The great existential question of our time and the time to come is how society on Earth will not merely survive but actually prosper.  Citizens and policymakers are in urgent need of constructive ideas about how to do this.

Capacitism is the economic system for the third millennium.  It is what may replace capitalism.  Over the coming decades, today’s global society will become a planetary one in which the overriding economic motivator will no longer be the accumulation of capital but the maintenance and enhancement of capacity: the capacity of nature to support the economy and the capacity, in turn, of the economy to support all its people.

Our current economy and society are unequipped to deal with the consequences of their systemic effects upon Earth’s natural systems and of nature’s reactions in turn upon them.  Worse, our economy encourages the accumulation of disproportionate wealth in the hands of the few, despite generating more than enough wealth for everybody.  The moral implications of these failures, serious though they may be, pale in comparison to the risks they pose to the stability of the economy itself, whether through surprises from nature or social unrest.

The root of the problem lies with the capitalist system’s rewarding of the accumulation of capital.  Left unchecked, this reward structure degrades both nature and society.  The 20^th-century’s principal alternative to capitalism—communism—exhibited an equally poor record in this regard, its only significant difference being that capital accumulated to the state rather than to individuals.

Everything the economy does—including supporting your lifestyle—depends upon nature’s capacity to provide inputs to the economy and to process outputs from it.  Today’s economy is now so large that it is locked into a material coevolution with nature.  No excess capacity remains.  Every decision every person makes affects nature’s capacity to support all of humanity.  Capacitism therefore is not only an economic doctrine but also an individual philosophy and practice.

Capacitism is the system toward which today’s economy must evolve in order to align with nature. While capitalism encourages exploitation in all its forms, capacitism encourages regeneration.  Banishing modernity’s rampant individualism, it will put the productive forces of competition and innovation to good use for planetary ends, transforming today’s exploitative economy into a future regenerative one.

Although capacitism could take a variety of forms, its greatest potential will be realized by harnessing the power of the markets for planetarian ends.  Unlike capitalism, where the market is king, left largely to its own devices, capacitism is goal-directed from the start, the market being in service to the maintenance of capacity.  

The economy can only be brought within nature’s capacity to support it if it also supports all its people.  A planetarian economy and society is, by definition, a full-participation system.  For the economy to come into material alignment with nature therefore necessitates the replacement of today’s extreme inequalities with widespread prosperity.  Indeed, the two processes go hand-in-hand and reinforce one another.   This is the essence of capacitism.

To learn more about the capacitist platform, read the article on Substack or visit the About page for additional resources.

Header image courtesy of Heiko Behn on Pixabay.