Quitting Capitalism
Joan Westenberg's "How to Quit Capitalism" begins with an acknowledgement that "capitalism" as we live within and struggle against it today is less an economic system (though of course it's that, too) than it is a "philosophical and ideological force that shapes our lives" -- and it is that to such an extent that it comes to seem there is no outside to capitalism, no means of escape. And yet she notes that there are in fact ways to pull oneself outside that ideological force. The first steps involve really acknowledging the ways that we're caught up in capitalist standards and assumptions, including competition, hierarchy, commodification, and more -- the issues that I have argued that the academy is being undermined by, and for which we must find alternatives. Westenberg describes an onion-peeling process through which one might gradually come to recognize, believe in, and embrace those alternatives, finally coming to work on enabling those alternatives for others, providing everyone opportunities to opt for localized production, scaled-down consumption, community engagement, and more.
Near the end of her essay she focuses on ways of embracing digital post-capitalism, and these were -- perhaps unsurprisingly -- the elements that I found most exciting. The first two of the ten actions she lists under this heading are "Support Open Source and Free Software" and "Use Decentralized Digital Platforms." I've dedicated a lot of my work in recent years to building free, open-source, decentralized platforms for scholarly communication, and it's been exhilarating. And depressing. Exhilarating to imagine new possibilities for communication among scholars that can move entirely outside the extractive, corporatized frameworks of conventional publishing. But depressing in seeing how hard it is not just to sustain that work financially, but to convince scholars themselves to choose the alternatives that we create. And that difficulty points directly to the issues I wrote about in Generous Thinking: because the reward structures of academia are so over-determined by the capitalist ideology Westenberg describes, even the scholars whose work includes a deep critique of capitalism often gravitate toward the platforms and communication mechanisms that will provide the greatest benefits within the existing structures. And so BlueSky rather than Mastodon, because it's easier to build a large audience. And conventional journals rather than experimental publications. And so on.
"Gravitate" is all too appropriate as a metaphor here: these platforms and tools exercise enormous force on all of us, keeping us locked into the ways things are done and requiring us to build significant escape velocity to get outside their grasp. One of the key goals for what remains of my career is helping build and promote the booster rockets, if you will, that might help more of us quit relying on the platforms provided by and serving the interests of capital and instead support community-owned and governed alternatives.
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