Marxismocritico.com-Why Class Matters Erik OlinWright

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Why Class Matters: Erik Olin Wright

marxismocritico.com /2016/01/08/why-class-matters/

Erik Olin Wright on class,

socialism, and the meaning of

Marxism

When Erik Olin Wright fell into Marxism in the 1970s, it was the only game in town for a serious radical

scholar.

By the 1990s this was no longer so, with Marxism retreating to the margins inside and outside the

academy. Wright chose to stay. He set out to reconstruct a sociological Marxism by treating it not as a set

of fixed ideas or as an idiosyncratic method, but as a distinctive set of questions and a conceptual

framework for answering them.

Wrights Marxism is ordinary social science, but guided by the pursuit of socialism.

His work over more than forty years has focused on rethinking two core parts of the Marxian tradition:

class and strategies for social transformation. Wrights new book, Understanding Class,bumps his own

approach to class up against the likes of Thomas Piketty and Guy Standing. And the ebookAlternatives to

Capitalism, recording a debate with Robin Hahnel, shows his recent thinking on socialist possibilities.

On a recent visit to Australia, Wright spoke with Jacobineditor Mike Beggs in a wide-ranging interview,

discussing everything from Weber and Marx to markets and his views on left strategy.

Lets start with the question of why class matters. David Gruskyputs the questionbluntly, arguing that class in the macro sense is just a scholarly construct. Whats

your response?

I disagree with the claim that its not a real category. I think the answer to the question, Is that a real

category? is, Does it identify real mechanisms that have causal force in the lives of people, regardless of

whether the actors themselves recognize that causal force or the legal categories draw boundaries around

those mechanisms.

The Marxist claim is that the social relations within a system of production identify real mechanisms that

shape the lives of people and define a terrain of conflict, and that the heart of those mechanisms is a
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combination of exploitation and domination. These are the two words that are used to characterize the

specific mechanisms that Marxian classes identify as causally relevant.

So the Grusky claim that these are not real has to be the claim that exploitation and domination are not

real, that they are just figments of the analysts imagination. I think thats a palpably incorrect diagnosis of

the nature of capitalist societies.

The claim that exploitation and domination are mechanisms is separate from saying that they explain the

whole range of concrete, observable phenomena that are of interest to class analysts.

Take the consciousness of people. How do people view the world? How do actors understand their

condition? Do domination and exploitation, and how people are located with respect to those mechanisms,

really explain peoples consciousness?

Well, no. Its never been true that class, by itself, explains consciousness. Consciousness is shaped by all

sorts of other things besides the particular mechanisms subsumed under the concept of class.

If all you care about is the explanatory power of those particular things which explain consciousness, then

you would have to say, No, class by itself is not the most important. But of course, thats an extremely

narrow and limited way of understanding the relevance of these concepts and their explanatory power.

The idea that class matters or at least, that inequality matters now seems to be

a mainstream position again, since the crisis, since Occupy, since Piketty. You are

critical of some common sense approaches to inequality, in which inequality is

discussed in terms of how people are sorted into positions. What do you think is

missing from that view?

Whats missing is an account of why there are those kinds of positions available for them to be sorted into,

and why the positions available have the properties they have.

Its one thing to say that cultural capital and social capital and educational capital enables you to become a

manager in a multinational corporation and be promoted up the ladder and eventually be a CEO. But why

is it the case that there are CEO positions available to be promoted into? And why, if theyre available, do

they have annual earnings that are four hundred times that of workers, as opposed to twenty times that of

workers, as opposed to six times that of workers?

How do you explain the nature of the positions into which people are sorted?

There was a time when a particular term was used to describe that fact. Class positions were referred to

as empty places into which people are sorted. As opposed to the view that people carry their class

positions on their backs, that its an attribute of the persons themselves.

Now, of course, theres a meshing of the attributes of persons and the attributes of positions in a stable,

well-ordered class structure, but the attributes of persons and the attributes of positions are distinct. What

class analysis in the Marxian tradition is about is the account of the positions themselves.

You suggest that both Marxian and Weberian approaches

to class have something to say about the structure of the

positions themselves. But Marxian and Weberian approaches have often been pitted

against one another.


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Theres an interesting thing to do for anyone who is unfamiliar with Weber: read the appendix to his book

from the late 1890s, The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations. The appendix contains a long essay

on the collapse of the Roman Empire, and why the slave economy eventually involuted and undermined

the reproduction of Roman society.

