Half of all adults in the U.S. will develop at least one mental illness during their lifetime, with 45 million experiencing psychiatric disorders in any given year. Suicide rates are currently at a thirty-year high, substance abuse has become epidemic, and a new culture of online connectedness thinly masks a phenomenon of social isolation. From city to suburbia, virtually everyone has either suffered or knows someone who has.

Most instances of mental illness go untreated, owing to a combination of social stigma and lack of access to care. The more fortunate among us will be prescribed regular meetings with a therapist who promises to fix us and help us adjust ourselves to polite society, possibly with the aid of medication to correct our “chemical imbalances.”

But with the symptoms so widespread in our population, we ought to ask: what if correcting ourselves is not enough? What if the problem runs much deeper: that distress, misery, and loneliness are woven into the very fabric of our social system? We have long known that our social conditions — everything from our physical environment, to socioeconomic background, to prevailing cultural beliefs — exert overwhelming influence over our psychological well-being. It’s time, then, that we started to be precise about what exactly is at the root of the mental health crisis; it’s time we identified this system by its name: capitalism.

An Anxious Society

At the heart of many mental health problems is a perceived lack of control over one’s circumstances, or fear of external forces. According to Irish psychiatrist Peadar O’Grady,

The term ‘anxiety’ is used particularly when the threat is not immediate or is unclear, but it is fear by another name… Whether the particular mental illness does not involve major disorganization of thought or perception (traditionally called neurosis) or is severe with disorganization of thought or perception (psychosis) or brain functioning (Delirium and Dementia), fear is often a central component of suffering and distress.

In this light, the connections between political economy and mental illness become clear; what is capitalism, after all, if not a system that rests upon the great majority of the population living in constant fear and insecurity? For forty years, wages have been stagnant or falling for most households, while those who are fortunate enough to have a steady job typically work longer hours than the average medieval peasant. Sky-high rents push neighbors out of their homes, wrenching apart communities and putting people on the streets. Social media keeps us ever more connected online, while walling us off in the real world. Pressures and expectations set by corporate marketing departments degrade our self-image and induce eating disorders in teenagers. Public spaces are scarce and increasingly privatized, locking out those without the means to pay for the luxury of human interaction (how many places can you think of where you can sit down for an hour and chat with a friend, without buying something or paying a fee?).

The Psychology of Markets

Yet capitalism’s reach extends much further than its economic effects; it also shapes our ideology and how we perceive our place in the world. Modern-day capitalism, with its unshakable faith in deregulated markets, privatization of the public sphere, and austerity budgets, has of course contributed to our financial misery, leading to mass hopelessness and anxiety. But far from being confined to economic policy, contemporary capitalism (often called “neoliberalism”) also embodies a philosophical belief that self-interest and competition, not cooperation, should pervade every aspect of our lives. In short, our world is shaped in the image of the market. For those in distress, Margaret Thatcher’s oft-cited mantra, “There is no such thing as society,” sends the most disturbing possible message: “You’re on your own.”

The psychological toll of this market-extremist thinking is ubiquitous and measurable. A long line of social science research has shown that unemployed people are much more likely to become depressed; after all, under the reigning ideology, our self-worth is measured by our economic output. Moreover, since the market is (we are told) a level playing field, with no single actor appearing as the obvious coordinator, those who happen to be losers in this global scramble ostensibly have no one to blame but themselves. In such a world, it is extremely dangerous to fall below average — to be deemed inadequate, too lazy or incapable of pulling one’s weight, dependent on government handouts, and ultimately a burden on society.

Most of us intuitively understand this game and its stakes, which is why we set out very methodically to climb the corporate ladder and keep our resumes in top shape. This careerist mentality also seeps into our social interactions, as we are constantly spiffing up our Facebooks, uploading perfectly saturated Instagrams, and flouting our wokeness in Twitter arguments, all to market ourselves and develop our personal and social brand. These are not the actions of a human being in their natural state, but rather a creature modeling itself after the capitalist firm, an institution bestowed with the legal mandate to relentlessly maximize profits — social, ethical, and environmental consequences be damned. The corporation checks off so many of the traits usually assessed for psychopathy — manipulativeness, shallow affect, lack of long-term goals, aversion to responsibility — that legal scholar Joel Bakan called it, in his book The Corporation, “a pathological institution.” If we ever encountered a person who sought only to pursue self-interest, they would be regarded as psychopathic; yet increasingly, this is precisely what we are doing and becoming.

An Engine of Alienation

Beyond these direct threats to our material and psychological wellness, modernity also seems to be accompanied by an inescapable feeling of general emptiness, isolation, and lack of meaning, which so many existential philosophers and social theorists have attempted to capture and understand. Some, such as Durkheim, studied how religious communities (or lack thereof) contribute to suicidal tendencies. One historical figure too often omitted in contemporary discourse, however, is the young Karl Marx. In his “theory of alienation,” developed in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and other texts, Marx showed that the meaninglessness and isolation of modern life is baked into capitalist economic relations.

To do this, Marx asked us to imagine the pre-industrial artisan — the shoemaker, the baker, the tailor — who worked not for a capitalist, but for themselves. Such an independent producer retained control over their work and the entire creative process, so that their product was something they could be proud of and see themselves in; moreover, they had the satisfaction of seeing their product go to immediate use, fulfilling a human need. “Our products,” Marx concluded, “would be so many mirrors in which we saw reflected our essential nature.” Labor was a point of joy, meaning, and human connectedness.

