Introduction
Reviewing How to Be an Anticapitalist in the 21st Century is a demanding task. Erik Olin Wright, one of the greatest Marxist sociologists of our times, completed the book shortly before dying of acute myeloid leukaemia on 23 January 2019. Prima facie, this is a straightforward book: the style of writing is fluid and full of implications for social analysis; the explicit intention is to address anticapitalism militants with sound scholarship; the declared approach is not to resort to bibliographic references, quoting only a few authors and selected works. Above all, it is a difficult book to review because it adopts a definite moral posture, implicitly requiring that the reader adheres unconditionally to the very title of the book: How to Be an Anticapitalist in the 21st Century.
Why should a social scientist care about this topic? Erik Olin Wright is very clear from the first chapter: today, being an anticapitalist is as much an ideological choice as not being an anticapitalist. The choice of the scholar, in other words, is not between axiological neutrality and critical posture, but between the different types of moral gaze that today’s capitalism necessarily solicits or implies. In its historical development, capitalism has placed us before such wicked problemsFootnote 1 that even axiological neutrality is de facto an ethical choice. For the law, the omission to provide assistance is a crime, as is the sin of omission in theology. To avoid misunderstanding, Erik Olin Wright is not concerned with the crisis of capitalism in itself; rather, his focus is on the world that hosts it—and the species that inhabits this world—that suffer such consequences as to require a critical-moral posture.
To substantiate this thesis, the author recalls three serious and pervasive wicked problems that qualify axiological neutrality as an omission of help: (i) non-inclusive growth, (ii) the environmental crisis, (iii) the denial that human flourishing is the key driver of development. The empirical consistency of these three diagnoses is certainly a matter of discussion and controversy, so much so that each of the previous points can lend itself to different interpretations. In this regard, Wright’s position is consistent with the so-called Seneca effect: growth is slow, but ruin is rapidFootnote 2. The book recognizes the many advances made by capitalism in the course of its development, believing at the same time that the very same path does not allow for axiological neutrality. If “welfare capitalism” and the compromise between capital and labor—one of the resistance strategies analyzed in the following chapters—had made possible a value-neutral attitude with respect to capitalism in the past, that is no longer the case. Welfare capitalism was a historical contingency: it does not represent normality for capitalism but an exception in its historical development. Assuming that the “Glorious Thirty” represent a steady-state or a model within capitalism that can be extended in space and time is a major error. Thus, the slow and steady progress brought about by capitalism is not at odds with its rapid acceleration towards catastrophic outcomes. Contemporary capitalism is made up of monopolies and oligarchies, privatized lives, environmental threats and meaningless jobs. Thanks to huge wealth concentration, power imbalances and extractive financializationFootnote 3, capitalism is ruling out both market competition and material well-being.
Capitalism, market, and the State
From an analytical viewpoint, the author argues, it is first and foremost necessary to draw a line between the market and capitalism, a point already emphasized by Ferdinand Braudel and now taken up from the perspective of “Foundational Economy”Footnote 4. Capitalism is the historically variable combination of market prices, as a mechanism of exchange, and the power relations between those who own capital and those who only own labor. In reality, power relations are always multidimensional and, for this reason, anticapitalism cannot be based only on a clear-cut and dualistic conflict between proletariat and capitalists; it must also rely on a criticism informed by social justice. From this standpoint, the author’s message is in line with scholars from different intellectual backgrounds, from Amartya K. Sen to Tony Atkinson. With the neo-liberal turn and the spread of hyper-competition even outside the marketFootnote 5, public action has given way to the power of a few large corporations and to the logic of maximizing value for shareholders, while collective action in favor of interests other than those of shareholders has weakened. Accordingly, wealth inequalities and power imbalances have grown in parallel.
