How to Be an Anticapitalist in the 21st Century summary

Many anticapitalists would argue that issues like poverty and inequality aren’t just social problems that plague our current economic system. They’re moral failings that deserve condemnation. 

It's wrong that so many people suffer from want while a small group of elites live in luxury, these anticapitalists would say. It’s even worse that many of those impoverished people are children, who are undeniably blameless for their economic situation. And it’s downright perverse that capitalism perpetuates this injustice while producing more than enough wealth to eliminate it. 

Are you the CEO of a multinational corporation? Then your class interests are clearly in favor of capitalism. Or do you work in a sweatshop? Then your class interests are clearly against it. 

But if you’re like most people in the developed world these days, you’re probably somewhere in between those two extremes. Consider a highly educated professional working in a well-paid occupation. She experiences a mixture of upsides and downsides under capitalism – a good salary but long working hours, perhaps. That means she also has a mixture of class interests both for and against the current economic system. 

Why do you do the things you do? What motivates and guides your decisions? Unless you’re an imaginary person straight out of an economics textbook, the answer isn’t your economic self-interests alone. To at least some degree, you’re also influenced by your moral values. 

That’s especially true of people’s political activism. Consider Friedrich Engels – Karl Marx’s closest comrade and coauthor of The Communist Manifesto. If ever there was an anticapitalist, Engels was one. And yet he was also the son of a wealthy capitalist who owned a manufacturing company. According to classical Marxism, Engels’s class interests would have been completely in favor of capitalism. So why did he oppose it? Because he found it morally offensive. 

Alright, so class interests aren’t the be-all, end-all of anticapitalist politics. Values and identities matter too, and class interests don’t even cover the full extent of people’s overall self-interests. 

People can have all sorts of other interests related to their race, gender, and various other aspects of their identities. Meanwhile, class interests themselves are multifaceted and contradictory, thanks to contemporary capitalism having such a fragmented class structure. 

If we want to mount a moral argument against capitalism, we can’t rely on claims of fact alone. For instance, we can’t just say that poverty still exists under capitalism. We need to be able to give a reason why this problem is morally unacceptable in the first place. 

To do that, we need a normative foundation for our argument – a set of core values we can use to judge the current system and its possible alternatives. For this purpose, the author proposes three pairs of values: equality/fairness, democracy/freedom, and community/solidarity. Each pair is joined by a slash because they’re like two sides of the same coin. Together, they form the moral bedrock on which we can build our anticapitalist politics. 

With our normative foundation in place, we’re now ready to build our moral argument against capitalism. All we have to do is take our three pairs of values and see how capitalism measures up to them. 

Let’s start with community/solidarity. This one is easy to make short work of. As pro-capitalists would be the first to admit, capitalism encourages people to think and act in highly competitive, individualistic, and selfish ways. It’s a system that pits everyone against each other, splits people into “winners” and “losers,” and urges them to just look out for themselves. These behaviors and mentalities are directly at odds with the values of community/solidarity, which are animated by the spirit of cooperation and the sense that “we’re all in this together.”

“All right,” a skeptic might say. “Maybe capitalism does fall short of all those values you’ve set forth. But what’s the alternative? Socialism? Countries like the USSR tried that in the twentieth century, and it failed miserably. Not only were they ruled by oppressive regimes, but their economic systems didn’t even work. That’s why they collapsed. Surely you don’t want to live in a place like the Soviet Union, do you?” 

In a word, no. While societies like the USSR claimed to be champions of socialism, they were really examples of an economic system that could more accurately be called statism – a system where the economy is controlled by the state. We don’t want that. But there’s another option: democratic socialism. 

Worker cooperatives would be just one of many possible features of a democratic socialist society. 

Participatory budgeting committees could allow residents of cities to decide for themselves how public funds are spent in their own neighborhoods. Peer-to-peer collaborative production networks could allow innovators to link up and build things together on a similar model as Wikipedia. Nonprofits, mutual societies, and a variety of other local community organizations could help people meet their needs for childcare, eldercare, and affordable housing. 

Imagine you’re walking toward a lake. From a distance, it looks like a single, unified object – just a big body of water. But if you get closer, you’ll see that it’s a complex ecosystem, full of different creatures, plants, and physical elements like rocks and soil. 

Economies are like that too. Each of them is a complicated web of diverse enterprises, associations, and institutions. Some of these entities lean more toward the capitalist, statist, or democratic socialist end of the spectrum than others. And many of them lean in multiple directions at once. For instance, a corporation could be owned by private investors but governed by a board of directors whose members are elected by its workers. 

So what should we do? Just sit back and let the process of erosion do its thing? 

Not quite. We need to give it time, but we also need to nurture it. Among other things, that means advocating for certain forms of state intervention in the economy, which we’ll look at in a moment. 

With measures like universal basic income, we’ve only scratched the surface of the possible building blocks of a democratic socialist future. But rather than going through a laundry list of other possibilities, let’s end by stepping back and asking a question that looks at the bigger picture: How do we go about putting these building blocks into place? 

Classical Marxism primarily advocated a single strategy: smashing capitalism. Destroy and replace the system in one fell swoop, they argued. But in the twentieth century, this led to many undesirable consequences in countries like the Soviet Union. We don’t want to repeat their mistakes, so we should reject our revolutionary impulses in favor of more gradual approaches to changing the system.