6
Agents of Transformation
In some ways, the most vexing problem with the strategic vision of eroding capitalism is how to create collective actors with sufficient coherence and capacity for struggle to sustain the project of challenging capitalism. It is not enough to have a solid diagnosis and critique of the world as it is and a compelling account of the desirability and viability of alternatives that would make the world a better place. It is not even enough to map the strategies that would move us in the right direction. For those alternatives to actually be achievable, there must be political agents of transformation capable of bringing them about using those strategies. So, where are these collective actors?
I will begin by clarifying why collective actors are essential for any plausible strategy intended to erode capitalism. I will then discuss the notion of “agency” and three concepts that are central in the formation of collective actors: identities, interests and values. The rest of the chapter will explore the problem of how to navigate the complexities of creating effective collective actors for social transformation in the world today. I won’t be able to provide a real answer to the question of where these collective actors are to be found, but I hope to clarify the task we confront in creating them.
Collective actors for eroding capitalism
To recall the central argument of Chapter 3, eroding capitalism combines four strategic logics: resisting capitalism, escaping capitalism, taming capitalism and dismantling capitalism. Different kinds of collective actors and coalitions of collective actors are involved in each of these.
Resisting capitalism is at the center of much of the labor movement and many social movements that confront the depredations of capitalism. Episodic mobilizations for protests and occupations designed to block austerity are contemporary examples. Escaping capitalism is a strategy for community activism anchored in the social and solidarity economy and in the cooperative market economy. Sometimes this can involve large federations of groups organized to foster noncapitalist forms of economic activities; sometimes the collective actors can be very small, taking advantage of local spaces that are available for creating noncapitalist economic relations.
Neither resisting nor escaping necessarily involves action primarily directed at gaining state power. In contrast, since both taming and dismantling capitalism seek to change the rules of the game, not simply move within existing rules, these strategies require political action to gain some measure of power within the state itself. Taming capitalism neutralizes harms of capitalism, especially through state-provided insurance of various sorts. Dismantling capitalism transfers certain aspects of property rights from private to public control, and removes the provision of certain kinds of goods and services from the market and the control of private investors. The pivotal logic of eroding capitalism, then, is that these changes in the rules of the game from above can expand the space for building alternatives to capitalist economic relations from below in ways that, over time, encroach on the dominance of capitalism.
One of the attractions of this strategic concoction is that it provides a legitimate place for very different kinds of activism that in different ways oppose the dominance of capitalism. Rather than seeing community activism around the social and solidarity economy and political activism over the state as antithetical, these can become complementary. In practical terms this is not always easy, of course, especially because the kinds of organizations needed for these different forms of anticapitalist strategy are so different. Nevertheless, they need not be viewed as intrinsically antagonistic.
The biggest puzzle in this argument on strategy for eroding capitalism concerns the creation of robust collective actors capable of acting politically to challenge and change capitalism’s rules of the game in a progressive direction. Traditionally this has been the work of political parties. Other kinds of organizations and associations also play a role in politically directed action for progressive social change: lobbying organizations, interest organizations of all sorts, labor unions, community organizations, social movement organizations and many others. In some times and places, some of these organizations can have decisive effects on the prospects for progressive state action. But for these various kinds of civil society–based collective actors to have sustained efficacy in changing the rules enforced by the state, they need to somehow be connected to progressive political parties capable of acting directly within the state. Ultimately, then, the strategy of eroding capitalism depends on the existence of a web of collective actors anchored in civil society and political parties committed to such a political project.
The question, then, is how to think about the process of creating these kinds of interconnected collective actors capable of acting politically. To give more precision to this issue, we need to detour into a classic theme of social theory: the problem of collective agency.
The problem of collective agency
Social theory is filled with discussions of what is sometimes called the structure/agency problem. Much of this discussion is very abstract and often quite obscure. The issues are implicated in some of the big fault lines in social theory over things like methodological individualism versus systems theory, micro versus macro theory, contingency and determinacy, and the nature of explanation in social science. We won’t explore these issues here. What we do need to do is clarify the idea of agency, especially “collective” agency, and then give some precision to the problem of creating effective collective actors for struggles against capitalism.
