Mudge 9/2019, not for circulation or citation
Can Democracy Survive Capitalism’s Erosion? A Comment on Erik Olin Wright
Stephanie L. Mudge September 27, 2019
DRAFT paper presented at “How To Be An Anti-Capitalist in the 21st Century: A One-Day Conference in Memory of Erik Olin Wright,” 9/26/2019.
Word count: 7,077 Comments welcome: [email protected]
Abstract
This paper celebrates the memory of Erik Olin Wright via an extended critical engagement with his final work, How To Be An Anti-Capitalist in the 21st Century. Through a comparison of Wright’s and Wolfgang Streeck’s analyses on matters of capitalism, crisis and the state, and collective action I highlight that, despite a shared concern with how capitalism shapes human abilities for building and enacting anti-capitalist strategic political movements (either by sapping or inadvertently cultivating it), neither analysis gives a satisfactory account of the formation of historical persons—nor, indeed, for the existence of theorists like themselves. Instead, based on macro-theoretical analyses and broad historical knowledge both infer certain kinds of actors: hopeless self-medicating worker-consumers for Streeck; partially-embedded human repositories of values, beliefs, and identities, whose anti- capitalist impulses can be honed by way of strategic anti-capitalist theory, for Wright. The shared problem of assuming the nature of the capitalist subject, I argue, is entirely resolvable by making it an empirical matter, accessible via a long line of sociological thinking that is concerned with the historical conditions of critical reason. By incorporating these concerns into the normal methodological practices and orientations of sociological political economy, I argue, there is the possibility of bridging Wright’s future-oriented optimism with Streeck’s pessimistic history of the present.
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Can Democracy Survive Capitalism’s Erosion?
Erik Olin Wright’s How to be an Anti-Capitalist in the 21st Century offers a refreshingly optimistic take on future possibilities in a moment that is otherwise saturated with foreboding. Rather than succumbing to “gloom and doom” Wright imagined a societal order founded in equality and fairness, meaningful democratic freedom, and cooperative solidarity, making the case that a better world is possible—and, more importantly, plausible.
In his final work Wright focused his energies on the question of the “vehicle,” or getting from here to there, advancing a strategic theory of “eroding capitalism” via a combination of resistance, avoidance, and head-on pursuit of legislative and political power.
And yet, though Wright’s optimism is heartening, his final work is more sketch than history; it does not dwell in any great detail on our current predicament. Here we might contrast Wright’s utopian optimism with the decidedly darker and more deeply historical analysis of Wolfgang Streeck, who argues that a world of accelerating finance-saturated global capitalism and declining debt-cum-consolidation Western states adds up to a state of indeterminate decline that exceeds the analytical capacities of sociological theories. In
Streeck’s words, “unexpected things can happen any time.” Streeck’s analysis can be read as a refutation of both the letter and the spirit of the Wrightian take—that is, of its analysis (the letter) as well as the very notion that theoretically-informed sociological political economy is able to contribute to transformational projects (the spirit). In Streeck’s view, future possibilities are both wide open and negatively skewed; they may include capitalism or democracy but not both (or maybe neither); the chance of a socialist future, if not foreclosed,
2 Mudge 9/2019, not for circulation or citation is exceedingly dim. Assuming that Streeck’s historical analysis is broadly correct1 we might ask, then, whether the political-economic ‘game’ is, in Elizabeth Warren’s favorite term,
“rigged” such that “eroding capitalism”—which, in the United States, one could say is already underway in some corners—is more likely than not to culminate in something entirely less desirable than democratically-grounded emancipatory socialism that will remain beyond our grasp until it is upon us.
In the spirit of Wrightian optimism, however, we cannot be content to leave it at that.
Through a comparison of Wright’s and Streeck’s analyses on matters of capitalism, crisis and the state, and collective action I highlight that, despite a shared concern with how capitalism shapes human capacities for critical reason and, by extension, building and enacting anti- capitalist strategic political movements (either by sapping [Streeck] or inadvertently cultivating it [Wright]), neither analysis passes the litmus test learned by graduate students in their first sociological theory courses: there is no satisfactory account of the existence of the theorist—that is, of themselves. The more general criticism here is the absence of any sustained theory of the making of definite historical actors, anti-capitalist or otherwise.
Instead, based on macro-theoretical analyses and broad historical knowledge (and, no doubt, personal experience), both infer certain kinds of actors: hopeless self-medicating worker- consumers for Streeck; partially-embedded human repositories of values, beliefs, and identities whose anti-capitalist impulses can be honed by way of strategic anti-capitalist theory, for Wright.
1 This is a big assumption; Streeck’s analysis has attracted criticism on various fronts. A recent article in Historical Materialism by Jerome Roos of the LSE characterizes Streeck’s take as an “exceedingly catastrophist worldview, devoid of any emancipatory potential” that, with its emphasis on the nation-state as a bulwark against the ever-deeper encroachments of market society, veers “dangerously close to the welfare chauvinism of the nationalist right” (Roos 2019, 248; see also Tooze 2019). I have my own, very different, criticisms— elaborated below.
