multiracial, and young. Yet our political leadership continues to legislate against that future by attacking DEI, Ethnic Studies, public education, voting rights, and democratic participation. These attacks are often justified in the language of efficiency, neutrality, excellence, or fiscal restraint. Mattei helps us understand that such language is not innocent. It is often the vocabulary through which power protects itself.

To escape capitalism, then, is not simply to imagine a distant alternative. It is to reclaim the present by insisting that health care, education, housing, retirement, clean water, public knowledge, and democratic participation are not mere commodities. They are conditions of collective life. Freedom is not being abandoned to the market. Freedom is not choosing among unaffordable options. Freedom is not debt. Freedom is not silence in the face of political intimidation. Freedom is the ability of people and communities to shape the conditions under which they live, learn, work, remember, and dream.

This is why the defense of Mexican American Studies, African American Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, Indigenous Studies, and public education is not a narrow academic matter. It is part of a larger democratic struggle. These fields teach us to see the world historically, relationally, and structurally. They expose the myths that justify inequality. They remind students that the present was made—and therefore can be remade.

Mattei’s great contribution is to remind us that capitalism is not destiny. It is a political order, and political orders can be challenged. Hawaii’s challenge to Citizens United reminds us that corporate power is not destiny either. It, too, is a legal and political arrangement. It, too, can be contested.

The first step is intellectual: to stop mistaking domination for freedom, austerity for responsibility, privatization for innovation, market dependence for democracy, and corporate spending for speech. The next step is collective: to build institutions, movements, curricula, laws, and public policies that invest in people rather than discipline them.

That is the work before us. Not charity. Not nostalgia. Not reform around the edges of a system that produces abandonment by design.

The work is democratic reconstruction.

The work is reclaiming the public good.

The work is recovering freedom itself.

References

Behal, A. (2026, April 15). One of Asia’s richest men is grabbing sprawling slum and crushing its economy. Pulitzer Center. https://pulitzercenter.org/projects/one-asias-richest-men-grabbing-sprawling-slum-and-crushing-its-economy

Kelleher, J. S. (2026, May 14). New Hawaii law targets corporate influence in politics after Citizens United ruling. Associated Press. https://apnews.com/article/corporate-campaign-money-citizens-united-hawaii-71a28bc7e8f6e0279b31e999f222519a

Lavandera, E. (Reporter). (2022, June 24). Deep in the pockets of Texas [Television special]. CNN. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7B3PTuADIHQ

Mattei, C. E. (2026). Escape from capitalism: An intervention. Simon & Schuster.

Reed, K. (Director). (2018). Dark money [Film]. PBS Distribution; POV. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Money_(film)

Sen, A. (1999). Development as freedom. Alfred A. Knopf.

Supreme Court of the United States (2010). Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/558/310/

Weiner, D. I. (2025, January 29). Citizens United, explained, Brennan Center for Justice. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/citizens-united-explained

Beyond the Myth: Rethinking Meritocracy in Education and Society, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Beyond the Myth: Rethinking Meritocracy in Education and Society

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

September 2, 2025

For generations, we’ve been told that education in the United States is a meritocracy—that if you work hard, study diligently, and play by the rules, you can rise as far as your talent will take you. It’s the story of the “American Dream” translated into classrooms and campuses. But for anyone paying close attention, this story is less truth than myth. Meritocracy suggests that educational outcomes are solely about individual effort. Yet persistent disparities by race, class, gender, and language tell a different story. 

Some students start the race miles behind, while others inherit head starts in the form of privilege, networks, and resources. To cling to meritocracy is to ignore history, power, and systemic inequality. If we are serious about democracy, we must stop pretending that meritocracy delivers justice and instead imagine what a truly liberatory education could be.

Rather than treating education as a contest where a few winners emerge, we reimagine success as the ability of all children to thrive. Education must be about collective flourishing, not exclusion. True equity requires more than the promise of opportunity; it demands addressing deeply unequal starting points and ensuring that outcomes are not predetermined by race, class, or zip code. Equity-driven pedagogies already point the way. 

Culturally sustaining pedagogy argues that schools should nurture rather than erase students’ home languages and cultures (Paris & Alim, 2017). Yosso’s (2005) framework of community cultural wealth highlights the rich forms of capital—aspirational, familial, social, linguistic, navigational, and resistant—that marginalized students carry into classrooms. And Freire’s (1970/1998) critical pedagogy insists that education should prepare students not simply to adapt to unjust structures but to question and transform them.

