The Capitalist Conscience Movement and the Communitarium Project: Two Divergent Lessons from 2008
In the wake of 2008, two responses emerged: one to soften capitalism's image through ethics and purpose, and one to move beyond it by reimagining individuality and community from the ground up. The Communitarium Project rejects capitalist assumptions, to build shared life beyond enclosure and accumulation.
In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, many asked: Can capitalism be saved from itself? For some, the answer lay in reforming its spirit—humanizing markets, re-centering values, and emphasizing purpose over profit. For others, the crisis revealed something deeper: that capitalism’s very logic had become incompatible with human flourishing.
These two paths—the capitalist conscience movement and the Communitarium Project—represent divergent responses to the same moment of rupture. They share surface similarities—both speak of cooperation, transparency, and shared values—but their underlying orientations could not be more different.
What is the Capitalist Conscience Movement?
The capitalist conscience movement refers to a constellation of initiatives that emerged or gained traction in the 2010s. Its central aim: to soften capitalism’s sharpest edges without fundamentally altering its structure.
The most prominent expression of this tendency is the rise of conscious business, described here, and popularized through frameworks such as:
- Conscious Capitalism, championed by Whole Foods co-founder John Mackey and academic Raj Sisodia
- B Corporations, which integrate social and environmental goals into their legal charters
- ESG investing, which redirects capital toward ethical and sustainable outcomes
- Organizational models like Holacracy and teal organizations that aim to reinvent workplace hierarchy
Across these efforts, a familiar refrain emerges: capitalism can work for everyone—if it remembers its soul.
The Trouble with Good Intentions
While often well-meaning, this movement tends to leave the structure of capitalism intact. It refrains from questioning the core mechanisms of:
- Accumulation: the relentless pressure to turn every relation into profit
- Enclosure: the privatization of commons, attention, knowledge, and care
- Market mediation: the idea that access to life’s essentials must pass through money and markets
In doing so, the conscience movement risks becoming capitalism’s repair shop—not a source of liberation, but a method of stabilization.
By injecting values like purpose, empathy, or stakeholder accountability, it offers capitalism a moral facelift while leaving the deeper mechanisms of exploitation and alienation unexamined.
The Communitarium Project: A Deeper Response to 2008
The Communitarium Project was born from a different reading of the same historical moment. Rather than seeing 2008 as a hiccup, it interprets the crisis as a revelation—a moment when the fragility, fiction, and enclosure of social life under capitalism became visible.
Its founding premise is not that capitalism needs a conscience, but that we need to relearn how to live, think, and act beyond it.
And crucially, it also takes into account two powerful forces that most conscience-capitalist efforts ignore:
1. The Rise—and Fall—of the Internet’s Democratic Promise
The early internet hinted at radical possibility: decentralized communication, open knowledge, bottom-up coordination. But what emerged instead was the platformization of life: a technofeudal regime where data is extracted, attention is commodified, and every interaction becomes surveillance.
2. The Birth of Technofeudalism
We now live under a system where platforms, not markets, dominate allocation. Ownership and control are increasingly exercised through opaque algorithms, not price signals. It’s not capitalism 2.0—it’s something more dangerous: a fusion of enclosure and computation, more totalizing than either.
What the Communitarium Project Aims to Build
Rather than patching up capitalism, the Communitarium Project begins by refusing its most foundational assumptions—especially the liberal conception of the individual as a self-contained, rational chooser navigating a field of market opportunities and social preferences.
Where the capitalist conscience movement leaves intact the hegemonic fiction of individualism—what we’ve elsewhere termed idiotism—the Communitarium Project rejects it outright. It understands the self not as a bounded unit but as a participant in ongoing, co-constructed fields of meaning, formed and re-formed through shared activity, care, and communication.
In place of the alienated subject of late capitalism—resigned to navigating platformed life through scrolling, reacting, consuming—the Communitarium Project centers the relational subject, whose capacity for action arises from enrollment in living, schmooze-level social ensembles.
And this extends to its understanding of community. “Community,” in the capitalist conscience movement, often refers to thin aggregates—brand followers, customer bases, stakeholder groups. The Communitarium reclaims the word for something richer: environments of collective attention and mutual constitution, where deliberation, caregiving, storytelling, coordination, and disagreement are embedded in material and symbolic mutuality.
It aims to:
- Rebuild the microstructures of shared reality that capitalism dissolves
- Foster environments of meaning, not just environments of purpose
- Recover community as a site of generative contradiction, not merely of shared interests
- Reimagine individuality as something fluid and relational, not fixed and possessive
Conclusion: Soften It, or Supersede It?
This is the deeper divergence.
The capitalist conscience movement asks: How can capitalism grow a heart?
The Communitarium Project asks: What kind of social world grows the kinds of people we need?
The former operates within the dominant logic of liberal individualism.
The latter seeks to undo that logic, and to recompose human sociality itself—not through abstract ideals, but through the construction of environments that make shared life possible again.
The good news? We still have the tools. We still have each other.
And we still have time—but not much.