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

• None of this is to say that anti-capitalism is easy, and the capitalist system has both direct and indirect ways of facing off challenges. Some of the very direct tactics were exposed in Confessions of a Union Buster, whereas Hegemony Now! analyses the more subtle methods by which consent and compliance are maintained.
• One attraction of Wright’s approach is that it doesn’t lock you into one specific form of activism on the ground that this is the One True Path. You don’t have to stand outside your local library flogging badly stencilled pamphlets. On the other hand, this does mean that you have to work out for yourself what you can do. Wright’s strategic outlook accommodates a multitude of approaches, so if you are unsure, see if there are campaign groups active in your local area, or based on issues that are important to you. If you are in work, always join a union, or set one up if there isn’t one yet. If you want to influence national politics where you live, join or donate to a political party to support them. How to Be an Anti-Capitalist in the 21st Century tells you that you don’t have to do everything yourself. All it asks is that you find ways for your actions to clear the way for others.

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Each review is marked either #fiction or #nonfiction

Each review lists the medium of the review’s subject: #books #films #theatre #tv #videogames

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Some of my blogs share a theme or a perspective, that is separate from the topic of the work I’m reviewing. These themes are also marked, and include:

• #boundedimagination for reviews that consider how the limitations of our political imagination express themselves in both fiction and non-fiction works.
• #protagonismos for reviews that consider where works of fiction place agency and heroism. This theme was directly inspired by two essays by Ada Palmer.

Finally, if you do want a chronological list of all published reviews, you can find it in the archive.

Where have all the comrades gone? Once a common term of address for those engaged in joint struggle for a better world, decades of defeat, betrayal and marginalisation leave it barely used except ironically. In Comrade – An Essay on Political Belonging, Jodi Dean seeks to recover the term by arguing it defines a unique and necessary relationship for common struggle. As a union organiser, I was very sympathetic to this endeavour. Effective collective organising undeniably demands a strong level of commitment and discipline that cannot be attained through allyship or arise spontaneously. As Rodrigo Nunes and Vincent Bevins convincingly argued in Neither Vertical nor Horizontal and If We Burn respectively, neither disorganised horizontalism nor the post-capitalist networked citizen can amass the power we need for the struggles we face. Unfortunately Dean’s argument doesn’t succeed in revitalising the comrade for the 21st century, attempting to resurrect the ideal comrade from the 19th century instead. The effort is commendable, but unconvincing. The old order has gone, and we cannot simply will it back into existence.

Comrade begins with a useful and necessary distinction between allies and comrades. Allies, as Dean points out in the first chapter, are not engaged in our fight, but only asked to offer assistance. They may share our goals, but they cannot share the struggle, because its contours are delimited by one’s identity. Comrades, on the other hand, contribute to a common struggle regardless of their identity. Comrade is a reciprocal relationship based on a recognition of a common aim and common enemy.

In the same chapter Dean also contrasts comrades with systems, despite these being different categories. Dean considers a systemic view to be disempowering due to its scale, but that is because she only picks systems at vast spatial or temporal scales. It is not clear if she is ignorant or disingenuous, given a system can refer to any set of related entities that together produce some effect on the world. Yes ‘climate change’ is a system and it is very big, but smaller systems are available: ‘the economy, ‘the party’ or even an amoeba. It felt odd to me that Dean would dismiss an effective analytical tool for understanding the world and finding ways to change it, but the disinterest in understanding the world persists as an unfortunate theme for the remainder of the essay.

Chapter Two draws on examples from the early days of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) and Soviet Union to preempt the criticism that comrades can only be white, male and stale, but it is questionable if this is the right target. The more obvious attack to anticipate is that the cloak of comradeship has historically been used to cover enduring prejudice against female or black comrades. In particular because, as Jo Freeman argues in The Tyranny of Structurelessness, putative equality can make actual inequality much harder to challenge. The female comrade isn’t absent from our cultural imagination, but she was still expected to cook dinner, clean the house and raise the kids after the agitating was done. Invoking Alexandra Kollontai doesn’t prove women were equal comrades any more than Barack Obama’s presidency proves the US is no longer racist. A more effective argument could have mirrored Kristen Ghodsee’s Why Women Have Better Sex under Socialism, which demonstrates that while communist regimes were unable to fully eradicate patriarchal oppression they nonetheless advanced women’s liberation much further than their capitalist counterparts, but that is not the road that Comrade takes.

Chapters Three and Four define the boundaries of comradeship by including those who are faithful to a common truth and have the discipline to fight for it. Immediately this raises the question of who defines this Truth, and Dean does not have a satisfactory answer but implicitly falls back on the traditional communist position that it is the Party. This leads us back to the dangerously tautologous logic that the party gets to define truth because it represents the workers, and we know the party represents the workers because it articulates their truth. Dean herself includes various examples where parties schismed, dwindled or descended into internecine warfare, but does not use these as a prompt to explore how a party could be organised so that it can attain a shared truth without its uniformity risking disintegration, irrelevance or internal violence. If the objective of the essay is to revive a viable organisational form, then this is a fatal omission.