The concept of “agency”
As a general, abstract notion, the idea of “agency” refers to the fact that people, to use Göran Therborn’s apt expression in his book The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology (Verso, 1980), are “conscious, reflecting initiators of acts in a structured, meaningful world.” People are not simply programmed to follow scripts defined by roles; they instigate actions, often with considerable intelligence, creativity and improvisation. Of course, such agency occurs within all sorts of constraints, both those generated by the social structures within which people act and the internalized constraints embodied in beliefs and habits. Sometimes those constraints severely narrow the range of possible self-initiated actions; sometimes the constraints are looser. But human beings are never robots.
Social theorists and analysts vary in the extent to which human agency figures in their explanations of social phenomena. At one extreme are theorists, sometimes referred to as “structuralists,” who come close to treating people as simply bearers of the social relations within which they live; for them, it is an illusion to think we are authors of our own acts. At the other extreme are theorists who come close to denying the explanatory relevance of social structures altogether. People are constituted by complex, intersecting subjectivities through which they form identities and act in the world.
In the present context, there is no need to sort out these very abstract issues. I will take it as given that people in fact are conscious initiators of actions, even if they are also creatures of unconscious habit and often act in highly scripted ways. This is critical, because unless people are agents in this sense, there really would be no point in writing books to clarify the harms generated by capitalism, the desirability of an alternative and the dilemmas of realizing those alternatives. The very possibility of strategy depends on people being conscious initiators of acts.
The idea of agency applies both to individuals and, in a more complex way, to collectivities. The shift from individuals to collective entities is another minefield in social theory, since collectivities don’t “act” in exactly the same sense that individuals do. A statement like “the capitalist class opposed the New Deal” could mean “most capitalists opposed the New Deal” or “organizations and political parties representing the interests of the capitalist class opposed the New Deal,” or “powerful members of the capitalist class, connected through social networks and private associations, opposed the New Deal and other capitalists generally went along with them”; but a “class” as such is not the sort of thing that is a conscious initiator of action. Collective actors have social bases, but the bases themselves are not “actors.” When I refer to the agency of a collective actor, therefore, I will be referring to various kinds of organizations and associations through which people join together to cooperate in pursuit of their goals. Sometimes these can be tightly bounded organizations, like labor unions or political parties. Other times the idea of a collective actor applies to looser forms of goal-oriented cooperation, as in coalitions and alliances, or even broader concepts like “social movements.” In all of these cases, the human persons who constitute the organizations, associations and coalitions are the real conscious initiators of action, but the fact that they have joined together to coordinate their actions through an organization means that their actions now have a collective, not simply individual, character.
Collective actors are critical for emancipatory social transformation. As noted in Chapter 3, much social change happens “behind the backs” of people as the unintended side effects of human action. But it is implausible that emancipatory social transformations that would better realize the values of equality/fairness, democracy/freedom and community/solidarity could simply be the cumulative unintended by-product of human action. Human emancipation, if it is to come about, requires strategy, and this implies agency. And since some of the targets of such strategy are powerful institutions, an effective strategy requires collective agency. So, again, where are the collective actors?
We need three more concepts to begin to explore this question: holding identities, interests and values as overlapping bases for the formation of collective actors. Identities are especially critical in forging solidarity within a collective actor; interests are central to shaping the objectives of collective action; values are important for connecting diverse identities and interests within common meanings.
Identities
The term identity, in its broadest sense, helps us understand how people classify themselves and others in terms of things that are salient in their lives. People have all sorts of identities, including those affiliated with their gender, race, class, sexual orientation, ethnicity, nationality, religion, language and physical disabilities, but also things like being a jazz lover, New Yorker, intellectual, long-distance runner, grandparent or having a specific political ideology. All of these (and many more) could appear in response to the question: what are the things that define who you are? The answer intrinsically has a dual character: any definition of who I am also defines which other people are like me. A person’s identity, then, is a complex intersection of these kinds of categories.