Against this background, the first chapter goes on, anticapitalism must be based on three value clusters: equality/justice, democracy/freedom, and community/solidarity. Social justice requires equal access to those means/goods (material and social) that allow the full development of human capacities, making it possible for people to fully live a life of value and guaranteeing the same opportunity for future generations. To be fully realized, this condition requires freedom of choice, both individually and in relation to others, in the private as well as in the public sphere. The first two clusters require the sharing of common purposes defined by the third cluster, where the “others” are not means to extrinsic ends but in turn represent something worthy of intrinsic value, permeated with reciprocity and moral sense. Freedom, equality, solidarity: the three concepts that nourished the French Revolution constitute the metrics for evaluating every form of human coexistence and socio-economic order, including capitalism. Inequalities (of income, wealth, power, and recognition), economic exploitation and asymmetry of social risks are formidable obstacles to the realization of the first cluster of values (equality/justice) (Chap. II). At the same time, the lack of the public dimension of decision-making processes for the benefit of private arenas, the capture of public resources by private interests, and the close connection between wealth and power distort and limit the full development of the second cluster (democracy/freedom).
Finally, over-competition as the only legitimate means to support human progress erodes the moral resources necessary to treat others “as ends in themselves”, framing individual and family acquisitions as a matter of private resources. This diagnosis is criticized, even by those who sympathize with it, as capitalism is not considered the cause of the aforementioned problems. Globally and over time, capitalism has reduced poverty and has improved the access to primary goods for a large part of the world’s population; the public participation deficit is typical of all complex societies and not just of capitalism; the ecological threat is not directly due to capitalism, but to the industrial paradigm and predominance of technology over nature. And so on and so forth. Moreover, given the tragic failures of the past, capitalism still remains the best of all possible systems and its alternatives are as dangerous as they are impossible to achieve. For Erik Olin Wright, to the first criticism it is sufficient to answer that, if capitalism is not the only cause, it is certainly one of the most important and transversal causes. And, as such, it deserves attention. In addition, as noted above, the “Seneca effect” warns against sudden failures of systems that have experienced smooth improvements in the past. The following chapters (III-VI) are devoted to the second line of criticism: the search for viable alternatives to capitalism.
Capitalism and its alternatives
Anticapitalism has different forms (chapter III): smashing capitalism, dismantling capitalism, taming capitalism, resisting capitalism and escaping capitalism, generated by the intersection of two dimensions (levels of the system and objective of the struggle). Wright embraces the doubts relating to the revolutionary strategy (smashing), also considering the criticisms of the Hayek-Popper tradition against social engineering and the unexpected consequences this had in “socialist” countries, a point underlined also in his Presidential address to the American Sociological Association (2012)Footnote 6. This standpoint is shared with the so-called radical social innovation perspective (Unger 2015) which does not believe in structural dogmas and in definitive blueprints for the organization of society. At the same time, this de-coupling between structural solutions and structural dogmas does not imply the enthusiastic acceptance of neo-liberal faith in capitalism as the best of all possible worlds or in the supremacy of market-like mechanisms to organize human societies.
The reformist strategies based on the welfare state (dismantling and taming), which for some decades have worked in specific national contexts, have entered into crisis for both endogenous and exogenous causes. What appeared to be a steady-state of capitalism—the Fordist-Keynesian social model and its social basis—has actually proved to be an exception, the result of a contingency (or a phase) that cannot be repeated. The last two strategies (resisting and escaping) are typical of bottom-up responses, in collective and/or individual form, and feed on different ideological currents, of a communitarian, ecological type or connected to the social economy.
However, Wright looks at a sixth form of anti-capitalism, eroding capitalism, which is a variable combination of the previous strategies: a form that results in the introduction of “alien species” into the ecosystem of capitalism, gradually replacing the “native species” and thus becoming the dominant ones. This requires the construction of what the author himself—in a previous work in close continuity with the one discussed here—defined as real utopias Footnote 7: concrete organized settings in workplaces, in exchange systems, in the management of common goods and in local practices of self-government that give birth to feasible alternative arrangements. Real utopias that promote organized experiences of “interstitial wedging” that, step by step, outcompete the capitalist ones. In this light, the fourth chapter exemplifies certain conceptual guidelines useful for “rethinking socialism” in an anticapitalist vein in the 21st century. The focus of the analysis is the redistribution of power, which implies a decoupling between market and capitalism, notably through the redistribution of economic power and the democratization of market power. They can be achieved through the introduction of an unconditional basic income (UBI), the spread of cooperative business models and collective property rights, public support for the cooperative economy, the strength of progressive municipalism, the consolidation of non-market economic institutions (public and peer-to-peer), and the knowledge commons.
