How to Be an Anticapitalist in the Twenty-First Century - Erik Olin Wright

Partial Excerpts (antilibrary)

Preface

This book was originally conceived as a streamlined distillation of the central arguments of Envisioning Real Utopias, published in 2010

My focus of attention had shifted from establishing the credibility of a democratic-egalitarian alternative to capitalism to the problem of strategy, how to get from here to there. What I initially planned as a short distillation of my 2010 book had become more of a sequel.

My problem was basically that I was writing for two distinct audiences

The solution I came up with was to plan a book with two parts.

By March of 2018, I had what I felt were solid drafts of the first five chapters

In early April I was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia.

proposed that when I had completed the manuscript, Part 1 be published as a short book without waiting for Part 2. If all goes well and the transplant is successful, then sometime in the future I can write Part 2 if this still seems worthwhile.

In the book, I argue in favor of democratic market socialism, understood as a radical form of economic democracy

1. Why Be Anticapitalist?

For many people, the idea of anticapitalism seems ridiculous. After all, look at the fantastic technological innovations in the goods and services produced

the array of consumption goods available and affordable for the average person, and even for the poor, has increased dramatically almost everywhere

Here is another story: the hallmark of capitalism is poverty in the midst of plenty. This is not the only thing wrong with capitalism, but it is the feature of capitalist economies that is its gravest failing

In particular, the poverty of children who clearly bear no responsibility for their plight is morally reprehensible in rich societies where such poverty could be easily eliminated

4. The Destination beyond Capitalism: Socialism as Economic Democracy

Until the final decades of the twentieth century, radical anticapitalists had a pretty clear idea of the desirable alternative to capitalism. They called it “socialism.”

By the end of the twentieth century, few critics of capitalism retained much confidence in such a highly statist understanding of a desirable alternative to capitalism. The ultimate failure of the historical attempts at building an attractive alternative to capitalism in the Soviet Union, China and elsewhere discredited the idea of comprehensive, bureaucratically directed central planning