About

Alternatives to Capitalism (AC) is a major new multidisciplinary initiative to investigate viable alternatives to capitalism and explore how legal, political, economic, and cultural life might be organised beyond capitalist social relations.

Led by Professor Lea Ypi and Dr Vincent Harting, it brings together leading scholars in political philosophy and the social sciences to examine competing post-capitalist visions, institutions, and strategies for social transformation. Through research, public engagement, and interdisciplinary collaboration, the initiative seeks to advance rigorous thinking about what should come after capitalism and how such alternatives might be realised.

By capitalism, we refer not merely to an economic system of markets and private property, but to a historically specific social order characterised by the private ownership of productive resources, the subordination of labour to capital, production dominantly directed to profit accumulation rather than fulfilling human needs, competitive imperatives of reinvestment and expansion, and a global hierarchy of dependency that continues to transfer value from the periphery to the core. AC proceeds from the strong intuition that the harms of capitalism are not accidental, but constitutive and structural features of this global system. At the same time, our normative orientation remains informed by central commitments within the liberal tradition (broadly conceived): Freedom, equality, and self-government. AC thus seeks to recover and reinterpret these ideals in ways that make them compatible with social forms no longer structured by capitalist imperatives.

The research agenda of AC combines normative theory with empirical and historical inquiry to explore feasible alternatives to capitalism. Its projects bridge conceptual work in political theory with studies of institutional experiments, social movements, and policy innovations that prefigure post-capitalist arrangements.

Two broad areas of focus guide our agenda. First, we examine alternatives to liberal-democratic representation, including proposals for participatory, deliberative, and associative forms of democracy, as well as institutional designs that empower local and regional bodies of self-government, such as class-specific political institutions, which focus on working-class modes of empowerment. We also investigate the role of contestation, trade unions, and civil society as vehicles of democratic empowerment and as laboratories of alternative social coordination, as well as which economic arrangements are required to sustain egalitarian social relations. Second, we will focus on the rapidly changing conditions of the international institutional landscape. Capital mobility, trade regimes, intellectual property protections, and debt and monetary hierarchies can all constrain domestic experimentation. Developing an alternative globalisation is therefore essential to make domestic alternatives sustainable and mutually reinforcing. Because of the world-systems-oriented approach of AC, all this research work will include contributions from collaboration with scholars situated in peripheral regions, especially the Global South.

Funding

The Alternatives to Capitalism Programme has been made possible thanks to a transformational gift from the Open Society Foundations.