Not so under capitalism, when one toils in the factory or office for a wage. Here, the worker is a replaceable commodity who does what the boss demands; as a result, labor is used not as an outlet for creative self-expression, nor to fulfill the needs of our fellow human beings, but rather to produce a profit. The daily act of work serves as proof of our unfreedom rather than of our humanity; the very product that rolls off the production line appears as an object alien to us, rather than as a manifestation of our individuality. In Marx’s words: “The activity of the worker is not his spontaneous activity. It belongs to another. It is a loss of his self.”

The loss of meaning and agency at work — where we spend most of our waking hours — is a huge blow to the psyche in and of itself. However, the capitalist system generates alienation on an even grander scale. As social beings gifted with powerful mental faculties, we are naturally wired to cooperate and to create. But because capitalism forces us to fight over jobs and resources, we view each other not as collaborators and companions, but as competitors. In time, this system would come to dictate our social relations; now, in an era of competition and profit maximization, we see each other as objects — as means to our various ends, rather than multi-dimensional beings. Indeed, research done by social psychologists such as Tim Kasser have found that individuals who internalize “the materialistic ethos of corporate culture” exhibit “more anti-social activities” and “lower empathy.” In short, the capitalist wage relation alienates us from our product, while the broader labor market alienates us from one another.

Reflecting on the present day, is this not precisely what has transpired? We hate our jobs and have little control over what we do — and often have no idea what purpose it serves anyway. Work feels draining rather than satisfying, because we understand that those hours do not belong to us; our lives begin when work ends. In the pittance of spare time we have left, we try to consume ever more stuff, hoping to satisfy our craving for ownership and expression. But alas, commodities don’t provide lasting fulfillment; only genuine human interaction and authentic self-expression can. The solutions presented by capitalism inevitably fail to cure the malaise capitalism itself created.

Medicalizing the Psyche

What can be done about all this? Today, the severity of the mental health crisis is now widely recognized. There is an international movement comprising public health experts, social workers, and academics, who have set about very seriously and sentimentally to raise awareness of mental illness, to destigmatize the seeking of professional help, and to improve access to care.

Yet the contemporary medical reaction to this epidemic almost never asks the difficult but necessary questions: Why are people physically and emotionally isolated? Why do we feel such lack of control over our own destinies? Which structures in society give rise to these conditions?

Because it lacks a critique of the social systems at the heart of the crisis, the mental health community remains singularly focused on symptoms rather than causes, and ends up peddling palliatives, not cures. As anyone who has seen a psychotherapist knows, the premise is that the subject is “sick” and therefore needs to be fixed, whether by medication, adjustments in lifestyle, or ultimately changing one’s mindset. In recent years, members of the psychiatry community have come out against the social ideology of the field, and especially of the dominant paradigms of therapy such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. As psychoanalyst Robert Fancher writes in Health and Suffering in America,

The basic norm of cognitive therapy is this: Except for how the patient thinks, everything is okay. Reality is not pathogenic. Just think straight and life can be good enough. A person should…convince herself of a generally optimistic view of how life works in this time and place — and confine her imagination to possibilities consistent with this. She should quell passions that would put her at odds with the status quo. She should not let her mind drift off into thoughts about life that might make her conclude that she…is unlikely to find fulfillment.

Once we have reduced this complex social phenomenon to the apolitical realm of individual medicine, it follows that the solution to the broader mental health epidemic is presented as merely public “awareness” and “destigmatization” — essentially efforts to funnel people into the therapy pipeline.

But as we have seen, mental distress arises in large part because of the discrepancy between human needs — connection, security, meaning — and the alienating social conditions offered by society. It is the plight of the initially sane person reacting to a mad world, to which the modern psychiatry industry would have us believe that the solution is to improve the individual, whether through therapy sessions or psycho-drugs. The late cultural theorist Mark Fisher summarized the situation thusly:

The privatisation of stress is a perfect capture system, elegant in its brutal efficiency. Capital makes the worker ill, and then multinational pharmaceutical companies sell them drugs to make them better. The social and political causation of distress is neatly sidestepped at the same time as discontent is individualised and interiorised.

Therapeutic Struggle

How can we go beyond mainstream psychiatry, and build a movement to advance mental health at the societal level? Today, there are slivers of hope: a growing awareness among psychiatrists that social and cultural norms influence mental health and diagnoses; psychology research that critically examines the effects of neoliberal policy and values; and renewed interest in worker cooperatives, which promote greater worker happiness. All of these directions should be explored, nurtured, and funded.

Ultimately, however, we will need to think bigger. Psychiatry, no matter how well-intentioned, is largely structured as a capitalist enterprise, and does not address the causes of the problem. Worker cooperatives, meanwhile, are still subject to the competitive dictates of the market. The present situation calls for a new, radical politics that de-commodifies as much as possible, including and especially human labor. In other words, in the end we must still confront and defeat capital, the cancer that poisoned modernity.

And there is no time to lose: part of the reason why fascism is on the rise across the West is because it gives people meaning, social cohesion, and a sense of purpose. This is of course a cohesion built around the exclusion of marginalized people, but it is a seductive offer that technocratic liberals are ill-equipped to confront. Fortunately on the socialist left, we have arguably the most powerful ideological tools available. It is curious and sublime, though perhaps not coincidental, that the very act of leftist politics is one of social healing, of solidarity and collective struggle — the very opposite of isolation and alienation. It is our task to bring this emancipatory language and action back into the political realm.

