Anti-Capitalism After Reading Erik Olin Wright, Part I

I want to criticize Erik Wright’s Anti-Capitalism book (‘AC’). I never met him, nor saw him speak. I’m innocent of even the most minimal instruction in his field, sociology, though amusingly enough, one of my few publications (co-authored) in a refereed professional journal is in sociology. Wright sadly passed away before his time, and he had many admirers and friends. The last thing I want to do is suggest any deficiencies in his dedication, professional competence, or character.

I got into AC after falling down the “Analytical Marxism” rabbit hole a few weeks ago. I’m still exploring it, with the help of other worthies such as Gerry Cohen, John Roemer, and Jon Elster. More on that some other time.

A basic problem in the politics of anti-capitalism is that its most likely recruits are the restless young. The young face high walls blocking affordable access to higher education, home ownership, and starting a family. On top of that, we are in a run of decades of wage stagnation that forces workers to start at lower rungs on the ladder, and to climb more slowly.

The importance of these things, not least because the window to a viable family life closes inexorably as time passes, drives the young to anger and extremes. We geezers already have all the educational credentials and real estate we are ever going to have, so it takes some effort and imagination for us to identify with the benighted generations.

The extremes may entail what used to be called “catastrophist” theories of revolution. With a sufficient catastrophe afflicting the working class, it can rise up in revolution and remake the world. Anything short of that, including tenable reforms, would be inadequate and of no interest. Worse, a constructive reform might be opposed as helping to prop up a fundamentally unjust and dysfunctional system. This gives rise to political isolation for radicals.

Radicalism also promotes an interest in Marx. If Marxism is the bane of the rotten system that confronts us, there must be something to it. So being pro-Marx becomes a sign of commitment and seriousness. Whatever might be thought of as valuable in Marx, however, you can have socialism without it. There is not actually much in the way of detail in Marx on how socialism would work. Socialist ideas in diverse forms pre-date Marx.

My view is that catastrophes don’t enable revolution. We’ve just had one thanks to the Covid pandemic, and we will probably see more of that type. No revolt of the working class was in evidence, except for some weirdness among the white folks, like supporting a profoundly flawed, not to mention anti-working class demagogue.

The Marxian cliche that people are motivated by material circumstances doesn’t seem to fly. Here they were not motivated by the interest in not dying from preventable disease, nor in cooperation in disaster relief. Perceptions of upset in a country’s demographics just seems to drive people nuts.

As I’ve mentioned before, the mass immiseration Marx envisioned seems to have been substantially exported to what is now called the “Global South.” I don’t mean there is none left here in the U.S. There is still plenty, though it is not so visible or acknowledged. To some extent, it’s a source of shame and denial.

At any rate, there is no apparent dramatic, open bifurcation between the haves and the have-nots that congeals into overall class struggle. Instead there is all sorts of perverse fragmentation and madness within classes, and not just in the U.S. The pattern of political divisions founded on race, national origin, and education can also be found in the well-off, social-democratic nations of Western Europe. Wright is very much attuned to this. In fact, he was one of the foremost scholars of class structure.

More tomorrow . . .