How to Be an Anticapitalist in the 21st Century

How to Be an Anticapitalist in the 21st Century Plot Summary

Introduction

For many people, the idea of anticapitalism seems absurd when they consider the remarkable technological innovations, rising living standards, and extensive consumer products generated by capitalist economies. The standard story celebrates capitalism's growth machine while dismissing alternatives as unrealistic or harmful. Yet there exists a counter-narrative: capitalism perpetuates poverty amid plenty, generates massive inequality, and increasingly threatens environmental sustainability. The fundamental disagreement lies not in whether capitalism has transformed material conditions—it undeniably has—but whether it's possible to have productivity and innovation without capitalism's harms. The central argument explored throughout these pages is fourfold: another world beyond capitalism is indeed possible; this alternative world could improve conditions for human flourishing for most people; elements of this new world are already being created within our current reality; and there are viable pathways from here to there. Anticapitalism isn't merely a moral stance against injustice, but a practical orientation toward building alternatives that foster greater human flourishing. By examining what capitalism is, how it fails to meet basic human values, and what strategies might overcome it, we can envision concrete pathways toward a more democratic, egalitarian, and solidaristic future.

Chapter 1: The Moral Case Against Capitalism: Three Core Values

The moral critique of capitalism centers on three interconnected clusters of values that provide the normative foundations for anticapitalism: equality/fairness, democracy/freedom, and community/solidarity. These values have a long pedigree in social struggles, dating back at least to the French Revolution's ideals of liberté, egalité, fraternité. Though these terms have contested meanings, they provide the ethical framework for understanding what's wrong with capitalism and what would constitute a better alternative. The value of equality/fairness embodies the principle that in a just society, all persons would have broadly equal access to the material and social means necessary to live a flourishing life. This goes beyond mere equality of opportunity, which could be satisfied by a lottery system. Equal access recognizes the sociological realities of human lives—people make mistakes, random events impact outcomes, and it's virtually impossible to clearly distinguish things for which one bears responsibility from those one doesn't. A flourishing life is one in which a person's capacities and talents develop in ways that enable them to pursue their goals and realize their potential. Importantly, equality doesn't mean everyone should receive identical resources, but rather that distribution should meet different needs ("to each according to need"). Democracy/freedom represents the value of self-determination. In a fully democratic society, all people would have broadly equal access to the necessary means to participate meaningfully in decisions that affect their lives. Freedom applies when decisions affect only the individual making them; democracy applies when decisions affect others as well. Both reflect the underlying principle that people should determine the conditions of their own lives to the greatest extent possible. The boundary between the private sphere (freedom) and public sphere (democracy) is itself a subject of democratic deliberation in a deeply democratic society. Community/solidarity expresses the principle that people ought to cooperate with each other not simply because of what they personally receive, but from a genuine commitment to others' well-being and a sense of moral obligation. When such cooperation occurs in everyday activities, we call it "community"; when it happens in collective action toward common goals, we call it "solidarity." This value applies to any social unit where people interact and cooperate—families, neighborhoods, organizations, and nations. Community strengthens social bonds, enhances human flourishing, and supports both equality and democracy by fostering concern for others' welfare. These three value clusters provide the ethical foundation for evaluating both capitalism and potential alternatives. While capitalism may realize these values in limited ways, the moral case against capitalism is that it systematically obstructs their fullest realization. As we'll see, these values offer a clear normative standard against which to measure economic systems and guide transformative efforts.

