How to Be an Anti-capitalist in the 21st Century – Being like water

#nonfiction #books #politics #socialism

The Left excels at diagnosis. There is no shortage of books, articles, papers, podcasts, documentaries, reports and more decrying the ills of late-stage capitalism. From deepening inequality to the breakdown of the biosphere, we can argue convincingly how capitalism fails us. What, however, is to be done about it?

Here we are on substantially weaker ground. Marx famously declared that he was not in the business of writing the cookbooks for the post-revolutionary workers’ state, and this injunction against utopianism has hung like a shadow over socialist writers ever since. The nature of actually existing socialism limited the imagination even further, equating post-capitalist society with dreary authoritarianism. Yet even where alternative futures are being imagined, such as in visions of degrowth or solarpunk, the question of how we get from here to there often remains unanswered. Attaining the future we want is not merely a matter of having the right ideas, it is also about building the power to get there.

Erik Olin Wright’s How to Be an Anti-capitalist in the 21st century directly grapples with this question. Wright’ final book, it builds on decades of Marxist sociological research and activist practice, distilling these into a delightfully short primer on how to change the world. It is not an instruction manual for building a community group or trade union along the lines of Jane McAlevey’s Organising for Power and similar works, but a guide to what anti-capitalist organisations can do to move us closer to a better future. Although the book contains some policy ideas, it is not a catalogue of nice but unachievable policy prescriptions either, but instead presents a strategic framework that organisers can use to assess whether their efforts are likely to erode capitalist dominance.

Ecosystem socialism

While it might be assumed that readers picking up a book titled How to be an Anti-capitalist in the 21st Century would already be persuaded of the evils of capitalism, Wright nonetheless starts off with a succinct overview of the arguments against it. As an Analytical Marxist, Wright has disavowed Marxism’s original foundation on the teleological movement of history and the exploitation of workers through the extraction of surplus value. Wright’s case against capitalism is instead purely moral, grounded on capitalism’s inherent tendency to undermine equality, freedom and community. It is an elegant first chapter, and while traditional Marxists may well find it too milquetoast for their liking, it will appeal to a much wider left-wing readership. The availability of multiple arguments against capitalism in any event strengthens rather than weakens the case.

Wright’s Analytical Marxism similarly excuses him from the search for a revolutionary subject charged to be the sole agent of historical progress, something much left-wing writing has been agonising over after the failure of the traditional proletariat to usher in the socialist new dawn. Hopes have been pinned on revolutionaries in the global periphery, other oppressed groups such as women or ethnic minorities, students, or a new generation of ‘networked workers’. Not that hope in the working class has been fully abandoned either: there are still those yearning for a return to the centrality of the working class led by a reinvigorated communist party to act as the revolutionary vanguard. Wright avoids this fruitless search for a single historical subject, and instead roots his analysis in a recognition that capitalism harms people in many different ways, leading them to organise against it for different reasons and with different goals. It is diversity instead of uniformity, and to Wright this is a strength rather than a weakness, although he does not downplay the difficulties of organising across an ecosystem of groups, communities and movements. In this, he his much closer to writers like Rodrigo Nunes who in Neither Vertical nor Horizontal also advocates for ecosystemic approach, than to Jodi Dean’s argument in Comrade for a return to the traditional communist party. Or, as revolutionary poet Diane di Prima explained:

NO ONE WAY WORKS, it will take all of us shoving at the thing from all sides to bring it down.

If I wanted to get there, I wouldn’t start from here

Once you recognise that it will take a multitude of us shoving at the thing from all sides, the logical next conclusion is that it will also take a multitude of methods. Wright thus takes the holistic view that an ecosystem of actors will deploy a range of strategies to bring about the demise of capitalism, depending on their situation, capacities and preferences. How to Be an Anti-capitalist in the 21st Century identifies five types of strategy: smashing capitalism through revolution, dismantling it by political means, taming it to limit its worst effects, resisting it locally, or attempting to escape it altogether. Discarding revolutionary rupture on the grounds that it is neither likely nor desirable in advanced democracies, Wright concludes that a combination of the other four strategies must be used to erode capitalism.

Selecting ‘all of the above’ may look like a trite way out of an analytical quandary, but Wright’s assertion is deeply considered and its value lies precisely in its ability to pragmatically transcend both the sterile argument about an ideologically ‘correct’ course of action and the fatalistic sense that because revolution is not on the horizon everything is futile. It cannot be denied though that Wright’s assertion here rests in large part on faith. In essence, Wright’s gambit is to replace the belief in an inevitable historical telos with a hope that the strategic combination of the four strategies remaining to us will be sufficient to carve out a path beyond capitalism through gradual change. This is of course not a novel position. Reformist or gradualist approaches have been advocated for as long as there have been socialists, with the most famous proponents of this approach probably the British Fabian Society. What How to Be an Anti-capitalist in the 21st Century adds is a recognition that parliamentarianism alone is also not enough, but that it will require the combination of political advances, grassroots campaigning, and the nurturing of anti-capitalist modes of living in the interstices of the capitalist system to secure victory. By pointing at the interdependency of these strategies, Wright prompts us to identify opportunities to deploy them in mutually reinforcing ways: changing laws or institutions to make cooperatives more viable, or using grassroots action strategically to extract political demands. Although not explicitly referenced, How to Be an Anti-capitalist In the 21st Century bears the influence of André Gorz’ non-reformist reforms: changes that don’t just deliver immediate material gains, but change the terrain on which class struggle plays out to our advantage.

The ecumenical perspective may not appeal to all, and traditional Marxist or communist readers will likely take issue with absence of dialectical materialism or the endorsement of market socialism. For socialists wedded to revolutionary rupture, I imagine that Wright’s alternative will feel either too soft, too utopian, or both. Wright does not dispute that eroding capitalism is not going to be easy. He is well aware that conditions are far from optimal, the road long and arduous, and success far from certain. Yet for anyone who accepts that revolution is either unlikely or undesirable, How to Be an Anti-capitalist in the 21st Century gives a lot of useful food for thought. This is true even if the reader does not wholly agree with Wright’s premises or conclusions, and that is precisely because Wright’s proposal is expansive and accommodating of different approaches and perspective. In essence, Wright’s strategic programme is a contemporary rearticulation of Laozi’s ancient wisdom that water is stronger than stone:

There is nothing softer and weaker than water, And yet there is nothing better for attacking hard and strong things. For this reason there is no substitute for it.

At ~150 pages, How to Be an Anti-capitalist in the 21st Century can only give a cursory introduction to many of the concepts and strategies discussed, though it is a testament to Wright’s mastery as an academic and writer that he does everything he covers a great degree of justice in the limited space available. It is a great tragedy that Wright was never able to write the intended, more extensive companion book for How to Be an Anti-Capitalist In the 21st Century due to his death to acute myeloid leukemia in 2019. Instead, How to Be an Anti-capitalist will have to be a starting point or roadmap for those who want to engage more with socialist thought, rather than a detailed compendium in itself. But its real value lies in what it was always intended to do: offer activists not only a framework and a theory of change to take into the world and act, but also the hope to do so. The purpose of philosophy is not, after all, to merely understand the world, but to change it.

Notes & Suggestions

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