The GameStop Revolt Exposed Capitalism

In 1976, Peter Drucker published The Unseen Revolution: How Pension Fund Socialism Came to America. The book opened with a sentence that would have seemed astonishing at the time, and looks vaguely amusing today: “If socialism is defined as ‘ownership of the means of production by the workers’ . . . then the United States is the first truly ‘Socialist’ country.”

Pension fund socialism is based on a very appealing idea: that social change can happen slowly, iteratively, and without much overt conflict. Rather than fighting against their bosses on the factory floor, or against the capitalist state that exists to defend their bosses in the streets, workers could use their power as owners to pressure businesses into acting more responsibly.