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

Link

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

Naomi Klein on Conspiracy Culture and “the Mirror World”: Let's Go Back to that "Collective Unsettling" and Make the World Anew

Check out this excellent interview of journalist Naomi Klein on her new book, Doppleganger: A Trip into the Mirror World. I like how she unpacks what I am sure so many—if not most of us—felt throughout the pandemic that continues into the present. Specifically, this consisted of a "collective unsettling," experienced by the "lockdown class" to not just see, but to be so perceivably impacted by the consequential societal inequities that had been unmasked. I appreciate Klein's analysis herein on how the pandemic resulted in 

"an absolute frontal confrontation with the logic at the heart of capitalism that tells you you’re on your own. You are an island. All of your successes are yours alone, and people who don’t have them, it’s their fault. " 

All of a sudden, a largely racialized workforce of frontline workers, such as those working in meat packing plants and Amazon warehouses, forced all to consider that they breathe the same air as the rest of us, too. Many wondered and grew concerned that they, too, have rights and that these workers' needs, rights, and risks are not only borne unevenly, but affect the whole. 

This was a hard pill to swallow under neoliberal, individualist capitalist thought that nevertheless appreciated in that moment government "largess" of eviction control and flexible working arrangements.

Citing Arundhati Roy's eloquent 2020 Financial Times piece on how the pandemic held promise as a portal to a new and better world, what started out as a fresh kind of hopefulness for societal change for some, myself included, got taken up and distorted by extremists.

After all, with what seemed to be a racial reckoning in 2021, many of us were hopeful that this heralded a new multiethnic, multiracial democracy where greater justice lives.

Klein's research illuminates a core strategy by the likes of Steve Bannon in taking up the rightful anger against big pharma and the elite and artfully flipping these sentiments to manufacture—via social media—xenophobia, racism, transphobia, and the like. She cautions against the online cruelty and de-platforming of her Doppelganger, former feminist, "Naomi Wolf"—with whom Klein is often confused—hence, the title of her book. De-platforming extremists, she cautions, hardly means that they're no longer a threat to democracy when people like her are able to balloon their following, for example, by turning coats and becoming regular spokespersons on the Steve Bannon Show.

I recently listened to this excellent interview of author Naomi Klein Youtube interview on Democracy Now! and encourage you to do the same if you prefer to listen to her talk about her doppelganger, Naomi Wolf, and how this led her into the mirror world of the far right.

I understand this "mirror world" of which she writes as largely a bait and switch strategy. First, your against big pharma. Next your against immigrants crossing the border. First it's about "ending all wars;" next, it's about starting a war with China. I look forward to reading this text. In the meantime, let's pause and consider Klein's thesis and analysis of the far-right's manufactured, dangerous, and conspiratorial “mirror world.” It should concern us all that Steve Bannon is forging, in Klein's words, an "international nationalist alliance, authoritarian alliance," with Wolf allowing herself to be a tool for that agenda while enriching herself.

A good, immediate first step for all of us is to listen for the authenticity of the specific policies that any pundit, politician, or marketer like Steve Bannon professes since the mirror world is about sowing confusion and capitalizing on issues that used to be important to the left. Geez, they are wide open in their intentions that it's about taking power. The world is so fearful and boy, can they sell you a dream they'll never deliver on. They haven't yet. They're happy to take your money though.

Let me read your policy proposal and strategy on China, Steve Bannon. How will you accomplish your expressed ends? 

In short, there is a vacuum that right-wing media is exploiting primarily to take power in the service of this unholy, "international nationalist alliance." For the record, China is a market-capitalist country, sometimes described as "socialism with Chinese" characteristics. My husband and I have been to China. They are beautiful people. Very kind and respectful. Incredible history and very ancient. Impressive and magisterial in so many ways. It saddens me that there are not better relations between our countries.

I think we should all go back to that space of a "collective unsettling," that hopeful portal, and make the world anew. THAT's the conversation we should be having and that gets structured out with these intentionally diversionary politics. Weapons of mass distraction, I call them. 

Let's unite and do this by getting involved at the grassroots level. Join or re-commit to a coalition, a civil rights organization, a nonprofit, and any organization doing important work and premised on the humanization of all. It's going to take a lot of work, so the effort itself must rejuvenate. 

Sí se puede! Yes we can!

-Angela Valenzuela

#JoinTheMovement

References

Klein, N. (2023). Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World. MacMillan books.

