FROM META-CRISIS TO TRANSFORMATIVE POSSIBILITIES

T R A N S I T I O N

Alchemizing and Liberating Capital in Service to Life 

R E S O U R C E

FROM INDIVIDUAL ENTITLEMENT TO COLLECTIVE ENTANGLEMENT

C I R C L E

We are the Transition Resource Circle (TRC)—an assemblage of activists, artists, funders, cosmologists, and others focused on the transition from our current meta-crisis to life-affirming possibilities.
At TRC, we work with resources and resource holders—through philanthropy and beyond—to alchemize and liberate wealth in service to Life. 

We believe that wealth must be healed from its extractive logics and reoriented toward regenerative and liberatory systems to seed Cultures of Transition.

We describe our model as justice plus onto-shifts. We work with our growing circle of allies to build movements that move beyond the just transition to include practices that embody ontological shifts, the very way we see, understand, relate and interact to/with/through the world. These shifts include transitioning from capitalist to post capitalist, life-affirming ways of being. From a culture of entitlement to entrustment, rationalism to relationalism, materialism to animism, separation to entanglement, and beyond.

About

We are in the midst of a meta-crisis. Ecological collapse, climate change, species extinction, increasing pandemics, spiking inequality, inhumane poverty, racialized hierarchies and spiritual ennui are the outcomes of systems of domination, exploitation and separation. This has culminated into our current operating system: neoliberal capitalism.

For every dollar of new economic growth, about 93 cents ends up in the hands of the top 1%. And only about 5 cents up in the hands of the world’s majority - 60% of humanity. Therefore, by definition, wealth creation actively creates inequality and poverty. Every dollar of wealth created also heats up our planet as we have an extractives-based, fossil fuel economy. Therefore, by definition, capitalism also creates climate change. Also, because capitalism started in Europe, descendents of Europeans had at least a two century head start on acquiring capital, largely through what historian and geographer David Harvey calls “accumulation by dispossession” - imperialism, slavery, genocide, land theft, etc.

Therefore, white supremacy is embedded within the capitalist system. Within the context of the existing operating system, no amount of reform, whether it be green investment or otherwise, can change the structure and trajectory of this self-terminating, exponential function.

This meta-crisis is not something outside of us. We are all complicit, to various degrees, in perpetuating and benefitting from the dominant culture.

TRC focuses on philanthropy as it has the potential to play a critical role in rebalancing wealth, power and historical injustices. Yet all too often philanthropy perpetuates and exacerbates the current system through undemocratic and unaccountable systems, by increasing endowments through existing market mechanisms, and its lack of imagination to support a necessary paradigm shift.

Ways of Working

As we are all implicated and inextricably woven into the fabric of neoliberalism, late-stage capitalism, patriarchy and structural racism, we need approaches that support us to identify, untangle, and actively unlearn the deep logics we have internalized. We also need methods that support us to open up to the plurality of ways of seeing and knowing to cultivate imaginal realms; to conceive and create alternative possible future(s); and to take practical steps in achieving these realities.

Areas of inquiry

As economists, bankers and others warn us, we must grow the global economy at 3% a year to avoid stagnation and/or recession. This doesn’t sound like much, but it requires a doubling of the economy every twenty years. We have already crossed six of the nine planetary boundaries and are in the midst of the Sixth Great Extinction. We are at a crossroads and our choice is clear: growth or life?

We can continue to benefit from capital expansion based on an extractive system that requires the exploitation of living systems, human and more-than-human, or we can use existing capital to usher in a transition to build a post-capitalist world. 

POst Capitalism

How do we transition from neoliberalism towards life affirming systems? A conceptual container pointing to want we want to transition out from and transition towards to?