Depending on the context, any one or a cluster of the elements in a particular person’s identity profile could be subjectively the most salient to them. Consider a middle-class, Black, American, male jazz lover. There could be times and places in which being a jazz lover is what matters most in terms of this person’s own sense of who they are and who they feel are kindred spirits, people like himself. Or consider a German secular intellectual of Jewish heritage. In 1925, being a German intellectual could have been their most salient identity. In 1935, being Jewish could have become the most salient.
This last example reveals something important about the idea of identity: Identities are not simply descriptive attributes of people that they find subjectively salient; they are closely linked to social relations and power. Here is a vignette that will clarify the issue.
In 2007, I spent a week in Sarajevo; I was invited by a group of undergraduates at the university who had organized a conference on the relevance of Marx and Hegel for contemporary issues. I stayed beyond the conference and gave a number of lectures and seminars on the themes of my work on Real Utopias. The students were eager and animated. They came from all three ethno-religious communities in Sarajevo—Bosnian Muslims, Croatian Catholics and Serbian Orthodox. They had all lived through the siege of Sarajevo as children and were fed up with ethno-nationalism. They desperately wanted to be cosmopolitan Europeans. By the end of the week, I felt very close to a number of them.
On the last evening we were in a pub together and I said, rather glibly, “You know, in terms of identity I feel much more like all of you than like American Christian Fundamentalists. They seem like they’re from another planet. You are all kindred spirits, sharing my core values and sense of meaning.”
A young woman in the group, in her early twenties, replied, “This is not what identity is all about. It is not an answer to the question ‘Who am I?’ It is the answer to the question, ‘Who do other people say I am?’ If we were to cross the bridge to the Serbian sector and there was a policeman who saw you get mugged, he would come to your rescue. If he saw me getting mugged, he would turn away.”
Later she added, “It is a great privilege for people in rich countries with liberal democracies to be able to ask the question ‘who am I?’ rather than have their identities coercively imposed on them. The idea of young adults ‘searching for their identity’ just doesn’t make as much sense here.”
This story illustrates an important contrast among the many forms of identity that are subjectively salient to people: some of these mainly reflect differences among people, differences that matter to them and which to a greater or lesser extent they choose to cultivate, while others are imposed on them by the society in which they live. I had experienced the week in Sarajevo with these students as reflecting our common identity as progressive intellectuals, an identity that is chosen and cultivated over time. They experienced identity as something imposed on them by powerful forces over which they had little control. I had not recognized the inherently privileged position reflected in my view of identity as self-discovery.
Things are, of course, even more complicated than the simple contrast between imposed and cultivated identities. Many identities may be both imposed and cultivated. Ethnicity is a good example: the basic menu of ethnic identities may be given by the cultural practices of a society, and some of these may be imposed on people, but there can still be considerable variation in the extent to which the salience of a given ethnic identity is strengthened or weakened through individual and collective practices. At times, there are sharp struggles within an ethnic group over precisely this issue, especially when an ethnic identity is deeply connected to conflict with other ethnic groups. In the episodes of violent ethno-nationalist conflict in the aftermath of the disintegration of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, there were places in which there had been considerable intermarriage across ethnic lines and ethnic identities were quite subdued prior to the state’s collapse. Political operatives engaged in acts of ethnic violence in order to create an atmosphere of fear across ethnic boundaries as a way of intensifying the salience of ethnic identities, which could then be used to form effective ethnically based collective actors. More generally, social movements grounded in imposed identities often spend considerable energy trying to strengthen and deepen the identities they are attempting to mobilize.
Identities play a critical role in the formation of collective actors because of the ways in which shared identity facilitates the solidarity needed for sustained collective action. Sustained collective action faces all sorts of obstacles. In particular, if people are motivated exclusively by narrow, personal self-interest, participation in collective action will often be experienced as costly in various ways. This can lead to what is called “free riding”: sitting on the sidelines and letting other people do the work and bear the costs of participation in collective action. If, on the other hand, motivations are bound up with identities of fellow-feeling toward members of a group and a sense that “we’re all in this together,” then free riding may be a less pressing problem. Strong shared identities also can increase the sense of trust and predictability among potential participants in collective action and can therefore facilitate the formation of durable collective actors.