The interstitial strategies that these “moves in the game” make possible, however, require two conditions. The first, the subject of the fifth chapter, is the pro-active role of the state, the precondition of which is obviously that it does not act as the “business committee of the bourgeoisie”. Here Erik Olin Wright assigns an important role to the challenges represented by climate change and technological change: if public action is able to govern these two challenges in the light of the redistribution of economic power and the democratization of market power, then the State will be able to act as a virtuous lever. This will be all the easier the more the institutions of liberal democracy are accordingly reformed: democratically empowered decentralization, new forms of citizen participation, new institutions for democratic representation, and the democratization of electoral rules of the game. This cannot take place (Chapter VI) without the role of collective “agents of transformation”, able to politically challenge and henceforth change capitalism’s rules of the game in a progressive direction: social movements, associations of active citizenship, cooperative productive organizations and platforms for the management of common goods, alliances between researchers and activists, together with renewed political parties capable of changing public action and the institutions of capitalism in the desired direction. To be effective, these configurations must solve three well-known challenges of the micro-macro link in sociology: the relationship between individual identity and collective identity, the relationship between individual interests and group interests, and the connection between individual motives and the construction of systems of collective ideas or ideologies. From an institutional standpoint, this requires the regeneration of the public sphere, realigning fragmented class interests, reinvigorating the identifying force of ideologies and their normative force, as well as building formal/electoral rules for the renewal of participation and for the selection of the political class.
Governing the bifurcations
Up to now, I have summarized the analytical structure of the book, net of some passages and details that do not obscure its analytical backbone. As previously argued, the book is built on an explicit moral posture, well-rooted in the dilemmas and conceptual apparatus of social theory and research, even though this link is not always made explicit with the necessary clarity. Furthermore, but this is somehow inevitable given the tragic circumstances in which it was written, the last two chapters are rather contracted, sometimes apodictic, and reveal the existential urgency that characterized their writing. Why should a social scientist care about anticapitalism, apart from its moral implications?
As noted earlier, Erik Olin Wright sees in the political guide of the technological breakthrough a window of opportunity for the renewal of public action in an anticapitalist fashion. The technological change currently underway could enhance widespread access to knowledge, promote entrepreneurial innovation, facilitate cooperative relationships, generate new and good jobs, accelerate the ecological transition, and so on and so forth. But it can also have the opposite effects, that are already well investigated: from “surveillance capitalism”Footnote 8, to the government of algorithms, to the concentration of market power in a few large corporations that extract value from platform user experiencesFootnote 9. The pervasiveness of new technological frontiers, the growing digitalization of production processes, the role of robotics and the impact of artificial intelligence risk relegating politics to the role of “helpless observer”, at most calling it to exercise attitudes of benign neglect. For this reason, technology, today more than ever, requires a proactive role of politics and directly questions the governing capacity of the ruling class. To deal with new technologies on an equal footing, policy makers must be able to decode complex information, if not as real specialists, at least as competent actors capable of dealing with “expert rules” that perform interface functions between technology, ethics, economics and politics. The evocative metaphor of the “Unbound Prometheus”—coined by the historian David S. Landes—aimed to explain the Industrial Revolution as the complex of technological innovations which, by replacing human ability with machines, have made possible the birth of a modern economy with largely positive-sum games between capital and labor. This is no longer the case. The increased weight of intangible capital (knowledge not incorporated into machines) accentuates the interest gap between capital and labor. The replacement of work by technology is changing the very nature of innovation processes: new technologies not only replace work, but also appropriate the knowledge previously incorporated into machines, extracting it both from living labor and from the consumption of dead labor embedded in goods and services. Today, mining technologies are strongly concentrated in a few large corporations, increasingly built on these strategic assets, and less and less inclined to invest in tangible fixed capital.
For these reasons, the ongoing technological revolution asks politics to assume a posture that does not end in an uncritical, dazzled and admired acceptance of the gifts of technology. Human societies, strengthened only by the control of techniques, cannot live in a political community: for this, they need to share a horizon of ethical-political values, justice, law, collective education. What are the socio-structural conditions that allow the genesis, growth and diffusion of the ethical-political capacity of the actorsFootnote 10? What, in other words, are the social mechanisms of anticapitalism?
