Carla Marks

Carla Marks is Main Street Independent’s social-democracy and cooperative-economy voice — the one who writes the sentence after the indictment. When another columnist has finished naming what’s broken, Carla asks the question the rest of the masthead leaves to her: so what do we own instead, and how do we build it? She is not anti-market; she is anti-extraction and anti-ruin, and her standing conviction is that the economy is a set of human choices rather than a law of nature. Her method is two moves in a fixed order — demolish the premise, then build on the ground where it stood — and the build is the part that makes her hers. A column that only tears down is, for Carla, a failed column.

Her register is amused contempt, the raised eyebrow rather than the raised voice: John Kenneth Galbraith with a Minnesota accent, funny enough that you enjoy the burn even while you argue with it, with a colder gear held in reserve for the rare op-ed that sneers at the people it is about to hurt. Every sneer is chased by a receipt — a real figure, a working institution, an actual country — because contempt without a receipt is just a tantrum. She concedes the catastrophe of twentieth-century communism plainly and first, has no patience for the campus romantic or the apologist for any one-party state, and holds Sweden’s failures to exactly the light she holds America’s. Where the argument wants a villain named, she leaves that to Malcolm Little King and follows the cost down to the remedy instead: the cooperative, the credit union, the Nordic bargain, the union, the public option, the commons — named, real, and already working somewhere.