Klein, N. (2023, Sept. 13).  To Know Yourself, Consider Your Doppelgänger, New YorkTimes. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/13/opinion/naomi-klein-wolf-doppelganger.html

Lewis, H. (2023, Sept. 12). From Feminist to Right-Wing Conspiracist: What Naomi Wolf's Odyssey can teach us about seeing patters where they don't exist, The Atlantic. Retrieved: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/10/naomi-wolf-klein-doppelganger-book/675120/

Naomi Klein on Conspiracy Culture and

 “the Mirror World”

Sep 15, 2023 | 2:00 AM

View on the original site.

Naomi Klein, author, professor, journalist, and contributing editor at The Intercept, has ventured into the far-right “mirror world,” exploring the movements and figures promoting conspiracy theories, misinformation, and its hold on large segments of society. This week on Deconstructed, we bring you a live conversation between Ryan Grim and Klein at the George Washington University Amphitheater, organized by Politics and Prose. Klein and Grim discuss Klein’s newest book, “Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World.” They discuss the labyrinthine world of conspiracy theories and how the right has effectively sowed confusion and capitalized on issues abandoned by the left.

Ryan Grim: Welcome to Deconstructed. I’m Ryan Grim.

On Wednesday of this week, I interviewed Naomi Klein about her new book, “Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World,” which begins with Naomi following her doppelganger, other Naomi — that’s the feminist-turned-Steve-Bannon-ally, Naomi Wolf — down a series of rabbit holes.

Describing her journey to these shadowlands, she also looks into the mirror, and asks all of us to look in the mirror as well, and ask what role we’ve played in ceding turf to the right, or abandoning principles — like skepticism of corporate greed and big pharma, opposition to censorship and mass surveillance, and so on — that have long been the domain of the left. By abandoning that territory, did we play a part in clearing the ground for the mirror world? And how can we reclaim our confidence and our voices in such disorienting times?

We spoke at George Washington University at an event hosted by Politics and Prose. That independent bookstore, by the way, will also be hosting a reading for my own forthcoming book, “The Squad: AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution.” I’ll be in conversation there with my Breaking Points colleague Krystal Ball on November 27th.

Now, here’s Naomi Klein with a brief reading from her new book, followed by our conversation.

[Deconstructed intro theme, continued.]

Presenter: Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in giving a warm and enthusiastic welcome to Naomi Klein and Ryan Grim.

Naomi Klein (Reading from “Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World”): In my defense, it was never my intent to write this book. I did not have time, no one asked me to, and several people cautioned against it. Not now, not with the literal and figurative fires roiling our planet, and certainly not about this.

“Other Naomi,” that is how I refer to her now; this person with whom I have been chronically confused for over a decade. My big-haired doppelganger. A person whom so many others appear to find indistinguishable from me. A person who does many extreme things that cause strangers to chastise me, or thank me, or express their pity for me. The very fact that I referred to her with any kind of code speaks to the absurdity of my situation.

For a quarter of a century, I have been a person who writes about corporate power and its ravages. I sneak into abusive factories in faraway countries and across borders to military occupations. I report in the aftermath of oil spills and Category 5 hurricanes. I write books of big ideas about serious subjects.

And yet, in the months and years during which this text came into being, a time when cemeteries ran out of space and billionaires blasted themselves into outer space, everything else that I might have written appeared only as an unwanted intrusion, a rude interruption. In June 2021, as this project began to truly spiral out of my control, a strange new weather event, dubbed a “heat dome,” descended on the southern coast of British Columbia, the part of Canada where I now live with my family.

The thick air felt like a snarling, invasive entity with malevolent intent. More than 600 people died, most of them elderly. An estimated 10 billion marine creatures were cooked alive on our shores. An entire town went up in flames. It’s rare for this out-of-the-way sparsely populated spot to make international headlines, but the heat dome made us briefly famous.

An editor asked if I, as someone engaged in the climate fight for 15 years, would file a report about what it was like to live through this unprecedented climate event.

“I’m working on something else,” I told him, the stench of death filling my nostrils.

“Can I ask what?”

“You cannot.”

There were plenty of other important things I neglected during this time of feverish subterfuge. That summer, I allowed my nine-year-old to spend so many hours watching a gory nature series called Animal Fight Club that he began to ram me at my desk like a great white shark. I engaged in all of this neglect so that I could, what? Check her serially suspended Twitter account? Study her appearances on Steve Bannon’s live streams for insights into their electric chemistry? Read or listen to yet another of her warnings that basic health measures were actually a covert plot orchestrated by the Chinese Communist Party, Bill Gates, Anthony Fauci, and the World Economic Forum, to sow mass death on such a scale, it could only be the work of the devil himself?