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This shared problem, I argue, points to a means of bridging Wright’s future-oriented optimism with Streeck’s pessimistic history of the present. Because many social theorists have taken up the problem of the making of certain kinds of historical persons, practices, and action-orientations—an incomplete list would include Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Du Bois,
Mead, Dewey, Cooper, Gramsci, Fanon, de Beauvoir, Bourdieu, and more or less the whole of feminist, postcolonial and critical race theory—it also points the way to a needed corrective to Streeck’s troubling contention that sociological theory is rendered helpless in the face of crisis-laden indeterminacy. In short, my overarching claim is that, if the aim is an eleventh- thesis kind of theory—that is, an assessment of the present in light of the past capable of addressing the strategic question of what is to be done—then the practice of political economy needs to incorporate a meaningful analysis of the conditions of (im)possibility of transformative social actors.
The letter: Wright vs Streeck—or, will “erosion” lead to socialism?
Streeck’s recent work—including especially How Will Capitalism End? (2016 [2017]2) and
Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism (2013 [2017])—can be read as a refutation of both the letter and the spirit of Wrightian optimism. In this section I focus on the letter. In particular, I work through a contrast of Wright and Streeck’s views of capitalism, crisis and the state, and collective action to arrive at a crucial question: whether “eroding capitalism” may kill the (already ill) democratic patient, lead down a path other than that
Wright envisioned—one that may be entirely less desirable than a democratically-grounded, emancipatory socialism. However, lacking any sustained theory of the making of definite
2 How Will Capitalism End? features work published between 2011 and 2015.
4 Mudge 9/2019, not for circulation or citation historical actors (anti-capitalist, democratic, socialist, or otherwise—all of which, we might note, can be found in contemporary the world), despite a shared emphasis on the centrality of human capacity for strategic collective action, and no shortage of theories of the formation of different sorts of historical persons, neither perspective is capable of answering this question.
Capitalism
Wright defines capitalism as a two-fold “form of social organization” defined by “a class structure characterized by private ownership of the means of production” in which most people get by “selling their labor on a labor market” and a mode of “economic coordination organized through decentralized market exchange” (Wright 2006, 100). Two hallmarks,
“poverty in the midst of plenty” and environmental destruction, are among its “gravest” failings (Wright 2018, 1). Prioritizing future-oriented normative critique over the more conventional Marxian concern with structural contradictions and the supposed necessities thereof, Wright makes the case that our starting point should not be whether things are better in a capitalist order over the “long run” but rather, looking forward from the present, whether an alternative economy would “be better for most people” (ibid).
Wright’s notion of capitalism as a class structure plus market coordination contrasts with Streeck’s dynamic, sociological, “progressive” conception of “capitalist society”:
… “a ‘progressive society’ in the sense of Adam Smith and the enlightenment … that has
coupled its ‘progress’ to the continuous and unlimited production and accumulation of
productive capital, effected through a conversion, by means of the invisible hand of the
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market and the visible hand of the state, of the private vice of material greed into a public
benefit (Streeck 2016, 1-2).
Streeck focuses on capitalism’s mode of self-legitimation, dependencies, and internal contradictions: capitalism legitimates itself via unsustainable promises about the future
(“infinite growth of commodified material wealth in a finite world”), achievable in the short- to-medium term only by piggybacking on “modern science and technology” and pushing for the continuous “expansion of free, in the sense of contestable, risky markets” and riding “on the coat-tails of a hegemonic carrier state and its market-opening policies both domestically and internationally” (Streeck 2016, 1-2).
Streeck’s notion of capitalism is far more total than Wright’s. More than an economic system and a class structure, for Streeck capitalism is an all-encompassing dynamic socio- cultural-political-economic-technological order. Streeck concurs with Wright’s normative assessment of capitalism’s most critical problems: the concentration of ownership (backed by [capitalists’] property rights); the powerlessness of the majority of us who must work at the mercy of private owners of capital (Streeck 2016, 1-2). But unlike Wright’s selective and
(very) structural notion of what lies within the category “capitalism” and what lies beyond it, for Streeck capitalism both exists ‘out there’ and reaches into the core of experience, feeling, and belief—by, for instance, converting our “ever-present fear of being cut out of the productive process” into a “belief in the legitimacy of capitalism as a social order” and making
“insecure workers” into “confident consumers” (Streeck 2016, 2). Here Streeck veers in an almost Foucaultian direction in which capitalist logics beget thoroughly capitalist subjects, their faith in capitalism impervious to experience, whose daily lives are organized by
6 Mudge 9/2019, not for circulation or citation individualized consumption (“shopping”), staving off despair (“coping”), self-help
(“hoping”), and self-medication (“doping”).