If I assigned this essay to my really smart PhD students and they didnt know who wrote it, and I said,

Give me a diagnosis of the theoretical embeddedness of this chapter, they would say, Its clearly

Marxist. Webers view on class has a very Marxian character to it.

Weber very much sees classes within capitalism as systematically structured by property rights. Thats

what he sees as the central axis of class relations: capitalist and laborer. Those two categories are the

guts of his class analysis.

The difference between Marx and Weber is that Weber regards the systems of domination and inequality

before capitalism as being based on status rather than class, so he sees class analysis as something

appropriate only for capitalism, rather than class analysis as being a way of understanding the broad

variations across historical periods in the structuring of domination and exploitation.

In the analysis within capitalism, there are also some important differences between Marx and Weber,

particularly in the way Weber ignores the problem of exploitation. Nevertheless, the crucial distinction

between these traditions is that Marxian class analysis of capitalism is anchored in a very bold proposition:

that theres an alternative to capitalism.

The central purpose of class analysis in Marxism is clarifying the conditions for the transcendence of

capitalism and the creation of a socialist alternative. If you drop socialism as an alternative to capitalism,

theres hardly any point left to being a Marxist. There would still be some Marxian ideas that might be

useful; but anticapitalism is the critical purpose of Marxist class analysis. That is clearly not the case with

Weber.

The purpose of class analysis in Weber is to understand variations within capitalism. Webers analysis is

about how classes are constituted in capitalist society and how various kinds of property rights help to

structure class relations in terms of the life chances and opportunities that get blocked or opened up.

If youre interested in the varieties of capitalism and understanding how class structures vary across

capitalism, Weberian categories are pretty flexible for that. They have lots of possibilities of subdivisions

based on the nature of the employment contracts, the nature of the technical training of workers; all of

these create different market capacities, and different kinds of capitalism either validate or undermine

those capacities.

So Marxist class analysis helps us understand the big epochal contrasts and the challenge to capitalism

from the possibility of an alternative. Weberian class analysis helps us to understand variations within

capitalism.

The reason I think these are compatible is that Marxists also are concerned about variations within

capitalism, and when they study that, they sound awfully Weberian. They invoke the same kinds of issues:

organized versus disorganized capitalism, capitalism with a strong labor movement that provides for

secure employment rights versus capitalism with a disorganized labour movement, and so on.

Youve often argued that Marxism shouldnt be distinguished by a special

methodology. Can you elaborate?

Its not unthinkable that Marxists will have discovered some new methodology which actually helps identify
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real causal mechanisms that nobody else has talked about. Its possible. So I dont mean that Marxism

couldnt have a distinctive methodology. But if it has discovered a new methodology, this would be a new

scientific methodology that everybody should adopt.

Theres no reason for there to be some peculiar esoteric methodology that is needed to analyze these

problems, but not also needed then for everything else.

So if dialectics means something coherent, if its useful for understanding the transformations of systems,

then its useful for understanding everything in which systems figure. When I try to understand ideas like

dialectics or contradictions and try to give them precision, it cant be something of the form, For every

thesis, theres an antithesis out of which comes a synthesis.

Why should that be the case? Why is there some underlying law of nature that says wherever theres a

thesis, there has to be an antithesis out of which comes a synthesis? No. Where there are certain kinds of

causal processes, they may, for reasons that have to be explained, trigger forms of resistance and

opposition. And out of that conflict comes some kind of new resolution. If that is a good argument, its an

argument about mechanisms. This is not clarified by invoking an expression like dialectics.

I think that all of the substantive theses of Marxism that have credibility can be formulated as ordinary

realist scientific explanations causal processes. There are underlying mechanisms which generate

effects, and then these mechanisms interact.

Mechanisms are not isolated; theyre not hermetically sealed; they interact. And out of that interaction of

causal processes comes the phenomena which we observe in the world. The complexity is that all of this

is occurring in the context of human consciousness and agency in which people observe the world itself

and interpret it thats part of the process. So what does dialectics mean then?

One sociological formulation is whats called the structure-agency problem. The structure-agency

problem is not an obscure esoteric problem; it simply means that human beings are born into already-

existing social worlds which constrain their actions.

That seems obvious how can anybody object to that? Theres no sociologist who has ever lived whodoesnt realize that babies are born into worlds in which there are already-existing social relations not of

their making.

But people grow up and become conscious agents and engage in practices, which generate those same

relations. People are actors constrained by relations, but their actions affect those relations. Isnt that just

the structure-agency problem?

This is not a big deal. Its ordinary common-sense sociology. But it is also a big deal because thats the

relationship that makes possible conscious, deliberate social change, which is what the purpose of a

Marxian analysis is.