Source: Schools Matter

Meritocracy is upheld not just through ideas but through the machinery of schooling. Practices like tracking and high-stakes testing place students on narrow paths early, often based on biased measures. 

Standardized tests and admissions practices reward wealth and cultural privilege more than effort, while school funding tied to property taxes guarantees uneven opportunity from the start. To move beyond meritocracy, these structures must be dismantled, and resources redistributed so that a child’s future is not dictated by neighborhood, language background, or family income.

Perhaps nowhere is the myth of meritocracy more visible than in our obsession with testing. These exams, presented as “objective,” disproportionately punish students of color, bilingual learners, and those from low-income families (Au, 2009; Valenzuela, 2005). Because scores track most closely with family income, they measure privilege more than potential. Worse, they narrow the curriculum, pushing out art, history, and critical thinking in favor of endless drills (Au, 2009). 

Students are reduced to data points and teachers to test-prep technicians. Low scores are framed as individual failures rather than reflections of systemic inequality, perpetuating deficit narratives that work to reinscribe Eurocentric cultural dominance. Far from advancing equity, high-stakes testing suppresses the very cultural wealth and talents that students bring to school.

Moving beyond this obsession requires recovering cultural frameworks that define education differently. In Latina/o culture, being bien educado/a—well-educated—refers not to grades, degrees, or credentials but to respect, reciprocity, and responsibility to community. This ethic challenges the individualism of meritocracy and reframes education as a public good essential to democracy. It calls on schools to replace competition with cooperation, to cultivate belonging, and to ground learning in dignity and care.

Policy, too, must confront legacies of exclusion head-on. Affirmative action and targeted supports remain necessary correctives to centuries of systemic inequality. Community-university-school partnerships can bring resources into underserved neighborhoods while honoring families as co-educators and decision-makers. Democratic accountability must mean more than bureaucratic checkboxes; parents, students, and communities deserve a real voice in shaping curriculum, discipline, and funding priorities.

Perhaps the boldest step is to abandon meritocracy as the ultimate measure altogether. Drawing inspiration from Sen’s (1999) Development as Freedom and Nussbaum’s (2011) Creating Capabilities, the capabilities approach shifts the focus from test scores and credentials to what people are actually able to do and be.

While neither Sen nor Nussbaum cite Paulo Freire directly, their visions align with his insistence that education must be a practice of freedom. Freire (1970/1998) argued in Pedagogy of the Oppressed that true learning cultivates critical consciousness—the ability to question, imagine, and act upon the world in transformative ways. 

In Pedagogy of Freedom (1996/1998), he further emphasized that teaching should nurture autonomy, responsibility, and ethical engagement. Similarly, Sen (1999) and Nussbaum (2011) contend that development and education should be measured not by narrow economic or meritocratic outcomes—like GDP or test scores—but by the expansion of people’s real freedoms and capabilities. 

Read together, Freire’s pedagogy of liberation and the capabilities approach point toward a shared horizon: an education that resists domination, affirms human dignity, and equips learners to participate fully in democracy and in shaping more just futures. Education, then, is not a scarce privilege but a human right, to be measured by how well it reduces inequality and advances collective well-being.

Critiquing meritocracy is not about dismissing effort or perseverance. It is about dismantling the lie that effort alone determines who succeeds and who struggles. It is about exposing how privilege tilts the field for some and not others.

The challenge before us is to imagine—and fight for—an education system that lifts everyone, not just a select few. One that affirms students as cultural beings, equips them as agents of justice, and measures its worth not by how many are excluded but by the communities it strengthens. Education must be redefined as a shared project of democracy, care, and liberation. Only then will we move beyond the myth of meritocracy and realize what education has always promised at its best: not a sorting mechanism for the few, but a foundation for freedom.

References

Au, W. (2009). Unequal by design: High-stakes testing and the standardization of inequality. New York: Routledge.

Freire, P. (1970/1998). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum.

Freire, P. (1996/1998). Pedagogy of freedom: Ethics, democracy, and civic courage. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Nussbaum, M. C. (2011). Creating capabilities: The human development approach. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Paris, D., & Alim, H. S. (2017). Culturally sustaining pedagogies: Teaching and learning for justice in a changing world.New York: Teachers College Press.

Sen, A. (1999). Development as freedom. Alfred A. Knopf.

Valenzuela, A. (2005). Accountability and the privatization agenda. Educational Policy Analysis Archives, 13(41), 1–24.

Yosso, T. J. (2005). Whose culture has capital? A critical race theory discussion of community cultural wealth. Race Ethnicity and Education, 8(1), 69–91.