This is a second blog arising out of my reading of Erik Olin Wright’s How to Be An Anti-capitalist in the 21st Century. While the first focused on general modes or strategies for resisting capitalism, this one summarises and comments on his listing of pragmatic interventions to this end.
I have always found a tension between two different concepts of ‘utopia’. The first offers a comprehensive blueprint for a future and better society. History has bequeathed us some intriguing examples (Plato, More etc). But regardless of its heuristic uses, this is surely a suspect concept: I discern a link with a totalitarian impulse and exhortation to ‘impose’ the blueprint. The second concept is less worrying. It entails the presentation of alternative – that is, more satisfactory – forms of organisation, whether or not these are oriented to a more widespread social transformation. This is very much in line with what I have advocated as ‘foresight sociology’. Wright’s list is in tune with this second concept.
He writes of possible means of eroding capitalism, to my mind a telling phrase. He emphasises the need for democratisation, but is commendably cautious in describing a series of possible ‘building blocks’. These might be captured as follows:
- Unconditional basic income (UBI) – UBI represents a fundamental redesign of income distribution. It would be funded from taxes paid from higher earners; would lead to the elimination of public programmes of income support (excepting those connected to special needs); and render redundant minimum-wage laws. As well as combatting/eliminating poverty, Wright contends that UBI would allow people to say ‘no’ to the capitalist labour market, hence opening up new possibilities like worker cooperatives and multifarious other life-affirming ventures.
- The cooperative market economy – the idea of ‘cooperatives’ embraces a range of ‘non-capitalist’ possibilities, including consumer cooperatives, owned by consumers and governed by consumer-members; credit cooperatives (ie credit unions); producer cooperatives, whose members are privately-owned firms that come together (eg in relations to food processing, distribution and marketing); housing cooperatives, including communal housing and co-housing; solidarity cooperatives, governed by elected boards of stakeholders; and worker cooperatives owned by workers and governed democratically on a one-person-one-vote basis. As far as worker cooperatives are concerned, Wright specifies a number of preconditions: (a) UBI, which would reduce the dependency of worker-owners on market income generated by the cooperative enterprise; (b) public programmes to facilitate the conversion of capitalist firms into worker cooperatives; (c) specialised public credit institutions to support cooperatives; (d) publicly supported cooperative development initiatives, eg local municipal community trusts; and (e) publicly funded educational programmes for cooperatives organisations and management.
- The social and solidarity economy – an umbrella term covering heterogeneous community-anchored organisations committed to social justice (eg non-profit, mutual, voluntary). UBI salient here too. Underwritten by the state, such organisations might prove the optimal way of providing certain services, like childcare and care for the elderly.
- Democratising capitalist firms – this involves extending constraints on the property rights of capitalist firms (eg minimum wage laws, health and safety rules, employment security laws), plus enhancing the decision-making power of workers to counter authoritarian workplace practices (eg in large firms, via a bicameral board of directors, one elected by shareholders and the other by workers on a one-person-one-vote basis).
- Banking as a public utility – the introduction of public banking: ‘in capitalism, the mandate of banks is to maximise profits for their owners; in a socialist economy, banks would be treated as a public utility and their mandate would include a range of social priorities.’
- Nonmarket economic organisation – increasing the role and prominence of nonmarket organisation via, for example: (a) the (decentralised) state provision of goods and services (eg health and social care); (b) peer-to-peer (P2P) collaborative production (eg Wikopedia, Linux), notably decentralised IT-enabled small-scale production, extending to non-proprietary design libraries; and (c) the knowledge commons, via the creation of ‘open access’ licenses (eg Copyleft, Patentleft, Creative Commons Licenses, and BiOS (Biological Open Source) licenses.
The greater the progress made through erecting such building blocks, the less capitalist the economy/society. Nor, as Wright makes clear, is it a matter of starting from scratch: embryonic versions of these institutional innovations either already exist or are finding a home in political manifestos (see Labour’s Corbyn and McDonnell in the UK and the aspiring Democratic candidate-in-waiting for the US Presidency, Sanders). In relation to the UK specifically, check out Economics for the Many, edited by McDonnell.
Implicit in Wright’s idea or ‘eroding capitalism’, perhaps, is the notion of a threshold or tipping point, which sits comfortable with my advocacy of ‘permanent reform’. My third blog on his text will address what he terms ‘agents of transformation’, a topic of previous blogs on my part. In the meantime, I repeat my recommendation that friends and colleagues with a left-mindset beg, steal or borrow his book.