Lessons of What Never Was: “Un-Justifying” Capitalism to Imagine Alternative Futures

This chapter reflects on possible economic futures by looking at the apparent margins of contemporary capitalism. In the everyday practices through which people sustain their socioeconomic worlds, and in the more intentional adaptations and workarounds by which some communities seek to disconnect from capitalism, we can detect partial responses to the challenges of imagining a different economic future. As a cultural model of and for the world, capitalism shapes ways of seeing human behavior along the lines of basic assumptions of capitalist thought and social norms shaped by dominant institutions of capitalist practice. Taking this manifold shaping force as processes through which projects of capitalism effect their own justification, I propose an “unjustified” approach to economic futures to better identify alternatives already present and emergent. The chapter draws on economic anthropology and other social sciences of capitalism as these document the incompleteness of capitalism as realized in everyday life. I argue that avoiding the justifying “-ism” of an axiomatic capitalist worldview allows for a more empirical engagement with possibilities arising from the nuanced complexities of the present. [Anthropology; Capitalism; Community; Culture; Degrowth; Economy; Globalization; Neoliberalism].