Chapter 2: Diagnosing Capitalism's Structural Flaws

Capitalism inherently generates massive inequality in access to both material and social conditions needed for flourishing lives. This inequality violates principles of social justice and creates absolute deprivation for millions even in wealthy countries like the United States, where many face economic precariousness, hunger, poverty-related health issues, unsafe neighborhoods, and social stigma. These inequalities aren't accidental but emerge from capitalism's core mechanisms. Three interconnected processes drive this inequality. First, the class relationship between capital and labor creates an inherent power imbalance. The ownership of capital by a small minority means most people must sell their labor power to survive, with employers holding disproportionate power, especially in a globalized economy. This results in exploitation—a specific economic relationship where the rich are rich partly because the poor are poor. Second, market competition tends to accumulate advantages and disadvantages over time, with winners gaining more capacity to win again. Economic volatility and crises generally impact those at the bottom more severely than the wealthy, who can better insure against risks. Third, capitalist economic development, while dynamic, frequently destroys jobs and sometimes entire sectors of employment. While capitalism creates new jobs, there's no mechanism ensuring that displaced workers can access these positions, leading to sharp inequalities between winners and losers in the development process. Beyond material inequality, capitalism also generates severe inequality in access to meaningful, fulfilling work. Most jobs created by capitalist firms are tedious or burdensome, with the satisfying aspects of work unequally distributed. While capitalism can't be blamed for all inequalities, it systematically generates levels of inequality that both violate the value of equality/fairness and create real suffering. Capitalism also undermines democracy and freedom, despite claims to the contrary. While capitalism has historically been associated with the expansion of individual freedoms and democratic forms of government, it simultaneously creates significant democratic deficits. First, crucial decisions affecting many people—such as corporate investment decisions—remain outside democratic control. When a corporation closes a factory, devastating a community, those affected have no right to participate in that decision. Second, private control over investment creates constant pressure on public authorities to maintain a "good business climate," giving capitalist interests priority over others. Third, wealthy individuals and corporations have greater access to political power through campaign contributions, lobbying, elite networks, and sometimes corruption—violating the democratic principle of equal access to political participation. Fourth, capitalist firms function as workplace dictatorships where owners have the right to tell employees what to do, violating the principle of self-determination. Finally, inequalities in wealth and income create inequalities in "real freedom"—the ability to say no to undesirable options and the resources needed to pursue one's life plans. While various policies can mitigate these antidemocratic effects, they remain intrinsic to capitalism's structure. Capitalism also corrodes community and solidarity by fostering motivations and cultural values that undermine these principles. The driving motivations within capitalism are economic self-interest, greed, and fear. As philosopher G.A. Cohen noted, in market societies other people are "seen as possible sources of enrichment, and as threats to one's success"—horrible ways of seeing other people despite centuries of habituation. These motivations aren't simply character traits but are fostered by competitive markets themselves. The culture of capitalism promotes two value clusters that undermine community: competitive individualism and privatized consumerism. Competitive individualism encourages people to measure self-worth through comparison with others and to prioritize individual responsibility over collective welfare. Privatized consumerism treats personal consumption as the primary source of life satisfaction while devaluing public goods and collective consumption. While people certainly hold other communitarian values, capitalism tends to narrow the social contexts where these apply, restricting community and solidarity to smaller circles while expanding the domain of competitive individualism. These structural flaws of capitalism aren't merely contingent problems that could be fixed with minor adjustments. They represent inherent tendencies within capitalist economic relations that systematically undermine equality, democracy, and community. Understanding these deep structural flaws is essential for developing effective strategies to move beyond capitalism.