To quote Marx, the point is not merely to interpret the world, but to change it. That would be a nonsensical

statement if strategy is impossible. There has to be agency, but it would also be nonsensical if agency

doesnt confront structures that need transformation. The idea that we have to change the world means

that theres a world to be changed, independent of our will to change it. Thats all the structure-agency

problem means, and I think thats what dialectics must mean otherwise I dont know what it means.

Can you say what Analytical Marxism means to you, and whether its still a useful

description of a living tendency?


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The term was coined in the early 1980s as a way of describing what was held in common by a group of

Marxist or Marxian or Marxist-inflected or crypto-Marxist scholars that met on an annual basis to discuss

core Marxist ideas.

This was a group of people who engaged in the relentless, systematic, clear interrogation of broad

Marxian concepts. Take the concept of exploitation. It had been originally formulated by Marx in terms of

the labor theory of value. We then had a series of debates stretching over many years over how best to

think about the concept of exploitation. I developed what I called a sociological account of exploitation that

is quite independent of the labor theory of value.

All of this was in the effort to give precision to the underlying mechanisms that these concepts identified.

The analytical rubric was derived from analytical philosophy, which is just, I think, a way of talking about

the precise and clear use of terms so that you define everything in ways that make it clear exactly what

youre talking about.

Analytical doesnt imply any substantive claim about the content of ideas, just about how we should

assess them. It is also not the case that Analytical Marxism had actually any particular commitment to

rational choice theory; this is just one of the currents that Analytical Marxists take seriously.

Analytical Marxism is thus about conceptual clarity and precision around the mechanisms in play. Now,

rational choice theory is elegant precisely because it is so precise and clear about the mechanisms in play,

and for certain kinds of problems, that gives you a very good way of anchoring a set of arguments.

And for some of the people in the group John Roemer especially that particular way of framing

problems and searching for solutions does dominate their thinking. But even John Roemer wouldnt insist

at all that rational choice models are the way to explain everything.

The internal name that the group gave itself, perhaps a little arrogantly, was the Non Bullshit Marxism

group. That was our internal joke about what defined us. And I think, in some ways, it better characterizes

what its mission was: to get rid of the obscurantism from Marxism and to identify the most robust and

defendable core.

In my case this helped consolidate my commitment to Marxism as the terrain on which I wanted to

continue doing my work. For some other people in the group, it convinced them that, well, Marxism was a

good little specialty area, but its really not for them any longer.

Adam Przeworski and Jon Elster both left the group. They felt that they had exhausted this particular task

of interrogating Marxs concepts. There wasnt that much more to be gained from it, and that the questions

they were more interested in would be most fruitfully pursued on a different terrain.

InA Future for Marxism?, Andrew Levine writes that his own trajectory and he

sees it as a natural trajectory was from Althusserian to Analytical Marxism. Thatseems unusual because French theory and analytical philosophy often seen as polar

opposites. Was that your path, or did you come from a different place?

The first piece that I wrote that was firmly engaged with these issues was about Poulantzas. I read

Althusseras a graduate student in the early seventies, and Poulantzas even more than Althusser; I found

in Poulantzas a much richer set of arguments. I think, so to speak, the bullshit quotient in Althusser was

still pretty high: he waved his hand and invoked concepts without specification quite a lot. You had to cut

through that to really get to the analytical core of it.

Its still the case, though, that both Poulantzas and Althusser were concerned with specifying concepts, not
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just taking them off the shelf and then pushing an argument with these reformulated and clarified concepts.

I learned much from bouncing off of Poulantzass arguments. My first work on class was a critique of

Poulantzas. Poulantzas proposed that what is commonly called the middle class was a new petty

bourgeoisie. I made an argument as to why I think that did not properly identify the mechanisms involved

why the category unproductive labor was not a useful category for understanding class relations.

And then I proposed an empirical test of the debate so it would not just be a debate about definitions: we

can develop evidence as to whether the new petty bourgeoisie conception actually identifies class

boundaries better than my alternative conception in terms of contradictory locations within class relations.

Thus, in my personal case, it is certainly the case that reading Althusser and Poulantzas came before my

engagement with what came to be known as Analytical Marxism, but I think that my stance towards

Althusser and Poulantzas was still Analytical Marxist as opposed to Althusserian.

Although I wouldnt have called it that, I think that the way in which I interrogated them was to say, These

concepts arent quite clear enough. Lets try to give precision to the mechanisms. Lets see if there are

empirical ramifications that we can then use to feed back into our theoretical thinking.

