Our friend Erik Olin Wright has s long essay on How to be an Anti-Capitalist at Jacobin. Read the whole thing here.
An excerpt:
The Four Types of Anticapitalism
Capitalism breeds anticapitalists.
Sometimes resistance to capitalism is crystallized in coherent ideologies that offer both systematic diagnoses of the source of harms and clear prescriptions about how to eliminate them. In other circumstances anticapitalism is submerged within motivations that on the surface have little to do with capitalism, such as religious beliefs that lead people to reject modernity and seek refuge in isolated communities. But always, wherever capitalism exists, there is discontent and resistance in one form or other.
Historically, anticapitalism has been animated by four different logics of resistance: smashing capitalism, taming capitalism, escaping capitalism, and eroding capitalism.
These logics often coexist and intermingle, but they each constitute a distinct way of responding to the harms of capitalism. These four forms of anticapitalism can be thought of as varying along two dimensions.
One concerns the goal of anticapitalist strategies — transcending the structures of capitalism or simply neutralizing the worst harms of capitalism — while the other dimension concerns the primary target of the strategies — whether the target is the state and other institutions at the macro-level of the system, or the economic activities of individuals, organizations, and communities at the micro-level.
Taking these two dimensions together gives us the typology below.
{ 63 comments }
Metatone 12.05.15 at 9:17 am
Interesting and useful piece I’d say.
Although that marks me out on someone who has given up on a big bang of smashing capitalism. So the notion that transcendence likely comes out of “erosion” appeals to me.
At the same time, I think there’s a tension between the categories of “escaping” and “eroding” on the ground. Many efforts which may have the effect of erosion (co-operatives spring to mind) may start out as an attempt to “escape” or be motivated much more by the idea of “escape” than erosion.
It also springs to mind that part of the ideological work still to be really completed is in elaborating methods of co-operation and cohabiting (at least in the work sense) that don’t rely on “market” logics. Part of the seductive aura of those market logics is that they claim to embed algorithms for fairness (particularly wrt hierarchy), while alternatives rely on fallible human judgement. I suspect that a two pronged approach is required.
First, we have to rehabilitate judgement (which remains under heavy attack) and second, more dots have to be joined up in all the work on democracy, co-operation and systems of fair decision making. (I think in the first arena (judgement), there is still a pile of conceptual work to be done, where in the second I suspect it’s more about collecting together all the good ideas that remain fragmented and uncorrected.
Ebenezer Scrooge 12.05.15 at 1:55 pm
I read the thing a few days ago. Decent piece of work, but. It’s hard to distinguish Wright’s “taming capitalism” version of anticapitalism from ordinary boring welfare-state capitalist liberalism. And that seemed to be Wright’s favorite option. Although I’ll admit that Wright’s #2 option–eroding capitalism–is not subject to this criticism.
bob mcmanus 12.05.15 at 3:12 pm
I also read the work before linked here.
Yeah, the “eroding capitalism” appears to allude to and be influenced by, admittedly by Wright, the strands of anarchism and “communisation” I read, tiqqun, TC, The Invisible Committee (“To Our Friends”, 2014.) Benjamin Noys (Persistence of the Negative, Malign Velocities). But these are much more determinedly negative and destructive, less Utopian, than Wright
philofra 12.05.15 at 3:24 pm
With all the anti capitalism sentiment out there I have this satisfying feeling that no matter what, capitalism will always be with us. We live in a modern world and such a world wouldn’t/couldn’t exist without the mechanics of capitalism. It musters the resources and human capital to maintain and sustain modern societies.
Of all the anti capitalism choices the “taming” of capitalism makes the most sense. But the taming of capitalism has been going on since its inception. That process and its outcomes has given us the world most of us will never give up. Had western capitalism existed in Syria prior to its civil war there wouldn’t have been a civil war. Capitalism gives individuals a sense of ownership and a stake in the system. Such systems, although imperfect, are not overthrown.
Capitalism insinuates itself on society, often in unpleasant ways. It agitates society so that it constantly rejuvenates itself. If communism had this agitating factor about it the Soviet Union would still exist today.
What most people detest about capitalism is is extremes. But that in itself is not sufficient reason for overthrowing it.
steven johnson 12.05.15 at 3:46 pm
Wright observes “In what is sometimes called the ‘Golden Age of Capitalism
— roughly the three decades following World War II — social-democratic policies, especially in those places where they were most thoroughly implemented, did a fairly good job at moving in the direction of a more humane economic system.”