Identities that are rooted in various forms of socially imposed inequality and domination are especially salient for the formation of emancipatory collective actors. People live their lives within social structures not of their choosing; identities are, in significant ways, forged through their lived experiences within those structures. In particular, social structures are characterized by multiple forms of intersecting inequality, domination, exclusion and exploitation. These generate experiences of real harms in the lives of people—disrespect, deprivations, disempowerment, bodily insecurity and abuse. These experiences get transformed into shared identities through cultural interpretations, which, of course, are themselves objects of contestation. The aforementioned social bases of emancipatory social movements—class, race, gender, ethnicity, and so on—are deeply connected to these kinds of identities.
There is one additional feature of identity relevant to the forming of collective actors capable of contributing to emancipatory social transformation. Identities change over time, and one way that they change is through the effects of social struggles. The lived experience of participating in social movements and other forms of collective action can change a person’s sense of who they are, what kind of person they are. Partially this is simply a spontaneous result of the shared experience of struggle, but of course it is also a result of the wide range of cultural and ideological practices that occur within social movements designed to cultivate changed identities. The result can be the formation of cultivated identities that are deeply connected to the collective actors in struggles—political parties, social movement organizations, labor unions—rather than simply to the categories that constitute the social base for those struggles.
Interests
Interests are connected to identities, but they are not the same thing. Identities are subjectively salient classifications of persons. Interests refer to things that would make a person’s life go better along some dimension important to that person. Interests are anchored in the solutions to the problems people encounter in their lives; identities are anchored in the lived experiences generated in part by those problems. To say that a labor union is in the interests of workers is to assert that a union would make it easier to improve wages and working conditions for workers. To say that reduced government environmental regulation is in the interests of certain kinds of investors is to claim that the rate of return on their investments would be higher in the absence of regulation. A claim about interests, in a sense, is always a kind of prediction about the effects of alternative possibilities.
People can therefore be mistaken about their interests. Parents can believe, falsely, that vaccinations cause autism and are thus against the interests of their children. Lower-income people can believe that tax cuts for the rich will benefit the poor. This is the sense in which one can speak meaningfully about “false consciousness”—a false understanding of what in fact would make one’s life better, about what specifically are the best means to realize some end. Claims about false consciousness are not in general claims about false identity. False consciousness describes incorrect beliefs about how the world actually works, which lead to incorrect views about the effects of different courses of action.
Some interests are closely tied to identities. A transgender person has specific interests about the ways culturally recognized gender classifications affect access to various kinds of amenities and resources. A linguistic minority in a country has specific interests about the official standing of different languages, as well as policies around language use and education. A person with a strong Catholic identity may have specific interests about policies that would prevent abortions. Other interests are not so closely grounded in specific identities. The interests people have in policies that would reduce carbon emissions and mitigate climate change are not simply the interests of people with identities as environmentalists. And the interests that broad masses of people have in economic democracy are not closely linked to their specific identities within capitalist class relations.
Because of the complexity of lives and identities, people have many different interests, which are often in tension, even incompatible. People have interests linked to their class location, gender, health status, religion, ethnicity, nationality, language, sexuality. They also have short-run interests and long-term interests, which may also be in tension. As a result, when people think about what is in their interests, they inevitably have to foreground some interests and bracket others. A central issue in political struggles is precisely over which interests should be given the greatest attention.
Values
When we say that people are “conscious, reflecting initiators of acts in a structured, meaningful world” we are not merely saying that they consciously initiate acts, but that they do so in a “meaningful world.” A key part of an action’s meaning involves values—the beliefs people hold about what is good, both in terms of how people should behave in the world and how our social institutions should function.
Values have a fraught relationship to interests. When political conservatives defend tax cuts for the rich by saying that, through increasing investment and thus economic growth, this is the best way to help the poor, they are invoking a general social value: poverty is a bad thing and a good society is one in which the lives of the least advantaged improve over time. Most people would agree with this affirmation of values. If it were true that cutting taxes for the rich was the best way to help the poor, this would be a powerful reason to support such policies. Of course, this view of tax cuts is a rationalization for the interests of the rich. It is often relatively easy to invoke broadly shared values as a cover for self-interest. This happens on the left as well—for example, when authoritarian states used the banner of communism to claim to be democratic and ruled by the people. It is only because values are important to people that this ideological strategy of mystification works.