Then I read Jerry Cohens bookand that, of course, like for many people, was an enlightening experience.

When I read it, I said, Ah ha, now I see that this is the way you should do it. This is how you get down tothe root of explanations and make sense of them, rendering coherent ideas that were less clearly

formulated. I then wrote a critical review of Jerry Cohens book, which Jerry liked a lot, and so he invited

me to join this Analytical Marxism group in its second year.

The person who started in the Althusserian position and has written the best pieces of work which I

would consider as an Analytical Marxist reconstruction of Althusser and Poulantzas is Gran Therborn.

The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideologyand What Does the Ruling Class Do When it Rules? I

think these are the two best books written in the Althusserian tradition. They are Althusserian in the sense

that they take dead seriously the ideas of Poulantzas and Althusser, but give them the rational, coherent

form that neither Poulantzas nor Althusser could do. I think those are astoundingly good books.

Those books came out at the tail end of the great flourishing of Marxism in the 1970s that ended in the

course of the early 1980s, and neither of them have been taken up as core bodies of ideas in subsequent

Marxist thinking. I think theres a reasonable chance at some point that theyll be rediscovered and given

the prominence they deserve.
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You have always been inclined toengage seriously in

debateabout your scholarly work and have been known

to change your mind, sometimes about fundamental

concepts. What has been consistent in your work from

the beginning, and what has changed?

The most consistent idea is basically the Marxian core: the purpose of

understanding the class structure of capitalism is to understand the

conditions of transforming it. The reasons to focus on the nature of

capitalist exploitation include both the normative commitment to

eliminating capitalist exploitation, and the sociological commitment to

understanding the conditions for the transformation of capitalism or

the transcendence of capitalism into an alternative.

I would say that the anticapitalist analysis of capitalism runs

throughout my work: the idea that the guts of what renders capitalism

a harmful social structure is its class structure. There are Marxists

who think that really the culprit is markets that classes are bad, but

really the culprit is the market. Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel argue foran anti-market critique ofcapitalism. I disagree with that. Whats objectionable about markets is only objectionable if wherever you

have markets you will have, eventually, capitalist exploitation and domination.

I would agree with the critique of markets if it were true that markets necessarily generate capitalist class

relations. That is essentially Michael Alberts view. He argues that a little bit of markets is like a little bit of

slavery, or little bit of cancer. A little bit of markets is eventually going to kill you.

I just think thats wrong. You can have pretty robust markets within which concentrations of capital are

blocked, and democratic control over the allocation of resources is maintained. Robin Hahnel and I have

engaged in an extended debate on these issues in our forthcoming book from Verso,Alternatives to

Capitalism: Proposals for a Democratic Economy.

What does a socialist economy look like? What mechanisms would be there to

prevent concentrations of capital?

First of all, I think the notion of a fully market socialist economy is incoherent. Just like the notion of a fully

capitalist economy is incoherent. Every economy is going to be an ecosystem of heterogeneous,

qualitatively distinct production and distribution mechanisms. The question is, Which mechanisms

dominate? Not, Which mechanisms take over everything?

In any socialist economy, there will be a large public-good sector of amenities directly provided by state

allocation. If education and health care and lots of public recreation space and an array of other things are

all provided as decommodified public goods, this could easily constitute 60 percent of the economy. Thats

not market socialism, thats just socialism. At most, the market is going to be part of the economy.

In any socialist economy with markets, part of that market is not going be socialist either. I dont see any

reason why you cant have small restaurants that are simply organized by people who want to run a small

restaurant.

And maybe they dont all have to be cooperatives. My predilection is to argue that small firms should be

cooperatives they should still be democratically run but maybe not. There is maybe a space for

certain kinds of non-cooperative entrepreneurial individual proprietorships in an economy dominated by
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socialist relations. I dont know what the optimal mix of different forms should be.

The employees in the hypothetical private restaurant, they would have other options?

Absolutely. You give everybody a basic incomeso that everybody can say no. You have an expansive

set of public goods, so that a significant part of everybodys consumption is not market-based. Peoples

standard of living doesnt depend simply on earnings; it depends upon the amenities that are publicly

available plus your earnings. The combination of basic income plus public amenities means that you can

live a decent life without engagingin capitalist relations of production.

A market socialist economy would have all sorts of other facilitations for different forms of cooperative

production. I would expect that a market socialist economy would be biased towards public underwriting of

cooperatives over individual entrepreneurship. And there are all sorts of ways of doing that for example,

in terms of the way you organize credit markets and the way you organize public space: creating

makerspacesfor small-scale modular advanced technology manufacturing and the like.