1945 to 1975? Well, yes, two thirds of the way through the US dismantled segregation and instituted Medicare and anti-poverty programs. And of course the US labor movement was purged of the evil Communist conspiracy, which apparently Wright approves, along with the Korean War and the Vietnam War and the slaughter in Indonesia and invasions of Lebanon and Dominican Republic and interventions in Iran and Guatemala. Whether he regrets intervention in Suez instead of Hungary he neglects to say.
But of course Wright might like other countries better? British food rationing in the Fifties and the suppression of the Mau Mau in Kenya more to his taste perhaps? Or maybe South Africa? Brazil, before or after Goulart? Chile after the blessings of capitalism were restored by Pinochet? Perhaps you protest at ungenerous sarcasm, and say, “Sweden.” But was Sweden’s performance any better than Switzerland, another country whose neutrality protected them from harm while they traded with Nazi Germany?
I do not value Wright’s judgments on the success of capitalism nor the failure of socialism.
harry b 12.05.15 at 3:54 pm
stephen johnson. Honestly, it is incredible that you could read that piece and think that the author is a pro-imperialist, pro-segregation defender of Mcarthyism. But well done, its quite an imaginative achievement!!
Mike Schilling 12.05.15 at 4:59 pm
But always, wherever capitalism exists, there is discontent and resistance in one form or other.
Unlike socialism, where everyone is happy. Or else.
steven johnson 12.05.15 at 5:09 pm
harryb@6 It’s incredible you could read that piece without wondering what Wright does mean when he takes the Golden Age of Capitalism as good times for social-democratic “policies.” Maybe you don’t like my sarcasm, but any response to what he wrote is superior to an uncritical reading.
harry b 12.05.15 at 5:22 pm
Well, since I’ve read pretty much everything he’s written, and talked to him about these issues for year, no, not incredible. really.
But that aside, some basic principle of charity is in order when reading — looking for what is interesting, assuming the person whose work you are reading is not an idiot, and has given some thought to why they say what they say. You don’t really think he’s unaware of all the things you raise, nor do you think he approves of them. You also know that his audience is international, not parochially US, and that when he talks about social democratic policies he is referring to policies in those countries in which social democratic parties had access to the levers of power — eg, specifically not the US. You know there is a reason, to do with effectively conveying the analytical framework he is offering, why he doesn’t need to say everything about everything, and doesn’t throw thousands of footnotes in to qualify each comment. Either you don’t use that principle, in which case you have a really hard time conversing with people, or you do use that principle and you are simply being a twit here.
Luke 12.05.15 at 6:44 pm
steven johnson@9
If you’re unclear what Wright means by “social-democratic policies†for the purpose of “taming capitalism” a good start would be trying to identify some social-democratic policies, rather than imperialist adventures.
js. 12.05.15 at 6:57 pm
It’s interesting stuff, and if people like it, there’s a whole lot more of it in his Envisioning Real Utopias, (previously subject of a seminar on this very site). I think it’a a great book, and it has a lot of very useful discussion, but I was a little underwhelmed by the end—by the end it wasn’t clear to me that there was a whole lot of anti-capitalism left. And I have a similar reaction to this piece (tho I’m obviously reading it through the lens of the book’s discussion).
Brett 12.05.15 at 7:01 pm
It’s always struck me as strange to talk about “eroding capitalism”, given that capitalistic market economies themselves are quite malleable in terms of institutions and entities. Capitalism probably won’t look the same 300 years from now as it does now, and if you changed up the actors within the system – more cooperative entities, fewer C corporations, more non-profits, etc – you’d still have a capitalistic market economy.
The only way you’d really eliminate capitalism altogether would be if you attacked the two fundamentals: exchange and diversified ownership of assets, resources, and debts. Otherwise you’re going to get some type of capitalism even if the capitalists are worker-owned firms and the investment done by mission-driven non-profits like credit unions and social investment funds.
Stephen 12.05.15 at 7:04 pm
Query whether Erik Olin Wright might considerate it as important to be anti-socialist?
“always, wherever socialism exists, there is discontent and resistance in one form or other”? Or would that, in an ideal society as per EOW, not be permitted to survive?
I have my doubts.
Watson Ladd 12.05.15 at 7:20 pm
Wrong life cannot be lived rightly! Andrew Carnegie was not “escaping” or eroding capitalism when he established libraries. Hippies did not escape capitalism by running into the woods. As far as the “Golden Age” the eventual revolt against the welfare state showed exactly how benevolent it really was to those it supposedly helped.
