Building Freedom: Our Challenges

The collection of lectures and publications from the Schumacher Center for a New Economics represents some of the foremost voices on a new economics.

In his lecture, Ed Whitfield discusses the history of capitalism and its deep-seated ties with slavery. He grew up in the Black Freedom movement with the stories of courageous Black folks—from the Little Rock Nine, Garrison Frazier, and Harriet Tubman to his own father. Slavery, he explains, is when someone else gets the benefit of your labor. The contradiction that’s built into capitalism today is that production is booming, but there aren’t enough people who are able to afford to buy what is produced—oftentimes the same product that was made with their own hands. Whitfield urges us to keep our eyes on the goal of building a society in which all working people own the product of their own labor, and in doing so they will be truly free.