In sum, though neither use the various concepts we have that sensitize us to matters of practice and practical reason, Wright’s and Streeck’s notions of capitalism are distinguished by very different notions of the habits, styles, and dispositions that capitalism cultivates—that is, in Bourdieusian terms, the habitus of the capitalist subject. The distinction between the two thinkers on this question roughly parallels Granovetter’s (1985) contrast between the undersocialized and oversocialized social actor, and might be summarized thus: for Wright capitalism is a set of structures that we live in/under, but is not constitutive of who we are or our values and beliefs in a fundamental way (except, perhaps, by prompting the making of anti-capitalists—on which more later); for Streeck the capitalist subject is constituted in and through capitalist processes, rendering them unable to think outside or against them. These opposing views, as we will see, inform both authors’ perspectives on crisis, the state, and strategic action.
Crisis and the state
Viewing today’s financialized democracy as a technocratic mirage, for Streeck capitalism remains—as ever—a constitutionally crisis-ridden order prone to self-destruction (Streeck
2016, 2). This, and the way in which crisis is internalized and processed by the state, sits at the crux of Streeck’s whole analysis—a mode of thinking that he traces to a long line of figures including not only Marx but also Keynes, Polanyi, Ricardo, Mill, Sombart, Hilferding,
Schumpeter, Luxemburg, Kondratieff, Hayek, and Weber. “The fact that capitalism has, until now, managed to outlive all predictions of its impending death,” he argues, “need not mean
7 Mudge 9/2019, not for circulation or citation that it will forever be able to do so” (Streeck 2016, 3-4). Nor need crisis come in the form of a dramatic or decisive event; if anything, crisis is more like a condition or a syndrome that makes the state terminally ill, even if it doesn’t know it yet.
What characterizes the current crisis for Streeck? Taking the Schumpeter-
Goldscheid-O’Connor notion of the “tax state” as a starting point, Streeck’s general story is of a cycle in which crisis-induced political-social settlements (a certain form of the state; a certain mode of cultural legitimation), or equilibria, produce new economic disequilibria, which then destabilize the political order, producing new settlements and new disequilibria
… and so forth (Streeck 2013 [2017], xix). Thus from the inflation-induced ruins of the “tax state” emerges the “debt state” (on the public side) and the expansion of credit (on the private side); this, in turn, pushes the tax state beyond the limits of its extractive powers, leading us into the next, drawn out but eventually fatal, phase:
Could it not be that the stubbornly rising state debt is seeking to tell us that the need for
collective investment and collective consumption has grown beyond what a democratic tax
state can manage … to confiscate from its propertied citizens and organizations… (Streeck
2013 [2017], xx-xxi)?
Capitalism today exhibits, in Streeck’s view, a state of pervasive crisis: “multi-morbidity in which different disorders coexist and, more often than not, reinforce each other.” Nothing— not “pluralism, regional diversity and uneven development, political reform, or independent crisis cycles”—can save it (Streeck 2016, 13).
Consistent with his notion of the capitalism-saturated modern subject—but, it would seem, with little consideration of how such a notion can be reconciled with his own existence or practical commitments—Streeck suggests that sociologically-informed transformative
8 Mudge 9/2019, not for circulation or citation theorizing has met its match. A crisis of contemporary capitalism that has the special character of “deep indeterminacy” renders “traditional” sociological theories helpless.
“Knowledgeable observers can legitimately disagree on what will happen,” but “long-valid causal relations … become historically obsolete” (Streeck 2016, 12, emphases added in the latter quote). A sociological dark age is, in Streeck’s view, “a result, but also a cause, of a destruction of collective agency” (Streeck 2016, 12).
Unsurprisingly Streeck’s views on crisis and the state bear little resemblance to
Wright’s. For reasons that are not spelled out in his final work, Wright essentially dismisses
Marxian crisis theory—that is, the whole underpinning of Streeck’s analysis—in How To Be
An Anti-Capitalist. This is consistent with earlier work, including a 2006 piece in the New Left
Review in which Wright declared that the claims that “capitalism necessarily destroys itself and will therefore need to be replaced by some alternative,” and that it exhibits a “systematic tendency for crises to intensify over time,” rest on “questionable theoretical grounds”
(Wright 2006, 103). Wright’s final work indicates that, even in the unstable political and economic aftermath of the financial crisis, he continued to attach little value to the deterministic notion that capitalism’s internal contradictions usher in “intensifying crisis and decline” (Wright 2006, 102).
The Wrightian state, by (sharp) contrast, mainly appears as one of two strategic problems in How To Be An Anti-Capitalist (the other is collective action): a host through which capitalist institutions can be chipped away from the inside, all within the framework of existing democratic institutions including, especially, political parties. To the argument that the capitalist, tax-dependent, elite-oriented, private property-based state can’t be an instrument of erosion, Wright responds that states’ variable paths of historical formation
9 Mudge 9/2019, not for circulation or citation add up to important variations in their degree of capitalist-ness (Wright 2018, 45-6).3 While
Streeck appears to have given up on political parties (or, at least, they do not attract his explicit analytical attention4), Wright sees democratic institutions and practices as non- capitalist (or maybe non-necessarily-capitalist) intra-state spaces. And so the
more robustly democratic are the forms of decision-making and accountability, the less
purely capitalist is the class character of a state apparatus. Even ordinary parliamentary
democracy has always had a contradictory class character: while it may be true that the rules-
of-the-game of electoral democracy have the general effect of constraining and taming class
struggles over the state in ways that support capitalist dominance, it is also true that to the
extent that elections involve real democratic competition, they introduce potential tensions
and uncertainties in the class character of legislative bodies (Wright 2018, 47).