Further Reading

How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation

Capitalism is Dangerous for Your Mental Health was originally published in Reason in Revolt on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In Asian American circles, few movies from the past decade have been as hotly anticipated as Crazy Rich Asians. It boasts the first all-Asian cast in a major Hollywood film since 1993’s The Joy Luck Club, including such names as Constance Wu of Fresh off the Boat, Ken Jeong of Hangover fame, Silicon Valley’s Jimmy O. Yang, and Michelle Yeoh of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. For Asian America, a group typically relegated to depictions as unattractive math nerds or exotic kung fu masters, it’s easy to see why Crazy Rich Asians is heralded as a cultural triumph. Many of us wanted to watch this movie take off, and to carry with it our aspirations of entering the U.S. mainstream at last.

Sure enough, there is something about Crazy Rich Asians that speaks to many Asian Americans. Every scene is exaggerated, yet essentially accurate: Rachel Chu, the Queens-raised young adult, mustering her best Mandarin to appeal to the elders; Eleanor Young, the tiger mother, as family enforcer; all the unwritten laws, like how the entire room immediately rises from their seats upon the arrival of the matriarch, Ah-Ma. All of these details make clear that Crazy Rich Asians is, unlike most similar works, a movie for the children of immigrants — not a generic American audience, nor for Asians observing from abroad.

Unfortunately, this is about all the “progress” the movie makes in terms of bringing an authentic Asian American lens to the silver screen. Upon closer examination, the way in which the film speaks to its audience, far from being subversive or even progressive, is one that reinforces the status quo of American racial hierarchy.

Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics

The movie opens with a barrage of wealth porn, as Nick Young whisks Rachel away to Singapore in a private first-class suite—and we, the audience, are taken along for the ride. We witness Rachel and her college friend Peik Lin entering the Youngs’ unimaginably lavish estate; Nick’s wealthy cousins posing for Vogue in million-dollar earrings; a bachelor party atop a spiffed-up freight ship. These exotic thrills overwhelm us with awe and give us a taste of the good life, lowering our critical guard for what’s to come. Distracted by the novelty of seeing Asian faces onscreen, we find ourselves warming up to some of the most powerful people on Earth.

For Asian Americans, this first half of the film presents an enticing fantasy of what life could be like—not just one of luxury, but freedom from the marginal status we currently occupy in white America. However, by propping up the Youngs as the embodiment of that freedom, the movie suggests a specific means to that end: Asians must become the rulers of global capitalism. Never mind that this economic structure requires the systematic trampling of the vast majority of society, including and especially other Asians—Singapore itself is home to 1.3 million foreign workers, largely dark-skinned people, who perform the low-wage drudgery that enables the royalty to live in unconscionable splendor.

At the same time, the Youngs are, as far as capitalists go, not the crass, tasteless variety; they’re not just crazy rich; they’re the right kind of rich. Art deco designs line their homes, jazz bands grace their soirées, and a venerable family history secures their right to rule—the Youngs entered Singapore essentially as settler-colonizers in the 19th century, when it was, to use Peik Lin’s derisive characterization, “nothing more than jungle and pig farmers.” These are not the Gateses, Trumps, or Buffetts of the world; these are F. Scott Fitzgerald’s untouchable Buchanans.

When we talk about whiteness, what typically comes to mind is a person’s skin color or country of origin. But whiteness as a social construct has historically been highly malleable; there was a time when even Irish and Eastern European immigrants to the U.S. were not considered white. Whiteness has always been in dialogue with class, culture, and geopolitics. The Youngs and their circle may not be white in skin tone—though, as many commentators have noted, the cast is conspicuously light-skinned for a film set in Singapore—but in almost every other way, they are truly the white people of Asia; perhaps whiter, in their mannerisms, their tastes, and their history, than any actual white people most of us interact with today.

Manufacturing the Model Minority

Of course, as the Youngs are technically the antagonists in this story, it would be unfair to take their values to be those of the movie overall. To get at the film’s core message, we have to look to its protagonist Rachel, ostensibly a hardscrabble American immigrant who courageously battles the Singaporean aristocracy.

But what kind of resistance does Rachel put up, exactly? As soon as the wealth porn subsides and Rachel fully realizes the challenge ahead of her, she sets out on a specific task: to earn the respect of the Youngs and their elite circle. At the bachelorette party, Nick’s ex-girlfriend Amanda conspires with other women to shake Rachel’s confidence: they make a series of snide comments about her, and, in Godfather-like fashion, plant a dead fish in Rachel’s bed, beneath a line of bloody text calling her a “gold-digging bitch.” Rachel’s reaction to all this is one of classic American grit: after burying the fish in the beach, she vows to continue smiling and acting normally. With the help of Peik Lin and Nick’s cousin Oliver, she arrives at the wedding sporting a sparkling new dress, brushes aside other courtesans to pose for a photo, and schmoozes with the Malay princess Itan in her exclusive front row. Rachel’s insistence on suffering countless acts of humiliation and rejection, and rebranding herself as a new socialite, stands for a yearning not unlike one that Asian Americans feel in real life: to be accepted by society’s elite; to become one of them.

These efforts culminate in one of the final scenes, when, over a game of mahjong littered with powerful symbolism, Rachel reveals to Eleanor that Nick proposed to her, but she turned him down. And why is that? Is it because she wants to live a life free from the clutches of overbearing in-laws? Because she insists on her right to determine her own future, independent of the dictates of Eleanor, Ah-Ma, and the whole regime? No; it’s because, Rachel declares, “I don’t want him to lose his mom.” She proceeds, adamant on claiming the throne of virtue:

I just wanted you to know: that one day — when he marries another lucky girl who is enough for you, and you’re playing with your grandkids while the tan hua’s are blooming, and the birds are chirping — that it was because of me: a poor, raised by a single mother, low class, immigrant nobody.