Chapter 3: Strategic Logics: Five Approaches to Anticapitalism

Five distinct strategic logics have historically been important in anticapitalist struggles: smashing capitalism, dismantling capitalism, taming capitalism, resisting capitalism, and escaping capitalism. Though these strategies often intermingle in practice, each represents a distinct approach to addressing capitalism's harms. Understanding their differences and potential combinations is crucial for developing effective anticapitalist strategies for the twenty-first century. Smashing capitalism represents the classic revolutionary strategy. It argues that capitalism is fundamentally unreformable and must be overthrown through a decisive rupture in the existing system of power. This approach traditionally relied on periodic economic crises to create vulnerabilities that revolutionary parties could exploit to seize state power. Once in control, revolutionaries would restructure the state to destroy capitalist power structures and build new economic institutions. While this strategy animated many twentieth-century struggles, revolutionary seizures of power never resulted in democratic, egalitarian alternatives. Whether due to unfavorable circumstances, leadership errors, corrupted motives, or inherent flaws in the ruptural approach itself, this strategy has consistently failed to produce emancipatory outcomes. Dismantling capitalism represents a reformist approach that shares revolutionary aspirations. Rather than attempting a sweeping overthrow, this strategy envisions a transition through state-directed reforms that incrementally introduce socialist elements from above. This approach requires stable electoral democracy and mass-based socialist parties capable of winning elections and implementing changes over extended periods. While this strategy gained traction after World War II with nationalizations and mixed economies in several countries, it ultimately faltered as capitalism's dynamism and ideological offensives pushed back against these initiatives. By the late twentieth century, privatization rather than nationalization dominated political agendas. Taming capitalism seeks not to replace capitalism but to neutralize its harms through regulations and redistribution. This became the dominant strategy of social democratic parties in the second half of the twentieth century. It recognizes that capitalism creates serious harms—inequality, job destruction, economic insecurity, environmental damage—but argues these can be significantly counteracted through well-crafted state policies. During capitalism's "golden age" (roughly 1945-1975), social democratic policies created rules that reduced individual risk through social insurance, expanded public goods provision, and established regulatory regimes to manage negative externalities. Though capitalists didn't prefer these constraints, the system functioned adequately with these modifications. However, neoliberalism has subsequently rolled back many of these taming mechanisms. Resisting capitalism involves opposing capitalism's harms without attempting to gain state power. This strategy seeks to affect the behavior of capitalists and political elites through protest and resistance outside the state. Environmental activists protesting toxic dumps, consumer movements organizing boycotts, activist lawyers defending marginalized groups, and unions organizing strikes all exemplify this approach. Resistance occurs at many levels, from organized social movements to everyday workplace resistance, where workers withhold maximum effort as a basic response to exploitation. Escaping capitalism represents attempts to insulate oneself from capitalism's harmful effects by creating alternative spaces and practices. This includes utopian communities, workers' cooperatives, intentional communities, and various DIY movements that try to build micro-alternatives outside dominant capitalist relations. While often individualistic and sometimes dependent on capitalist wealth, escaping capitalism can contribute to broader anticapitalist projects by modeling alternative ways of living and creating building blocks for different economic relationships. These five strategic logics operate at different levels of the social system. Using the metaphor of a game, smashing capitalism focuses on changing which game is being played (revolutionary politics); taming and dismantling capitalism focus on changing the rules of the game (reformist politics); while resisting and escaping capitalism focus on moves within the existing game. Effective anticapitalist strategy requires thoughtfully combining these approaches rather than relying exclusively on any single logic.

Chapter 4: Eroding Capitalism: A Symbiotic Strategy for Transformation

Eroding capitalism represents a strategic vision that combines elements from the previous approaches in a distinctive configuration. This strategy envisions gradually displacing capitalism's dominance by building emancipatory alternatives in the spaces and cracks within the system while simultaneously using state power to expand those spaces. Though not explicitly embraced by any political movement, impulses in this direction can be found in progressive parties with close ties to social movements, such as Podemos in Spain, Syriza in Greece, and currents within established center-left parties. The underlying reasoning of this approach treats capitalism not as a totalizing system but as an economic ecosystem in which capitalist relations are dominant but coexist with various noncapitalist activities. These include state production, household production, community-based networks, cooperatives, nonprofit organizations, peer-to-peer networks, and many other forms. Some of these are hybrids combining capitalist and noncapitalist elements; some are entirely noncapitalist; and some are anticapitalist. Eroding capitalism means building more democratic, egalitarian, participatory economic relations within this complex ecosystem until they become sufficiently prominent that capitalism is no longer dominant. This approach bears similarities to how capitalism itself emerged within feudal societies. Proto-capitalist relations initially appeared in cities as merchant trading, guild production, and banking—activities that filled niches and proved useful to feudal elites. As these market activities expanded, they gradually corroded feudal domination through a long, meandering process spanning centuries. Political upheavals and revolutions occurred along the way, but these generally ratified changes already underway within socioeconomic structures rather than creating ruptures that built entirely new systems from scratch. Similarly, eroding capitalism envisions noncapitalist economic activities emerging in niches where possible, growing over time through both spontaneous development and deliberate strategy. Some initiatives emerge from below within communities; others are organized or sponsored by the state to solve practical problems. Struggles involving the state occur to protect these spaces and facilitate new possibilities. When movements encounter structural limits, political mobilization may expand the boundaries of possibility. Eventually, the cumulative effect of changes from above and initiatives from below may reach a point where socialist relations become sufficiently prominent that capitalism is no longer dominant. This strategic vision combines elements of taming capitalism (using the state to change rules of the game), dismantling capitalism (transferring certain property rights from private to public control), resisting capitalism (mobilizing against capital's worst abuses), and escaping capitalism (building alternative economic relations). Rather than viewing community activism around alternative economies and political activism focused on the state as antithetical, this approach treats them as complementary aspects of a unified strategic complex. While this strategy appears enticing because it suggests meaningful action is possible even when the state seems uncongenial to emancipatory change, skeptics might view it as implausible that noncapitalist activities could ever grow sufficiently to displace capitalism's dominance. The immense power of large corporations and most people's dependency on capitalist markets for their livelihoods suggests that truly threatening alternatives would be crushed. Three key issues must be addressed to show this strategy isn't merely fantasy: developing a substantive vision of democratic socialism as an alternative destination beyond capitalism; contending with the problem of the capitalist state and how it might facilitate rather than block alternatives; and identifying the collective actors capable of pursuing this strategy. The advantage of eroding capitalism as a strategic vision is that it provides a unifying framework for diverse anticapitalist initiatives, connecting immediate struggles to long-term transformation. It avoids both the unrealistic optimism of revolutionary rupture and the pessimistic resignation that meaningful change is impossible. By building real alternatives in the present while simultaneously working to transform the rules of the economic game, this approach offers a plausible pathway toward a more democratic, egalitarian, and solidaristic future.