The upshot, echoing Bernie Sanders and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), is that the strengthening and revitalizing democracy on all levels, and especially local levels, is equivalent to diluting the capitalist character of the state (Wright 2018, 47).
Wright also emphasizes the state’s contradictory and contested functions (Wright
2018, 47). He has no use for Streeck’s language of “equilibrium” on matters of the state; he finds no basis for a logic of even temporary stasis because (as Streeck also says) a solution to any given problem immediately creates or intensifies others. Wright then notes that the capitalist state’s constant flux creates temporal inconsistencies: “short-term effects of state actions,” but “long-run dynamic consequences” (Wright 2018, 48). These longer-run
3 [Note here Streeck’s commentary on the reconcilability past emphases on the ‘varieties of capitalism’ and his more global and unified notion of capitalism in recent years, explained in Buying Time.] 4 For one account of Streeck’s political and intellectual trajectory, see Roos 2019. I will simply note here that this account falls short of what I have in mind as far as a political economy that attends, as a normal and necessary part of its analytical practice, to the biographical trajectories and institutional formation of historical actors, including figures like Streeck himself. I address what I do have in mind, albeit partially, further below; see Mudge 2018a, 2018b for further elaboration.
10 Mudge 9/2019, not for circulation or citation dynamics are important strategically because, “[s]ometimes” they “become real threats to the existing structures of power” (Wright 2018, 48).
Wright’s key example in this regard is the history of social democracy (on which, because I plan to revisit this part of his thinking as I continue to develop this portion of the paper with reference special to my recent book on center-left parties and neoliberal politics
[Mudge 2018], I will quote him at length):
[I]n the middle of the twentieth century the capitalist state facilitated the growth of a vibrant
public sector and public regulation of capitalism associated with social democracy. Social
democracy helped solve a series of problems within capitalism commonly referred to as
“market failures”: insufficient aggregate demand to provide robust markets for capitalist
production; destructive volatility in financial markets; inadequate public goods to provide for
the stable reproduction of labor; and so on. In helping to solve these problems, social
democracy strengthened capitalism; but, crucially, it did so while at the same time it
expanded the space for various socialist elements in the economic ecosystem: the partial
decommodification of labor power through state provision of significant components of
workers’ material conditions of life; the increase in working class social power within
capitalist firms and the labor market through favorable labor laws; and the deepening of the
administrative capacity of the state to impose effective regulation of capital to deal with the
most serious negative externalities of the behavior of investors and firms in capitalist
markets (pollution, product and workplace hazards, predatory market behavior, market
volatility, etc.). The short-run, practical solutions embodied principles that had the potential
in the long-term to weaken the dominance of capitalism. Many capitalists may not have
embraced these state initiatives and even felt threatened by them, but the social democratic
state did help solve practical problems and therefore was tolerated (Wright 2018, 48-9).
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In true Polanyian style, Wright then situates the historical effects of social democracy in state formation as primary causes of a “neoliberal” counter-movement:
…it is precisely the property of social democratic initiatives to expand in ways that encroach
on capitalism that eventually lead to the attacks on the social democratic state under the
banner of neoliberalism. As capitalists and their political allies came increasingly to see the
expansive state as creating progressively suboptimal conditions for capital accumulation,
they waited for the political opportunity to launch an offensive against the affirmative state
(Wright 2018, 49).5
And yet, as today’s cracks in neoliberal hegemony duly attest, it did not amount to a total erasure of non- or anti-capitalist possibilities. Here, however, Wright seems to waver on the matter of pervasive crisis—or, at least, a sense thereof:
Neoliberalism may have been fairly successful in dismantling, to varying degrees, the socialist
elements within the late 20th century capitalist state and the capitalist economy in most
capitalist societies, but it certainly has not been able to eliminate the contradictory pressures
on the state or the internal contradictions in its political structures. In the first decades of the
21st century these contradictions have become acute, generating a pervasive sense of crisis
within both the economy and the state (Wright 2018, 49).
Wright’s analysis thus returns, despite his dismissal of crisis theory, to the question of the character of the current crisis.
How do we evaluate whether anti-democratic, authoritarian, populist turns, the remaking of American Republicanism under the current administration, the return of labor unrest and mass public protest, geopolitical instability, and constant indications of an
5 See Harvey 2005 for a similar take. For a critical perspective on understandings of neoliberalism as a class project, see Mudge 2008, 2017, 2018a.
