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.