Chapter 5: Democratic Socialism as the Alternative Economic Model

Rather than envisioning democratic socialism as a unitary economic structure with a single institutional mechanism, this alternative to capitalism is better understood as a heterogeneous economic ecosystem organized around the principle of economic democracy. Unlike traditional state socialism with centralized planning, democratic socialism would likely include a diverse mix of participatory planning, public enterprises, cooperatives, democratically regulated private firms, markets, and other institutional forms, evolving through experimentation and democratic deliberation over time. At its core, democratic socialism represents an economy in which social power predominates over both state power and economic power. Social power is rooted in people's capacity for voluntary collective action; economic power derives from control over economic resources; and state power is grounded in rule-making authority over territory. A socialist economy is one where the allocation and use of resources occur through the exercise of social power—where ordinary people collectively decide what to do through democratic processes. This contrasts with capitalism (where economic power dominates) and statism (where state power dominates). Democratic socialism would include multiple building blocks, many of which already exist in nascent form within capitalism. Unconditional basic income (UBI) would provide everyone sufficient resources to live above the poverty line without work requirements, creating economic security that enables people to engage in noncapitalist activities. A cooperative market economy would feature diverse cooperative organizations—worker cooperatives, consumer cooperatives, credit unions, housing cooperatives—functioning within markets but organized around democratic principles rather than private profit maximization. The social and solidarity economy would encompass community-based organizations serving needs rather than profits, including caregiving cooperatives, community kitchens, tool libraries, and affordable housing projects. Capitalist firms would be democratized through workers' councils and bicameral boards of directors where workers elect half the representatives. Banking would function as a public utility with mandates encompassing social priorities beyond profit maximization. Nonmarket economic organization would play a much larger role than in contemporary capitalism, including direct state provision of goods and services, peer-to-peer collaborative production (like Wikipedia), and various commons-based resource systems. The state would provide or fund healthcare, education, caregiving services, transportation, and other public goods, though often through decentralized delivery systems rather than centralized bureaucracies. Intellectual property would be largely replaced by various forms of knowledge commons and open-access licensing. These building blocks wouldn't eliminate markets entirely—markets would still coordinate many economic activities—but they would function within a framework where social power and democratic decision-making predominate over capital accumulation. The precise configuration of elements would evolve through democratic experimentation, with inevitably different trade-offs between various values. What's certain is that a sustainable democratic socialist economy would contain heterogeneous institutional forms rather than relying on any single organizational principle. This vision of democratic socialism doesn't provide a detailed blueprint but rather identifies key institutional possibilities that could be combined in various ways. Many of these elements already exist within capitalism, though in limited form; others could be implemented within capitalism but haven't been fully developed; and some would likely require moving beyond capitalism's dominance. Together, they constitute a practical destination beyond capitalism that could more fully realize the values of equality, democracy, and solidarity.