12 Mudge 9/2019, not for circulation or citation accelerating of descent into an ecological abyss should all be read as Streeckian “unexpected things,” as opposed to what Wright sees as openings for strategic intervention? Streeck’s analysis of the debt state as a servant of a cosmopolitan financial elites, or what Sandy Brian
Hager calls “the bondholder class” (Hager 2016), as opposed to non-cosmopolitan, nationally-centered, wage-earning and indebted democratic constituencies, has a relentless
(and relentlessly depressing) logic. One can criticize Streeck’s conceptual terminology (eg,
Tooze 2019) or the uncomfortable political implications of his analysis (eg, Roos 2019) but, for anyone who has read Marx or knows a bit of economic history (or simply checks the news), one can’t help but sympathize with Streeck’s story of a world that appears to be teetering on the edge.
On a first reading one is thus tempted to dismiss Wright’s dismissal of crisis theory.
And yet there is a non-totalizing impulse in Wright’s understanding of capitalism that is appealingly correct. “No economy has ever been – or ever could be – purely capitalist,”
Wright notes; in any otherwise capitalist order there are non-market forms of exchange and non-wage- and labor market-based forms of work. Wright points to state-directed production and distribution, families and communities, cooperatives and non-profits as
“hybrids, combining capitalist and non-capitalist elements.” “[I]n real economic systems,” he notes, “a variety of different games are being played simultaneously, each with their own rules and moves”; capitalism may be “dominant,” but it is never total (Wright 2018, 26). This, then, helps to account for the historical emergence of a variety of anti-capitalist strategies:
“smashing capitalism, dismantling capitalism, taming capitalism, resisting capitalism, and escaping capitalism” (Wright 2018, 17). “Erosion,” Wright argues, is the strategy best-suited to the moment.
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And so in the end, where Streeck sees capitalist pathologies Wright saw “spaces and cracks” in a “complex system” filled with “more democratic, egalitarian, participatory” potential. Global warming becomes “grounds for optimism” because it signals the death- knell of neoliberalism (“The market is simply not going to build sea walls to protect
Manhattan”); the rise of precarious employment and the threat of technologically-induced mass unemployment mean the expansion of state projects and the prospect of state-funded employment; proposals like UBI are a means to erosion (Wright 2018, 49-51). This glass- half-full viewpoint is the beating heart of Wright’s “erosion” theory of anti-capitalist strategy:
The idea of eroding capitalism imagines that these alternatives have the potential, in the long
run, of becoming sufficiently prominent in the lives of individuals and communities that
capitalism could eventually be displaced from this dominant role in the system as a whole
(Wright 2018, 26).6
This, then, brings us to Wright’s second “strategic problem”: the question of collective action. As I will discuss in the next section, here it is crucial that Wright does not share
Streeck’s dire assessment of the oversocialized capitalist subject. And yet, at the same time,
6 Further: “Alternative, non-capitalist economic activities, embodying democratic and egalitarian relations, emerge in the niches where this is possible within an economy dominated by capitalism. These activities grow over time, both spontaneously and as a result of deliberate strategy. Some of these emerge as adaptations and initiatives from below within communities. Others are actively organized or sponsored by the state from above to solve practical problems. These alternative economic relations constitute the building blocks of an economic structure whose relations of production are characterized by democracy, equality, and solidarity. Struggles involving the state take place, sometimes to protect these spaces, other times to facilitate new possibilities. Periodically what seems to be structural “limits of possibility” are encountered, and to go beyond such limits may require more intense political mobilization directed at changing critical features of the “rules of the game” within which capitalism functions. Often such mobilizations fail, but at least sometimes conditions are ripe for such changes, and the limits of possibility expand. Eventually, the cumulative effect of this interplay between changes from above and initiatives from below may reach a point where the socialist relations created within the economic ecosystem become sufficiently prominent in the lives of individuals and communities that capitalism can no longer be said to dominate the system as a whole (Wright 2018, 27).
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Wright’s undersocialized and (more importantly) undertheorized notion of the (anti- capitalist) strategic actor, I argue, leaves much to be desired.
The possibility of strategic collective action
Streeck sees little room for the survival of capitalist democracy, and even less for a social democratic future, short of a major reversal in the very structure of the international economy. In Streeck’s retrospective preface to the second edition of Buying Time he notes tepidly that “[t]he book tries to be less than totally pessimistic.” On the matter of financial regulation Streeck locates questions of capacity and implementation “beyond the scope” of his study—but notes, lest we should place too much faith in regulatory solutions, “how little has been achieved since 2008” (Streeck 2013 [2017], xxviii).
