This paper reviews David Schweickart's After Capitalism (2002), in which Schweickart critiques capitalism's role in producing unemployment, environmental degradation, poverty, and international conflict. The review examines Schweickart's proposed alternative — Economic Democracy — a worker- and community-oriented form of market socialism that would replace wage labor with worker ownership, financial markets with democratic investment control, and expansionary corporate behavior with socially guided production. Drawing on Marxist political economy and comparisons with global capitalism, the paper evaluates how Schweickart's framework would reshape the international political economy by reducing exploitation, limiting corporate expansion, and redirecting profit toward collective social benefit.
After Capitalism by David Schweickart is a book targeting capitalism and promoting the advent of socialism in today's economy. Many regard the book as a condensed successor to his earlier work, Against Capitalism, published in 1996. It is easy to claim that a socialist America might be a better one, but Schweickart argues that the word "socialism" is repeatedly invoked merely to frighten the American public (Schweickart xvii). The book's central argument is that capitalism is neither inevitable nor irreplaceable, and that a workable alternative — what Schweickart calls Economic Democracy — is both theoretically coherent and practically achievable.
In the book, the major critique is directed at capitalism and its negative impacts on society. Schweickart argues that capitalism has led to environmental degradation, unemployment, overwork, wars, hunger, and poverty. He contends that the capitalistic outlook present in today's economy is not truly free from government entanglement. The government, he suggests, pretends to have given people all the power while continuing to serve its own requirements.
The larger the market grows, the more competition arises, and with it greater room for deception. According to Schweickart, it is this deception that has fueled wars and contributed to capitalism's long-term instability (Ali). He points to the capitalist slogan TINA — "There Is No Alternative," associated with advocates of free-market capitalism — which asserts that capitalism is efficient and dynamic. Yet in practice, he observes, capitalism has delivered instability, an overworked labor class, and widespread pollution. Firms operating under capitalist logic are compelled to expand constantly into new markets, exploiting labor abroad and generating chaos in the long run (Schweickart 128).
The major goal Schweickart sets out is the transition toward Economic Democracy — a community- and worker-oriented form of market socialism. This form of democracy would represent the first step toward a genuinely socialist system. Economic Democracy functions on the same basic principles for goods and services as the current market, but with fundamental structural changes: the institution of wage labor would be abolished, and workers would become the owners of their own enterprises. Rather than financial markets directing investment, there would be democratic control over how capital is allocated.
Schweickart also explains the classical role of the capitalist: according to neoclassical economic theory, an entrepreneur or capitalist is a person who brings together land, labor, and capital to generate profit (Schweickart 35). In the current system, while everyone else remains part of the labor class, the capitalist alone can invest and extract profit. Schweickart applies Marx's labor theory of value to practical examples to illustrate how this arrangement systematically disadvantages workers. He also emphasizes that Economic Democracy would be more locally based, with the global economy of large corporations giving way to home and community-run markets — a precondition, he argues, for meaningful socialist reform (Ali).
"Labor working for collective good without competitive expansion"
"How Economic Democracy reshapes global economic conflict"
Capitalism's primary aims are increasing wealth, maximizing profit, and gaining competitive advantage. Under the Economic Democracy proposed by Schweickart, investment must be allocated socially rather than privately. In his proposed system, restrictions would be placed on large firms to prevent them from perpetually expanding through reinvested profits. Schweickart observes that many firms find themselves with surplus profits after tax cuts and use these funds to grow further — he describes profit as the weapon used in economic warfare.
If a social investment plan were implemented, the global political economy would no longer forge alliances based purely on capital interests. There would be no dominant group of firms reallocating capital among themselves while blocking smaller businesses from growing. Although market socialism may appear unstable as a concept, Schweickart presents it with considerable conviction. His book makes clear how international political actors exploit one another in pursuit of profit, and how the international political economy has grown increasingly conflict-ridden as a result of the compulsion to expand. Schweickart's contribution lies in exposing these negative dynamics of the capitalist economy and articulating a coherent, if idealistic, vision of how Economic Democracy might replace them.
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