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 time) which 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