Values have always played a crucial role in emancipatory struggles. White students who went to the southern United States to help register African Americans to vote during Freedom Summer in 1964 did so not because this was in their interests, but because of commitment to values of equality, democracy and solidarity. The movement in the United States and Europe during the anti-apartheid struggle to boycott participation in events in South Africa and to divest universities and other institutions of investments in South Africa was not because of the interests of participants, but because of their values. Of course, people also join social struggles because the goals are in their interests, but moral commitments and values help to reinforce their participation and widen the appeal of the cause.
Values can thus be powerful sources of motivation. Crucially, they can themselves become a robust source of identity. When those values are integrated into more or less systematic bodies of thought, they can be thought of as a dimension of ideologies. Emancipatory ideologies combine explanations for how the world works, account for what alternatives are possible, and affirm values. Such ideologies can be highly elaborate or loosely constructed; often, they are filled with internal inconsistencies. But even with inconsistencies, ideologies can become important dimensions of people’s identities.
From identities, interests and values to collective actors
Identities, interests and values do not spontaneously precipitate the formation of collective actors, let alone politically organized collective actors capable of contributing to emancipatory social transformation. While it is always the case that people have identities, interests and values that they hold in common with others, these need not be translated into coherent forms of collective organization. What is more, which aspects—if any—of a person’s identity are translated into solidarity and which interests and values garner their attention depends heavily on the presence of preexisting collective actors attempting to mobilize identities in pursuit of interests and values. This is a kind of chicken-and-egg problem: identities are critical for the formation of collective actors, but collective actors play an active role in strengthening the salience of particular identities. Social struggles are often precisely over competing bases trying to mobilize the same people: class or nationality or religion, for example. And of course, most people live their private lives disengaged from any significant involvement in organized collective action, whether political or civic.
This is the terrain on which any political project for eroding capitalism must operate. This terrain poses three main challenges to the task of constructing collective actors capable of sustained political action: 1. overcoming privatized lives; 2. building class solidarity within complex, fragmented class structures; 3. forging anticapitalist politics in the presence of diverse, competing non–class-based forms of identity.
Overcoming privatized lives
Most people usually live their lives in networks of family, work and community, dealing with the practical matters of everyday life without being mobilized into the base of support for any politically oriented collective actor. The tasks of daily life, especially once one has a family and children, take enormous amounts of time, energy and attention. It is not surprising that it is young people, often less encumbered by such responsibilities, who fuel protest movements and political mobilizations.
The gulf between private lives and public involvement is always a problem. It is made more difficult in a consumerist society, where people are led to believe that personal happiness and well-being depend largely on one’s level of personal consumption, especially when this is combined with highly competitive labor markets, in which the acquisition of the means of private consumption depends on one’s ability to compete with others.
Taken together, the universal issue of time and energy constraints for individuals living their lives and the more specific issues of consumerism and competitive individualism create a difficult environment for mobilizing coherent political collective actors in contemporary capitalist countries. These difficulties historically have been somewhat mitigated by various kinds of civic associations, which integrate with people’s daily lives. In many places, two such associations have played especially salient roles: labor unions and churches. Unions, where they are strong, form a robust bridge between politics and workers’ daily lives. It is no coincidence that progressive political parties critical of capitalism typically have strong ties to labor movements. Churches, in different times and places, have also played this sort of role, although more often for conservative than for progressive politics. People gather in church as part of their ordinary lives. They talk to each other at church functions. They share a salient identity anchored in religion. And sometimes churches become directly involved in political organizing, helping overcome the purely private concerns of their members by linking religious identities to political interests. Black southern churches in the United States played this role for progressive politics during the civil rights era. Today, white evangelical churches play this role in overcoming the apolitical, privatized lives of their members by linking religious identities to right-wing politics.
Fragmented class structures
Class is at the very heart of the strategic configuration of eroding capitalism. Eroding capitalism means undermining the dominance of capitalism over time within the overall economic ecosystem, and this means undermining the power of capitalists. The most natural social base for such struggles are those people within class relations who are directly subjected to capitalist domination and exploitation, the working class. The lived experience of domination and exploitation of workers within capitalist relations could provide a congenial context for forging strong working-class identities. The identity-interests of workers would then form the core of progressive politics that embraced the more universal interests linked to values of equality, democracy and solidarity.