I have great difficulty seeing what externalities prohibiting competition among airlines ameliorated, or the logic of industrial policy extending the coal extraction industry in Yorkshire instead of inviting new industries. There is nothing in the three causes Erik Olin Wright identifies with the welfare state that Milton Friedman would object to solving.
steven johnson 12.05.15 at 8:12 pm
luke @11 Imperialist adventures aren’t adventures at all, they are business as usual. It’s the social-democratic policies that are local, episodic, temporary. They’re they adventures in crisis management. That’s what’s wrong with taking Wright seriously.
harry b@ “Perhaps the three decades or so of the Golden Age were just an historical anomaly, a brief period in which favorable structural conditions and robust popular power opened up the possibility for the relatively egalitarian model.
Before that time capitalism was a rapacious system, and under neoliberalism it has become rapacious once again, returning to the normal state of affairs for capitalist systems. Perhaps in the long run capitalism is not tamable.”
No, there’s no way to charitably read the claim that capitalism was relatively egalitarian in the “Golden Age. No, there’s no way to charitably read the claim that neoliberalism is just some mistaken policy that can be defeated or avoided or its supported persuaded to good morals. No, there’s no way to take seriously an analysis including the notion that China is a shining example of a capitalist economy freed from those pesky crises. Being “charitable” to this nonsense is playing the twit.
bob mcmanus 12.05.15 at 8:19 pm
13: Not gonna bother
15: Wright obviously remains fairly bourgeois, that’s why they call it “political Marxism”
The Radical Left mentioned above, and MUSE and Claire Fontaine, talk about “desertion-in-place,” soft sabotage, communisation not as Utopianism but as extra-legal methods and tactics of eroding/disrupting capital flows, for a meaning of capital that approaches totality. The classic example is squatting to prevent gentrification. Also hacking, phreaking, piracy. Trolling. Dispersal. Dis-organization. Stop making sense.
Real subsumption requires semiotic resistance.
bob mcmanus 12.05.15 at 8:22 pm
Sorry, Analytical Marxism. Woods ain’t that far from Cohen.
geo 12.05.15 at 9:07 pm
Real subsumption requires semiotic resistance.
Right on!
engels 12.05.15 at 9:17 pm
Also hacking, phreaking, piracy. Trolling
Phishing?
harry b 12.05.15 at 10:14 pm
You might want to look up the word “relatively”. But, for sure you’re not going to get anything useful out of Wright. Thanks for letting us know.
engels 12.05.15 at 10:15 pm
I am a big fan of Erik Olin Wright, and he’s certainly my favourite analytic Marxist by far, but not really the real utopias stuff (I haven’t read the book though). Although he was less categorical about it then Cohen, it seems they both embraced post-Marxism at just the moment the world was starting to look a lot more Marxist to many people than it has for decades.
A bit of a side track but has any analytic Marxist written anything good about the financial crisis? Recent imperialist wars? The collapse of the political centre?
bob mcmanus 12.05.15 at 11:15 pm
20: Phishing? Or just fishing.
There is a strong case to made that civilization is facing a terminal crisis of overproduction (though not distributed well)*, including and especially semantic and social production, such that only the violence of IP and imperialism can anymore turn production into surplus value, and the last thing we need is anybody, in their own small way, making one more damn contribution to society. We need an army, nay a movement, of Bartlebys trading cat pictures at work.
And no more books, I don’t need any more new books to read.
And way too much irony also.
*Anybody remember my catch phrase?
Peter Dorman 12.05.15 at 11:30 pm
I like where Wright is trying to go, and I strongly identify with his strategy of erosion cum taming. But I’ve always felt that his conception of what the practices and levers are is much too narrow, largely reflecting the traditional concerns of Marxism (to which he has added environmental sustainability). We have income inequality, alienation at work, occupational safety. Well, yes, of course. But there are other issues and fronts to work on.
I’ll mention just two. One is asserting social control over the direction of investment and technological change, overcoming the historical inertia (path dependence) of a market system. In practice this is about industrial policy, but not from a beat-the-foreigners-in-international-competition perspective. There are lots of elements of a post-capitalist industrial policy out there which could be built on.
The other is achieving more participation and autonomy within large-scale production. You might call this the Stafford Beer problem, and he made a decent start on thinking it through. We have a lot more experience to draw on today, however, and the theory of productive organization has continued to move forward in fits and starts.
