I. Three elements that must inform the politics for transformative change
To think of ourselves as anti-capitalists means that we are committed to getting rid of capitalist relations of production.
Stated in this bald, simplistic way, anti-capitalists will find it difficult to persuade many to join their struggles. This is so because all they present is a negative position. They want to get rid of something and not saying what will replace it. To be successful in the fight to rid ourselves of capitalism and its destruction of human potential and our physical environments, at least three things must be done, simultaneously.
A. We must formulate, as best we can, a vision of what we want the world to look like when we win our struggles. This vision must be a realistic one, even if it currently looks out of reach. People will not join us in the struggle against capitalism if we do not offer them an attractive and attainable alternative way to live.
William Morris:
“Intelligence enough to conceive, courage enough to will, power enough to compel. If our ideas of a new society are to be anything more than a dream, these three qualities must animate the majority of the working-people; and, then, I say, the thing will be done.”
Daniel Singer, Whose Millenium? Theirs or Ours?, N.Y.: Monthly. R. P. 1999.
“If any attempt to change society, and not just to mend it, is branded angrily and contemptuously as utopian, then, turning the insult into a badge of honor, we must proudly proclaim that we are all utopian.”
Istvan Me’sza’ros, Socialism or Barbarism: From the ‘American Century’ to the the Crossroads, N.Y.: Mthly. R. P. 2001.
“Without identifying the overall destination of the journey, together with the strategic direction and the necessary compass adopted for reaching it, there can be no hope for success.”
William Tabb, “The World Trade Organization? Stop World Takeovers” (2000), 51 Monthly Rev. 8:
“Change does not come about from the mere fact of oppression, but from a belief that a better alternative is not only desirable but possible, not necessarily tomorrow, but when the momentum can be turned around.”
For BOTC’s embryonic efforts to formulate Visions for a Better Future, see …
Comments and discussion of these ideas are welcome.
B. Those who currently activate against the harsh outcomes of capitalism, are fighting their fights within that system. It is a holistic system which is intent on maintaining and perpetuating
itself. The logic, rules and ideology which it produces and which envelop all of us are designed to serve this goal of self-preservation. This requires activists to be careful as they seek to remedy any particular ill. They must educate themselves to the danger of further embedding the social, political and ideological aspects of capitalism which maintain capitalist relations of production.
This is a call for caution, not inaction. Not all reforms, even if momentarily successful, are progressive in the sense that they advance the possibility of transformative change. This presents activists with complex issues. The section on this site headed Non-reformist reform is intended to highlight and analyse these issues by examining the nature of on-going fights. The point of urging this self-examination of our tactics when involved in struggle is that it will also help us see what kinds of concepts and values ought to inform our struggles, that is, how positive fights to move toward our vision for a better future should be fought.
Our first illustration on the site is the discussion on the recent Ontario government extension of legal immunity to government and its partial shielding of Long Term Care operators from litigation.
C. The final plank in the platform to build a better world is to develop a set of principles on which each and every struggle should be fought. Those principles, by definition, must be compatible with, indeed must be derived from, the values that we want to be embedded in the new world that is to replace capitalism. This is much easier said than done. Central to fighting in this way is the idea that we will become other by doing other (Panitch & Gindin).
Corbyn in Jacobin:
Socialism isn’t about saying to everybody, ‘go off and read this or that history book or theory’. But it’s about saying,’ in your everyday life, you’re a socialist’. You look after your neighbour, you share things, support the National Health service, and make socialism a part of your life.
Gerald Cohen: “Back to Socialist Principles” 18 March, 1994, U of T, WS 1993-95 (10):
“The point of theory is not to generate a comprehensive social design which the politician then seeks to implement… implementing a design requires whole cloth, and nothing in contemporary is made of whole cloth. Politics is an endless struggle, and theory serves as a weapon in that struggle, because it provides a characterization of its direction, and of its controlling purpose.”
In sum: the identification of three separate aspects of transformative action is an analytical device. The core of the analysis is that an integrated approach, an effective approach, requires all three elements to be considered in all militants’ efforts to move us toward a better world. Every struggle must be examined to see how it can be tailored toward the goal of a better world, what pitfalls must be avoided and how the strategies we use mould us to become more altruistic, more compassionate, more democratic, more caring of, and respectful to, others.
The BOTC website will present a series of short papers, interviews, panel discussion and conversations on any progressive struggle from the perspective of how they can be made part of a movement toward achieving a non-capitalist world in which human beings can attain their humanity and preserve the bounty and beauty of nature.
II. Opening up the discussion on ways in which the three elements might be brought to bear
In his last book, Erik Olin Wright, How to be an Anti-capitalist in the 21st Century, London/New York: Verso Books, 2019, set out to craft a framework for anti-capitalists. He begins with the argument that it is not sufficient to reveal the many oppressions inflicted by capitalism. It must be argued that a good society has guiding principles that are antithetical to capitalism.
Every struggle ought to have these end-goals in mind. And the activists must conduct their struggles in ways that accord with those principles. They must walk the talk as they are trying to develop a new conversation. The struggles must be guided by the values of material and social equality, fairness, democratic participation in all spheres of decision-making and the building of communitarian and solidarity principles.