How do you prevent concentrations of wealth? We have regulations already in place that allegedly, but not

effectively, prevent monopoly. To prevent concentrations of wealth, you need rules that put clear limits on

private accumulation. Firms above a certain number of employees have to cooperativize, and if they dont

want to, thats fine they can just stay small. There is, after all, no imperative to become big.

Competition does not force firms to get larger unless there are bigger economies of scale, right? If there

are no economies of scale, there is no reason whatsoever why firms have to grow in order to compete.

Their competitive advantage doesnt increase if theyre larger.

I think economies of scale are declining rapidly in many areas of production, which enables the

reproduction of small-scale, high-productivity firms. Thats the recipe for a cooperative market economy.

This kind of vision is very controversial on the far left, correct? The presence of

markets is going to offend some socialists, and some object to the very idea ofworking out recipes for the cookshops of the future.

Let me make just one quick terminological intervention. Its the expression far left. I would say that

markets are objected to by the rigidleft. Far implies that its somehow more left; but moreleft doesnt

mean more simple-minded. It means more deeply committed to a sustainable democratic and egalitarian

emancipatory alternative. I consider myself very far left. Thats precisely why I want institutional

heterogeneity in the destination I believe thats our best bet. I dont think its appropriate to say that

makes you less of a leftist.

I think the foundational principle for socialism is democracy all the way down, but you cant decide in

advance what the outcome of democratic deliberation should be. Thats for people engaged in democratic

struggle to figure out, because we dont know what the contingencies are.

My prediction is that a deeply, robustly democratic society will create space for markets because the

people will see it as a cheap solution to a complex problem. Given all the trade-offs that are inevitable, its

better to have a reasonable space for markets than to try to plan everything.

But that is a prediction as to what democratic deliberators will come up with, not a prescription for what

they should do. Unless you believe there are no trade-offs, then inherently there will be ambiguities in

figuring out precisely what the role for markets should be in a post-capitalist economy.
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The challenge I presented to Hahnel (who believes the economy should be democratically planned without

any role for markets), which I dont think he answered, is: Yes, if you believe that there are no trade-offs,

that theres no too many meetings problem, that there arent going to be other unanticipated

consequences of trying to have people figure out their consumption package for the next year in advance

which is part of their plan maybe markets could be eliminated. Im skeptical. But unless you believe

there are no trade-offs, then you cant decide in advance what the mix is.

Your new book brings together the two main strands of your work understanding

class in a capitalist society, and the exploration of real utopias as a form of

socialist strategy.

The original title was Challenging and maybe Transcending Capitalism through Real Utopias.But the new

title, what Im actually talking about, is How To Be An Anti-Capitalist For The 21st Century.

So tell us how.

Heres the short punchy version. There are four ways to be anticapitalist: smashing capitalism, taming

capitalism, escaping capitalism, or eroding capitalism.

Smashing capitalism was the vision of nineteenth and twentieth century revolutionary communism. The

scenario is familiar to most people: you organize a political movement, a political party being the standard

form. In historically contingent circumstances, that political movement is capable of seizing state power.

That could be through an electoral process thats not inherently ruled out or through a violent

insurrection.

Regardless of how you seize state power, the first task is to refashion the state itself to make it an

appropriate instrument of transformation, and the second task is to smash the centers of power of the

existing social structure.

That enables you to launch the long process of building the alternative. You can think of the smashingcapitalism strategy as smash first, build second. That was the revolutionary ideal of the twentieth century.

I think the evidence from those experiments is pretty strong that capitalism is not the kind of social order

at least in its complex forms thats smashable. The last line of the Wobbly anthem, Solidarity Forever,

is, We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old. What the revolutionary movements of the

twentieth century showed is that it is possible to build a new world in the ashes of the old its just not the

world that anybody wanted.

There were achievements of the Russian and Chinese Revolutions, of course, but they did not create a

world of democratic egalitarian empowerment of ordinary people capable of fashioning their own destinies.

Thats not what came out of those revolutions.

Whether that is just because of the historically adverse circumstances under which those revolutions took

place or because this is an intrinsic consequence of the strategy of smashing, of burning down, of trying to

build on the ashes thats debateable.

My bet is that the chaotic forces that get unleashed in the smashing strategy are so unwieldy and

dangerous that they lead to repressive responses to recreate the conditions of social integration. Social

order and security is such a pressing need that it creates forms of domination in the new post-

revolutionary society that then are extremely hard to dislodge, perhaps impossible.