Consistent with his contention that sociological theory has met its match, Streeck sees such scope limitations as a symptom “not of the research approach adopted, but of the real world under study” (ibid).7 Ultimately, in Streeck’s view, the present conjuncture far exceeds the predictive power of “traditional and sociological theories” thanks to the intertwined nature of the contemporary economic order and the “destruction of collective agency”
(Streeck 2016 [2017], p. 12). Sociological theories cannot help us think our way out of the crisis, because the practical machinery that makes analysis actionable—capacity for collective action—is beyond repair. Capitalist democracies’ ability (in Streeck’s words) to
“buy time” depends on the cultivation of “agents of transformation” capable of overcoming
“privatized lives,” class fragmentation, and competing identities—a prospect for which
7 [Footnote on his discussion of ending EMU, returning to national currency regimes capable of strategic devaluation, and a ‘European Bretton Woods.’]
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Streeck holds out little hope. The implication as far as Wright’s final work is that its aim, while admirable, rests on a premise that is now untenable: that there exists in the world a capacity for sustained, strategic collective political action, anticapitalist or otherwise.
Wright’s position on “agents of transformation” flirts with Streeck’s notion of the oversocialized capitalist subject but resists the temptation to see it as a permanent or total condition. Capitalism, Wright notes, exhibits a tendency to contract the space of the political—or, in his words, “the way the boundary between the public and private sphere is drawn in capitalism,” such that “crucial decisions that affect large numbers of people” are made in the absence of participatory democratic control (Wright 2018, 12). Primary here, and reminiscent of a Streeckian debt state that panders to the bondholding class, are matters of spending and investment: private power “creates a constant pressure on public authority to enact rules favorable to the interests of capital” (Wright 2018, 12). Wright acknowledges the wealth inequality/political inequality relationship that is duly documented across the social sciences (and would come as no surprise to Marx) and argues that, in combination with asymmetric power dynamics in the workplace, the cumulative effect is that precious few of us really have “the ability to say “no”” (Wright 2018, 12-13). Meanwhile, an economic system that operates on “[g]reed and fear” on the level of individual motivation, and
“competitive individualism and privatized consumerism” on the level of “cultural forms,” does little to foster “the value of community and solidarity” (Wright 2018, 14).
But just as capitalism is always partial in the Wrightian view, so is the capitalist subject. Capitalism socializes us in contradictory ways: on the one hand it “promotes the emergence and partial development of both freedom and democracy,” but on the other hand it “obstructs the fullest possible realization of these values” (Wright 2018, 12).
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Capitalism breeds anti-capitalists. In some times and places the resistance to capitalism
becomes crystallized in coherent ideologies with systematic diagnoses of the source of harms
and clear prescriptions about what to do to eliminate them. In other circumstances, anti-
capitalism is submerged within motivations that on the surface have little to do with
capitalism, such as religious beliefs that lead people to reject modernity and seek refuge in
isolated communities (Wright 2018, 2).
The problem, then, is removing the obstructions to the realization of anti-capitalist values.
Here we encounter what Wright presents as the “biggest puzzle” that an erosion strategy confronts: collective action. How, Wright asks, do we foster “the creation of robust collective actors capable of acting politically to challenge and change the rules of the game of capitalism in a progressive direction”? Identifying political parties as “traditional” drivers of the formation of progressive-transformative actors, Wright also points to “lobbying organizations, interest organizations of all sorts, labor unions, community organizations, social movement organizations, and many others,” but argues that “they need to somehow be connected to progressive political parties capable of acting directly within the state.”
Offering little in the way of analysis of actually existing parties, he settled on the argument that “the strategy of eroding capitalism depends on the existence of a web of collective actors anchored in civil society and political parties committed to such a political project” (Wright
2018, 57).
One wishes here for the kind of sustained attention to parties that Wright gives to the state. Instead, however, Wright turns to a loosely Weberian sketch of the social actor and social action. Arguing that class interests and moral values are the “[t]wo general kinds of motivations” in “diverse forms of struggle within and over capitalism,” Wright boils down
17 Mudge 9/2019, not for circulation or citation the possibility of anti-capitalist collective action (“in part”) to “values” rather than
“interests”:
because of the complexity of class interests, there will always be many people whose interests
do not clearly fall on one side of the fence or the other. Their willingness to support anti-
capitalist initiatives will depend in part on what other kinds of values are at stake
(Wright 2018, 3, emphasis added).
“[M]ost people,” he notes (with reference to no person, time, place, or context), “are motivated at least in part by moral concerns, not just practical economic interests” (Wright
2018, 4). The way to deal with this, Wright contends, is via a combination of truth-claiming and value-defining: first, to “identify the specific ways in which capitalism harms the material interests of certain categories of people,” and second to “clarify the values that we would like an economy to foster” (Wright 2018, 4, emphasis added).
Touching (too) lightly on the questions of how, by whom, where and under what conditions anti-capitalist values might be cultivated and defined, Wright takes up the task of value-defining himself, offering up three principles—equality/fairness, democracy/freedom, and community/solidarity—and laying out “some general [strategic] guidelines” for the practice of progressive politics (Wright 2018, 66), as follows.
• First, the discussion of values should be at the very center of progressive politics. The three
clusters of values discussed in chapter one – equality/fairness, democracy/freedom,
community/solidarity – should be made explicit and explained. … It is important to
emphasize the relation of these values to the concrete policies that advance radical economic
democracy (Wright 2018, 66).