As for social democracy, the critical new front is international (or post-nationalist): migration, global public finance, etc.
To put it somewhat simplistically, what’s good about EOW is his creative rethinking of received Marxian categories; what’s frustrating is the continued overhang of those categories.
harry b 12.05.15 at 11:35 pm
I think of him as one of the two who really is still a Marxist. Robert Brenner’s the other.
I can’t think of anything off-hand — has Brenner written anything about it since his last book?
engels 12.06.15 at 12:18 am
Sorry I wasn’t thinking of Brenner: I agree about him, and he has written about it.
geo 12.06.15 at 1:35 am
bob: *Anybody remember my catch phrase?
Wasn’t it:
“Resist the seduction
Of overproduction!
Improve distribution,
With no substitution!”
Rakesh Bhandari 12.06.15 at 1:45 am
How about anti-capitalist capitalism–eliminate economic rents, end agricultural subsidies, weaken intellectual property rights and no-compete clauses, put in the dustbin limited liability and bailouts, and of course depoliticize the money supply by returning to the gold standard. My serious question: should we even consider the complex, mixed system that we presently have to be capitalism?
Bernard Yomtov 12.06.15 at 4:10 am
eliminate economic rents,
Definition please.
end agricultural subsidies,
Suits me.
weaken intellectual property rights
IP is pretty much a mess, at least in the US. It’s far from clear to me what a sensible scheme would look like.
and no-compete clauses,
These are close to being a dead letter already.
put in the dustbin limited liability
Well, OK, but how do you propose to assess liability? Are you claiming that the corporate form as it exists should be outlawed? That has implications.
and bailouts,
Maybe. Would things be better if all those GM employees were scrambling around looking for work?
and of course depoliticize the money supply by returning to the gold standard.
Utter nonsense. Terrible idea.
John Quiggin 12.06.15 at 4:10 am
David Harvey has written some interesting things. I agree with a lot of what he writes, which suggests either that I’m more Marxist than I imagine, or that he is less so.
Andrew Kliman has written a lot of in defence of Marxist orthodoxy, arguing that this is a classic “declining rate of profit” crisis, but (IMO) he’s talking nonsense. He relies pretty heavily on the American Enterprise Institute to make the case that the 1 per cent isn’t doing well at all.
Apart from that I haven’t seen much, somewhat to my surprise.
Rakesh Bhandari 12.06.15 at 4:41 am
John Quiggin writes: “Andrew Kliman has written a lot of in defence of Marxist orthodoxy, arguing that this is a classic “declining rate of profit†crisis, but (IMO) he’s talking nonsense.”
Well Marx wrote that the declining rate of profit on new investments was perfectly compatible with high profits for extant capitalists:
“The rate of profit, i.e., the relative increment of capital, is above all important to all new offshoots of capital seeking to find an independent place for themselves. And as soon as formation of capital were to fall into the hands of a few established big capitals, for which the mass of profit compensates for the falling rate of profit, the vital flame of production would be altogether extinguished. It would die out. The rate of profit is the motive power of capitalist production. Things are produced only so long as they can be produced with a profit. Hence the concern of the English economists over the decline of the rate of profit.”
At any rate, I don’t think he is being unpersuasive defending Marx in the following quote in which he suggests that what seems to be high profits today are not high returns to capital per se but the rents that monopolists enjoy:
“One of the puzzles of our economy today is that on the one hand, we have record low real interest rates, ones that are expected to be record low for 30 years if you look at the index bond market. And on the other hand, we have record high profits. If you tend to think record high profits would mean record high returns to capital, which would mean really high interest rates. And what we actually have is really low real interest rates. The way to think about that is there’s a lot of rents in what we’re calling profits that don’t really represent a return to investment, but represent a rent.”
But that wasn’t written by Andrew Kliman; that’s Larry Summers.
js. 12.06.15 at 4:55 am
Wow, really? Do you have any particular suggestions? I tried reading Harvey about a decade ago, and at least then, I failed to get much out of him.
hidflect 12.06.15 at 7:17 am
I don’t need to be a gravitationalist for gravity to keep working. And I’m not an anti-gravitationalist to insist on some guide ropes and safety nets to ameliorate its devastating effects on those who slip or stumble while climbing the mountain that is life’s journey. But right-wingers ARE gravitationalists. They insist that railings on balconies are an affront to the purity of gravity and that all hand-holds must be removed lest they impair its operation and cause disaster for us all as a result. Capitalism is not a philosophy but a rule of nature, like gravity. I think that’s where most people are getting it wrong.
