In connection with Wright’s two-by-two model for “strategic logics of anticapitalism,” the erosion of capitalism within civil society is made possible by generating robust patterns of social empowerment within the existing capitalist state and business apparatus. Over time, these new patterns of doing and knowing—practice and discourse—become institutionalized so that growing numbers of people will no longer need or desire to rely on capitalist modes of labor and consumption as their primary ways of being in society. What this means for PCD practices is that they can exist in the hybrid conditions of an economy that is predominantly capitalist, while building stronger and more robust institutional patterns that wither dependency on capitalism and transform the discipline of design. In this way, designers can play a role in transformational change beyond individual projects or practices alone. The theory of design after capitalism as a discipline rests on the capacity for design practices to actively engage in this process of erosion. In other words: play the long game.
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