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A review by hberg95
How to Be an Anticapitalist in the Twenty-First Century by Erik Olin Wright
4.0
A concise, systematic overview of historical forms of anti-capitalism and how anti-capitalism can be realized in the 21st century.
The big takeaway for me is the central concept of eroding capitalism as a strategy - Wright talks so clearly about how we can't commit ourselves to only a single strategy, that we must engage in many at once as we maintain the Gramscian "pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will".
The problem with erosion is that it is slow. It seems like a clearly effective means of anti-capitalism, and potentially the only viable one we have, but there is a sense that we may need to act urgently, that erosion might be too slow for what we're looking at.
I'm interested in the relationship between this text and another recent Verso publication, Andreas Malm's How to Blow up a Pipeline. As an intellectual prominently interested in issues of environment and politics, Malm's solution for enacting political change is to advocate for a radical flank of the environmental movement - this may enable us to enact fast change. I think both authors agree that change needs to happen, and that "doom and gloom" responses aren't sufficient, but I think the question of time is interesting here. I'm empathetic to the argument that strategies that imply slow reformism could leave us shrugging on the path to destruction.
I'm a little skeptical of fully embracing Wright's "Analytical Marxism", because I can see it oversimplifying the theoretical questions and neglecting to address how these things work on the ground. For example, increasing democracy is a theoretically excellent goal, but in practice we still have an ideological media apparatus hell-bent on convincing us all to vote against our interests and avoid any kind of solidarity. I'm sure Wright had ideas about this specific problem, but I didn't feel like they were addressed sufficiently here.
The big takeaway for me is the central concept of eroding capitalism as a strategy - Wright talks so clearly about how we can't commit ourselves to only a single strategy, that we must engage in many at once as we maintain the Gramscian "pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will".
The problem with erosion is that it is slow. It seems like a clearly effective means of anti-capitalism, and potentially the only viable one we have, but there is a sense that we may need to act urgently, that erosion might be too slow for what we're looking at.
I'm interested in the relationship between this text and another recent Verso publication, Andreas Malm's How to Blow up a Pipeline. As an intellectual prominently interested in issues of environment and politics, Malm's solution for enacting political change is to advocate for a radical flank of the environmental movement - this may enable us to enact fast change. I think both authors agree that change needs to happen, and that "doom and gloom" responses aren't sufficient, but I think the question of time is interesting here. I'm empathetic to the argument that strategies that imply slow reformism could leave us shrugging on the path to destruction.
I'm a little skeptical of fully embracing Wright's "Analytical Marxism", because I can see it oversimplifying the theoretical questions and neglecting to address how these things work on the ground. For example, increasing democracy is a theoretically excellent goal, but in practice we still have an ideological media apparatus hell-bent on convincing us all to vote against our interests and avoid any kind of solidarity. I'm sure Wright had ideas about this specific problem, but I didn't feel like they were addressed sufficiently here.