Gareth Wilson 12.06.15 at 9:57 am
It’s a good analogy, if you include plenty of people who think they can fly.
John Quiggin 12.06.15 at 11:18 am
@32 I liked Enigma of Capital, perhaps more because it accorded with my views than because of any striking insights.
@31 The distinction between profit and interest isn’t new. Marx was talking about profit, I think.
Lee A. Arnold 12.06.15 at 12:08 pm
I wish that all such articles about capitalism began with the author’s definition of what real activity he/she refers to, by using the word. Never mind telling us to go read something else! Is capitalism the making of money from money (i.e. finance capitalism)? Is capitalism the ownership of private property? Is capitalism the extension of the concept of property to the gains from real production? Is capitalism the inescapable epistemological condition that mental concepts are relatively efficient?
William Timberman 12.06.15 at 12:56 pm
bob mcmanus @ 23
Hasn’t actually existing capitalism already done that for us? Consider:
a) The payday loan industry (!)
b) Privatization (schools, prisons, water systems, parking meters, etc.)
c) The Affordable Care Act (neither affordable nor caring, despite what Krugman says)
d) The sharing economy.
e) The falsely significant iota of difference between the Hillary and the Donald.
f) The grand European cacophony (Scheitert der Euro, scheitert Europa. Wir schaffen das. Grexit, Brexit, Flüchtlingskrise.)
g) Breathing in Beijing.
h) Gunfire coming soon to a mall near you.
Le Poète se fait voyant par un long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens. We are all poets now, it seems.
oldster 12.06.15 at 1:24 pm
Republican voter-suppression schemes are most effective in areas of the south where they control all of the levers of power and can prevent Democratic voters from registering.
Where they do not enjoy such structural advantages, they can always rely on left-on-left voter-suppression efforts to do their work for them:
“e) The falsely significant iota of difference between the Hillary and the Donald.”
geo, you were much too sanguine on that other thread.
Louis Proyect 12.06.15 at 1:31 pm
http://louisproyect.org/2007/03/06/erik-olin-wrights-envisioning-real-utopias/
steven johnson 12.06.15 at 2:04 pm
The thing is, Wright doesn’t talk about these things “relatively” to anything, he doesn’t relate them at all. He studiously ignores vast parts of reality. If only he looked at things “relatively,” he wouldn’t be so impressed with the Golden Age.
In the end, Wright believes “capitalism may be an indefinitely robust, dynamic form of economic organization…” I guess Francis Fukuyama can this stuff seriously. But really the proposition that all human prehistory and history before 1500 or so was trial runs for the Final Society? John Quiggin notwithstanding, it’s not clear that unlimited economic growth in capitalism is compatible with a survivable environment. Nor is it clear that imperialist war is a desirable dynamic, no matter how much Wright likes it.
And, remember, if anyone were to start talking about the successes of socialist economies relatively to their starting points, and relatively to the obstacles they face, and their average standard of living relatively to the average standard of living in the whole capitalist world…”relatively” might suddenly seem just another weasel word.
Bernard Yomtov 12.06.15 at 3:19 pm
Lee Arnold @36,
Excellent suggestion.
engels 12.06.15 at 3:32 pm
David Harvey’s great but he’s not an analytic Marxist and neither is Kliman. I think there’s been plenty of Marxist commentary on all three topics – ymmv.
Rakesh Bhandari 12.06.15 at 4:10 pm
But Summers is suggesting that we have record-low interest rates because returns on new investments are projected as low, a fact that may be disguised by presently high profits which in fact include monopoly rents, and are not a pure return on capital. Those high “profits”, in other words, should not blind us to declining profitability or what Keynes would have called a declining marginal efficiency of capital, i.e. low net rate of return expected from the purchase of additional capital.