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We certainly have no evidence that if you smash the old structure, you can build an emancipatory,

egalitarian, democratic participatory environment for human flourishing. I think smashing is off the

historical agenda in complex societies.

A democratic transition, I think, is possible. Thats what Im going to argue for. The problem is that the

ruptural moment will unleash hugely chaotic processes, even under democratic conditions. Thats the

Syriza problem. If they abandoned the euro, they would be plunged into an economic chaos. Then the

question is, could they, at that point, engage in a rupture with capitalism, under democratic conditions?

Whats going to happen in the next election? Things are going to be miserable. In the next election, some

parties say, Come vote for us, and were going to bring Greece back into the euro. And whats going to

happen? European bankers are going to say, Yeah, yeah, vote for these guys and were going to help you

out. Then theyll get the subsidies. There is no way that youre going to be able to survive the number of

elections needed under democratic conditions to traverse the transition trough, the decline in standards of

living and material conditions of life.

In a complex society, where theres so much interdependency, the amount of suffering that gets unleashed

by an effort at rupture makes it unsustainable under democratic conditions. Under non-democratic

conditions, the problem is that authoritarian transitions dont result in democratic and participatory

destinations. I am not prepared to formally proclaim an impossibility theorem. Thats too strong. There aretoo many contingencies, but my intuition is that a system-level ruptural transformation of capitalism is

impossible.

The other options are taming, escaping, or eroding. Taming is the social-democratic solution. You still

capture the state. You get state power in the formal sense. You dont have societalpower because

capitalism is still very strong. Capital controlsthe means of investment.

You do have state power in the governmental sense. You have political power. You have enough

mobilization behind that political power to negotiate a deal with capital where you create constraints on

capital that are beneficial for workers, but there has to be a quid pro quo collaboration by workers in a

capitalist development project. Its a class compromise.

Taming capitalism is meant to reduce and neutralize the worst harms that are generated by capitalism

risks to the individuals, deficits in public goods, negative externalities. You mitigate these harms, but you

leave capitalism intact and just deal with the symptoms. Taming capitalism works pretty well. At least it

worked for a while. Its gottena little ragged lately.

Neoliberal ideology says that the social-democratic solutions are permanently off the table. Thats just self-

justification of elite privilege. Even in a relatively open, globalized, financialized world, theres no reason to

believe (aside from the political power of the forces of neoliberalism) that taming mechanisms cant be

reestablished. They just havent been reestablished yet.

One thought is that the global crises of climate change are going to kill off neoliberalism because theres no

way that the market is going to solve the adaptation problem, let alone the mitigation problem. The giant

public works needed to deal just with the disruptions of climate change are going to open up another space

for a new round of the affirmative stateproviding public goods and social justice goods through mitigating

the adverse effects of global warming.

In any case, thats taming capitalism. Its certainly ragged today compared to thirty, forty years ago, but still

part of the menuof anticapitalism.

Escaping capitalism is the more individualistic solution. The hippies indulged in it in the 1960s and 1970s.

The pioneers in the Western movement in the United States were escaping capitalism. That was their
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central impulse: to move west, to get out of the clutches of the banks and the landlords. Voluntary simplicity

movements or anti-consumerist movements are a kind of escaping capitalism people wanting to scale

back in order to live more balanced lives.

Escaping capitalism is an interesting form of anticapitalism. It has very little potential on its own to be

transformative. It can, in some settings, provide useful experiments, useful models for things that could

then be generalized in altered conditions.

Eroding capitalism is the least familiar. Thats more in line, I think, with certain anarchist tendencies.

Proudhon can be thought of as an early eroder. His view was, You create worker cooperatives. Theyll be

attractive ways of life. Workers are going to flock to them. Capitalism will collapse because it cant find

anybody to work.

Its a simple-minded view of how worker cooperatives would survive and compete with capitalists. Marx, in

his famous debate with Proudhon, thought this was ridiculous and dismissed it along with utopian socialist

projects as just pointless little experiments. Worse than pointless they were diversionary.

Later, Marx actually was pretty favorable to worker cooperatives and other forms of cooperatives, and felt

that they were palpable demonstrations that workers could actually govern production and that the problem

with them as a strategy was that they wouldnt be tolerated. If they were ever a threat to capital, theyd just

be destroyed.

There are a lot of examples today of economic iniatives that fall under the eroding capitalism rubric. The

Brazilian Landless Workers Movements project of land reform, land occupations, other new forms of

community and agricultural production, worker cooperatives, and many other forms of cooperatives.