• Second, these values can provide the vital connection between the class interests at the heart
of eroding capitalism and other identity-interests with emancipatory aspirations. What has
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been termed “identity politics” of oppressed social categories should be treated as an integral
element within a broad emancipatory politics rather than a matter of secondary concern. …
(Wright 2018, 66).
• Third, the value of democracy … should be given particular emphasis in articulating the
concrete program of progressive politics. A deeper democracy, a real democracy, is in the
interests of a very broad part of the population beyond the working class. The thinness of
democracy within capitalist states constitutes one of the principle obstacles to advancing
policies to reduce the dominance of capitalism, but efforts to restore and deepen democracy
also constitute a unifying objective for people who may be less sympathetic to the overall
anti-capitalist agenda. (Wright 2018, 66)
• Fourth, … the overall strategy of eroding capitalism is not exclusively a state-centered
strategy, and political parties are not the only collective actors needed for this strategy to be
carried out. … In particular, the efforts at building and expanding the social and solidarity
economy, the cooperative market economy, and the array of new economic practices opened
up by IT-enabled economic relations such as peer-to-peer collaborative production, is
essential for the long-term prospects of eroding capitalism. Remember: eroding the
dominance of capitalism means both encroaching on capitalism by reversing the
privatization of the provision of public goods and services by the state and expanding the
diverse forms of noncapitalist economic activity outside the state. New technological
developments, which reduce economies of scale and facilitate cooperation, are likely to
increase the potential growth of these non-capitalist ways of organizing economic life.
Recognizing the importance of these initiatives from below, and formulating a set of reform
policies that would expand the economic space for their growth, would also deepen the social
base for the broader agenda of eroding capitalism (Wright 2018, 66).
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Does “erosion” end with socialism?
Arguably, the Streeckian response to Wright’s strategic program hinges on the question of the capitalist subject: that is, whether Wright’s notion of the incomplete and contradictory socializing institutions of capitalism is more correct than Streeck’s bleak assessment of our hopelessly oversocialized condition. There is much at stake. If we indeed cannot be anticapitalists in any meaningful historical sense, having lost our capacity to act collectively in a sustained way in a world that lurches from crisis to crisis, then necessarily short-lived efforts to enact a strategic framework of any sort seem just as likely to make things worse as they are to make things better. Given the delicate state of democratic politics and the planet, the broader question here is whether a Wrightian strategy, played out by Streeckian capitalist subjects, points history in an entirely less desirable direction than the socialist one.
The spirit
How do we adjudicate between Wright’s future-oriented optimism and Streeck’s pessimistic history of the present? How, in short, do we keep the spirit of Wright’s project alive?
There are grounds for disputing Streeck’s notion that sociological theory has somehow exhausted itself. Here we might start by noting that such a contention, if true, renders our presence at an event celebrating the life and work of Erik Olin Wright a mystery.
We might also note that it is entirely within the purview of existing sociological theories to treat the question of the oversocialized capitalist subject as a historical and empirical matter, as opposed to an unexplored (and unexplorable) hypothesis. Indeed, many social theorists have taken up the problem of the making of certain kinds of historical persons, practices, and action-orientations with special attention to the conditions and cultivation of critical reason;
20 Mudge 9/2019, not for circulation or citation an incomplete list would include Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Du Bois, Mead, Dewey, Cooper,
Gramsci, Fanon, de Beauvoir, Bourdieu, and more or less the whole of feminist, postcolonial and critical race theory.
Marxian theorizing has long struggled with the problem of treating persons and intentionality as incidental to macro-historical change and, by extension, first-person accounts as indicative rather than explanatory (Martin 2003). But there are alternatives to this way of thinking about things, even within the Marxian tent. Some are built on incisive analyses of what we might think of as the Marxian ‘field’—that is, a space of historical social relations, organized by a shared investment in Marxian theorizing, that has its own specific logic. Here I have in mind Cedric Robinson’s (1983 [2000]) assessment, which identifies a certain tendency in Marxist theorizing in which the drive for historically-grounded certainty begets its opposite: dogma, over-certainty, and pure empiricism. Citing Trotsky’s call to
“liberate man from all that prevents his seeing” (Trotsky, quoted in Robinson 1983 [2000],
208), Robinson argued that the impulse to absolute truth in the Marxian tradition tends to give rise to “the emergence of its corrosives, its oppositions.” Rather than “an intellectual or theoretical problem,” he contends this should be understood as a definite organizationally- and socially-rooted socio-political dynamic that Marxist dialecticism is in fact well-equipped to recognize, even (or perhaps especially) within the Marxist tradition (ibid).
