How to Be an Anticapitalist in the Twenty-First Century

Eric Olin Wright, How to Be an Anticapitalist in the Twenty-First Century, Afterword by Michael Burawoy, (New York/London: Verso, 2019), 157 pages, $29.95.

The late US social theorist Erik Olin Wright has been one of the protagonists of Analytical Marxism. As such he has been active in a project of liberating Marx from the shackles of Hegelianism (including any idea of dialectics) and of articulating a Marxian philosophy on the level of argument defined by Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein. For all those interested in Marxian theory or in Marxist science the contribution of Analytical Marxism is undeniably real, but rather limited.

Wright’s last book, written in the urgency of his unsuccessful struggle with cancer, is of greater interest. He has not produced a continuation of Envisioning Real Utopias (2010), the programmatic elaboration of his broader project.¹ Instead, he has taken a turn towards political deliberation: by concentrating on what he calls the “problem of strategy” (xi), he is helping to shape and fortify anti-capitalism.

He has successfully implemented his own postulates about an “emancipatory social science” which he has defined by four principles: “1. Specifying the moral principles for judging social institutions. 2. Using these moral principles as the standards for diagnosis and critique of existing institutions. 3. Developing an account of viable alternatives in response to the critique. 4. Proposing a theory of transformation for realizing those alternatives.”² This clearly implies that his deliberation is not just moral but political.

Wright opposes the dominant identification of capitalism – a term that Marx rarely used – with market economies:

Capitalism is not simply an economy in which markets play a central role in coordinating economic activity; it is a specific kind of market economy, one in which workers do not own and control the firms in which they work, capital is privately owned and allocated to alternative purposes on the basis of private economic returns (or, equivalently, on the basis of private profit-making), and labor is allocated to economic activities through labor markets.³

Wright is moreover well aware of the complexity that any realistic strategy must address: “Existing economic systems combine capitalism with a host of other ways of organizing the production and distribution of goods and services” (59). Wright convincingly calls the society capitalist when “capitalism is dominant in determining the economic conditions of life and access to livelihood for most people.”

This may be acceptable on the level of moral-political deliberation – which is indeed the level on which his argument unfolds. On a scientific level, however, it would have to be replaced by a two-tiered analysis of, on the one hand, the different logics of the relevant structures of domination and their processes of reproduction – “in their idealized average” (Capital III, MEW 25, 839 [my translation]) – and, on the other, the concrete analysis of their overdetermination in a given conjuncture.

Whereas the relevant sciences always tend to be too late and too fragmented for fully achieving this, the intelligent guesswork of the “concrete analysis of the concrete situation” (Lenin) constitutes the decisive first step of any deliberation process – as it has to be understood and articulated. And this is what Wright sets out to do.

First, he specifies three groups of moral principles as underlying an anti-capitalist stance, i.e. as deliberatory “grounds for opposing capitalism” (5). In a clearly normative approach, he delineates the values of “Equality/fairness,” “Democracy/freedom,” and “Community/solidarity” (9-21), which he convincingly claims to be “relevant for the evaluation of any social institution or social structure” (20).

Second, he makes it clear that he moves in a space beyond pure science: he offers a “diagnosis” – which, as in medicine, is a key concept for the decisive intellectual step from a scientific analysis of the given conjuncture to judging it from a perspective of practice. This is here applied to “capitalism as a way of organizing an economic system,” which he sees as impeding the realization of his normative goals (23).

Using the analogy of natural ecosystems (60), Wright compares the “process of transcending capitalism” with the transition from feudalism to capitalism. He calls for a strategy of “eroding” capitalism, as opposed to historical strategies of “smashing,” “dismantling,” “taming,” “resisting,” or “escaping” it (38-53). The resulting “strategic configurations” are then made explicit in terms of “three logics of social transformation,” described as “ruptural,” “symbiotic,” or “interstitial” (55). It is to be remarked, however, that Wright’s way of modelling these conflicts misses the problem of transition politics which always has to begin by making what he calls “interstitial” changes to the “moves of the game,” in order to initiate changes in the “rules of the game” and to develop a real perspective of “ruptural” changes which would change the nature of the game.

In spite of this shortcoming, Wright gives his strategy of “eroding capitalism” some credibility by discussing “the basic contours of an emancipatory destination beyond capitalism.” He examines how, despite in-built class biases, it is possible “to create new rules of the game through the capitalist state that can facilitate the expansion of emancipatory noncapitalist relations” (64). In the end, he arrives at a conditionally optimistic conclusion:

The potential for constructing a broad social base for a new era of progressive politics exists. The contingencies of historical events and the creative agency of activists and collectivd actors will determine whether this potential is realized. (145)

Wright makes short shrift of the theoretical debates so far deployed within the Marxist tradition. More importantly, however, he fails to address an existing audience. Even in the Anglo-Saxon sphere which he implicitly addresses, the level of political deliberation he takes for granted does not really exist: There is no common denominator between the politics of the US, Canada, and Great Britain, let alone Australia and New Zealand, and such a common denominator cannot be expected to emerge.

And yet there is, in the present moment of global political mobilization, an urgent need for general strategic guidelines. Wright’s last book therefore deserves to be taken up and discussed well beyond the confines of analytical marxism – wherever the task is to bring anti-capitalism back into the broader debates on radical strategy, from which it had been practically eliminated in the 1990s, under the double attack from postmodernism and neoliberalism. How to Be an Anticapitalist in the Twenty-First Century succeeds in putting anti-capitalism back on the strategic agenda.

Frieder Otto Wolf 
Freie Universität Berlin
fow@snafu.de