Wikipedia destroys the three-hundred-year-old capitalist market in encyclopedias within a decade. It is

way more productive than any capitalist model, as is Linux and other open-source software. Thats eroding

capitalism.

Now eroding capitalism, I argue, is extremely appealing and utterly far-fetched as a strategy for

transcending capitalism. Its appealing because even with a really hostile environment, you can do

something. And I think activists always are desperate to work out,What can I do? My students are

constantly asking me, What can I do? I want to do something constructive.

Eroding capitalism builds these alternatives, and they all make life better. They are definitely illustrations of

better ways of life. They may be effective, but is it likely that the accumulative effect of community gardens,

worker coops, Wikipedia, and the like, is to actually undermine the possibility of capitalism and transcend it

to an alternative? This seems pretty far-fetched.

I dont think its plausible that the anarchist strategy of just getting on with the business of building the

world you want in the world that exists is likely to succeed in transforming the world as a whole. But I do

think if eroding is combined with new ways of thinking about taming capitalism, then it might be possible to

create a long-term political strategy which combines the best of the progressive side of social democracy

with the most constructive versions of anarchist community activism and bottom-up creativity.

This means combining anarchism and social democracy in a couplet where you erode capitalism to make

it more tamable, and you tame capitalism to make it more erode-able. You span that political divide,

rejecting the vision of smashing capitalism because of its impossibility and escaping capitalism because of

its narcissism.

I think that couplet is not an easy one. Its not a linear one. Its not as if once youve figured out the

formula, you then just let it rip and its going to take care of itself. No, its going to be filled with

contradictions. Thats intrinsic to the process: the way in which you tame capitalism is by making deals
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with capital. Those deals are inherently unstable. They depend upon the balance of forces.

But whats the alternative? Its not that Im making a prediction, If you do this, we will win. Im saying that I

dont see any other strategy that has any plausibility of being able to transcend capitalism.

Some might say, This is Bernsteins evolutionary socialism, minus the evolution,

minus the certainty that its going to happen.

Well its not, because Bernstein didnt emphasize bottom-up mobilization to build alternatives in the spacesof society. His strategy was parliamentary socialism.

What then do you see as the role of parliamentary or electoral politics? Surely

that is an essential part of the taming side of the strategy.

One of the traps of parliamentary democracy is the belief that it has to be at the commanding heights. I

think that a very important arena for this is municipalities local-level politics and building national

movements on the foundation of local mobilizations.

In the US, municipal governments are particularly strong and have particularly large

responsibilities, whereas national politics are inaccessible, pretty well-defended

against any kind of left strategy. So it might be different in different settings.

In some political systems there is no space at the local level. So, in the most centralized of capitalist

democracies, cities are more like administrative units of national governments rather than autonomous

sites of political struggle. It could be that in some contexts the struggle for more municipal autonomy is part

of the political project needed in order to create more space.

I think the state is going to play a very important role, and the idea that you could influence the state

primarily as outside actors causing trouble in order to force the state to do things is preposterous. It hasnever worked anywhere as a long-term strategy.

Sure, if you cause enough trouble and disruption you can get the state to do things, but then as soon as

your mobilization declines, the gains are reversed. A strategy that focuses exclusively on outside pressure

and disruption is not robust. The only way to have robust change is to have changes in the rules of the

game, and that requires political parties that are capable of contesting power and changing the rules of the

game.

And yet in the US its a very difficult strategic proposition either to engage through

the Democrats or to get a third party off the ground.

Thats one reason why lower levels of government are more effective. A big continental state like United

States is an unwieldy example. Its certainly not the case everywhere in the world that the conventional

parties are robustly inaccessibleto social movements.

But even in the Democratic Party in the United States, the left wing has real proposals that are genuinely

amenable to these things. Its not the case that its homogeneously neoliberal. A very big part of the

Democratic electorate and a non-trivial number of the elected politicians are for higher taxes, more public

goods, more regulation, more environmental initiatives, and a reconstruction of the labor movement to

increase popular power.
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These are all on the agenda of public debate, if not immediate action. For all sorts of reasons this agenda

has been marginalized in the sense of being able to translate this into policy, but that doesnt have to be

permanent.

In the American context I think this has to be fought out within the Democratic Party. I dont think the idea

of a third party is viable. I think the task is to make the progressive wing of the Democratic Party more

resilient, and to figure out ways of mobilizing the electorate in order to give it electoral credibility.