As noted, in the middle of the nineteenth century, Marx believed that the underlying dynamics of capitalism would push people in capitalist societies in this direction. In particular, he believed that over time the class structure of capitalism would become increasingly simplified, with the vast majority of people sharing relatively homogeneous conditions of existence, making the task of class identity formation easier. Ideological struggles would still be needed to get workers to understand the causes of their common lived experience of suffering under capitalism, but changes in the underlying class structure would make this task easier. The working class would become over time the coherent social base for a powerful political collective actor organized against capitalism. The aspiration of this prediction is captured in the famous last sentences of the Communist Manifesto, “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working Men of All Countries, Unite!”
This is not how the class structure of capitalism has developed over the last 150 years. Instead of increasing homogenization of the working class, the class structure has become more complex in ways that undercut the shared sense of fate and life conditions. While it may be true that income distributions in many advanced capitalist countries have become considerably more polarized in recent decades, which fueled the slogan “we are the 99%,” it is not the case the 99 percent share a common lived experience. Even if we take the subset of that 99 percent consisting of wage earners selling their labor power in the labor market—the broadly defined working class—there is a pervasive fragmentation of lived experience that makes a common class identity difficult to forge. To list only a few of these complexities, the lived experiences of workers vary enormously in terms of level and security of earnings; precariousness of employment; autonomy within work; skill levels and education required within work; opportunities for creativity; and so on.
To use the game metaphor framework from Chapter 3, the working class may share common interests at the level of “the game”—economic democracy as an emancipatory alternative to capitalism would make life better for all workers—but at the level of the rules and, even more so, moves in the game, the working class is fragmented with divergent interests. Economic struggles within capitalism are waged largely over game moves and rules, and thus such struggles often intensify rather than mute these divisions. Many people still experience class as a salient identity, but it does not provide the universalizing basis for solidarity for which progressives once hoped.
Competing sources of identity
The third major challenge to forging politically robust anticapitalist collective actors concerns the heterogeneity of salient sources of identity in people’s lives. Here is the problem: anticapitalism is, at its heart, a class project, but class identities must compete in various ways with all sorts of other identities as the basis for emancipatory collective action.
As a first approximation, we can distinguish two situations: Some non-class identities themselves constitute distinct bases for emancipatory struggle and have the potential to be constituent elements of progressive politics; other non-class identities generate interests hostile to emancipatory alternatives to existing social structures and institutions, and thus constitute obstacles.
One of the hallmarks of progressive politics in recent decades has been the importance of identities rooted in the lived experience of domination, inequality and exclusion other than class. The familiar contemporary examples include race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality. Social movements and other forms of collective actors anchored in these identities have often been more prominent politically than explicitly class-based anticapitalist collective actors.
The interests directly linked to these non-class identities are not the same as class interests, but the values connected to those interests overlap with the values of emancipatory anticapitalism. Consider identities rooted in racial oppression. Oppressed racial minorities have identity-interests in ending racial discrimination and domination. These are not the same as working-class interests. Sometimes, indeed, there are tensions between the identity-interests of racial minorities and the identity-interests of workers, as when struggles against racial discrimination affect the immediate conditions of labor market competition for white workers. Yet both sets of interests share the egalitarian value of equal access to the material and social means necessary to live a flourishing life. Similarly, for the harms linked to oppressions tied to gender and sexuality: these harms generate distinct identity-interests, but they share the same fundamental egalitarian value as emancipatory anticapitalism. Values, then, constitute a potential basis for constructing political unity across these diverse identities.
Any effort at constructing a robust anticapitalist collective actor has to navigate the complexity of these multiple, intersecting identities that share common underlying emancipatory values but nevertheless have distinct identity-interests. A potentially much more difficult problem concerns non-class identities whose identity-interests are deeply hostile to the values associated with anticapitalism. In the first decades of the twenty-first century, of particular salience throughout the developed capitalist world are identities rooted in racial dominance and exclusionary nationalism. What has come to be known as “right-wing populism” mobilizes people on the basis of interests tied to such exclusionary identities. The attraction of significant segments of the working class to this kind of political formation is a direct challenge to the prospects of any form of emancipatory anticapitalism.