Thus in the span of a few minutes in a gambling house, Rachel convinces Eleanor that she is the daughter-in-law sought by the Young family elders — someone who will put family, husband, and tradition above self. Soon after, Eleanor approves their marriage and the movie ends in celebration.

It is in this latter half that Crazy Rich Asians reveals its true ideology. It’s the story of a Stanford-pedigree, rags-to-upper-middle-class Asian American woman peddling respectability politics — the kind of politics in which we promise to be upstanding citizens who play the cello, get into Yale, and uphold family values, never disrupting the rhythm of polite society. This liberal assimilationist approach has been tried for decades in the U.S., and what do we have to show for it? Today, Asian Americans are considered respectable, yet not respected; either fetishized or emasculated, but rarely loved; approaching, in some contexts, the status of honorary whites, yet still perpetual foreigners.

Beyond Representation

To do better, we have to move beyond thinking of our goal in terms of mere representation. In every area of social and political life, movements originally intended to improve the lot of marginalized groups are regularly co-opted by the powerful, under the vague banner of “inclusivity.” Representation in the existing order is not subversive; in fact, it lends a certain legitimacy to our own shackles. This is why asking “Are we represented?” or even “How are we represented?” often brings a toothless analysis of a work of art or literature. A more useful notion might be that of struggle: which culture, class, or other social group do we struggle against, and how?

To the extent that Crazy Rich Asians depicts any sort of struggle, it’s one in which the petite bourgeoisie tries to obtain the recognition of the haute bourgeoisie. On top of that, the movie depicts the enemies of Asian Americans as other Asians overseas — not, apparently, the white society we face at home. It’s worth noting that the other blockbuster “diversity” film of the year, Black Panther, suffers from a similar problem. As philosopher Christopher Lebron notes,

In 2018…we are given a movie…where the only redeemed blacks are African nobles. They safeguard virtue and goodness against the threat not of white Americans or Europeans, but a black American man, the most dangerous person in the world.

For a racist, capitalist America, these sorts of films are the furthest thing from threatening. Fortunately, better examples can be found just a bit outside the mainstream: in the recent film Sorry to Bother You, low-wage workers at a call center in Oakland rise up against their bosses and demand better conditions, with an Asian American man leading the charge to unionize and strike. Joined by masses of disgruntled (and largely Black) workers, they successfully revolt against an eerily Amazon-like corporation and the modern police state.

Sorry to Bother You offers an insightful lesson: A truly radical film must correctly identify the oppressors and depict deliberate, organized, mass struggle against them. It also demonstrates how racial struggles can be revolutionary: rather than showing individuals triumph through personal grit, a truly liberating work would introduce the notion of solidarity between marginalized people, leading to mass action.

Crazy Rich Asians does just the opposite, encouraging minorities to learn how to cope with oppression on their own. Ultimately, the film embodies an ideology that ruling elites are all too happy to embrace: a select few people rule the world, while the rest of us have to learn to get along with them; some cultures are truly valued, while the rest of us can only hope to become more like them. As Asian Americans, we ought to reject this assimilationist consensus. Rather than strive for respectability, we should endeavor to be dangerous.

Further Reading

• Why 'Crazy Rich Asians' Makes Us Cry
• One Way That 'Crazy Rich Asians' Is a Step Backward

Further Viewing

• Sorry to Bother You (2018)
• Gook (2017)

In ‘Crazy Rich Asians,’ Asian America Forges its Own Shackles was originally published in Reason in Revolt on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Is it ethical to dedicate one’s life to making money through capitalist businesses, with the intent of later using it for social good?

Let’s leave aside the practical question of whether someone can effectively preserve their ethical code while engaging in a lifetime of potentially unethical behavior, or what the measure of “social good” is. To get to the heart of the matter, let’s assume that you will be the same person you are now in all respects, except that you will be equipped with the financial resources to effect a major change that is unquestionably good for society. The question is whether it is permissible to acquire those resources as a capitalist industrialist—someone who makes a profit from hiring others (at a salary or wage) to produce goods or services that are sold on the market.

In an age in which it is increasingly fashionable to pledge a fraction of one’s income to charity (like a carbon offset for your conscience) or even to take on miserable finance jobs to maximize donations, it seems that the answer ought to be in the affirmative. However, a radical, critical look at this issue suggests otherwise.

A Means to an End

Imagine that the year is 1830 and we ask, “Is it ethical to own and accumulate slaves in order to use the wealth to achieve socially positive ends?” We may very well be able to contrive a twisted scenario in which a particular person accumulating slaves could be a net positive for society. And yet regardless of how much good it purports to achieve, we react with horror because quite simply, the ends do not justify the means.

But the modern question on our hands is not very different, as wage labor is merely an indirect form of enslavement. As Noam Chomsky has quipped, “Free people do not rent themselves to others.”

The notion of wage labor as wage slavery is perhaps shocking to a modern audience in the capitalist West, yet was plainly understood by everyone from the Roman politician Cicero, who observed in his treatise De Officiis,

Vulgar are the means of livelihood of all hired workmen…for in their case the very wage they receive is a pledge of their slavery.

to Frederick Douglass, who in 1883 concluded:

Experience demonstrates that there may be a slavery of wages only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the other.

Even the New York Times, that notorious bastion of anti-capitalist subversion, decried in 1869 the rise of Northern wage labor, “a system of slavery as absolute if not as degrading as that which lately prevailed at the South”.

Wage Slavery 101

What is it about wage labor that caused all these non-socialists to compare it to chattel slavery?