My deepest shame rests with the unspeakable number of podcasts I mainlined, the sheer volume of hours lost that I will never get back. A master’s degree worth of hours. I told myself it was research. That, if I was going to understand her and her fellow travelers who are now in open warfare against objective reality, I had to immerse myself in the archive of several extremely prolific and editing-averse weekly and twice-weekly shows, with names like “Q Anon Anonymous” and “Conspirituality,” that unpack and deconstruct the co-mingling worlds of conspiracy theories. wellness hucksters, and their various intersections with COVID 19 denial, anti-vaccine hysteria, and rising fascism.

This, on top of keeping up with the daily output from Bannon and Tucker Carlson, on whose shows Other Naomi had become a regular guest. “I feel closer to the hosts of Conspirituality than to you,” I whimpered one night into my best friend’s voicemail.

I told myself I had no choice. That this was not, in fact, an epically frivolous and narcissistic waste of my compressed writing time, or of the compressed writing time on the clock of our fast-warming planet. I rationalized that Other Naomi, as one of the most effective creators and disseminators of misinformation and disinformation about many of our most urgent crises — and as someone who has seemingly helped inspire large numbers of people to take to the streets in rebellion against an almost wholly hallucinated tyranny — is at the nexus of several forces that, while ridiculous in the extreme, are nonetheless important, since the confusion they sow and the oxygen they absorb increasingly stand in the way of pretty much anything helpful or healthful that we humans might at some point decide to do together.

Thank you.

[Audience clapping.]

Is Capitalism Racist? by Nicholas Lemann

"Racial capitalism" is more than just a catchphrase or slogan. This piece by Nicholas Lemann resurrects a 1944 text titled  “Capitalism and Slavery,” authored by Eric Williams that provides conceptual grounding for a new generation of scholars looking at this intersection.

I like the idea of dispelling with the notion of slavery as a “peculiar institution,” as coined by a former U.S. Vice-President John C. Calhoun in 1850, a defender of slavery.  Calling it "peculiar" makes it seem not solely special, but also exceptional and not the horror that it actually was. 

Lemann and other scholars today make the case today that both racial capitalism and racial capitalists are core to American social, political, and economic history itself.

-Angela Valenzuela

#RacialCapitalism

Books

May 25, 2020 Issue

Is Capitalism Racist?

A scholar depicts white supremacy as the economic engine of American history.

By Nicholas Lemann | May 18, 2020 | The New Yorker

Before the Civil War, Southern slaveholders used to claim that their labor system was more humane than “wage slavery” in the factories of the industrializing North. They didn’t win that argument, but the idea took root that the South, during and after slavery, did not have a true capitalist economy. In 1930, twelve Southern writers (all white men) published a collection of essays, titled “I’ll Take My Stand,” that opened with a declaration that they “all tend to support a Southern way of life against what may be called the American or prevailing way; and all as much as agree that the best terms in which to represent the distinction are contained in the phrase, Agrarian versus Industrial.” To believe that the South was economically different didn’t entail being a defender of slavery or segregation; it didn’t even have to mean you were a political conservative. When I was growing up in New Orleans, among the descendants of antebellum sugar and cotton planters, efficiency and industriousness were not highly valued, and all the general social indicia—income, health, education—were much lower than they were in the North. This condition seemed connected to the exploitation and political disempowerment that went along with a racial caste system. It was worse than capitalism, not part of capitalism.

But for many years now historians have disputed the old Southern agrarian notions about how the South related to capitalism. This form of revisionism, which has blossomed in the academy and beyond during the past decade or so, takes its inspiration from “Capitalism and Slavery,” published in 1944 by Eric Williams, a young historian who later became the first Prime Minister of an independent Trinidad and Tobago. The book, which argued for the centrality of slavery to the rise of capitalism, was largely ignored for half a century; now its thesis is a starting point for a new generation of scholarship. Large-scale Southern slaveholders are today understood as experts in such business practices as harsh, ever-increasing production quotas for workers and the creation of sophisticated credit instruments. Rather than representing an alternative system to industrial capitalism, American plantations enabled its development, providing the textile mills of Manchester and Birmingham with cotton to be spun into cloth by the new British working class. As Walter Johnson, one of our leading historians of slavery, wrote in 2018, “There was no such thing as capitalism without slavery: the history of Manchester never happened without the history of Mississippi.”

