A once-in-a-decade winter storm is coming for the Mid-Atlantic—the kind that shuts everything down with roads impassable, power grids strained, and supply chains interrupted. Virginia has already declared a state of emergency, and I suspect Pennsylvania and other states will follow. For forty-eight hours, maybe more, the ordinary infrastructure of daily life will simply stop working.
I find myself thinking about seemingly unrelated things: whether we have enough firewood, which neighbors might need checking on if the power goes out, how we’d coordinate if cell service becomes spotty. These are the immediate, practical questions that surface when you can see the systems you depend on preparing to fail.
And I also find myself thinking about how much of our discourse about capitalism has nothing to do with moments like this. We have spent a lot of time refining critiques of extraction, commodification, and market logic. We debate whether capitalism can be reformed or must be abolished, whether wealth should be redistributed or production reorganized. These arguments are serious, often sophisticated. But they operate in a register that assumes the continuity of the systems being critiqued, as if markets and states will keep functioning while we decide what to do about them.
What happens when they don’t? What actually holds social life together when the infrastructure we take for granted stops working? And why are so many of our critiques of capitalism completely unprepared to answer that question?
⸻
Many of my colleagues in the social sector have declared capitalism incompatible with justice. Then we professionalized impact measurement, optimized donor retention, and made reciprocity legible to wealth advisors. Something here is not working.
The critique has become ubiquitous: capitalism is extractive, broken, incompatible with the flourishing of communities and care. These positions are often sincere, morally serious, born of lived frustration with systems that reward accumulation while eroding trust and participation. But the critique changes little.
Foundations still design grantmaking around wealth preservation. Nonprofits still build fundraising systems that treat generosity as consumer preference. Consultants still help organizations “leverage” capital, “mobilize” philanthropy, and “align” wealth with impact. The language of opposition is everywhere. The logic of capital remains undisturbed.
This is not hypocrisy. It is something more structural. The problem is not that we lack moral clarity about capitalism’s harms. The problem is that moral condemnation substitutes for understanding how societies actually coordinate life and what would coordinate it if capital were no longer central. We have named capitalism as bad without asking what makes societies hold together in the first place, what capital quietly depends on, or what reasserts itself when markets fail.
⸻
Markets do not create trust. They require it. States do not generate social cohesion. They formalize it. Contracts do not produce obligation. They convert existing relationships into enforceable terms.
This is what the social sector keeps forgetting. We speak as if capitalism invented coordination, as if markets were the natural state of human interaction. But, long before markets, people survived through obligation, bound to one another through acts that could not be priced, optimized, or made voluntary.
The Japanese philosopher Kojin Karatani calls this Mode A: gift and reciprocity. It operates through social expectation rather than contract, through relationship rather than transaction, through binding obligation rather than voluntary exchange. In The Structure of World History, Karatani contrasts this with Mode B (rule and redistribution through states) and Mode C (commodity exchange through markets). Where Marx read human history through modes of production, Karatani reads it through modes of exchange—a shift that reveals these modes as coexisting and competing rather than replacing one another in linear succession.
Karatani develops this framework with help from Marcel Mauss, whose anthropological work showed that gifts in traditional societies weren’t voluntary; they were obligatory. The gift created binding expectations: the obligation to give, to receive, to reciprocate. You couldn’t opt out. The gift was the social bond. This matters because it means Mode A isn’t a moral preference or a psychological disposition. It’s a structure with its own logic, its own binding force that operates independently of state enforcement or market pricing.
The crucial insight is that these modes do not replace one another. They coexist. Mode C—capitalism—does not eliminate the gift. It suppresses it, abstracts it, pretends not to need it. Genevieve Vaughan argues it’s parasitic. Mode C, like civilization itself, cannot function without the obligations the gift creates. Trust must exist before contracts work. Care must exist before it can be professionalized. Social bonds must exist before authority becomes legible.
The gift is not a stage we evolved past. It is the ground floor of social life—the condition that makes all other forms of coordination possible. I have heard colleagues dismiss Mauss’s obligations of the gift as primitive, insisting they are no longer relevant to modern life. That argument only holds while the state and market remain intact. When they fail, the gift will still be there because it never left. This truth appears most clearly in disasters.
⸻
Rebecca Solnit noticed something strange about disasters. When earthquakes level cities, when hurricanes flood neighborhoods, when systems collapse we expect chaos. But that’s not what happens. Strangers pull each other from rubble. Neighbors pool food and share generators. Informal networks of care emerge faster than official response. People who have never met become responsible for each other’s survival not because someone organized them, but because crisis strips away the fiction that obligation is optional.
In A Paradise Built in Hell, Solnit documents this pattern across San Francisco’s 1906 earthquake, Mexico City’s 1985 quake, 9/11, Katrina, and beyond. When everything falls apart, people do not wait for new systems to be designed. They fall back on older, more proximate forms of coordination. They rediscover dependence. They improvise obligation.