The first observation we make is that wage workers are exploited. If a business owner hires you at $X an hour, it is because they anticipate gaining more than $X from the product of your hour of labor. If this were not the case, the capitalist would have no reason to run the business. This gap between the value of an hour’s product and the hourly wage paid out to the worker, which Marx called the rate of exploitation, implies that a wage earner never gets the full value of their labor.

One might protest that by the turbulent nature of business, not every venture or hiring decision pays off, and so the owner is entitled to the profits for having taken on risk. But a burglar who breaks into your home also takes a risk; are they entitled to your laptop? Indeed, our point about exploitation still stands in the following sense: the expected value of your labor must exceed $X, for otherwise the businessperson would eventually go bankrupt with high probability.

From this point, what begins as a potentially modest amount of profiteering is then compounded by all manner of second-order effects, like the fact that capital grows itself, and that money buys political power. We will not delve into these aspects here, but they are all too familiar.

Let us return to the plight of the wage worker. While on the job — and we must remember that most of our waking adult hours are spent either on the job or recovering from it — you submit yourself to the near-totalitarian authority of your employer (modulo minimal government regulations). Working for a wage is only unlike chattel slavery insofar as workers rent themselves out rather than sell themselves. As Friedrich Engels put it, “The slave is sold once and for all; the proletarian must sell himself daily and hourly.”

At this point, the situation might be partly salvaged if workers could easily move between employers who competitively bid for their labor, thus bringing the prevailing wage very close to its true value. Indeed, the neoclassical justification for the wage system hinges on this argument. Yet for the wage worker, the truth is that exploitation and submission are involuntary. Since there is always a sector of the population that is unemployed and desperate for a job, workers engage in brutal competition for low wages; it is almost never the other way around, in which firms raise their salaries to obtain more labor. The libertarian notion of “entering into a free contract with your boss” is nonsense; this is not a contract between equals, but a threat to accept meager conditions or starve. As even laissez-faire mascot Adam Smith made clear in The Wealth of Nations,

What are the common wages of labour, depends everywhere upon the contract usually made between [workers and masters] … It is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other into a compliance with their terms.

All this is to say that on the road to accumulating wealth, you will be forced to do the ethically unthinkable: take advantage of people who are in many ways involuntary servants.

Consequentialist Arguments

The doctrine that underlies the above argument—that people should be treated as ends in themselves, never merely as a means to an end—is just Kant’s categorical imperative. Thus from a Kantian perspective, the answer to our question is “no, being a capitalist for social good is unethical” and the discussion ends here.

However, there are plenty of good consequentialist or utilitarian arguments against such a proposal as well.

Ineffective Altruism

First, lifelong wealth accumulation and redistribution is a strategy whose expected payoff is pathetically low. It is enticing to think that, if only the CEO of Amazon were one of us, $100 billion could be allocated to cure society’s ills instead of lining Jeff Bezos’s pockets. But what is the chance that you or I could be the next Bezos, Gates, or Buffet if we tried? This is pure fantasy.

Moreover, the low probability of building such an obscene empire of wealth (again assuming, against all odds, that your high-minded values manage to emerge unscathed) must be weighed against the actual impact of having $1 billion or $100 billion at your disposal. A quantity in this range constitutes tremendous individual wealth, but not an astonishing number in the public sector. Our federal legislators deal in the hundreds of billions, just in “discretionary” spending, every year. We are much more likely to affect, via organized politics, the flow of $100 billion away from war crimes, corporate tax breaks, and towards social welfare, than we are to do it by instigating the next technological revolution.

Indeed, to believe that one must enter the ranks of the elite in order to effect real change, is to misunderstand the nature of politics. It is, and has always been, grassroots movements—not the rise of progressive billionaires, or the election of individual politicians, or the goodwill of the upper-middle class—that have changed the fabric of society for the better. A striking recent example is the push for universal health insurance following the 2016 elections: thanks to the dedicated organizing work of socialists, progressives, and healthcare workers, support for single-payer healthcare is now a de-facto litmus test for enterprising 2020 Democratic Party presidential candidates. What is remarkable here is what did not happen: these politicians did not campaign for their current offices on the promise of single-payer, overthrowing crusty old legislators who opposed the measure. By and large, they changed their minds after assuming office, in response to the political will of the masses.

Reconstructing Society

Nevertheless, what if you manage to amass enough wealth to make a significant difference? This opens up a whole new set of ethical issues concerning how we spend those resources. In particular, when we go about our philanthropy without seeking systemic change, we exonerate and even reinforce the inhumane systems under which people suffer.

The point is not merely philosophical. Around the world, philanthropy is a signature feature of societies in which capitalism runs rampant. The Charities Aid Foundation reported that in 2016, Americans gave 1.44% of their GDP to charity—almost twice the rate of the next country. Meanwhile, the Nordic countries gave among the least: individuals in Sweden, Finland, and Norway gave 0.16%, 0.13%, and 0.11% respectively.

Though there are many reasons for discrepancies in philanthropy, one important reason is simple: the most capitalistic societies, as well as those that have been ravaged by capitalism through unfair trade and imperialism, are the ones in greatest need of charity. To be sure, the Nordic states are absolutely run on capitalist economies. Still, the social-democratic model exemplified by these countries—which includes universal guarantees of higher education and healthcare, and strong labor unions—ensures low poverty and a mediocre wealth gap by American standards.

Thus in the United States, when we hear that “many wealthy people and large corporations give back to their communities”, we ought to remember that this is a minuscule fraction of the profits they have taken from the rest of us—the workers and the public. There would be little need to implore Jeff Bezos to donate his wealth, if his workers received the full fruits of their labor; instead, what we see in reality is Amazon paying workers so little that they qualify for food stamps. The ‘charitable giving’ flows from workers and the taxpaying public to shareholders and corporate executives.