Putting Andrew Kliman’s work aside–which I do well except that his persuasive criticism of comparative static methodology in my opinion enables a successful critique of what I would call Okishio’s impossibility theorem that viable technological change can never in itself depress the profit rate– I am suggesting that there is some interesting convergence between Keynes, Marx and Summers and that we should not be so quick to dismiss today’s difficulties as partly rooted in a classic “declining rate of profit” crisis, as you did @30
Rakesh Bhandari 12.06.15 at 4:12 pm
sorry, missing words….Putting Andrew Kliman’s work aside–which I do NOT KNOW well except that his persuasive criticism of comparative static methodology in my opinion enables a successful critique of what I would call Okishio’s impossibility theorem that viable technological change can never in itself depress the profit rate– I am suggesting that there is some interesting convergence between Keynes, Marx and Summers and that we should not be so quick to dismiss today’s difficulties as partly rooted in a classic “declining rate of profit†crisis, as you did @30
ccc 12.06.15 at 4:38 pm
Right on, Wright!
@36 Lee Arnold: quoted from Wright’s article: “Capitalism as a way of organizing economic activity has three critical components: private ownership of capital; production for the market for the purpose of making profits; and employment of workers who do not own the means of production. Existing economic systems combine capitalism with a whole host of other ways of organizing the production and distribution of goods and services: directly by states; within the intimate relations of families to meet the needs of its members; through community-based networks and organizations; by cooperatives owned and governed democratically by their members; though nonprofit market-oriented organizations; through peer-to-peer networks engaged in collaborative production processes; and many other possibilities. Some of these ways of organizing economic activities can be thought of as hybrids, combining capitalist and noncapitalist elements; some are entirely noncapitalist; and some are anticapitalist. We call such a complex economic system “capitalist†when capitalist drives are dominant in determining the economic conditions of life and access to livelihood for most people.”
js. 12.06.15 at 4:48 pm
JQ — Thanks, I’ll check it out.
LFC 12.06.15 at 4:52 pm
Has anyone here read this (I haven’t)
http://www.amazon.com/Does-Capitalism-Future-Immanuel-Wallerstein/dp/0199330859/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1449420600&sr=1-1&keywords=does+capitalism+have+a+future
LFC 12.06.15 at 4:59 pm
I am so glad that W Timberman @37 has thrown in some French along w his usual German.
p.s. on the Golden Age of Capitalism, see e.g. Marglin and Schor (eds.) 1990 bk of that title.
“Real subsumption requires semiotic resistance”: no idea what that means. But I guess that’s the point.
bob mcmanus 12.06.15 at 5:15 pm
No, but I will keep an eye for it. Wallerstein may have been the founder, but he is near the bottom in my World-systems preferences. Arrighi, Gunder Frank, Samir Amin, Janet Abu-Lughod are all a little better for me. I like Wallerstein, but the Eurocentrism and core-periphery analysis are very problematic.
I like Randall Collins a lot. I will get around to Michael Mann’s doorstopper next year. Read some Baumann and Meszaros first.
john c. halasz 12.06.15 at 5:15 pm
@49:
Marxian concept. Formal subsumption is when a sector or region is brought under sway of capitalism, but still maintains its traditional mode of organization and operation. Real subsumption is when the region or sector is broken down and reconstituted entirely in terms of the circulations of capital accumulation.
Semiotic resistance:
http://earthfirstjournal.org/newswire/2015/12/03/paris-600-fake-ads-denounce-climate-conference-hypocrisy/
LFC 12.06.15 at 5:20 pm
@j.c. halasz: thanks
William Timberman 12.06.15 at 6:03 pm
LFC, the point is simple enough. The control of things — and of people — begins and ends with the control of meaning. How much of that control is a matter of consensus and/or natural social evolution, and how much a matter of decree and/or social engineering, is very much at the crux of the modern political dilemma. The well-meaning, from modest Hillary apologists to the earnest innovators of EOW’s struggling co-ops, must all inevitably deal with the fact that many of the definitions already in our political dictionaries are fundamentally hostile to their efforts.
The ambition of modern propagandists, advertisers, etc., may not exceed that of the Spanish Inquisition or the Soviet Politburo, but their reach — and their grasp — are in some ways far more impressive. If your enemies have only the language you’ve chosen for them to use against you, you already have a leg up. Hence real subsumption requires semiotic resistance is neither obscure nor obscurantist, but rather a simple word to the wise.
Peter K. 12.06.15 at 6:19 pm
@ 39 whose link concludes with:
“Alternatives to capitalism will not arise because a critical mass of the population has become smitten with such utopian schemas, but because the conditions of daily life have become so onerous that they revolt against the system in its totality. As that day grows near, it will become urgent to develop a revolutionary movement of the classical type no matter whether that is fashionable in the academy or not.”