Public rituals and heterarchies
I would maintain that anticapitalism requires, first of all, the growth of those forms of action and organization that take aim at the defense and promotion of the collective voice of “marginal subjects”. These forms of interaction constitute what the scholars of organizational processes and innovation call heterarchies Footnote 11, a term that originates from the work of neuroscientist Warren McCulloch who identified circuits among “dromes” in the nervous system that lacked a singular dominant value or preference. If translated to anticapitalism, the concept of heterarchy leads us to consider those configurations (alliances, platforms, movements, production spaces, community organizations, alternative exchange systems, networks of knowledge and action, forms of direct action, transition towns, peer-to-peer systems, etc.) where different quality conventions and value orders confront each other under the banner of mutual difference and incommensurability. It is within these forms that the moral instances of anticapitalism can emerge, where individual and collective identities can find a synthesis, and fragmented structures can be recomposed, responding to the questions posed by the book. It is these “regimes of interaction” that can feed the humus for the rise of anticapitalism as a form-of-life. Here, however, lies a potential analytical weakness of the book.
Erik Olin Wright argues for the potentially unifying role of values and ideologies that would support the genesis of collective actors, able to promote the renewal of political parties and public action, in favor of the “interstitial strategies” described above. Instead, I would rather suggest that the growth of anticapitalist practices does not necessarily require a previous all-encompassing ethical-ideological agreement. Rather, as I have just argued, it questions the presence of heterarchical “interaction regimes” where all the actors involved recognize that collective action is important as such and, therefore, agree that it cannot provide a coherent and complete solution to all problems and conflicts of value that need to be addressed in its course. In a synthetic formula: anticapitalism flourishes in the presence of heterarchies where the actors act to find an agreement; they do not find an agreement and then act as an end in itself. From this viewpoint, it is the very idea of citizenship that must be rethoughtFootnote 12 as a social practice.
As Arjun AppaduraiFootnote 13 notes in the case of India, in the course of collective actions a symbolic repertoire is generated transforming immediate daily-life needs from simple stimuli (hunger, cold, illness) to a set of intrinsic values for participants. For the rest of the world, these values stand for the aspiration of “being together with others” in a non-instrumental wayFootnote 14. How do joint aspirations arise? Durkheim’s analysis and the connected theory of ritualsFootnote 15 are useful tools for digging deeper into the analysis of these processes. With reference to this theoretical frame, we can define the interaction regimes that enact the capacity to aspire as states of effervescence or “natural rituals”. These states of effervescence thicken the social ties, endowing them with an emotional crescendo that eventually solidifies in shared moral values, in a sense of belonging to a collective, as well as in the sacredness of “objects” taken as a symbol of the group. Ritual-like interactions consolidate normative orientations, moral standards, and agents’ behaviors accordingly. They shape individual identity, anchoring it to a wider identity, i.e. to a collective profileFootnote 16. Here is where everyone can act as a “mundane Prometheus”, feeding the 21st century anticapitalism that Erik Olin Wright strived for.
Social infrastructures and the “vacant We”
A further and last dimension to be explored is the role of the State in supporting the flourishing of the “heterarchical interaction regimes” just illustrated. In this line, Erik KlinenbergFootnote 17 argues that the future of democratic societies is built not only or not so much on the basis of common values, but thanks to the presence of shared spaces. Libraries, childcare centers, bookstores, churches, mosques, synagogues, fablabs, coworking spaces, community hubs and parks can constitute contexts in which people interact in ways that have key consequences for the democratic quality of a given society and, therefore, of the politics that this society is able to express. These are spaces in which people come together to satisfy at the same time—through practical actions—a private aim and a public project. Klinenberg defines these places as crucial building blocks for the birth and growth of the “social infrastructure” of societies. When this infrastructure is robust, the democratic quality of societies is well safeguarded; when it is weak, individuals lose the ability to collectively aspire to a common project. The analytical philosopher Margaret GilbertFootnote 18 warns that without a joint commitment there cannot be a collective orientation to a shared future. Thus, the social foundations of a political demand for the democratization of capitalism are lacking. It is no coincidence that the neoliberal turn was accompanied by the dismantling of the public sphereFootnote 19. The unfulfilled promises of the market, which should have carried success and well-being for everyone, have opened the doors for a nativist and frightened “We” that leaves room only for retreats of one’s own individuality, easy prey to a politics of nostalgia based on nativism, the identity politics of the disaffiliated and unprotectedFootnote 20.