The same tautological flaw also affects Dean’s comrades directly. Comrades are comrades because they execute the party’s directives with enthusiasm, courage and joy, and they have enthusiasm, courage and joy because they are comrades. Comrades are not only expected to do the work, but in a rather unpleasant similarity with your average Pret-a-Manger worker, they must enjoy it. I don’t dispute that working together for a common goal can enable people to do great things, but that is not the same as assuming that all obstacles can be overcome simply by sheer force of Stakhanovite will. Again, Dean is not interested in questions of organisation. Maybe that is expecting too much from the essay, but without attending to it, the argument comes down to assuming that if people will something hard enough, they can achieve it.

If moving mountains by force of will wasn’t enough, Dean also asks her comrades to subsume their identity into the generic nature of the comrade. Comrades are not only functionally, but also personally interchangeable. Again, I don’t dispute that surrendering a degree of individuality to be part of a common effort cannot be rewarding and joyous. But if comradeship requires a total renunciation of who we are, then why would anyone want to be a comrade? In Taoist terms, Dean’s comrade is all yang and no yin: all force and will, no patience or introspection. There is no balance.

We have seen where this leads. Dean’s comrades populate the pages of Hannah Proctor’s Burnout. Comrades who fell out and apart because they couldn’t will the world they wanted into being, or themselves into the transformed people they desired. The road to the Workers Paradise is paved with the remains of comrades who willed themselves to destruction, and what exactly has it given us?

I expect that Dean would counter that my position is the result of cowardice, of an unwillingness to do what is necessary to be a comrade, a bourgeois inability to surrender my individuality. And she may well be right, but I would argue that doesn’t actually matter. Our present moment demands a comradeship that can accommodate both collectivity and individuality, discipline and diversity, yang and yin. Time has moved on. New Soviet (Wo)Man left on the dustheap of history. A historical materialist cannot ignore the hard lessons of the 20th century or fail to acknowledge our world differs from that of our ancestors, only to fall back on an idealist faith in the power of voluntarism. Comrade is a missed opportunity to reinvigorate an essential relationship for the 21st century. The past can help us chart our course, but we cannot return there. We must move forward, as comrades, together.

Notes & Suggestions

• An alternative to Dean’s focus on a central communist vanguard party is a decentralised movement composed of many diverse actors, working together in coalitions or networks. This ecosystemic view has been proposed by Erik Olin Wright in How to Be an Anti-capitalist in the 21st Century and Rodrigo Nunes in Neither Vertical nor Horizontal. These authors recognise that in today’s fragmented world, building a movement on a monolithic conception of the proletariat is probably a fool’s errand, and it is more productive to work out how to form cooperative alliances instead.
• is Rodrigo Nunes’ Nether Vertical nor Horizontal is a much more nuanced and constructive exploration of organisational forms, and a genuine attempt to salvage what we can from our past failed efforts to help us move forward.
• Hannah Proctor’s Burnout carefully and compassionately assays what happens to communities who strain themselves beyond endurance in an attempt to bring a new world into being, and suggests what we may do to care for ourselves and each other while we still live and struggle in our broken world.

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A long time ago, I had a blog of political polemics. Then life happened and I stopped writing.

Yet the desire to write never went away, and so this blog was born. Of polemics we already have a sufficiency, however. One only has to read a news site. Instead, I am trying my hand at reflections on the cultural artefacts I ‘consume’: books, games, movies, and so forth.

The name of this blog expresses my capacity as an ordinary consumer, and hence merely a ‘casual’ critic. I cannot boast of a degree in art history, cultural studies or English (or any other) language. Nor am I a paid reviewer. I do believe though that most authors create an artefact because they want their audience to actively engage with it, rather than merely consume it passively. Writing reviews is my way of entering into dialogue with a text, as well as an opportunity to be creatively active myself. If people enjoy reading the end product, then so much the better.

About the blog

The function of this blog strongly informed its form. I ended up on Write.as because of the minimalist aesthetic and the deliberate absence of social media plug-ins, Fediverse integrations excepted. There is no SEO, and no trackers. It does mean that the blog lacks some features that readers will have come to expect, most notably the ability to comment and a navigation menu or archive.

To help find your way around, Write.as uses hashtags. Clicking a hashtag will generate a page listing all the posts with the same hashtag. I do my best to label all reviews, and my most common hashtags are at the end of this page.

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How to navigate

Every post has one or more tags (‘#’) associated with it to help categorise it. Instead of using menus, you can click on a tag to retrieve all posts with the same tag. You can do this from within any blog post, or you can use the list below.

Mediums #books #films #theatre #tv #videogames

Type #fiction #nonfiction

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Non-fiction categories #history #politics #tech #culture #unions #socialism