Free The New Prophets of Capital by Nicole Aschoff Page B

get by. Conservative opponents of welfare exploited this disparity, stoking anger among those getting no support toward those receiving (meager) state support. In contrast, Social Security is a benefit enjoyed by nearly everyone: only 4 percent of the population is excluded from receiving Social Security benefits, and 87 percent of Americans want to preserve Social Security for future generations. Creating the space to radically de-commodify our lives will require that social gains such as free higher education, single-payer universal health care, and a minimum basic income be made available to everyone regardless of their income.
    The immediate goals of projects and ideas that embrace the principles of democratization and de-commodification may vary, but their long-term goal is always to make people’s everyday lives better. To achieve these goals, groups and projects must emphasize a final principle: redistribution. The top 20 percent of households control nearly 90 percent of all wealth in the United States, while the super-elite (the top 0.1 percent) control more than 20 percent of all wealth. People in power of course downplay inequality. They say that just because a few people are extravagantly wealthy doesn’t mean the rest of us can’t be rich as well. And it is not only people in power who say this. Americans cherish their belief in meritocracy. They believe that if you work hard your circumstances and wealth won’t determine your chances of success. This may hold for a small sample of the population, but at a systemic level it is patently false. Extreme concentration of wealth, enabled by tax laws favoring the rich, inhibits democracy and de-commodification in a fundamental way, starving the public treasury and eliminating the means to provide a good life for everyone. Since wealth creation is a collective process, a wealth tax would provide a way for wealth to be shared collectively, while a robust public treasury could ensure that the rights of all people to housing, food, health, education, and a clean environment are met.
    These three principles don’t constitute a magic formula, nor will such ideas and projects change the system overnight. There are no shortcuts. But there is possibility. In this present moment, characterized by crisis, uncertainty, and anxiety a new spirit of capitalism is being formulated. So far, the loudest voices defining the contours of the new spirit are those of the super-elite. People with money and power are preaching a new spirit of capitalism that absorbs and displaces radical criticisms of the status quo. Sheryl Sandberg, John Mackey, Oprah Winfrey, Bill and Melinda Gates, and others like them are developing a new ideology for why capitalism is the only, and best, system possible.
    This doesn’t have to be the case. At the end of the day, for capitalism to function most of us must believe in the system and voluntarily devote our energies to it. But these existing beliefs and norms are not primordial or fixed. They can change and evolve. Collective projects and radical visions can foster new dreams and ideas and different beliefs and norms about how we should organize our lives and society. Instead of thinking about how to fix capitalism, we can start thinking about a different kind of society. We can imagine a world designed for the needs of people instead of profit, and we can get to work building it.
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    1 NTanya Lee and Steve Williams, “More Than We Imagined: Activists’ Assessments on the Moment and the Way Forward,” Ear to the Ground Project, eartothegroundproject.org .

Further Reading
    In this short book I have drawn on the work of many scholars, distilling their analyses and frameworks to make a straightforward argument. Inevitably, the essence of what makes these works great is lost in such a process, so any reader interested in the topics discussed should turn to the original source material. Below is a condensed list of works