Wright makes an important conceptual point. He observes that, right now, capitalist relations of production dominate our social relations. But it is not the only system through which social relations and economic welfare are produced. The State plays a role in the organization, production and distribution of goods and services; families have intimate relationships designed to help meet each other’s needs; community-based networks, the so-called social and solidarity community, plays such a role, as do co-operative democratically run by their members. While some of these additional ways of organization, production and distribution are capitalist in nature, some are not, indeed, they may be anti-capitalist. Wright notes that, as long as these alternate ways of providing for needs are minor and the dominant way of organizing and producing is capitalist, we are right to label our political economy as a capitalist one. But, depending on its composition, it has the seeds for planting a different system.
He uses this as a platform for suggesting a politics of anti-capitalism that might work. He labels it “eroding capitalism.”
He dismisses the idea of “smashing capitalism’, that is, to agree that capitalism is not reformable and, therefore, must be jettisoned and then build an alternative society as, he notes the closing words of Solidarity Forever sing: “We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old.” Wright thinks the current power imbalances make this hope rather fantastical. He does not feel much different when it comes to the strategy which he identifies as “dismantling capitalism’. Here there is an acknowledgment that “smashing“ is not on the realist agenda but gradual reforms by gaining influence and power in the State apparatus might do the trick. This would introduce and establish elements of a socialist society (more democratic, egalitarian, i.e., democratic socialism) from above. Wright argues that, despite some hopeful tendencies (especially post WW II) this has never proved a real possibility, capital always quick to recover from any dirigiste movements that inhibited it. This rejection of democratic socialism applies with even more vigour to the strategists who engage in what Wright calls ”taming” capitalism or what is more commonly known as social democracy. its flaws are that it never abandons the legitimacy or logic of capitalism but merely wants to curb its excesses. This leaves it feeble when capitalists fight back; more often, the reforms crafted suit capitalists quite well.
Wright recognizes that many people, indeed most who fight the outcomes of capitalism, do so outside the framework of the State – in the streets, in extra-legal settings where they are likely to conduct themselves democratically, in a solidaristic way.
This analysis takes him to his “eroding capitalism” argument. It is an amalgam of trying to have top down incremental changes and a resistance movement from below, working in tandem. It is not easy to see how this will avoid the very pitfalls that Wright identifies for some of his to-be-discarded strategies. He, therefore, gives a series of the fights he thinks people should undertake, from below and from above, to go toward a better world, one in which capitalism will have eroded.
He suggests a fight for a Universal Basic Income. His would be an unconditional one, which in no way was the equivalent to less eligibility of the Poor Laws genre which is what attracts conservatives to a UBI.
“Basic Income: Progressive Cloak and Neoliberal Dagger,” The Bullet, 4 April, 2018.
Such a basis for a flourishing life (see above) also will assist with other mechanisms, the establishment of co-operative, social and soilidarity economic endeavors, all underwriting self-reliance, democracy and dignity a they undermine the large capitalist market practices.co-operatives of all kinds (worker/consumer/credit, housing, food etc.,) plus existing survival informal efforts, eg., community kitchens, time banking, local currencies, daycare centres (as in Quebec) disability care… At the same time, pressure to democratize capitalist firms must be on anti-capitalists’ agenda. Similarly, baking has to be pushed a s a public utility. The State is to be pushed provide more goods and services.
On the face of it, it is not all that different from fighting the many ways people already are fighting but re-packaging it as an integrated set of strategies because the agents of change are to be conscious of the need to work from the bottom and the top at one and the same time with the same intent.
It does point anti-capitalists to better understand what is already being done. For instance, in 2014, a UN Report, “Measuring the Size and Scope of the Cooperative Economy” shows that in Europe and North America one third of the population holds membership in some kind of co-operative. The point Wright pushes is that this likely apolitical anti-capitalism needs to be deployed for transformative purposes.
For BOTC this suggests finding concrete ways of doing so. Ways of practicing democracy in all spheres of life should be investigated; political models leaning in the way in which bottom-up and top-down strategies might be partnered should be found and further developed. There is much to be done.
The Corbyn Labour Party in the UK produced a Manifesto, engineered by John McDonnell. It had a large number of recommendations which appear to reflect some of Erik Olin Wright’s ideas. It recommended the State taking much more direct control over the provision of essential needs, such as utilities and rail transport, for workers to have much more direct say over the way in which work was to be done, the decentralization of the knowledge economy, strong proposals on environmental change and a plan approaching the famous Swedish Meidner Plan which ahd envisaged the gradual take-over of control over shareholding in corporations by allocating a a portion of equity capital each financial year. The Swedish proposal led to a fight-back by capitalists, leading to the overthrow of a Social democratic government that had been in office for nearly three decades and the shooting of the Prime Minister. The UK proposals may have had much to do with the vicious anti-Corbyn campaign fought by every major media outlet and the elites, excoriating him for his (totally false) anti-semitism and his lack of charisma and communist sympathies.
For a good analysis of the Labour Manifesto, see Barnaby Raine, “Renewed Labour: McDonnell has a burning task on his hands,” Issue 33 Overtime, 2019.
The reactions in Sweden and the UK are, in a significant way, an acknowledgment that capitalists see the transformative potential of strategies that marry bottom-up struggles with strong actions at the State level. For activists this means that they must never lose sight of the need to ensure that there is an identity of purpose between anti-capitalists at these two levels of struggle.