what you get here

This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020

Friday, September 20, 2019

Another World is Possible

I increasingly marvel at the miracle of my laptop – an instrument that allows me to access the work of the world’s best brains even when their bodies are dead.
The last two posts reflect what has been a frenetic process of interrogating some hundred or so writers about what they think of the prospects for “a better world”….

It all started with my alighting on a piece entitled “How to be an anti-capitalist today” - written by Erik Olin-Wright in the radical American journal Jacobin which you will be able to read only by entering the “Jacobin” site and inserting Olin-Wright’s name in their search engine. It’s a cunning obstacle they’ve created to prevent people like me sharing the article widely….
I was impressed with the clear typology he laid out in the article which he expanded into a later paper on the “strategic logics of anti-capitalism” – namely “smashing capitalism, dismantling capitalism, taming capitalism, resisting capitalism, and escaping capitalism”. Some of this language may offend my readers’ tender ears but, whether they like it or not, each represents a distinctive option in the wider portfolio of choices of dealing with a nasty system…

I realised I had perhaps been too dismissive in my reaction to his Envisioning Real Utopias (2009) when I had come across it on the internet a few years ago – and had written it off largely on the basis of it devoting only a few pages to the amazing phenomenon of the Mondragon cooperatives. But there were also some aspects of the sociological lingo (referred to in a withering review at the timewhich I found off-putting He does, however, admit in the Preface (the entire book is available just by clicking on the title) that it is almost impossible to satisfy both the general and the academic reader. Here he is on the structure of the book -

This framework is built around three tasks: diagnosis and critique; formulating alternatives; and elaborating strategies of transformation. These three tasks define the agendas of the three main parts of the book.
Part I of the book (Chapter 3) presents the basic diagnosis and critique of capitalism that animates the search for real utopian alternatives.

Part II then discusses the problem of alternatives. Chapter 4 reviews the traditional Marxist approach to thinking about alternatives and shows why this approach is unsatisfactory.
Chapter 5 elaborates an alternative strategy of analysis, anchored in the idea that socialism, as an alternative to capitalism, should be understood as a process of increasing social empowerment over state and economy.
Chapters 6 and 7 explore a range of concrete proposals for institutional design in terms of this concept of social empowerment, the first of these chapters focusing on the problem of social empowerment and the state, and the second on the problem of social empowerment and the economy.

Part III of the book turns to the problem of transformation – how to understand the process by which these real utopian alternatives could be brought about.
Chapter 8 lays out the central elements of a theory of social transformation.
Chapters 9 through 11 then examine three different broad strategies of emancipatory transformation – rupture transformation (chapter 9), interstitial transformation (chapter 10), and symbiotic transformation (chapter 11). The book concludes in Chapter 12 which distills the core arguments of the book into seven key lessons.

Olin-Wright devoted his life to trying to understand the capitalist system and how it might be tamed. His university keeps a full range of his papers accessible here – and they are a real treasure trove for the serious researcher – and activist.
Associations and Democracy; J Cohen and J Rogers (1995), for example, was the first of a series of books he helped develop under the “Real Utopias Project” banner (the others can be accessed on his site). And Taking the social in socialism seriously (2004) is a superb exposition which shows him testing out the ideas which went into “Envisioning Real Utopias” a few years later….

Sadly, he died in January of this year – with very touching tributes to his work as an inspiring teacher (see resource at end). But, before his untimely recent death, Wright went on to write a booklet (of 70 pages) with the rather curious title “How to be an anti-capitalist for the 21st Century” (2018) which you can read in its entirety by clicking the title. An expanded version is now available as a book and was nicely reviewed in The Guardian only last month.
He took copious notes at his presentations and discussion – and gave a lot of thought to the process of change as is evident in Pathways to a cooperative market economy (2015). Curiously, however, for a self-avowed Marxist, he did not venture into the field of economics or other disciplines....

