How to Be an Anticapitalist in the 21st Century

Abstract

In a world where capitalism alone rules the global economic system, who better than Erik Olin Wright to provide an accessible, clear-eyed argument for how we might realistically resist and move beyond it? Wright’s lovely How to be an Anticapitalist in the 21st Century was the first of a planned two-part book series. Anticapitalist would be the short, reader-friendly introduction, to be followed by a more traditionally academic, rigorous second part fleshing out arguments, countering objections, and layering footnotes for the studious reader. Tragically, acute myeloid leukemia took Wright’s life before he could complete part two. What we have is a treasure that can be used by academics to motivate new generations of skeptics of status quo economic organization who are not content merely to dream of a more just future, but who look for guidance to move toward its realization. In this book, Wright recommends that we not accept our current capitalist system just because it has monopolized much, if not most, of human organization. Wright asks us to reorient our perspective on economic and social organization to focus on their contribution to human flourishing, or an all-around sense that a person’s life is going well, including access to both the material and social means necessary to flourish. Held to this standard, Wright quickly demonstrates how capitalism’s capacity to create a broadly flourishing humanity, both currently and historically, can be improved. Thus, can we envision a future in which our form of capitalism, both the method of economic production and the power relations rooted in economic production, differs for the better? To give such a dream a chance to become real in some way, we need a set of concepts that, while described with deceptive simplicity and clarity, cover the near entirety of social organization. We must be able to define what capitalism is and what it does that might lead one to oppose it (chapter 1). We need a coherent normative foundation of values and interests to name the harm that capitalism can cause to human society (chapter 2). We must understand the set of strategic approaches that can be taken to oppose capitalism (chapter 3). We need a positive vision of infusing a capitalistic system with more democratic mechanisms that can fundamentally alter power relationships across class locations (chapter 4). We need a definition of the state and a conceptual framework for understanding the many relationships that can exist between state governance and capitalist economic systems (chapter 5). And we need a view of individuals and collective groups as agentic bundles of interests, identities, and values to give hope to meaningful collective action to give hope to any attempt at anticapitalist mobilization (chapter 6). This is what Anticapitlism provides. He argues that another world is possible, that it could increase human flourishing, that the tools to create this new world already exist, and that we have access to the tactics to move from here to there.