Disrupting Systems For Good

In early October, I stumbled across, and happily joined, a Free Palestine march in Montreal on the two-year anniversary of the assault on Gaza. Around the same time, I was also reading One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad, a heartbreaking, beautifully written book that looks at Western privilege and our history of treating groups of human beings as not entirely human. A few days later, I was working through the back catalogue of the Diabolical Lies podcast and heard a great (and long) episode from April called “The Rise and Fall of Capitalism.” 

I’ve been marinating these three separate but connected things in my head ever since, turning them over, examining ways that they intersect with each other and with my own work.

This post is me sharing some of what I learned and thinking out loud about that intersection, especially within the context of the shift from problem-solving to possibility-imagining, and also the shift from certainty to curiosity. 

Because one common thread is how often we try to fix problems inside systems that are themselves the problem, and how things we have been taught to take for granted might not be true or in our own best interest.

Language and the Lens We Use
We use the language of problem solving like it’s the highest form of doing good. Fix the system. Tweak the policy. Patch the hole. But what about when the system itself is the problem?

And the word capitalism. This word has become a catch-all for economic freedom, entrepreneurship, and innovation. Things people value. 

But markets, or people trading goods and services, have existed for thousands of years, long before capitalism or modern economics.

And if markets are good, free markets must be better, right? I mean, who doesn’t like freedom? But the free part doesn’t necessarily mean “free and fair participation for everyone.” It means “free from regulation.” 

Capitalism is based on this political and economic ideology of free markets, with minimal government intervention, private ownership, and competition determining prices and production. In theory, free markets maximize efficiency, but in practice, they often concentrate power. 

So capitalism is more appropriately defined not as just trade, but as a system where the profits of work flow upward to a class of owners, not to the people who actually do the work. To put it plainly, it’s about extraction. It’s not just markets and entrepreneurship, it’s a system where ownership, and therefore power, is concentrated in a few hands. 

Or to put a slightly finer point on it: it’s a system where billionaires donate to a golden ballroom in the White House while food stamps are cancelled.

Booms, Busts, and Bailouts
In that Diabolical Lies episode, Katie and Caro do an in-depth review of the history of capitalism, and it is worth listening to (if you don’t mind lots of swears). But briefly here, it’s useful to note that capitalism crashes under the weight of its own greed every few decades. 

It is sold to us as a “market correction,” but the pattern is consistent: crash, bailout, consolidation. The rich buy low, the rest start over. Each “recovery” leaves ownership even more concentrated. Extract, exhaust, repeat.

Also of note, capitalism didn’t emerge from human ingenuity. It was built through enclosure (kicking peasants off the land they farmed), colonization (stealing other people’s land), and slavery (stealing other people’s lives and labour). The wealth of Europe and North America was largely amassed through organized theft.

And when people in other countries have tried to imagine something different—when they’ve experimented with socialism, worker control, or public ownership because they don’t have their own version of the global south to exploit—western powers have treated it as an existential threat. The US and its allies, including Canada, have meddled in, destabilized, or outright overthrown governments that threatened capital’s dominance: Chile, Iran, Indonesia, Cuba, and on and on. 

The history as shared on Diabolical Lies, particularly about the interference in these other countries, was WILD. I know many of you reading are further along this journey than me, and you have been knowing all this for a while. But for me, many beliefs that I held that I thought justified acts by Canada and the US in other countries in the name of democracy have been shaken. In a good way. If this sounds all new to you, I invite you to suspend your firmly held beliefs about what is possible and do a little research. Spoiler: We’re not actually the good guys in most of these stories, despite what we have been led to believe. 

People get pretty nervous when capitalism is critiqued. It’s almost like we’ve been fed a strong narrative our whole lives that there are no other viable options… 

But if capitalism is so great, why does it need to be bailed out regularly by the governments that it says it doesn’t need? And why do we have to stomp out every effort to do anything different, even in countries halfway around the world?

What Marx Actually Said
Karl Marx’s critique wasn’t that the state should run everything. His point was simpler: capitalism only works by paying workers less than the value they create. The difference—the “surplus”—becomes profit for the owners. The system requires inequality to function. The wealth of the few is the poverty of the many.

He didn’t believe markets themselves were evil; he believed that when ownership of production is private, exploitation is inevitable. It’s not bad actors, it’s a bad structure.

That’s what the threat was.

The System Is the Problem
This brings me back to that shift from problem-solving to possibility-imagining. Because what we usually call “problem-solving” might just reinforce the system we’re in.

Take universal basic income (UBI). Cash helps people survive, yes. But as Jason Hickel argues in his article, The Limits of Basic Income, what good is more cash if there’s no affordable housing, no public transit, no universal childcare? A cheque doesn’t replace a system. 

Under capitalism, what and how things are produced is shaped by profit, not by human need. If the system isn’t building public transit or social housing because those things aren’t as profitable as luxury condos or private cars, then UBI won’t help much. So we end up doing this: giving people money to live in a system that was never designed to meet their needs.

Hickel argues instead for universal basic services: healthcare, housing, transit, food, clean energy. He points out that such public services, combined with a job guarantee, can remake the production system itself: who controls it, what it produces, and for whom. 

In short, redistributing purchasing power (UBI) is helpful, but it leaves the deep structure untouched. Perhaps shifting from problem-solving to possibility imagining leads us to transforming the economy by redistributing production and ownership.

Canada’s Polite Capitalism
Canada likes to think of itself as kinder and gentler. A peacekeeping, maple-scented middle path. But the truth is that our comfort is built on extraction, too. From the theft of Indigenous lands to our mining operations abroad to our participation in global trade systems that rely on exploited labour, we are not outside capitalism. We are its friendly face.

Disrupting for Good
If “disrupting for good” means anything, it has to mean disrupting the stories that keep us compliant. The ones that say this is just how the world works. That the market is natural. That profit is progress. That some lives are disposable.

Capitalism is not forever. It had a beginning, it has a middle, and it will have an end. The question is whether we can imagine what comes next, and whether we’ll build systems that finally belong to all of us. 

And maybe that starts small: noticing the water we are swimming in. Refusing to accept what we’re told is best for us. Pushing back when we are told problems are “too complex” for us to understand, so best to keep quiet. Maybe we start by refusing to mistake the way things are for the way things have to be, and then get to work imagining something better.