It is easy—but, I think, a mistake—to see this upsurge of right-wing populism as tapping into widespread, virulent racist and exclusionary nationalist identities. To be sure, there are undoubtedly people drawn to these political movements whose core identities are deeply hostile to racial minorities, immigrants and others. But for many, perhaps most, people who end up supporting right-wing populist politics, these aspects of identity become foregrounded as a result of the political context and lack of available alternatives. Beginning in the 1990s, the political parties traditionally linked to the working class generally embraced, to varying degrees, the core idea of neoliberalism: wherever possible, markets and private initiatives should replace direct state programs as ways of fostering economic dynamism and solving social problems. The disillusionment with the capacity of those parties to improve the lives of most working-class people creates a political vacuum that allows right-wing populism to gain traction. So, while exclusionary nationalism and racism are part of the cultural landscape of identities in most places, the extent to which they are foregrounded or subdued depends on politics.
Real politics
The formation of effective politically organized collective actors is essential for eroding capitalism. And everywhere, political activists attempting to build collective actors opposed to capitalism face the obstacles of privatized lives, fragmented class structures and competing identities. These are universal issues. The practical challenges of how best to overcome these obstacles, however, are highly context-dependent, varying enormously over time and place.
Competitive individualism as a feature of broadly shared culture is more salient in the United States than in many other countries, and it intensifies the challenges created by privatized lives. Even within developed capitalist countries, there is significant variation in the intensity and forms of class structure fragmentation, the extent and distribution of precariousness, and the degree of inequality within the working class. The importance of racism as a salient obstacle to forming robust progressive political collective actors clearly varies across countries. It has been historically noteworthy in the United States, although in recent decades, with the rapid increase in immigration from Africa and the Middle East to Europe, racism has become increasingly salient there as well, especially in the face of the refugee crisis created by Middle East wars. In mid-twentieth-century Europe, fighting racism was not a central problem faced by anticapitalist actors in most places; today it is. In these and other ways, then, the challenges posed by privatized lives, fragmented class structures and competing identities vary.
Furthermore, in addition to these variations in social context for the formation of collective actors, there is enormous variation across countries’ political institutions, within which progressive political activists operate. These deeply shape the practical problems activists face in forming collective political actors. This is especially critical for building the long-term political capacity to effectively compete for state power within electoral politics, as eroding capitalism requires being able to use the state to tame capitalism and, in incremental ways, dismantle key aspects of capitalist economic relations. Protests and mobilizations outside of the state may be effective in blocking certain state policies; they are not by themselves effective in robustly changing the rules of the game in progressive ways. For this to happen, external protests must be linked to political parties able to pass needed legislation and implement new game rules. And this requires political parties capable of competing effectively in electoral politics.
The process of creating this political capacity is deeply affected by political rules of the game, including:
•Rules governing political representation: winner-take-all, single-member districts; single-member districts with runoff elections, including instant runoffs; various forms of proportional representation; nonpartisan elections (especially at the local level); and so on.
•Rules governing the drawing of boundaries of electoral districts: party-controlled gerrymandering; independent commissions.
•Rules governing the selection of candidates: systems in which political parties control the selection of candidates; primary election systems in which voters select candidates; nonpartisan elections in which candidates get on the ballot through petition signatures.
•Rules governing campaign finance: the degree of restriction on private financing of elections, including prohibitions on contributions by corporations; various forms of public finance.
•Rules governing eligibility to vote: automatic registration of all adult citizens; various rules that restrict or suppress voter registration (felon disenfranchisement; voter ID laws; voter list purges; and so on).
These rules (and others) significantly affect the tasks and dilemmas faced by progressive activists in trying to expand the capacity for effective political collective action. Should anticapitalist, progressive activists work within established left and center-left parties, or form new parties? Should their efforts be concentrated at local, regional or national levels of political contestation? What sorts of ties should there be between progressive social movements and political parties? Because of the complexity and variability both in social context and political institutions, there can be no general formula to answer these questions.
