Can society thrive beyond capitalism?

New York’s mayor spent his 100th day in office pouring concrete into a pothole. Zohran Mamdani, the first self-described democratic socialist to run America’s largest city, addressed a crowd at the Knockdown Center that night and framed the small repairs as proof of concept, arguing that government focused on fixing potholes and filling in for city services could still be trusted with bigger problems.

The image was deliberate. A politician once dismissed by critics as a fringe ideologue was staging himself as a competent plumber, proof that an economic philosophy built around collective provision could still fill 100,000 potholes on schedule.

That tension between skepticism about an idea and curiosity about whether it can actually govern is why the question of life beyond capitalism has moved from campus seminar rooms into mainstream American politics.

Faith in capitalism is sliding even among people who are not socialists

Gallup found in 2025 that 54% of Americans view capitalism favorably, down from 60% in 2021. That is not a collapse, but it is a meaningful erosion, and it is not evenly distributed. For the first time, fewer than half of Democrats, 42%, viewed capitalism positively, while independents held closer to 51%. Republicans barely moved, staying around three-quarters favorable.

Americans remain overwhelmingly positive toward small business at 95% and free enterprise at 81%, but big business has fallen to 37% positive, down from a high of 58% in 2012. People are not rejecting markets. They are increasingly convinced that the largest players in those markets have stopped working for them.

A Fox News poll taken in early spring captured the same discontent from a different angle. Half of registered voters said capitalism is not working well, and a record 38% said it would be good for the country to move toward socialism, up from 32% in 2022 and just 18% in 2010.

That appetite skews young and skews Democratic, with 66% of voters under 45 and 55% of Black voters open to the shift, while 61% overall still call it a bad idea, including three-quarters of Republicans and older men.

The word socialism stopped scaring some voters and started winning elections

What makes 2026 different from previous socialism scares is that the idea now has a scoreboard. Democratic socialists have taken city hall in New York and Seattle, won a congressional primary in Philadelphia, and advanced candidates for mayor in Los Angeles and Washington. Among Democrats specifically, favorable views of socialism climbed from 50% in 2010 to 66% last year, even as favorable views of capitalism in the same group fell to 42%, a complete reversal of the two’s standing in 2012.

Mamdani’s early record provides evidence for both sides. His administration’s own analysis found that 62% of New Yorkers, roughly 5 million people, cannot afford the city’s true cost of living once housing, food, health care, and childcare are accounted for. On the delivery side, the city secured a $1.2 billion investment in universal childcare, along with more than $9 million recovered for workers and small businesses and $34 million in tenant repairs and settlements. Those numbers are the closest thing democratic socialism has to a pilot program running in real time, in the country’s financial capital, under national scrutiny.

But the same 100 days exposed the limits of what a mayor can do without bigger structural change. His plan to build 200,000 affordable homes would require the city to borrow an additional $70 billion on top of $25 billion already committed, pushing past the legal debt ceiling and requiring approval from a state government he does not control.

Meanwhile, a report found that the city lost 20,000 jobs in 2025, concentrated in home health care, film production, and Wall Street, and a business group leader warned that some employers are already weighing relocation in response to proposed tax increases on high earners and corporations. Governing beyond capitalism, it turns out, still runs through capitalism’s institutions: bond markets, state legislatures, and employers who can leave.

Away from City Hall, the experiment looks less ideological and more practical

Outside electoral politics, the more interesting shift may be happening quietly inside American workplaces. Worker cooperatives, businesses owned and democratically governed by the people who work in them, are no longer a counterculture curiosity. The number of worker cooperatives nationwide has tripled over the past decade to roughly 1,300, generating $806 million in revenue in 2024, with more than half of those businesses founded in just the past five years. A separate sector census found that worker co-ops and democratic workplaces grew by 34% since 2020, while more than doubling their combined workforce.

Worker co-ops report an internal pay ratio of roughly 1.5 to 1 between the highest and lowest earners, compared with an average ratio of nearly 290 to 1 at conventional corporations. That single figure does more to explain the model’s draw than any manifesto. It is not a rejection of ownership or profit. It is a redistribution of who gets to hold both.

None of this amounts to capitalism being dismantled. Massachusetts now funds a state Office of Employee Ownership, and multiple states passed laws in 2022 specifically to promote employee ownership structures within the existing corporate and tax code, not outside it. The model that seems to be gaining traction is not socialism replacing markets but ownership being redesigned inside them.

The debate is really about who capitalism is currently working for

Skeptics have a genuine argument, not just a talking point. A 61% majority still views a move toward socialism as bad for the country, and that skepticism runs deepest among the voters who have historically been capitalism’s biggest beneficiaries, older men and self-identified conservatives. Their case draws on documented failures of centrally planned economies abroad and on the plain fact that American living standards, for most of the postwar era, rose inside a market system, not despite one.

It is not that Americans have suddenly discovered Marx. It is that confidence in big business has been sliding for years, even as confidence in small business and free enterprise stays remarkably high. Most people are not asking whether markets should exist. They are asking whether the current version of American capitalism is still built to reward work or mainly built to reward scale.

That is a narrower question than the headline suggests, and a more answerable one. The country is not choosing between capitalism and its absence. It is negotiating, city by city and workplace by workplace, over how much concentration a market economy can tolerate before people stop believing it is working for them at all.

Disclaimer – This list is solely the author’s opinion based on research and publicly available information. It is not intended to be professional advice.

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