Minneapolis is Teaching us Post-Capitalist Economics

No invisible hand, no supply and demand, just a city weaving webs of resiliency.

Over the past few days I’ve been coming back to an article reposted on social media, The Right is Shocked by Anti-ICE Organizing. This short piece captures the incredulity of hyper-online right wing “keyboard warriors” who got their hands on screenshots of anti-ICE Minneapolis Signal chats disseminating information on direct action and mutual aid.

The article conveys their dumbfoundedness at the sophisticated level of community organizing, with one dude even suggesting that someone would only undertake this “highly organized and efficient” level of work for pay and therefore it must be funded by dark money, namely the Chinese Communist Party. Which, if you have spent any time in underfunded left-wing activism, is good for a giggle.

One can’t read these gobsmacked reactions without realizing that these guys don’t know that Community Organizer is a real job in America, one you can actually get paid for or volunteer to do for free.

The article reinforced my belief that the construction of whiteness and masculinity are pathologically individualistic and necessarily alienating. It corroborates that atomization, isolation, and domination are the natural consequences of centering our social lives not around fleshy bodies grounded on the earth but pixellated avatars developed in technocratic ecosystems.

But that’s not why I kept coming back to the article. The reason I kept coming back to the article was that it handed me a mirror. A mirror that showed me a part of myself I hadn’t seen in a while and one I’ve too easily taken for granted amidst my political grief and frustration.

I kept coming back to it because it reminded me of who we are.

It reconnected me with the incredible wealth of left-wing talent, knowledge, wisdom, and courage learned from legions of activists and organizers before us; all of this cross-coalitional intergenerational work alchemizing in Minneapolis to protect people who are targets of state violence. The implementation of mutual aid channels, community organizing, teach-ins, resource shares, consciousness-raising, logistical spreadsheets, and strategic implementation of open-source tech tools—not to mention bodies in the street—all devoted to mobilizing available resources to where they are needed.

In other words, Minnesota has given us the gift of remembering and re-imagining our economic agency: who we are outside the confines of the market. In Minneapolis, money, food, and rent payments circulate beyond the realm of the transactional. There is no reciprocity. No invisible hand. No supply and demand. Instead, we see a city filled with people weaving of a web of resiliency.

This isn’t some libertarian bastardization of abundance, this is the lived practice of enoughness. It is an insistence that together, we have everything we need. The Signal chats and shared spreadsheets are establishing post-capitalist economic channels of circulation, ensuring that what lies fallow, unneeded, unused, or acquired in excess can be liberated, activated, and directed to fulfill neighbors’ needs. No waste, no greed, just circulation of resources to those in need.

This is the economic intelligence we must cultivate in ourselves and our communities, not just to endure military occupation. As capitalism reveals itself to have always only been oligarchy in disguise, we will need to re-imagine ourselves as economic actors, becoming practiced at creating interdependent webs of resiliency and resource circulation.

“From each according to ability, to each according to need.” If you know what I mean.

📷 Fibonacci Blue, Creative Commons BY 4.0