Update
Inevitably I no sooner post a table than I realise I have missed an important title. The Capitalism Papers – Fatal Flaws of an Obsolete System (2012) is a very readable but oddly neglected book by a great American journalist (and ecologist) who goes under the amazing name of Jerry Mander. Typically, however, he fails to mention Olin Wright – who I rather belatedly now realise was the foremost thinker of this genre…

Tributes

2 comments:

  1. The question is why would anyone want "to be an anti-capitalist today”?

    If you are not a socialist then, obviously you will not want to be an anti-capitalist unless, your goal is to seek to revert society to some form of more primitive society prior to capitalism. That appeared to be the goal of someone like Pol Pot, for example, or Mao in his more insane moments. It was the goal of the "Young England" Movement, described by Marx in the Communist Manifesto, for example, as well as of other reactionaries such as Malthus, as well as reactionary socialists such as Sismondi. I suspect that it is the intention for at least, some, and it is he consequence of the demands of most environmentalists who follow in the footsteps of Malthus, too. For example, on the news here yesterday there were some environmentalists picketing an oil refinery, and calling or all fossil fuel usage to be stopped overnight. Well if Brexit will be bad, and the 2008 crash was bad, imagine the state of primitivism society would be reduced to if all fossil fuel usage stopped overnight!

    If you are a social-democrat, you will no be an anti-capitalist, because the whole basis of social-democracy is a continuation of capitalism with the edges smoothed, founded on he belief that the interests of capital and labour are compatible and negotiable, and that the best interests of workers are thereby served simply by a more efficient functioning of the capitalist machine.

    But, as Marx also pointed out, communists are not anti-capitalists either. On the contrary, Marx notes that the historical mission of capitalism is to make socialism possible. Without capitalism the forces of production would not have been concentrated and centralised, and would not thereby have been massively developed. Nor would a working-class have been formed, and nor would the educational and cultural development of that class have been possible which is required for it to become he ruling class.

    Indeed, as Lenin sets out in his critique of the Sismondian position of the Narodniks, not only is capitalism a natural part of the social development of humanity, but its specific manifestation in places like Russia, of investment of capital by foreign "imperialist" capital also plays a vital role in this process, which is why "anti-imperialism" is a twin of "anti-capitalism", both representing reactionary forms of Sismondist socialism.

    Far from being "anti-capitalist", or "anti-imperilist", Marxists seek the most rapid and effective development of capitalism, so as to hasten its contradictions, and its supercession by Socialism. Far from being "anti-imperialist", we are pro the investment of capital by firms from "imperialist" countries, as a means of shortcutting the development process for less developed economies, for the same reason.

    Lenin certainly went to great lengths to try to get imperialist capital to invest in Russia, but other than with Occidental petroleum largely failed in that endeavour. Trotsky wrote that

    "Turning one’s back on foreign capital and speaking of collectivisation and industrialisation is mere intoxication with words.”

    As Marx also put it,

    "They ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economical reconstruction of society."

    Indeed, as Marx sets out in Capital III, the very process of capital accumulation leads to the destruction of capital as private property within the capitalist system itself, converting it into socialised capital in the form of cooperatives and joint stock companies, which are the property of the associated producers. This as Marx says, constitutes the transitional form of property between capitalism and socialism.

    So, as I said, why would anyone other than reactionaries want to be "anti-capitalist" rather than being pro-socialist.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I did find the title rather curious to say the least - and hardly calculated to attract many readers. So I'm grateful for this, Boffy. I had dismissed his "Envisioning...." book when it first came out - to a large extent because of Russell Jacoby's withering crit and learned only of his death in January when I came across the Jacobin article this week.....
    So I was in generous mood when I flicked at some of the shorter articles on his website.....
    But Jacoby is probably correct - that this is what happens when academics stay in their bubble too long......Quite tragic when you think of the damage that this incestuous academic specialisation does to the minds of both the specialists and their students......

    ReplyDelete