While there is no general formula, there are nonetheless some guidelines we can formulate from our analysis for forming collective actors to effectively erode capitalism.
First, the discussion of values should be at the very center of progressive politics. The three clusters of values discussed in Chapter 1—equality/fairness, democracy/freedom and community/solidarity—should be made explicit and explained. Discussions of values, of course, can become high-sounding but empty window dressing. It is important to emphasize how these values relate to the concrete policies that advance radical economic democracy.
Second, these values can provide a vital connection between the class interests at the heart of eroding capitalism and other identity-interests with emancipatory aspirations. What has been termed the “identity politics” of oppressed social categories should be treated as an integral element within a broad emancipatory politics rather than a matter of secondary concern. The task for progressive anticapitalists attempting to build a politics intended to erode the dominance of capitalism is to include explicit reform programs that recognize these identity-interests and connect them to the agenda of eroding capitalism, especially through actively valuing equal access to the social and material conditions necessary to live a flourishing life.
Third, the value of democracy, at least at this time, should be given particular emphasis in articulating the concrete program of progressive politics. A deeper democracy, real democracy, is in the interests of a very broad part of the population beyond the working class. The thinness of democracy within capitalist states constitutes one of the principal obstacles to advancing policies that reduce capitalism’s dominance, but efforts to restore and deepen democracy also constitute a unifying objective for people who may be less sympathetic to the overall anticapitalist agenda.
Fourth, it is important to remember that the overall plan of eroding capitalism is not exclusively state-centered, and political parties are not the only collective actors needed for this strategy to be carried out. Eroding capitalism depends as much on resisting and escaping capitalism as on the concentrated politics of taming and dismantling it. In particular, the efforts at building and expanding the social and solidarity economy, the cooperative market economy and the array of new economic practices opened up by IT-enabled relations, such as peer-to-peer collaborative production, are essential for this long-term erosion. Recall that eroding capitalism means both encroaching on it by reversing the privatization of the provision of public goods and services by the state and expanding the diverse forms of noncapitalist economic activity outside the state. New technological developments, which reduce economies of scale and facilitate cooperation, will likely increase the growth of these noncapitalist ways of organizing economic life. Recognizing the importance of these initiatives from below, and formulating reform policies that would expand the economic space for their growth, would also deepen the social base for the broader agenda of eroding capitalism.
In developed capitalist democracies today, there is a widespread sense that the political-economic system is not working well, perhaps even unraveling. Both the state and economy seem incapable of responding coherently and creatively to the challenges we face, whether it involves adapting to the ramifications of climate change, let alone mitigating its underlying causes; the global refugee crisis, which is likely to intensify in the coming decades as climate refugees are added to war refugees and economic migrants; increasing economic polarization within wealthy countries; the prospect of either a “jobless” future caused by automation and artificial intelligence, or at best a future in which market-generated jobs are either well paid and demanding very high levels of education and knowledge, or are badly paid, precarious positions. Capitalism as it exists today is a major obstacle to effectively dealing with all of these issues.
One reaction to these trends is gloom and doom. Capitalism seems unassailable. The disarray, and in some places the disintegration, of traditional political parties, has generated a sense of political incompetence and paralysis. This has created the opening for right-wing, nativist populism. One can easily imagine a future in which the erosion of liberal democracy accelerates and slides into much more authoritarian, if still nominally democratic, forms of government. Such developments are already apparent in some capitalist democracies on the periphery of western Europe. This could certainly happen as well in what had been thought to be the most stable liberal democracies.
But this is not the only possibility. Capitalism as it currently exists need not be our future. Popular disaffection with capitalism is widespread even in the absence of confidence in the viability of an alternative system. Resilient efforts at escaping the depredations of corporate capitalism by building new ways of organizing our economic life can be found everywhere. And there are serious efforts at creating new political formations, sometimes within traditional parties on the left, sometimes in the form of new parties. The potential for constructing a broad social base for a new era of progressive politics exists. The contingencies of historical events and the creative agency of activists and collective actors will determine whether this potential is realized.
Erik Olin Wright (1947–2019)