This is tough to do. The system is heavily rigged against us. But still, I dont see what the alternative is. If

you say, Okay, because its so inaccessible, well just abandon the state, that means retreating to the

eroding corner of my fourfold strategy without attempting the taming component. Change the world without

seizing power, or even contesting power, as Holloway proposes.

Well, maybe thats possible. Im not saying that I know for sure that you cant erode capitalism just by

building from the bottom-up alternatives. Im just skeptical that the space for those alternatives will be

secure enough.

And yet you are quite positive about a lot of those projects, right?

Absolutely. Im positive about all of them because theyre all examples that prefigure an emancipatoryalternative. The task is for these prefigurative examples to be generalized.

Now theres another piece of this equation which is a kind of wild card. This is a very classic Marxist idea:

the new forces of production that we are just entering into the twenty-first century are going to be, in my

prediction, enormously disruptive of existing forms of capitalism. Weve already seen that in some sectors.

And this could radically open up new possibilities.

The example I often give just because its cute is Wikipedia destroying a three-hundred-year-old

market in encyclopedias. You cant produce a commercially viable, general-purpose encyclopedia that

anybodys going to buy. Wikipedia is produced in a completely non-capitalist way with a few hundred

thousand free, unpaid editors around the world, contributing to the global commons and making it freelyavailable to everybody. And then it has a kind of gift economy to provide the necessary infrastructural

resources.

Wikipedia is filled with problems, but its an extraordinary example of cooperation and collaboration on a

very large scale thats highly productive. I think thats the leading edge of what is going be a very disruptive

phase for capitalism.

The issue here is bound up with the problem of economies of scale. If you have technologies which have

very limited economies of scale, so that the per-unit costs of producing small batches of things are no

different than producing huge quantities, then it is much harder for capitalists to monopolize the means of

production. The monopoly depends, in significant ways, on the fact that you need large amounts of capitalto produce anything competitively.

3-D printersare an example. I dont think were there yet, so lets just imagine ten, fifteen, twenty years

from now. Imagine if 3-D printers could print 3-D printers. Then we have a self-replicating machine. A self-

replicating machine that was a general purpose machine capable of making a vast array of goods would

completely undermine the possibility of monopolizing the means of production unless some very new

mechanisms of capitalist monopolization were introduced.

There are, of course, some things that are not going to be produced by a 3-D printer. Land will not be

produced by 3-D printers, nor will be the physical space in which you place your 3D printer. Many of the
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inputs used in 3-D printer resins and other kinds of feedstocks will not themselves be made by 3D

printers. Some of these inputs have to be dug up from the ground and processed. So its possible that

capitalist monopoly of the means of production is going to shift back to the natural resource space of

production.

So this is not a post-scarcity argument. Its the transformation of relations by forces

of production.

Absolutely. Thats what Im saying this is classic Marxism involving the intensifying contradiction

between the relations and forces of production.

Heres the point: the accelerating irrationalityof a private-property-based system of production when the

means of production can no longer be monopolized. Everybody can have their means of production, but

they cant use them properly because of a monopolization of natural resources by private property.

The glaring character of the contradiction between the forces and relations of production in that context

makes it a pretty simple matter to argue for the necessity of transforming the property relations that are

impeding the proper use of the forces of production.

If its just land and natural resources that are being monopolized in this selfish, self-aggrandizing,monopolistic way, thats a simpler problem than when its complex commodity chains and large capital-

intensive complexes of production.

These new productive forces if these anticipations are correct will set the stage for a different

environment of political struggle.

And intellectual property as well.

And intellectual property, right. All these developments means I think capitalism will be more erodible in

the future than it has been in the past because it will be easier to fill the spaces with alternative forms ofproduction. But its only going to be more erodible if it can also be more tamable, because of the need to

tame the rampant escalation of intellectual property rights and property rights over land and the like.

The environmental crisis may provide an opening for that as well. Clearly the question of who controls and

regulates access to natural resources is also going to be on the agenda in the context of global

environmental problems.

Just to reiterate my main point: real utopias become viable when they span these two strategies, taming

and eroding capitalism. Thats why its different from old-fashioned Bernsteinian evolutionary socialism.

The role of the state in such a transformational project is to defend and expand the spaces in which

alternatives are built from below, rather than for the state to provide, to be the central actor in the provisionof needs.

Fuente: https://www.jacobinmag.com/
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/12/socialism-marxism-democracy-inequality-erik-olin-wright/https://www.jacobinmag.com/2013/09/property-and-theft/https://www.jacobinmag.com/2011/12/four-futures/

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