Chapter 6: State Power and Democratic Transformation

The viability of eroding capitalism hinges on whether the state can facilitate rather than block the expansion of noncapitalist alternatives. Skeptics argue that the state in capitalist society is designed to reproduce capitalism through both elite control and institutional biases that systematically favor capitalist interests. Certainly, capitalist states do have structural features that support capitalism's dominance—dependency on tax revenues from capitalist economic activity, recruitment mechanisms favoring elites, legal protections for private property, and many others. However, two crucial insights challenge the view that the capitalist state inevitably blocks anticapitalist transformation. First, state apparatuses contain internal contradictions rather than functioning as coherent machines serving capitalism. Just as economic systems combine capitalist and noncapitalist elements, states consist of heterogeneous apparatuses with varying degrees of capitalist bias. Democratic processes, particularly when robust, introduce tensions that can loosen constraints on progressive state initiatives during crises and popular mobilizations. Struggles to deepen democracy can dilute the capitalist character of state apparatuses, especially at local and regional levels. Second, capitalism generates self-destructive tendencies that create contradictory functional demands on the state. These include depressed consumer demand due to low wages, underinvestment in training, financial instability from speculative bubbles, class conflicts from increasing inequality, environmental degradation from negative externalities, and market concentration leading to monopoly power. The state's efforts to counteract these self-destructive tendencies often involve contradictory interventions—solutions to some problems may undermine solutions to others. These contradictions create openings for progressive state actions that simultaneously solve immediate problems for capitalism while planting seeds for noncapitalist alternatives. For instance, mid-twentieth-century social democracy helped stabilize capitalism while also expanding socialist elements in the economic ecosystem through partial decommodification of labor, increased working-class social power, and enhanced state capacity for regulation. This temporal inconsistency between short-term functional solutions and long-term transformative potential creates space for symbiotic transformations that gradually erode capitalism's dominance. Two contemporary trends suggest further possibilities for such transformative state action. First, climate change will likely require massive state investment in environmental infrastructure and regulation, potentially ending neoliberalism's anti-state ideology. Second, technological changes in automation and artificial intelligence threaten widespread job displacement that market forces alone cannot solve. Together, these challenges may push states toward policies like unconditional basic income that simultaneously address immediate problems while creating space for noncapitalist economic activities. Realizing these possibilities requires democratizing the state itself. This means both reversing neoliberalism's antidemocratic effects (restoring capital controls, reregulating finance, reversing privatization, strengthening labor) and deepening democracy through institutional innovations. These might include democratically empowered decentralization giving real power to local governments; new forms of citizen participation like participatory budgeting; new institutions for democratic representation such as randomly selected citizen assemblies; and democratizing electoral rules through public financing and other reforms that reduce wealth's influence on politics. The capitalist state isn't designed for emancipatory transformation, but neither is it a perfect machine for reproducing capitalism's dominance. The strategy of eroding capitalism requires exploiting the state's internal contradictions and the temporal inconsistencies between short-term problem-solving and long-term transformation. By democratizing the state while simultaneously building noncapitalist alternatives from below, it becomes possible to gradually expand democratic, egalitarian economic activities in ways that could eventually displace capitalism's dominance.