The new history of slavery seeks to obliterate the economic and moral distinction between slavery and capitalism, and between the South and the North, by showing them to have been all part of a single system. Inevitably, this view has generated intense arguments, not only about how integral the slave plantation was to the national and global economies but also about whether we should regard the end of slavery as an important breakpoint in American history or merely a rearranging of an oppressive system into an altered but still essentially oppressive form. Critics of the new history of slavery chastise it for downplaying developments like Britain’s abolition of slavery in its colonies and the American Civil War, and for overstating slavery’s importance to the growth of the early American economy, even if the plantation was a particularly ruthless business enterprise.

The arguments about slavery imply larger arguments about America. At least among respectable academic historians, the days of triumphant historical accounts of the greatness of the United States are long past. But for some the national enterprise can still be seen as a slow and often interrupted progression toward a more just and democratic society; for others, it amounts to a set of variations on racial hierarchy and economic exploitation. Once slavery is positioned as the foundational institution of American capitalism, the country’s subsequent history can be depicted as an extension of this basic dynamic. This is what Walter Johnson does in his new book, “The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States” (Basic). The study demonstrates both the power of the model and its limitations.

How Environmental Destruction Fosters Epidemics and the World Over by Dennis Sanders

This is one of the best big-picture views I've come across in awhile on how not just "human activity," a euphemism, but capitalism, our economic system, is destroying the natural habitats from which viruses emerge. This has involved the mass destruction of forests in order to raise farm animals as well as for the harvesting of palm oil production, fracking, including the "out-of-control extraction of oil shale from Canadian tar sands," and so on, all at an alarming pace. 

The unending search for precious metals and minerals together with the wild animal global trade means that humans are entering spaces where deadly pathogens live, facilitating their transfer from animals to humans.  Along with an international re-commitment to the The Paris Agreement, supporting a Green New Deal that seeks to wean us from fossil fuels, and a global reforestation project, it makes great sense as this piece posits, to tax industries like mining, agriculture, oil and gas to fund the restoration of the planet.

I am encouraged by Presidential candidate Joe Biden's plan to get our country to a 100% clean energy economy with net-zero emissions by 2050. From everything I have learned about climate change after having taught a college course on it, that timetable itself is late, even if it's realistic.  However, it's infinitely better than no leadership at all as we are witnessing from a president whose rollbacks on environmental policies favor more pollution and a loss of protection for endangered species.

To all of this, I would add that we as the late Brazilian educator, Paolo Freire admonished, we need to put all student learning at the service of social justice. Can you imagine how powerful it would be if every kindergartner in the world were responsible for planting a small tree and watching it grow? This will guarantee that tree's survival, but also all of humanity's, as well. It's noteworthy that for many if not most, COVID is impacting their respiratory system. To me, this sounds like Mother Earth telling us that Her respiratory system is suffering, as well. 

She can’t breathe. And if she can’t breathe, we’re doomed as a human species. 

Forewarned is forearmed. None of us want either for ourselves or our children and grandchildren an Earth that is uninhabitable. Please do read David Wallace-Wells' book, “The Uninhabitable Earth,” to grasp where we are headed that strangely, the COVID virus—that has arrested our customary comings and goings—is signaling to all of humanity, regardless of whether your state, city, county, or country got it under control.

It's clear that our country and world are desperate for leadership that not only believes, but also fully embraces the science of climate change, lest millions more perish from epic diseases and illnesses like COVID together with devastating environmental effects of our Earth mother convulsing with equally epic wildfires, droughts, hurricanes, hail storms, earthquakes, pestilence, and tornadoes. 

Our Earth is out of balance and this COVID moment that we virtually all experiencing in some form or fashion as a planet should heighten our resolve for bold, new leadership with courage to address the spinning of a world that is out of control—even as this is an artifact of our own creation.

-Angela Valenzuela

How Environmental Destruction Fosters Epidemics and the World Over

by Dennis Sanders | Freedom Socialist (Aug.-Sept. 2020)

The outbreak of Covid-19 has turned the world on its head. It has shut down entire economies and destroyed the equivalent of 305 million full-time jobs globally just in the second quarter of 2020, according to the International Labor Organization. In the U.S. and many countries, it has exposed the racial and gender inequalities that have always existed, as well as the starvation of public health systems and preparedness for emerging diseases.

For many in the Americas and Europe, it seems as if the virus came out of nowhere. Others in Asia and Africa (from which many of the new diseases have emerged) have seen this before.

