Can Democracy Survive Capitalism's Erosion? a Comment on E.O. Wright

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. 1 Mudge 9/2019, not for circulation or citation 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. 3 Mudge 9/2019, not for circulation or citation 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’

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