Chapter 7: Building Collective Agency: Identities, Interests, and Values

The most vexing challenge for eroding capitalism is creating collective actors with sufficient coherence and capacity to sustain the project of challenging capitalism. Anticapitalism requires collective agency—organized groups of people cooperating to transform society—rather than relying solely on spontaneous, uncoordinated individual actions. The key question is: who will constitute these collective actors and how can they be formed? Three interconnected concepts are central to this question: identities, interests, and values. Identities concern how people classify themselves and others in terms of salient categories like class, race, gender, nationality, religion, and many others. Some identities are imposed by social structures and power relations; others are chosen and cultivated. Shared identities facilitate solidarity and trust needed for collective action by creating a sense that "we're all in this together." Interests refer to things that would make people's lives better along dimensions important to them. People can be mistaken about their interests, and they typically have multiple, sometimes conflicting interests linked to their various social positions. Values are beliefs about what is good, both in personal behavior and social institutions, and can be powerful motivators beyond narrow self-interest. Building collective actors for anticapitalist transformation faces three major challenges. First is overcoming privatized lives—the tendency for people to focus on immediate personal and family concerns rather than collective political engagement. This challenge is intensified by consumerism and competitive individualism in capitalist societies. Civic associations like labor unions and religious organizations have historically provided bridges between private lives and political action, but many such associations have weakened in recent decades. Second is the fragmentation of class structures. Rather than the homogenization of working-class conditions that Marx predicted, capitalism has produced increasingly complex forms of economic inequality and labor market segmentation. While the working class may share common interests at the level of economic system transformation, they often have divergent immediate interests regarding specific policies and workplace conditions. This fragmentation makes forging common class identity and solidarity more difficult. Third is competing sources of identity beyond class. Anticapitalism is fundamentally a class project, but class identities must compete with other identities as bases for collective action. Some non-class identities (based on race, gender, sexuality) also have emancipatory aspirations that share values with anticapitalism but focus on different interests. Other identities (based on racial dominance or exclusionary nationalism) may generate interests hostile to emancipatory values. Right-wing populism has successfully mobilized some working-class support around such exclusionary identities, partly due to the failure of traditional left parties to offer compelling alternatives to neoliberalism. Navigating these challenges requires strategies adapted to specific contexts, as both social conditions and political institutions vary enormously across times and places. However, some general guidelines emerge from this analysis. First, values should be central to progressive politics—making explicit the commitment to equality, democracy, and solidarity provides a unifying framework. Second, these values can connect class interests with other identity-interests sharing emancipatory aspirations, treating so-called "identity politics" as integral to anticapitalism rather than secondary concerns. Third, democracy should receive particular emphasis, as it represents a unifying objective for people beyond those immediately drawn to anticapitalism. Fourth, political strategies should combine state-centered and civil society initiatives, recognizing that eroding capitalism depends on both changing rules from above and building alternatives from below. The expansion of the social and solidarity economy, cooperatives, and peer-to-peer production remains essential alongside political campaigns for progressive state policies. In the early twenty-first century, widespread disaffection with existing economic and political systems creates both dangers and opportunities. While right-wing populism has gained ground in many places, the potential also exists for new progressive politics combining economic democracy with inclusive solidarity. Building effective collective actors for such a project requires connecting diverse identities and interests through shared values while developing practical alternatives that demonstrate another world is possible.

Summary

Anticapitalism in the twenty-first century requires moving beyond traditional revolutionary strategies toward a more nuanced approach of eroding capitalism's dominance. This entails building democratic, egalitarian economic alternatives within capitalism's ecosystem while simultaneously using state power to expand the space for these alternatives. The normative foundation for this project rests on three interconnected value clusters: equality/fairness (equal access to conditions for flourishing), democracy/freedom (meaningful participation in decisions affecting one's life), and community/solidarity (cooperation based on mutual concern rather than narrow self-interest). The pathway forward involves combining multiple strategic logics: resisting capitalism's harms through social movements, escaping capitalism by building alternative economic relations, taming capitalism through state regulations, and incrementally dismantling aspects of capitalist power. This symbiotic approach recognizes that transformative change emerges through the interaction between bottom-up initiatives and top-down policies, gradually shifting power relations rather than through sudden ruptures. While this strategy faces significant challenges—including the capitalist bias of state institutions, the fragmentation of potential political constituencies, and the difficulty of building durable collective actors—it offers a realistic vision for progressively expanding economic democracy. By focusing on concrete democratic alternatives already emerging within our current reality, anticapitalism becomes not merely a critique of existing arrangements but a practical project for creating a more just, democratic and solidaristic world.

About Author

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Erik Olin Wright

Erik Olin Wright was an American analytical Marxist sociologist, specializing in social stratification, and in egalitarian alternative futures to capitalism. He was the (2012) President of the American Sociological Association.Erik Olin Wright received two BAs (from Harvard College in 1968, and from Balliol College in 1970), and the PhD from University of California, Berkeley, in 1976. Since that time, he has been a professor of sociology at University of Wisconsin - Madison.Wright has been described as an "influential new left theorist." His work is concerned mainly with the study of social classes, and in particular with the task of providing an update to and elaboration of the Marxist concept of class, in order to enable Marxist and non-Marxist researchers alike to use 'class' to explain and predict people's material interests, lived experiences, living conditions, incomes, organizational capacities and willingness to engage in collective action, political leanings, etc. In addition, he has attempted to develop class categories that would allow researchers to compare and contrast the class structures and dynamics of different advanced capitalist and 'post-capitalist' societies.

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