I think it could go either way or one of three ways. Around the 1930s after rising inequality, you see financial crisis, Depression and world wars. Massive crises. Then comes the New Deal, social democracy and the Golden Age of rising living standards and the Cold War. Steven Johnson above talks of 1945 – 1975 as hell but compare preceding decades or the preceding 100 years. Japan and Korea go from agricultural societies to cutting edge economies. Look at China today.
Of course there is the possibility of environmental calamity. Some say it’s a certainty.
But look a the financial crisis and bailouts. Does one support the bailouts so one can live to fight another day or does one glibly watch the financial sector be wiped out? Need to crack some eggs to make an omelette? I’m tending towards the second option.
So either Capitalism evolves into something better or it become more and more onerous – as the reformers fail – and there’s a revolution. Or there’s a crisis and there’s a revolution. (Or there’s no revolution in scenarios B & C.) I think it could go any of these 3 (5) ways.
The problem with the New Deal and Social Democracy is that they didn’t *stick.* They got rolled back, almost immediately.
But after the Reagan/Thatcher and Clinton/Blair years we got Obamacare where the state intervened in private markets so that more people have health insurance and health care.
The future political outcomes is unknown because the neoliberal/conservative side has so much money. But the social democratic side has the votes depending on turnout.
The Republican base is shrinking and society is becoming more secular and less “authoritarian” as we see gay marriage and legal marijuana. And as the Republican base shrinks they become more and more stuck in their bubble. What will happen after they lose the Presidential election? And then the next one as demographics turn against them? What will happen to the Supreme Court and Federal Reserve?
I think evolution is a possibility. We could be seeing the last dying days of the old Republican party. What’s up in the air is that Big Money will still be with us. But as we see with Trump and Carson, big money can’t control everything.
Rakesh Bhandari 12.06.15 at 7:08 pm
https://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~wright/Published%20writing/Symposium%20on%20ENVISIONING%20–%20Socioeconomic%20review.pdf
LFC 12.06.15 at 7:59 pm
@56
financed more by global finance, less by national industries.
sounds like a comment from a textbook on American politics c.1957, and maybe not even true then. (Though I don’t really know the voluminous historical and other research on sources of funding for the parties.) Are the Koch Brothers, e.g., “national industries” rather than “global finance”?
The notion that the Democratic Party as a whole is more ‘neoliberal’ than the Republican Party as a whole I think is wrong.
bob mcmanus 12.06.15 at 9:54 pm
But isn’t the Democratic party more neoliberal (i.e. globalist) than the Republican?
Yes, the Democratic Party is more globalist, more diverse, more cosmopolitan, more reliant on the elites of intellectual and artistic labor, less nationalist, less religious and traditionalist, less militaristic, less hierarchical etc…yes, the Democrats are more neo-liberal.
Tabasco 12.06.15 at 11:00 pm
Unlike socialism, where everyone is happy. Or else.
What was it about socialism that the Czechs liked the best? The fact that the Slovaks had to live under it too.
engels 12.06.15 at 11:38 pm
Either that or the free health care, free education, full employment, public transport, public housing, advances in gender equality, cultural and scientific achievements, I dunno
Michael Furlan 12.07.15 at 4:06 pm
Strictly speaking isn’t Capitalism just an economic system? It doesn’t fully describe a society.
Socialism does, Fascism does.
But you can a lot of widely different societies that have private ownership and markets.
Rakesh Bhandari 12.07.15 at 4:10 pm
In the Manifesto M&E devote considerable attention to the critique of reactionary forms of anti-capitalism; I think that this is missing from this piece. One thinks of viciously anti-Semitic forms of anti-capitalism in the 20th century. Hal Draper has also most usefully analyzed the whole of Marx’s critique of visions of socialism other than his own.
JRLRC 12.07.15 at 4:25 pm
Steven Johnson doesn´t know Wright.
And David Harvey is a marxist but not an analytical one.
assman 12.10.15 at 4:34 am
Given the empirical proof that an non-capitalist modern economy is an impossibility, isn’t being an anti-capitalist the same as being a moron
engels 12.10.15 at 8:58 pm
No, but I’m sure it seems that way to morons like you
dax 12.11.15 at 12:15 pm
“Given the empirical proof that an non-capitalist modern economy is an impossibility”
What would be an empirical proof of an impossibility? The fact that you don’t see rectangular circles does not prove they are impossible, only that they do not exist. You can have an empirical proof of a possibility (if you’ve seen it, then it’s possible), but not the other way.
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