In fact, scientists specializing in virology, biology and the climate have been studying human encroachment into wild habitats and destruction of species and ecosystems for decades. They have increasingly concluded that there is a causal relationship between environmental degradation and the creation of deadly human diseases. A recent study found that new infectious disease outbreaks have more than tripled every decade since the 1980s.

The balance of nature altered. The profit-based system we live under has drastically eroded biodiversity and fragmented ecosystems. With the expansion of large urban centers, ongoing extraction of materials from the earth, deforestation, and land development for large-scale industry and factory farming, increasing numbers of natural ecosystems are being destroyed or fragmented. Human proximity to animals that they previously would rarely come in contact with increases, putting everyone at greater risk.

Scientists consider viruses, as part of nature’s diversity, to be in a “gray area” between living and non-living. They cannot self-replicate, but they can multiply in a host. They can cause disease in that species, or others that they “jump” to. In intact ecosystems, human beings are seldom impacted.

But in our fractured environment, the risk is breathtaking. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control estimates that 60 percent of known infectious diseases in people are “zoonotic,” meaning they are passed from other animals to humans.

Three of every four diseases that have emerged among humans in the last 30 years are of this type. Zika, HIV, Hendra, Avian Flu (H5N1), Nipah, Swine Flu of 2009, SARS, MERS, Ebola, and Covid-19 are all zoonotic diseases. A study by public agencies in Kenya, Great Britain and Vietnam estimates that these diseases kill over 2 million people annually and infect over one billion.

Market domination of the planet and its resources is depleting all species and the places they live at an alarming rate.

What It Means to Be Liberal by Michael Walzer in Dissent Spring 2020

If you like political theory, you'll want to sink your teeth into this piece by editor emeritus of Dissent, Michael Walzer, who tries to set the record straight in a thick read that's good for the college classroom.  The words, “liberal" and "liberalism," are concepts that we use casually often while assuming that others know what we mean when we use them.

Walzer's article demands that we step back to consider—as he illuminates in detail—the complexities of the concepts, “liberal" and "liberalism," while conceptually sorting out their various strands. 

I like his view that the word, "liberal," is best understood as a "pluralizing adjective," a descriptor with moral underpinnings, that plays out differently across social, cultural, economic, and political contexts.  Expressed differently, he suggests that liberalism is less about who we are and more about "how we enact our ideological commitments." 

-Angela Valenzuela

What It Means to Be Liberal

Like all adjectives, “liberal” modifies and complicates the noun it precedes. It determines not who we are but how we are who we are—how we enact our ideological commitments.

Michael Walzer  Spring 2020

The construction of the Statue of Liberty in Paris (Branger/Roger Viollet via Getty Images)

Is liberalism an “ism” like all the other “isms”? I think it once was. In the nineteenth century and for some years in the twentieth, liberalism was an encompassing ideology: free markets, free trade, free speech, open borders, a minimal state, radical individualism, civil liberty, religious toleration, minority rights. But this ideology is now called libertarianism, and most of the people who identify themselves as liberals don’t accept it—at least, not all of it. Liberalism in Europe today is represented by political parties like the German Free Democratic Party that are libertarian and right-wing, but also by parties like the Liberal Democrats in the UK that stand uneasily between conservatives and socialists, taking policies from each side without a strong creed of their own. Liberalism in the United States is our very modest version of social democracy, as in “New Deal liberalism.” This isn’t a strong creed either, as we saw when many liberals of this kind became neoliberals.

“Liberals” are still an identifiable group, and I assume that readers of Dissent are members of the group. We are best described in moral rather than political terms: we are open-minded, generous, tolerant, able to live with ambiguity, ready for arguments that we don’t feel we have to win. Whatever our ideology, whatever our religion, we are not dogmatic; we are not fanatics. Democratic socialists like me can and should be liberals of this kind. I believe that it comes with the territory, though, of course, we all know socialists who are neither open-minded, generous, nor tolerant.

But our actual connection, our political connection, with liberalism has another form. Think of it as an adjectival form: we are, or we should be, liberal democrats and liberal socialists. I am also a liberal nationalist, a liberal communitarian, and a liberal Jew. The adjective works in the same way in all these cases, and my aim here is to describe its force in each of them. Like all adjectives, “liberal” modifies and complicates the noun it precedes; it has an effect that is sometimes constraining, sometimes enlivening, sometimes transforming. It determines not who we are but how we are who we are—how we enact our ideological commitments.