kel smith

There is a common tendency to treat post-capitalism as something that arrives after or later. It is framed as a future stage; something that follows crisis, collapse, or transition. Capitalism is understood as the present condition; post-capitalism as what replaces it.

This framing assumes a linear trajectory. One system gives way to another, and history moves forward in stages, and change becomes something we wait for.

This notion is encompassed by the idea of teleology; the idea that we live in a plotline and events happen in terms of the purpose they serve rather than of the cause by which they arise. I believe this approach is wrong.

By post-capitalism, I do not mean what comes after capitalism. I mean forms of life, organization, and institution that exist within it, which draw from it, are constrained by it, but do not wait for its end.

The idea of “after” introduces a time delay. If post-capitalism only exists once capitalism has ended, then meaningful alternatives are always deferred, waiting for some event to occur that lets us know we are in the “after” period of time. Action becomes contingent on a rupture that may never arrive, and the present is simply reduced to something we must endure for the moment.

If we take “post”, then, to only mean after, this reproduces the logic of scale and totality. Post-capitalism is often imagined as requiring the size and dominance as to rival capitalism — to match its magnitude. But this holds the same assumptions that define capitalism: that legitimacy comes from scale, that systems must be total, and that alternatives only matter if they can replace what exists.

If post-capitalism must maintain the size and scale to look like capitalism in order to succeed, it might also start to hold other qualities of our current system, in which case it starts to look a whole lot like capitalism itself.

One way to move beyond this is to question a more basic assumption: that capitalism is total. We believe this because we’re sold this idea, but it’s worth pausing to question if this is actually true.

Gibson-Graham argue that this perception is misleading. What they call “capitalocentrism” leads us to interpret all economic activity in relation to capitalism, as if it were the only meaningful system.

But, in reality, our economic lives are already full of diversity. Alongside wage labour and market exchange, there are other forms of activity:

• cooperatives and collective ownership structures
• mutual aid networks
• informal and non-market exchange
• unpaid and care-based labour

These are not rare or exceptional. They are widespread, but often overlooked because they do not fit dominant economic categories. If we can acknowledge that these other systems are already in place and that capitalism is not the whole system, then post-capitalism does not need to wait for its end. It is already present in partial, embedded forms.

This also challenges the idea that there is a single trajectory of development.

In Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds, Arturo Escobar defines a “pluriverse” as a world made up of many coexisting ways of organizing life, rather than one shared system moving toward a common endpoint.

This rejects the assumption that there is a single economy or a single path of progress. Different forms of life with different relationships to land, labour, and value exist alongside one another, even within the same broader conditions.

If we can acknowledge this pluriverse, it follows that there is no clear moment of rupture as we break free from capitalism to what comes next. There is no point at which one system ends and another begins for everyone at once. Instead, we see a multitude of systems existing alongside one another at the same time; multiple forms of organization already in place, some aligned with dominant systems, others diverging from them.

Based on this, post-capitalism is no longer a destination. It is a way of naming forms of life that already exist, even as they remain entangled within capitalism. With this understanding, we can point toward a different way of defining the term.

Post-capitalism refers to forms of life, organization, and institution that:

• exist within capitalist conditions
• are shaped by, but not governed by, capitalist logics
• do not depend on a future rupture to exist

These forms are partial and uneven. They are often small in scale, locally grounded, and constrained by the systems they sit within. They do not add up to a single, coherent alternative system. And they do not need to.

The expectation that post-capitalism must become a total system that rivals capitalism in scale and dominance is likely to reproduce the same dynamics it seeks to move beyond.

And as per Gibson-Graham, if capitalism is not total, then alternatives do not need to be total either.

This reframing changes how post-capitalism is located. If it is defined as what comes after capitalism, it belongs to the future. It is something that has not yet arrived, and cannot exist until a broader transition takes place. But if it is understood as something that exists within capitalism, then it belongs to the present. It is not a future condition, but a way of naming forms of life and organization that already exist, even if they are partial, uneven, and not dominant.

This also changes what counts as post-capitalist.

It is no longer limited to large-scale systems or fully formed alternatives. It includes smaller, embedded forms that do not conform to dominant economic logic, even as they remain entangled within it. The lack of perfection does not limit what we might consider valid. This allows us to expand the realm of post-capitalist solutions rather than limit what counts because it doesn’t topple the giant.

Post-capitalism can explore both what it will become and also what it already is.

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Resources

Gibson K, Graham J. The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; 1996.

Gibson-Graham JK. A Postcapitalist Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; 2006.

Escobar A. Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Durham: Duke University Press; 2018.

Mason P. PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future. London: Allen Lane; 2015.

Srnicek N, Williams A. Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work. London: Verso; 2015.