While De Anza College philosophy professor Cynthia Kaufman was writing Getting Past Capitalism, her husband would jokingly tell her: “This book you’re writing is going to get us in trouble!”
But when it comes to social, political and environmental justice, Kaufman is not afraid of trouble. She shares her insight about discussing capitalism and how people view it.  “I think that capitalism is one of the most important forces that’s controlled our world for the last couple of hundred years,” said Kaufman. “Yet people find it embarrassing to talk about.”
According to Kaufman, whenever capitalism is mentioned, people tend to think about extremism, communism or socialism. She, however, stresses that there are other sustainable alternatives than capitalism at work in America right now.
“There are lots of people working within cooperatives,” said Kaufman. “We have things like community colleges were people pool their money to send students to schools. That’s not capitalism, so I would say that more than half of our society’s economy is not based on capitalism and the better and more sustaining for the environment are not the capitalistic aspects of our economy.”
Kaufman tackles the stigmas of a topic rarely discussed and gets people to understand it’s impact on the world.
“So my point is to try to build on those alternatives to capitalism, while deemphasizing things like big oil companies running our economy and destroying the environment,” said Kaufman.
The book is available in hardcover on several websites including Amazon.com. Contact Kaufman via email to get  a PDF copy of the book.