The encouragement of private philanthropy, therefore, fails on simple utilitarian grounds. As we just saw, it puts all the power in the hands of the wealthy. And it prolongs suffering by impeding the only sustainable solution: to reorganize society so that it is equal by design, and resources are democratically allocated for human need. As Oscar Wilde expounded in the opening lines of The Soul of Man Under Socialism,

The majority of people…find themselves surrounded by hideous poverty, by hideous ugliness, by hideous starvation. It is inevitable that they should be strongly moved by all this. … Accordingly, with admirable, though misdirected intentions, they very seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they see. … They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the poor.

But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible. And the altruistic virtues have really prevented the carrying out of this aim. Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it.

Presciently answering the original question on our hands, Wilde concludes,

It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property.

The System, Not the Individual

To be clear, the exploitation and suffering that we have discussed is, by and large, not the fault of regular people; living under our political and economic system means that if you want to make a living, but lack capital, then you are left with no choice but to submit to exploitation as a worker; otherwise, if you want to run a competitive firm, you are encouraged to exploit others (or go out of business).

Where does that leave the well-meaning person who wants to start a business—perhaps to use the accrued savings to do good, or to give people access to a product that can improve lives? In her advice to would-be bankers, Amber A’Lee Frost notes,

There are no clean hands in a dirty world…all attempts to live ethically under capitalism — whether by consumption, vocation, or any other means — will ultimately fall short. But there is absolutely no question that some hands are dirtier than others.

Thus, although it is ultimately the system that is to blame, those of us who are able to do something about it do bear some responsibility.

One strategy that is not incongruent with these ambitions is to start your business as a worker cooperative, a business arrangement in which those who work at the company also own the company and democratically make decisions about production and profits, thus minimizing inequality and exploitation within the firm.

If you already have money (or some time), consider putting it towards radical or progressive political causes and organizations. At the end of the day, if we recognize that philanthropy merely bandages over—and in fact, solidifies—unjust and irrational aspects of society, then we should also understand that a permanent solution for these ills requires changes in the way society functions. This, of course, requires political struggle.

Further Reading

• Philanthropy: the capitalist art of deception
• Against Charity
• The United States of Work

The Capitalist Altruist was originally published in Reason in Revolt on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Senate Bill 827 would usurp certain local building restrictions for new construction near transit hubs, setting looser state standards instead. It would allow residential developers to skirt local rules on height, density, and parking — if their buildings are within a half-mile of a train or subway station.

Although SB 827 was rejected in its first committee hearing in April, it’s important to analyze the discourse surrounding the proposed solution and the encompassing issue — the housing crisis. For this article, I’d like to spotlight the discussion on the most controversial idea proposed in SB 827: increased market-rate housing.

More Market Rate Housing

Wiener pointed to a McKinsey study to show the tremendous potential of increasing transit-oriented residential development in California. The state currently has 1.16 million housing units that can be considered transit-oriented. With SB 827, as many as three million new transit-accessible market-rate homes could have been built.

SB 827's push for more residential development on land that only allowed single family homes, also known as upzoning, made it the most aggressive bill recently pitched in California to address the housing crisis. The San Francisco Planning Commission said the bill would have effectively upzoned close to 96 percent of city parcels. With an interactive map, you can see that large portions of LA, San Diego, Berkeley, and several other cities would have been upzoned. Additionally, as Ethan Elkind pointed out, the map also highlights the battlegrounds in California where housing is desperately needed — prime transit-oriented spots, where residents can easily bike or walk to access transit. Alongside immediately practical implications, others have said that the bill also plays a role in dismantling the dominant hegemony of automobile and suburban individualism.

At first glance, passing SB 827 may have seemed like a crucial step in solving our housing shortage. But, with a closer look at the discourse surrounding the bill, I hope to show why tweaking the knobs in the simplistic model of supply-and-demand inherently falls short, though it is often thought of the panacea to this seemingly generic economic problem.

Surrounding Discourse

The proponents of SB 827 were mainly developers, who stood to profit from loosened zoning, and pro-housing and climate advocates. Going a step further in support, the pro-development left, consisting of YIMBY, or “Yes In My Backyard” groups— a crowd largely led by millennials frustrated at high housing costs — co-sponsored the bill. The YIMBY frame their activism for more housing production at all income levels in opposition to the selfish homeowner’s pleas of preserving “neighborhood character”. Attempting to rewrite local zoning controls across the state has been their most ambitious project yet. Previously they supported Wiener’s housing package, which streamlined various housing development processes. The YIMBY groups have been gaining momentum and support, even from tech companies — most recently California YIMBY received a $1 million donation from Stripe.

Their counterpart are known as the NIMBYs — the not-in-my-backyard residents. Though the term is more often used as a pejorative from the pro-development left than it is a proclaimed stance, the NIMBYs have indeed influenced many local governments in killing new housing. It is no surprise that the prototypical anti-development NIMBYism attitude is attributed to wealthy homeowners and landlords. The obstructing residents mask their interest of upholding their current property values with the guise of protecting neighborhood aesthetics, and preventing congestion and noise. Though not necessarily the case for new home owners, most NIMBY opposition to development is rooted in simply being a good capitalist and defending one’s major asset.

A perspective further left than the YIMBY has recently become more prominent in the housing debate. Advocating for “Public Housing in Your Backyard”, the anti-development left has joined traditional NIMBY groups, though for radically different ideas, in opposing both SB 827 and increased market-rate housing.

