We need to delegitimize the often hidden and unconscious way that money and the wealthy rule the world, says Marjorie Kelly in a thoughtful new book
Kelly and the Democracy Collaborative were among the early leaders in the movement toward shared ownership, with their innovative Cleveland Coop which generated jobs, new businesses, and democratic wealth creation linked to a huge hospital. But she’s decided that just focusing on the positive is not going to create the world we need. We need to challenge and upend the dominant paradigm, the way we let wealth rule and set the rules, the way we are forced to live within that frame.
Myth busting, changing the unconscious way we think is what’s needed, Kelly says in Wealth Supremacy: How the Extractive Economy and Biased Rules of Capitalism Drive Today’s Crises. As we did when we uprooted apartheid, or worked against anti-gay bias, or racial discrimination, we need to delegitimize the bias baked into our society and legal system that lets capital dominate.
She suggests pranks as a way forward, like when people suggested a few years ago that the users should buy twitter, causing people to question whether the then massive and popular social media platform should be sold to its users.
“In our theory of system change, pranks, renaming, and subversive acts are part of the delegitimizing efforts that can undermine the current system and empower a movement. Renaming helps us to see the water in which we swim,” Kelly says.” It happened in the abortion debate where new terms like reproductive freedom repositioned the dialogue.”
When you rename, you call out bias and provide a platform for building power. The #MeToo movement began as a hashtag and built real world change, for example.
The idea that workers are not members of corporations, but are resources to be deployed is part of the dominant myth. But the strength of the drive for unions, post-pandemic when people realized that to the big corporations they were just human resources to be turned into commodities, their lives put in danger to keep corporate profits on track, shows that the myth is breaking. It is being undermined even more.
At Neighborhood Economics: San Antonio, we will be focusing on the broad movement toward shared ownership. Societal attitudes toward the power of capital are changing, and new funds and financial platforms are creating the economy that shows that undermining the old myth of capital and replacing it with an economy where everyone can thrive is well on its way to becoming a reality.