Recognition of this dynamic, and more importantly an ability to escape it and advance in new directions—that is, to move theory in-step with the movements of history by taking up, for instance, the question of the capitalist subject, as opposed to capitalism writ large, in the contemporary moment—was, in Robinson’s view, a function of the socio-historical location of the theorist: they had to have a certain outsider quality made possibility by a
21 Mudge 9/2019, not for circulation or citation partial externality, or partial investment, to both the academic and the political game. Here
Robinson pointed to W.E.B. Du Bois, who operated in critical engagement with, but at a practical distance from, both Marxist-Leninism (by choice) and white-dominated American historiography (by choice and necessity) in the 1920s and 1930s. In Robinson’s words: “It was in those … irreconcilable roles--as a Black radical thinker and as a sympathetic critic of
Marx--that Du Bois was to make some of his most important contributions concerning Black social movements” (Robinson 1983 [2000], 207).
And so, for Robinson, Du Bois’ indictment of his historian contemporaries’ blindness to “the things that actually happened in the world” at the end of Black Reconstruction had much broader significance: it was an effort to both correct the racialized historiography of
Reconstruction and to shine a light on the ethical practices of the historian who, “posing as scientist,” instead sets out “to conceal or distort facts,” thus paving the way “for a muddled world out of sheer ignorance to make the same mistakes ten times over” (Du Bois 1935
[1998], 722, quoted in Robinson 1983). Du Bois thus called for new “standards of ethics in research and interpretation”—without which, he feared, history offers no future guideposts but rather a means of “pleasure and amusement, … inflating our national ego, and giving us a false but pleasurable sense of accomplishment” (Du Bois 1935 [1998], 714). Without a new ethics, Du Bois argued, “we must give up the idea of history either as a science or as an art using the results of science, and admit frankly that we are using a version of historic fact in order to influence and educate the new generation along the way we wish” (ibid). The danger of this course, as Du Bois saw it, was the reduction of history to propaganda:
It is propaganda like this that has led men in the past to insist that history is "lies agreed
upon"; and to point out the danger in such misinformation. It is indeed extremely doubtful if
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any permanent benefit comes to the world through such action. Nations reel and stagger on
their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and
beautiful things (Du Bois 1935 [1998], 714).
Taking Robinson’s and Du Bois’ analysis to heart suggests, in the present moment, an urgent need to revamp the theories, methods, and practices of historical political economy. Here my argument is simple: if the aim is an eleventh-thesis kind of theory—an assessment of the present in light of the past, aiming to address the strategic question of what is to be done— then surely one task is to grasp the conditions of (im)possibility of transformative theorists.
In doing so political-economic method acquires a means of understanding the making and worldviews of recognized “political economists” (or, for that matter, “economists”) and, more importantly, key socio-historical processes by which political and economic alternatives are constructed, interpreted, and ruled in or out (that is, if we take seriously the literature on economics’ “performativity”). In the process, political economy becomes better able to support and inform the cultivation of a new generation of political economists who share a commitment, in Julian Go’s phrasing (referencing Chakrabarty 2000 [2007]), to
‘provincializing the canon’ (Go 2019), sustaining the spirit of transformative theorizing for which Wright will surely be remembered.
References
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000 [2007]. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton University Press. Du Bois, W. E. B. 1935 [1998]. Black Reconstruction in America. The Free Press. Go, Julian. 2019. ASA Coser Lecture. Granovetter, Mark. 1985. “Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness.” American Journal of Sociology 91, 3: 481-510.
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Hager, Sandy Brian. 2016. Public Debt, Inequality, and Power. UC Press. Harvey, David. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford University Press. Martin, John Levi. 2003. ‘What is Field Theory?’, American Journal of Sociology, 109, 1–49. Mudge, Stephanie L. 2008. “What is Neo-liberalism?” Socio-Economic Review 6, 4: 703-731. Mudge, Stephanie L. 2017. “Neo-liberalism and the Study of ‘Isms’.” In Outhwaite, ed., SAGE Handbook of Political Sociology. Mudge, Stephanie L. 2018a. Leftism Reinvented: Western Parties from Socialism to Neoliberalism. Harvard University Press. Mudge, Stephanie L. 2018b. “For a First-Person Political Economy: A Comment on Michael McCarthy’s Dismantling Solidarity.” Critical Sociology 0,0: 1-5. Polanyi, Karl. 1944 [2001]. The Great Transformation. Beacon Press. Robinson, Cedric. 1983 [2000]. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Roos, Jerome. 2019. “From the Demise of Social Democracy to the ‘End of Capitalism’: The Intellectual Trajectory of Wolfgang Streeck.” Historical Materialism 27, 2: 248-288. Sewell Jr, William H. 2008. “The Temporalities of Capitalism.” Socio-Economic Review 6: 517- 537. Streeck, Wolfgang. 2013 [2017]. Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Capitalism. Verso. Streeck, Wolfgang. 2016 [2017]. How Will Capitalism End? Juggernaut. Tooze, Adam. 2019. “A General Logic of Crisis.” London Review of Books 39, 1. Wright, Erik Olin. 2006. “Compass Points: Towards a Socialist Alternative.” New Left Review 41: 93-124. Wright, Erik Olin. 2019. How to be an Anti-Capitalist in the 21st Century.
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