But here is what Solnit also documents: elite panic. Authorities expect disorder and respond with control. They impose curfews, restrict movement, suppress the mutual aid networks already operating. What fails in these moments is not social capacity. It is the ability of institutions to trust that capacity.
When communities organized mutual aid networks during COVID, sector leaders couldn’t refrain from asking: “How will you sustain this?” The question sounded reasonable, responsible. But listen to what it actually means: How will you convert gift logic into grant logic? How will you turn obligation into metrics? How will you make reciprocity reportable?
The question is not innocent. It is Mode C trying to exploit Mode A capacity while suppressing its logic.
The social sector does this constantly. We encounter forms of mutual aid and community care that are functioning well and then ask: Is it sustainable? Can it scale? Does it have measurable outcomes? We do not ask these questions out of cruelty. We ask them because we have been trained to believe that anything not legible to Mode C is fragile, amateurish, or illegitimate.
So we professionalize it. We turn volunteers into staff. We replace social obligation with job descriptions. We convert informal care into service delivery. We impose reporting requirements that make reciprocity administrative. We call this “capacity building.” But what we are often doing is taming the gift in favor of behavior that Mode C can recognize.
This is what Karatani helps us see. What we call “alternatives to capitalism” are almost always Mode C dressed in Mode A language. We use gift vocabulary—community, mutual aid, solidarity, reciprocity—to describe relationships that remain fundamentally transactional. We want the aesthetics of the gift without its obligations. We want mutual aid without dependence; reciprocity without binding claims; and generosity that is voluntary, measurable, and optimizable.
The gift binds and obligates. Capital liberates and promises options. You cannot design systems that serve both. Only one really works when everything falls apart. And the social sector’s inability to admit this is why our critique of capitalism remains theoretical while our practice remains extractive.
⸻
What allows the social sector to avoid this contradiction is a single belief: that obligation is optional. We have come to believe that genuine autonomy means never being bound by claims we didn’t explicitly choose, that real generosity must be voluntary, that legitimate obligation requires consent.
This is the essence of why the social sector's critiques of capitalism fall short: they can't tell us how things are going to work without it. You won't find much discussion of human obligation—the binding claims people make on one another simply by living together. Sure, kick capitalism to the curb. But if this storm gets out of hand, my hopes aren't going to be in Walmart any more than Washington. What actually ensures we survive? What coordinates care when the infrastructure stops working? The critiques are silent on the very thing that actually holds societies together when systems fail.
“Donor-centric” fundraising treats generosity as elective preference rather than social duty. The donor decides whether to give, when to give, how much to give, and what impact to demand in return. Obligation flows in one direction from recipient to donor, never the reverse. “Impact investing” wants transformation without dependence — capital flows to social good only if returns are competitive and exits are possible. In each case, the powerful retain the right to choose their obligations. The vulnerable do not.
This is presented as liberation from paternalism and coercion. But what we built instead was a system that made some people’s obligations escapable and others’ inescapable— a system in which the wealthy can choose their generosity but the poor cannot choose their need and where institutions can opt out of responsibility but communities cannot opt out of harm.
The gift was never fair. It was never supposed to be. It was mutual. What we call freedom now is the right of the powerful to remain unbound.
⸻
The social sector keeps asking how to “leverage” capital for social good, how to “mobilize” philanthropy for justice, how to “align” wealth with impact. These questions assume capital must remain central—that the gift must justify itself in Mode C’s terms, that any form of coordination not legible to markets is incomplete or unsustainable.
There is another option: stop asking for Mode C’s permission. Stop treating wealth as the prerequisite for social change. Stop designing systems that require the gift to prove its efficiency before it is allowed to operate.
This would mean accepting that we cannot serve both Mode C and obligation; that serving donors and serving communities often means opposing things; and that gift-centered work might not scale, might not attract investment, might not generate the outcomes that make philanthropists comfortable.
The social sector is not ready for this choice which is why the critique of capitalism remains theoretical while the practice of philanthropy remains extractive. We can name the contradictions, cite the theory, acknowledge the harm. We just cannot afford to stop.
Because stopping would mean admitting that much of what we call social change work is actually the management of capital’s relationship to inequality; that our organizations often exist, not to challenge the terms of exchange, but to make them feel less violent; that we are the buffer between wealth and obligation, ensuring that generosity remains voluntary and that the powerful never have to experience binding claims on their autonomy.
The gift does not care whether we are ready. When the systems we have built to suppress it finally fail, the gift will not ask for our approval. It will reassert itself, not as an ideal, but as a necessity.
When the snow storm arrives tomorrow evening, some of us will check on neighbors without being asked. We will share generators, coordinate childcare, clear driveways for those who cannot. We will do this not because we have optimized our mutual aid strategies or because a foundation funded our capacity building. We will do it because the infrastructure has failed and obligation has become visible again.
The question Solnit’s book asks us all is whether we will recognize what we are doing when we do it. Or whether, when the roads clear and the power returns, we will immediately try to professionalize it, measure it, and make it legible to those in charge.
- Jason Lewis, Partner & Chief Innovation Officer at Seed