Enter PHIMBYs

The PHIMBY groups have coalesced in rejecting the notion that the real-estate market is designed to produce anything but profit. They believe that a world where decent housing provided to all is possible. But the first order of business is confronting the housing system without illusions and directly overcoming the current process that consistently produces residential and social crisis.

PHIMBYs’ position is not simply a ding on YIMBY’s ideology and pragmatism, but is grounded in insights drawn from history:

Ultimately, YIMBYism is an exhortation to unleash unfettered market forces to remedy the housing crisis, despite the evidence that the profit motive is what caused the affordability crunch in the first place. Mortgage lenders realized they could make more money selling subprime loans and defrauding home buyers than they could by ensuring homeowners long-term stability. As a result, many former homeowners have joined the renter nation, competing for an increasingly unaffordable rental-housing supply.

YIMBYs argue that zoning and other restrictions on development prevent the market from meeting people’s housing needs. But the housing market has never met the needs of the poor — in fact, while the latest housing crisis was caused by the mortgage market’s collapse, working people have been overpaying for substandard housing since at least the mid-nineteenth century, well before New York City pioneered zoning restrictions in 1916.

— Karen Narefsky

The overarching critique from PHIMBY groups is that we already possesses the technical capacity and material resources to solve the housing problem.

“Necessary but Insufficient”

One undeniable truth, regardless of what you think should be in your back yard, is that scarcity of housing is indeed pushing up housing prices. A position many YIMBYs have taken comes from urgency and pragmatism:

Nothing about SB 827 implies, nor should imply, that it alone will solve the housing crisis. Building housing is a necessary but not sufficient strategy for solving our housing problems. …While new supply cannot by itself solve the housing crisis, there is no path out of the crisis that does not involve new supply. Building housing cannot be the only way we help low-income Californians. But not building housing will continue to hurt them.

The logic adopted by the pro-development left is that as the housing supply increases, rents will decrease and result in more affordable housing. There is truth to that claim: the San Francisco Planning Department found that SB 827 would likely result in the production of more affordable housing. More generally, Berkeley scholars found that both market-rate and subsidized housing reduce displacement pressures, although less than new affordable units. It is clear, then, that there is a need for building some housing, whether it be market-rate, affordable, or public.

Though the arguments for SB 827 from the pro-development left are practical and compelling, the strategy relies on private entities to provide desperately needed affordable housing. As Woocher and Singh point out, the real-estate market is designed to produce profits, not shelter. As a result of the profit motive, a basic tenet of capitalism, fundamental human needs cannot be entrusted to the market. More specifically, SB 827 is not designed to reverse historical patterns of displacement caused by real estate investment capital. It follows the long history of “progressive” policymaking that claims to be a first step in economically just housing policy, while only including the pro-development portion of the proposed strategy — the part attractive to real estate investors — and perpetually postponing equity concerns, leaving working-class renters by the wayside.

Additionally, we can point to numerous times in recent history where up-zoning directly harms people who need decent housing: in Brooklyn and Boston, time and time again, the upzoning of low-income communities driven by well connected real estate lobbies benefit of wealthy white residents, developers, investors and landowners at the expense of low-income renters, immigrant communities and communities of color. It would be naive to assume that we are an exception, that SB 827’s up-zoning will not produce similar effects in California.

The effects of SB 827 in low-income communities would have been devastating. It incentivized the destruction of “filtered” housing, in YIMBY parlance, which maintains that even luxury construction increases affordability: new luxury units attract higher income residents and decrease competition for existing lower-quality housing. The bill would have those soon-to-be destroyed units rebuilt at a much higher price transferred through rent. It begs the question: what does this bill offer a community that can’t afford the proposed housing units?

Beyond SB 827

A Right to Housing

The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.

— David Harvey

The radical right to housing implies fundamental challenge to the existing system. It points to the activist conception of rights invoked by the idea and slogan “the right to the city,” first proposed by Henri Lefebvre in his 1968 book Le Droit à la ville. As Peter Marcuse interprets, “‘right’ is not used in its conventional legal sense, but in an ethical and political sense.” Much more than a legal demand, the right to housing must take on the form of an effort to democratize and decommodify housing. In the absence of these rights, housing is relinquished to the political and economic instabilities that come from market provisioning.

However, merely proclaiming the idea of universal access to decent housing is not the same as actually providing housing for all. The path forward is to hold on to the ideal of housing for all, and adjust current conditions towards realizing a world that more closely resembles it.

What type of adjustments, then, are to be made? Reforms that are simply designed to streamline existing practices, or aim to ameliorate only the most undesirable aspects of a policy without addressing implicit power relations are system maintaining. The necessary adjustments are transformative demands, or what André Gorz calls “non-reformist reforms”: attempts to improve present conditions while progressively enabling the building of a different world.

Although precise demands need to be tailored to the conditions of municipalities, the following are directions worth broadly pursuing.

Decommodify Housing

Decommodifying housing simply means preventing housing from being treated as a commodity. The goal is to prioritize housing that is a place to live, not an investment vehicle or an asset to accumulate wealth.

Completely decommodified housing is indeed an ambitious housing demand towards the advancement of truly universal housing, and it’s unlikely that we are able to completely dismantle the existing political-economic order and replace the dominant ideology at this point in time. However, it is worth making explicit the most obvious and eventual goal: halt and reverse the processes of privatization and deregulation that have been exacerbating the housing crisis.

Until the window of mainstream political discourse — the so-called “Overton window” — shifts, and decommodifying housing becomes a realistic possibility, we should support wide experimentation of housing alternatives and new forms of tenure that fight residential alienation.

