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How to Be an Anti-Capitalist for the 21St Century

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How to Be an Anti-Capitalist for the 21St Century How to be an Anti-capitalist for the 21st Century Erik Olin Wright July, 2018 To my three grandchildren, Safira, Vernon, and Ida Table of Contents Preface i Chapter 1. Why be anti-capitalist? 1 What is capitalism? Grounds for opposing capitalism Normative foundations Equality/fairness Democracy/freedom Community/Solidarity Chapter 2. Diagnosis and Critique of capitalism 10 Equality and fairness Class and exploitation Competition and risk Disruptive economic growth Democracy and Freedom Community and Solidarity Skepticism Chapter 3. Varieties of Anti-capitalism 17 Strategic Logics Smashing capitalism Taming capitalism Resisting capitalism Escaping capitalism Strategic Configurations Eroding capitalism From Strategy to Transformation Chapter 4. The destination beyond capitalism: socialism as economic democracy 31 A power-centered concept of socialism Building blocks of a democratic socialist economy Unconditional basic income The cooperative market economy The social and solidarity economy Democratizing capitalist firms Banking as a public utility Nonmarket economic organization Back to the problem of strategy Chapter 5. Anti-capitalism and the state 45 The problem of the capitalist state Internal contradictions of the state Contradictory, contested functionality Prospects Democratizing the State Democratically empowered decentralization New forms of citizen participation New institutions for democratic representation Democratizing electoral rules-of-the-game Chapter 6. Agents of transformation 56 Collective actors for eroding capitalism The problem of collective agency The concept of “agency” Identities Interests Values From Identities, Interests and Values to collective Actors Overcoming privatized lives Fragmented Class Structures Competing sources of identity Real Politics Preface This book was originally conceived as a streamlined distillation of the central arguments of Envisioning Real Utopias, published in 2010. In the years after its publication, I gave periodic talks to community groups, activists, and labor groups around the world about the themes in the book. Generally, audiences were enthusiastic about the ideas, but many people found the size and academic trappings of the book off-putting. So, I thought it would be good to write a short reader-friendly version. By the time I began working on this, however, my ideas had evolved sufficiently that it no longer made sense to write a book that mainly recapitulated what I had written in Envisioning Real Utopias. My focus of attention had shifted from establishing the credibility of a democratic egalitarian alternative to capitalism to the problem of strategy, how to get from here to there. What I initially planned as a short distillation of my 2010 book had become more of a sequel. I still wanted to write something that would be engaging to any reader interested in thinking about these issues. But I also found it difficult to write about new arguments and themes without the usual academic practices of entering into debates with alternatives views, documenting the sources for various ideas that contributed my analysis, using footnotes to counter various objections that I knew some readers might have, and so on. My problem was basically that I was writing for two distinct audiences: people who would be interested in the issues but not the traditional academic elaborations, and readers who would feel that the book was not intellectually rigorous without those elaborations. The solution I came up with was to plan a book with two parts. Each part would have the same identical chapter titles. In Part 1, there would be virtually no references, no footnotes, minimal discussion of the pedigree of specific ideas, and only brief discussions of debates or objections where this was essential for clarifying the argument. In Part 2, each chapter would begin with a one or two- page summary of the basic argument of the corresponding chapter in Part 1, followed by an exploration of the academic issues left out of Part 1. My goal was for Part 1 to still fully reflect the complexity of the theoretical ideas in the analysis. Part 1 would avoid the digressions and academic encumbrances. It would not be an oversimplification of needed complexity. The editors at Verso were enthusiastic about this idea and agreed that when the book was published, Part 1 would be published as a short, inexpensive stand-alone volume, and parts 1 and 2 would be published together as a separate book. My strategy for actually writing the book was to first write a good draft of every chapter in Part 1, keeping notes on what issues needed discussion in the corresponding chapter in Part 2. I knew that inevitably I would make revisions to the Part 1 chapters once I got into the weeds of Part 2, but still it felt best to get the whole analysis laid out first. By March of 2018, I had what I felt were solid drafts of the first five chapters. The chapter that is the centerpiece of the book, chapter three, “Varieties of Anti-capitalism”, had gone through many iterations and had been presented in different forms in dozens of public presentations. Chapters one, two and four, are all chapters with a fairly close relationship to what I had written in Envisioning Real Utopias, and I felt they were also well-worked out. Chapter four in particular is largely a distillation of the ideas in chapters 5-7 in the earlier book. Chapter five, on the problem of the state, explores issues which I had not discussed systematically in the earlier book, but I had written elsewhere about the state and felt that this chapter was also in good shape. Chapter six remained to be written. It engaged an issue that I had not written about in a systematic way before – the problem of forming the collective actors capable of acting politically in an effective way to transform capitalism. But I figured even if I did not have anything very original to say on this critical subject, I could at least clarify the issues in play. Preface ii In early April I was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia. Acute myeloid leukemia cannot be kept at bay with episodic treatments over an extended period of time. The only strategy is to have a bone marrow stem cell transplant. If this is successful, I will be cured; if not, I will die. The prospects of survival are not remote, but far from certain. When I received the diagnosis, I contacted Verso and explained the situation. The actual stem cell transplant was several months off – there are a number of rounds of chemotherapy needed to set the stage for the transplant – and I hoped this would give me time to write a draft of chapter six. I proposed that when I had completed the manuscript, Part 1 be published as a short book without waiting for Part 2. If all goes well and the transplant is successful, then sometime in the future I can write Part 2 if this still seems worthwhile. It is now the end of July. It has been a challenge for me to work on the chapter much as I wanted to finish the book. There were periods when I could write with focus and energy for a few hours; but also, many days when this was impossible. The chapter has not gone through the public and private dialogue that has always been an integral part of my writing, but I think it serves the needed purpose. One note on the title of this book, “How to be an Anti-Capitalist for the 21st Century”. In the book, I argue in favor of democratic market socialism, understood as a radical form of economic democracy. The book could, therefore, have had the title, “How to be a Democratic Socialist for the 21st Century.” I decided to use the more encompassing term “Anti-capitalist” because much of the argument of the book is relevant for people who oppose capitalism, but are skeptical about socialism. I hope that my arguments convince at least some people that radical socialist economic democracy is the best way of thinking about a realizable destination beyond capitalism, but I did not want the book to seem relevant only to people who already agree with that vision. Erik Olin Wright Madison, Wisconsin July, 2018 Chapter 1 WHY BE AN ANTI-CAPITALIST? For many people the idea of anti-capitalism seems ridiculous. After all, look at the fantastic technological innovations in the goods and services produced by capitalist firms in recent years: smart phones and streaming movies; driverless cars and social media; cures for countless diseases; Jumbotron screens at football games and video games connecting thousands of players around the world; every conceivable consumer product available on the internet for rapid home delivery; astounding increases in the productivity of labor through novel automation technologies; and on and on. And while it is true that income is unequally distributed in capitalist economies, it is also true that the array of consumption goods available and affordable for the average person, and even for the poor, has increased dramatically almost everywhere. Just compare the United States in the half century between 1968 and 2018: The percentage of Americans with air conditioners, cars, washing machines, dishwashers, televisions, and indoor plumbing has increased dramatically in those fifty years. Life expectancy is longer for most categories of people; infant mortality lower. The list goes on and on. And now, in the 21st century, this improvement in basic standards of living is happening even in some of the poorer regions of the world as well: look at the improvement in material standards of living of people in China since China embraced the free market. What’s more, look what happened when Russia and China tried an alternative to capitalism! Even aside from the political oppression and brutality of those regimes, they were economic failures.
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