how i got to business school

disclaimer: this is my first blog post on my first ever blog. excited and terrified. and perhaps rambly.

i suppose an important backdrop for this blog is why i am in business school and why, in particular, the school i’m at. i’ll do my best to explain.

let me be the first to tell you that some days, i’m not sure why i’m in business school: incurring thousands in debt, partaking in the higher educational system and having less and less time for the organizing and farming that feed my soul.

here’s the short version: i’m in business school to take down capitalism.

ok, but for real. several years ago, i started teaching myself bookkeeping, as a way to offer a tangible skill to radical non-profits and grassroots organizations. i saw radical and progressive organizations ignoring the reality of money and their own financial impacts. that, and i love numbers and talking about money. so, i taught myself basic bookkeeping skills and set out to change the world of grassroots organizations’ finances. or make some money and be useful. or both.

i was also farming at the time. and found myself unemployed in maine in november after an amazing growing season. so, naturally, i started thinking about going back to school. then i moved to vermont. farmed for the season. and found myself unemployed in vermont in november after another amazing growing season. and again, i thought about going back to school. i also started thinking what i could do in the farming off-season. and duh, i circled back to bookkeeping. and that is where i think the story should end. in summer/fall 2012, i started a bookkeeping business, open bookkeeping. and it’s going really well.

but i wanted to do more than simply handle the finances of businesses, because where’s the revolution in that? so i got to thinking: how do you combine anti-capitalist politics and business consulting? i know that i’m against capitalism, but what does that mean in tangible terms? what are we (anti-capitalists) building as an alternative? can capitalism be taken down without causing mass destruction to those that are the most vulnerable and most affected by its impacts? what about the two-pronged theory of destroying the beast from the inside and outside? i think you get the point. i had a lot of questions. and i’m not sure i have answers to any of those questions.

i don’t really know how it happened but after thinking about going to hippie lefty new age business school for about two years, i started looking into sustainable MBA programs. and there was one based in Brattleboro, VT at the Marlboro College Graduate School. honestly, i talked to the admissions guy (hey there Joe!) and was pretty much like, “i would like to go to your school and take down capitalism, specifically the prison industrial complex. how are you going to support me in doing that?” and Joe was pretty much like “that sounds great. you are a genius and you should bring all your organizing background and explicit politics here to this school.” and then i pretended to look at other schools, but really just wrote some essays, got my transcripts from fancy undergrad together and started school in the fall of 2012. here is a brief excerpt from my admissions essay about sustainability and the role of entrepreneurs, today and in the future:

…Businesses are based on, and working within, a free-market capitalist economy, a system that is inherently flawed. Part of its flaw is in extracting non-renewable natural resources. But the majority of its intrinsic flaws are the upward (and unregulated) flow of money, power and resources.

Capitalism does not strive to create an equal playing field for all involved. Capitalism, by design and by default, extracts resources from people and from the land and hordes it amongst the power elite. In the form of money, labor, oil, minerals. In the era of the Occupy Movement, it is no big surprise to claim that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. That the wealth gap is widening. That the so-called middle-class is shrinking. That we are on the verge of economic collapse. That bailouts do not work. That capitalism is failing.

What this means for entrepreneurs and managers when thinking about sustainability is that we must re-envision the way we do business. The way business exists. And what kind of business is necessary. It is not sustainable for only a few to benefit. We must create an economic system in which everyone is benefitting, everyone is engaging and everyone’s needs are met. A way of running businesses that changes the relationship between a profiteering boss-man and a debt-incurring worker. A way of understanding our interconnectedness and dependency on each other such that we are setting ourselves up to support one another, not profit from and benefit off of one another.

As business entrepreneurs and managers, we need to think not only about businesses based on their profitability and consumption of natural resources, I believe we also need to think about the true necessity of each business. It is our job to ask the hard questions and come up with some real answers. A very real, and very controversial example is private prisons. It costs most states too much money to run their own prison systems. Instead of asking the question of which private prison company should they outsource to, what if states were asking themselves whether or not prisons were necessary? Reducing the amount of energy consumed by the Prison Industrial Complex (a term referring to the entire system including prisons, policing, surveillance & intelligence, courts, parole, etc.) by being more efficient is drops in a jar compared to the radical change it would create to figure out how to abolish prisons.

I know that this is a goal, a dream, a vision: to radically shift the way we understand our relationships to one another as human beings – not to mention the earth. We are not ready to undo capitalism, to simply take her down and divvy up the pieces. But we are ready to create stepping-stones and lay forth a path to move towards the vision of a just and equitable society. That, I believe, is the role of business entrepreneurs and managers, now and in the future.

[who wouldn’t admit me to business school with a pro-business essay like that?]

so then there came all these new questions as i got ready for my life as a business school student: am i going to be a freak? am i going to get into heated debates with professors and students about how incredibly unsustainable capitalism is? am i going to get brainwashed and start to preach about how capitalism needs to simply be reformed? am i going to be too political for business school and too mainstream for my political community? how do i hold all these tensions and also share the wealth of information i now have the privilege to access?

rest assured, i am not alone. the program is generally based on the notion that capitalism is unsustainable. there are as many ideas of how to move forward as there are brains in the program. so that is exciting. more on that later/soon.

as for the last few questions – how to stay connected, grounded and in conversation with my political community – i thought maybe a blog would help achieve all those goals. so here i am: attending business school. running a small bookkeeping business, farming in the summer and trying to remain grounded and visionary about my hopes for the future.