For anticapitalism to flourish as a form-of-life, then, what is urgently needed for its reconstruction is the capacity to aspire to a common future where individual needs are heterarchically intertwined with concepts of the “good life”. Anticapitalism is thus entangled with the material conditions that allow human beings to reflect, act and organize to collectively pursue a meaningful answer to the question: what is worth living for? And how can we contribute? A “We” of this kind requires daily opportunities to experience oneself in “practices of citizenship” that are open to the judgment of others: spaces and places for the people, as Klinenberg argued. How often do we have the opportunity to experiment, together with others, in practical actions where our needs find solutions that call into question the most general of social arrangements? How many times in the last week have we actually been citizens in this sense?
Conclusion
The endowment of social rights that characterized welfare capitalism began to consolidate in the post-war decades in the West. This model was largely based on the supply of public goods and services, which contributed to the “de-commodification” of everyday life needs. From the 1980s onwards, privatisation policies affected to a lesser or greater degree the welfare regimes of welfare capitalism. The cultural backbone of these reforms was neo-liberalism: i.e., meritocracy and supporting individuals’ capacity to reach personal well-being no longer by a public redistribution of goods and services, but rather through positive actions, equal opportunities, “active” work policies, human capital, the rationalisation of public expense and easing pressure on public expenditure. Liberal reforms did not achieve the promised aims: rather than empowering inclusion within the market, they eventually favoured value-extraction practices, placing citizens in a position of subjection, progressively either decreasing their power of collective voice as well as the one of individual choice Footnote 21. Erik Olin Wright’s book starts from this diagnosis: the current situation seems to vary greatly from that of such well-tempered liberalism and requires a moral posture. Capitalism is in good health; the world around it is not.
I argued that the anticapitalist momentum that E. O. Wright strove for, points analytical attention towards a specific kind of “interaction regime” which I have labelled as “public heterarchy”. These are potentially the new spaces in which to act, to create local economies, new stories, new ways of belongingFootnote 22. It is unlikely that the “anticapitalist voice”/critical capacity will develop unless these interaction-regimes flourish with the active help of the State. An “enabling State” would thus be key to enhancing the public sphere in this direction. Anticapitalism flourishes on heterarchical public rituals which link, in new ways, the immediate basic needs of everyday life or “experience-near” to more general “experience-distant” cultural concepts of the “good life”. As Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy put it: “[This] approach is broadly Durkheimian. Morality does not refer here to some universal ethical standard; rather, it means what a society, or a group, defines as good or bad, legitimate or inappropriateFootnote 23”.
Morally informed criticism emerges from those social activities in which—as Durkheim wrote—the profane and the sacred are always present together, as they are the emblem of a morally meaningful “good life”. In this line, even the mundane purchase of a refrigerator should have a symbolic implication that establishes links with the ideal of collective solidarity. The fact that you can say of that refrigerator “it is mine” makes it a representation of the solidarity of “We”. The same applies to talk of “my children” who have graduated in our school or of the ownership of “my home” as the symbol of the general right to housing. For working-class male breadwinners, buying a new refrigerator had a shared meaning: it was the achievement of a middle-class status embedded in a collective effortFootnote 24.
As argued, this could happen when specific “interaction regimes” allow heterogeneous individuals to make meaningful connections between individual needs and collective issues: between “my children” who have graduated in our school or “my home” as the symbol of the general right to housingFootnote 25. Public heterarchies, where the capacity for the collective voice of “marginal subjects” is empowered, might thus constitute the humus for the “secular faith” on which anticapitalism feeds (Hägglund 2019). The empirical inquiry on the social mechanisms of anticapitalismFootnote 26 is hence the key concern that Erik Olin Wright’s normative posture conferred on future generations in his last days in this life.
