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"Anti-capitalism"
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How to be an anticapitalist in the twenty-first century
What is wrong with capitalism, and how can we change it? Capitalism has transformed the world and increased our productivity, but at the cost of enormous human suffering. Our shared values - equality and fairness, democracy and freedom, community and solidarity - can both provide the basis for a critique of capitalism, and help to guide us towards a socialist and democratic society. In this book, Erik Olin Wright has distilled decades of work into a concise and tightly argued manifesto - analyzing the varieties of anti-capitalism, assessing different strategic approaches, and laying the foundations for a society dedicated to human flourishing.
Book
Rethinking Utopia as Form: Failure, Time, and the Political Subject of Anti-Capitalism
This essay theorizes utopianism as distinct from radical or revolutionary action and so capable of instantiating a desire for a world so different it cannot be represented. Asking whether \"failure\" is in fact a productive condition of possibility for utopianism, the essay considers a number of theoretical interventions including those of Fredric Jameson and Kathi Weeks. Drawing out the benefits and limits of these perspectives, the essay articulates utopianism's features and offers the demand for prison abolition as an example. Not only does this demand confront the impossibility of a different world, but it draws on the potentiality of past political agency and so posits what occupying the \"no place\" of utopia can be for those who have historically been denied the very temporalities upon which utopia has traditionally relied.
Journal Article
The Mexican Haunting of Venezuela’s Oil Workers (1912–1948)
This paper examines early twentieth century labor movements in Venezuela and Mexico that offer an opportunity to better specify how global capitalism can spawn divergent, not just convergent, resistance movements. It zeroes in on the oil workers in the decades when Venezuela became incorporated into global oil production (1912–1948). Their bread and butter demands for improvements to wages and labor conditions paled in comparison to those of their anticapitalist counterparts in Latin America’s first oil powerhouse: Mexico. This study elaborates why Venezuela’s labor movement is surprising, devises a world-historical approach to explain it, and illustrates the potential of this approach to help us reconcile differences in resistance despite apparent universalizing pressures of global economic forces. It demonstrates that Venezuela’s less radical forms of labor resistance derived from the earlier lessons the oil capitalists brought from Mexico to Venezuela on how to avoid anticapitalist labor militants. In unraveling the Mexican origins for Venezuela’s less anticapitalist labor resistance, this study spotlights incorporation as a process which can forge distinct resistance agendas even in nations on apparently parallel development trajectories. It calls for delving into histories of incorporation and exploring how their legacies create conditions more, or less, conducive for anticapitalist resistance today.
Journal Article
From resilience to resourcefulness
This paper provides a theoretical and political critique of how the concept of resilience has been applied to places. It is based upon three main points. First, the ecological concept of resilience is conservative when applied to social relations. Second, resilience is externally defined by state agencies and expert knowledge. Third, a concern with the resilience of places is misplaced in terms of spatial scale, since the processes which shape resilience operate primary at the scale of capitalist social relations. In place of resilience, we offer the concept of resourcefulness as an alternative approach for community groups to foster.
Journal Article
Novara Media and the Rise of the Digital Left: From Scaffolding a Movement to ‘Smashing that Like Button’
This paper explores the radical Left’s evolving relationship with media, focusing on the transi-tion from print to digital platforms. Historically, print media served as a central tool for agitation and organisation within socialist and labour movements from the late 18th century through the 20th century. However, the rise of digital media has transformed communication, contributing to broader shifts in social relations tied to neoliberalism. This paper examines Novara Media, a prominent digital platform in Britain, to explore the dynamics of the ‘Postmodern Left.’ It argues that while digital platforms have provided new opportunities for leftist politics, they have also fostered forms of activism that are detached from traditional working-class politics and large-scale social change. By contextualising this shift historically, the paper seeks to contribute to ongoing debates on the role of digital media in anti-capitalist political projects.
Journal Article
Populist discourse and entrepreneurship: The role of political ideology and institutions
Using institutional economic theory as our guiding framework, we develop a model to describe how populist discourse by a nation’s political leader influences entrepreneurship. We hypothesize that populist discourse reduces entrepreneurship by creating regime uncertainty concerning the future stability of the institutional environment, resulting in entrepreneurs anticipating higher future transaction costs. Our model highlights two important factors that moderate the relationship. First is the strength of political checks and balances, which we hypothesize weakens the negative relationship between populist discourse and entrepreneurship by providing entrepreneurs with greater confidence that the actions of a populist will be constrained. Second, the political ideology of the leader moderates the relationship between populist discourse and entrepreneurship. The anti-capitalistic rhetoric of left-wing populism will create greater regime uncertainty than right-wing populism, which is often accompanied by rhetoric critical of free trade and foreigners, but also supportive of business interests. The effect of centrist populism, which is often accompanied by a mix of contradictory and often moderate ideas that make it difficult to discern future transaction costs, will have a weaker negative effect on entrepreneurship than either left-wing or right-wing populism. We empirically test our model using a multi-level design and a dataset comprised of more than 780,000 individuals in 33 countries over the period 2002–2016. Our analysis largely supports our theory regarding the moderating role of ideology. However, surprisingly, our findings suggest that the negative effect of populism on entrepreneurship is greater in nations with stronger checks and balances.
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Reflections on #Occupy Everywhere: Social media, public space, and emerging logics of aggregation
This article explores the links between social media and public space within the #Occupy Everywhere movements. Whereas listservs and websites helped give rise to a widespread logic of networking within the movements for global justice of the 1990s–2000s, I argue that social media have contributed to an emerging logic of aggregation in the more recent #Occupy movements—one that involves the assembling of masses of individuals from diverse backgrounds within physical spaces. However, the recent shift toward more decentralized forms of organizing and networking may help to ensure the sustainability of the #Occupy movements in a posteviction phase.
Journal Article
The Digital Evolution of Occupy Wall Street
We examine the temporal evolution of digital communication activity relating to the American anti-capitalist movement Occupy Wall Street. Using a high-volume sample from the microblogging site Twitter, we investigate changes in Occupy participant engagement, interests, and social connectivity over a fifteen month period starting three months prior to the movement's first protest action. The results of this analysis indicate that, on Twitter, the Occupy movement tended to elicit participation from a set of highly interconnected users with pre-existing interests in domestic politics and foreign social movements. These users, while highly vocal in the months immediately following the birth of the movement, appear to have lost interest in Occupy related communication over the remainder of the study period.
Journal Article
Human geography without hierarchy
Responding to neoliberal decentralization, Marxists pair centralization with capitalism’s abrogation. Such a view considers hierarchy to be necessary and horizontal organization as propitious to neoliberalism. Anarchism’s coupling of decentralization with anti-capitalism is dismissed because Marxism cannot accommodate prefigurative politics, treating horizontality as a future objective. This temporality ignores the insurrectionary possibilities of the present and implies a politics of waiting. In terms of spatiality, Marxian centralized hierarchy deems horizontality inappropriate when ‘jumping scales’. Yet by rejecting this vertical ontology we may immediately disengage capitalism through a rhizomic politics. Consequently, human geography without hierarchy gains traction when we embrace an anarchist flat ontology.
Journal Article