Limited Equity Cooperative

A Limited Equity Cooperative is a non-speculative housing model that creates an autonomous and community-driven space. Members purchase and own shares in the cooperative that entitle them to live in stable, below-market rate housing and have a vote in the collective governance and control of the multiunit housing.

What distinguishes LEC from other, more commonly found market rate cooperatives is that the price of shares is not determined by the real estate market, but by a resale formula determined by the coop’s bylaws and subscription agreements. In a LEC, affordability is the primary concern. There are restrictions to whom and for how much a housing unit, or, more precisely, the respective shares, can be resold.

However, a model that is governed collectively isn’t always regulated equitably. While the LEC model may be a more democratic and possibly even anti-capitalist practice, they are inherently exclusive. As Amanda Huron points out in Carving Out the Commons, LECs often exclude the poor in large part because “the financial health of the commons as a whole is bound up in the financial lives of its individual members.”

Further, the model remains vulnerable to the pressures of capital as the cooperative accumulates value. Over time, especially in gentrified areas, when the market value of the cooperative’s share has grown substantially higher than the formula-determined price, there becomes a large economic incentive for members to change the coop’s bylaws to relax resale restrictions and to sell their shares for market rate, converting the building to market rate — an opportunity that does not benefit all members equally. Because of this vulnerability, a number of co‐ops that began as limited equity cooperatives have turned into market rate cooperatives.

Community Land Trusts

Community land trusts (CLT) are probably the most prominent alternative tenures today. The first attempt to set up a CLT goes back to the 1960s civil rights movement and have gained momentum within the last ten years. The model has many variations, but the basic model is that a nonprofit corporation acquires land in trust and offers permanently affordable, limited-equity, long-term leases to residents. The CLT is able to repurchase any improvement on the land through a resale formula, limiting resale value to maintain affordability. Additionally, the CLT is able to impose further restrictions to maintain housing quality and neighborhood stability — such as requiring that homes be owner-occupied, preventing absentee landlordism. This takes land off the commercial market and provides community-controlled affordable housing.

Unlike the co-op, the CLT is not only governed by its residents, but also by non-residents: its boards are usually comprised of one-third homeowners, one -third non-resident community members, and one-third public officials. Thus it tries to uphold long-term affordability through balancing the sometimes short-term interests of its homeowners with the larger community, and limiting resident control and emphasizing community and public control.

However, there is no guarantee that these alternative models will eventuate truly transformative endeavors. They cannot replace public investment in housing. Alternative tenures should be connected as much as possible to larger-scale efforts, to marginalized groups and to public housing authorities, so that they avoid being only interesting exceptions to an otherwise unchanged residential condition.

Expand Social Housing

Simply put, expanding social housing means constructing government-owned municipal housing. There are two significant benefits with directly providing government owned housing developments.

First, new rental capacity will be expanded directly where it is needed. By adding new supply where it is most needed, instead of where it is most profitable, cities can address affordability problems head on.

Second, the government can create a self-financing rental model by allowing city residents of all incomes to apply to live in the new developments. This diversity of income will prevent the concentration of poverty which is a condition associated with various social problems. Additionally, it will help defend against the transformation of these affordable units into a means-tested program, which renders the eventual lack of public understanding into alienation and malice towards distinct classes.

Funding for building new public housing can come through a variety of ways. The most direct way is to be funded by redirecting the hundreds of millions of public dollars given away as subsidies to corporate real estate. More tolerably in the current climate, money could be secured through capital grants from the federal government equal in value to whatever a private sector developer would receive from the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program for a similar development. Alternatively, the money could be borrowed from municipal bond markets or the federal government. The initial funding strategy is to close the gap in the unequal level of public sector and private sector access to federal capital subsidies for housing construction.

This approach and eventual goal is hardly innovative — the Swedish government set a goal of building 1 million new affordable units in the 1960’s when the population was only 8 million (around the same size as New York City, or ten times the size of San Francisco) and achieved it in less than a decade. Several European cities and countries have followed this general housing policy for decades.

The Peoples Policy Project Paper suggest that 10 million new public housing units would be a feasible ten-year goal in America. Their policy proposal highlights several more concrete strategies for initial funding, self-financing rental models and long term effects of large-scale municipal housing developments.

Shift the Discourse

SB 827 may be dead, but it sparked national discourse and drew mainstream attention to the crisis of housing and development. More thoughtful and committed citizens have joined the conversation and have begun thinking about new directions to establish fundaments of a new community.

It’s natural to ask how one can expect even more progressive bills to succeed in the future when SB 827 was so quickly rejected. This question arises all the time: should we try to achieve what seems within reach, or demand something more. There is no general answer.

In the current situation, land has become the government’s bargaining chip with real estate capital. Since development mechanisms are chiefly for-profit, using height and land as a strategic concession becomes critical. More specifically, focusing on upzoning becomes a crucial negotiating chip to get financing for subsidized construction and acquisition when federal social spending is marginal. Market-rate housing, the predominant mechanism of housing constructions, should only be utilized insofar as the government creates significant below market rate housing, community land trusts, or other forms of public value capture.

These ideas I’ve mentioned outline directions and strategies, but not a solution. Addressing residential injustice and inequality to make the right to housing a reality will require a continual struggle. Under the unified vision that a world where decent housing is provided to all is possible, the question becomes whether all who have been poorly served by the status quo can unite to create a truly humane system, where housing is not an commodity but is, instead, home.

Other bills are at the forefront of the conversation with elections coming up. With strategic decisions and demands, it is possible to lay the groundwork for a community-sustaining and democratizing transformative change.

The California Housing Crisis: Beyond SB 827 was originally published in Reason in Revolt on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.