Marjorie Kelly talks with Theresa Marquez of Rootstock Radio about alternatives to capitalism. In this podcast, Margorie Kelly talks about Owning Our Future and Devine Right Of Capital, and how to change the design of ownership:
The problem is this deep underlying social architecture that just is out of step. And it’s this deep underlying architecture of ownership that is driving wealth inequality and it’s driving a lot of the problems in our economy.
And so I started to ask myself, well, how else would you design ownership? Most of us don’t think of ownership as having a design. We think of it as just a fact—you own something or you don’t. But in fact, it can be designed a lot of different ways. Ownership is like a bundle of twigs; there’s different rights, you can distribute them in different ways.
So I traveled around the U.S. and Europe and I started looking for companies that are already designed a different way, and I found a lot of them. From the foundation-controlled companies of Northern Europe, like IKEA is one; John Lewis Partnership, a huge department store in London, is 100 percent employee owned—they give half their profits every year to employees. They do that because of their ownership design.