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Erik Olin Wright.

I had considered posting about this as well but after a search decided was probably not worth it. Hope i was wrong. He writes about his impending death in the same relentlessly analytical manner as his research. I have always appreciated his continuing involvement in writing about class in the contemporary world whilst not being too keen on his wider approach - an approach that i'm glad he's stuck to over the decades though. It shows real commitment not to go chasing after each new passing intellectual fancy.
 
butchersapron said:
I had considered posting about this as well but after a search decided was probably not worth it. Hope i was wrong. He writes about his impending death in the same relentlessly analytical manner as his research. I have always appreciated his continuing involvement in writing about class in the contemporary world whilst not being too keen on his wider approach - an approach that i'm glad he's stuck to over the decades though. It shows real commitment not to go chasing after each new passing intellectual fancy.
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Would it be fair to say he was the most "marxist" of the "analytical marxists"? I mean, G.A. Cohen's defence of uncle charlie's theory of history is really G.A. Cohen's theory of history - but EOW was somebody who really did try to combine the research agenda of classical marxism with the methodological individualism of the AM crowd (at least that's how I remember him - tell me if I've got that completely wrong).
 
Immanuel Wallerstein died last night. Maybe this thread could become a graveyard for people who probably wouldn't get too much interest in a thread?
 
The new/final EO Wright book looks interesting...from the review I read it sounds like it makes the case that the traditional (crude?) emphasis on class for meaningful social change is outdated, and shared values have become more important as class formations have splintered. I doubt he doesn't reject class completely. Im curious to read it when it comes out.
Verso
 
redsquirrel said:
Anyone read/reading this? I'm about halfway through. Something of a frustrating read IMO.
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I'm on the last chapter, should finish on my commute today - i look forward to chatting about it when I'm done. Though that said im really busy the next two weeks but will definitely come back to it. I expect I agree with it more than you do. Broadly there's a lot i like and I often feel like its expressing my own thoughts back to me in a way clearer than I had previously understood them... that said there's one major 'plot hole' about "eroding capitalism", which may yet be filled by the end, but casts a bit of a shadow over it.

I think its important to read the whole thing within the context of what he says in the intro: he was writing this facing a possibly terminal illness, in what was in fact the last year of his life, and I think it come across a little rushed as a result and maybe loses something in style and presentation. But the key thing are the ideas and I think its very clear what they are.

ETA: I got that wrong - the book ends with an obituary and it says he started writing it in 2016 but only finished it in his last year, post diagnosis. Likely wrong to say it was rushed then. But felt it could've been just a little bit longer ... sad
 
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Wright is quite clear that this is a book aimed at readers new to many of the concepts he is discussing and that the 2nd, uncompleted, part was for those readers with a knowledge of the background topics. And it would be unfair to criticise it for not being the book I would like it to be, the 2nd of those books rather than the 1st (though I would ask how many of the people who pick up and read this book are going to be coming to it without background knowledge).

Even so, a book aimed at a general audience can still be too simplistic, and when some of that simplicity seems to consist of creating a set of crude straw men to knock down and ignoring obvious gaps in arguments then its hard not to accuse the author of a certain amount of intellectual dishonesty.
 
I mean this is as crude a picture of revolutionary socialism as you sometimes see on U75
Erik Olin Wright said:
The problem for a revolutionary party, therefore, is to be in a position to take advantage of the opportunity created by such system-level crises to lead a mass mobilization to seize state power, either through elections or through an insurrectionary overthrow of the existing regime. Once in control of the state, the first task is to rapidly refashion the state itself to make it a suitable weapon of ruptural transformation, and then use that power to repress the opposition of the dominant classes and their allies, destroy the pivotal power structures of capitalism and build the necessary institutions for the long-term development of an alternative economic system.
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If a major part of your book is to do with the arguments for reformist socialism vs revolutionary socialism (which at its heart HTBAAIT21C is) then you owe it to both the tradition and your readers to give a proper discussion of both tendencies. Admittedly the above is an idealised logic of "Smashing capitalism" but even so, its so crude as to be a caricature.
 
Finished it now. Have to say found it very disappointing.

Once question for those with a better knowledge of Marx than me (butchersapron, danny la rouge, Pickman's model, Smokeandsteam, Louis MacNeice apols if I've missed people off.) Is the statement below an accurate summary of Marx's views IYO?
Wright said:
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.
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(NB: There is no citation given for the above claim)
 
redsquirrel said:
Finished it now. Have to say found it very disappointing.

Once question for those with a better knowledge of Marx than me (butchersapron, danny la rouge, Pickman's model, Smokeandsteam, Louis MacNeice apols if I've missed people off.) Is the statement below an accurate summary of Marx's views IYO?

(NB: There is no citation given for the above claim)
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He's probably thinking of the class-in-itself/class-for-itself distinction discussed in this section of the Poverty of Philosophy. The Poverty of Philosophy— Abstracts (Chpt. 2)

It's useful to read that in the knowledge that in Capital Marx notes the contradiction inside capital in that it needs an educated and able workforce in order to carry out the work, but that it does not want the workforce to become too rounded in that education. This discussion is in Section 9 of this part of Capital Vol 1: Economic Manuscripts: Capital Vol. I — Chapter Fifteen

In my edition of the book, it's pp617-619, including footnotes.

The reading in the paragraph you quote would seem to me to hint at owing more to Lenin's interpretation of Marx than one I'd subscribe to. I don't think Marx required outside actors to work towards the class becoming a class-for-itself. But without reading the rest of the context of the Wright passage, I don't know how much he means somebody "gets" the class to understand, or whether circumstances cause the understanding to develop.
 
It's an awful clunky reading. But it is possible to get that from Marx. You have to ignore a while lot of other stuff to do so though. This is exactly the reading of the 2nd international and it's Leninist progeny though. And i think one of the ways they managed to make it less clunky is exactly through the use of idea class in itself and class for itself. That was the cover for much of this 20th century vanguardism. For Wright it just comes from his need for clear lines, hyper rationalism etc the analytical Marxist tradition.
 
Cheers butchers

Anyway quick summary of my thought on the book just in case anyone is interested.

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The first two chapters of the book defining the problems capitalism and on the basis they need to be challenged are pretty good. There’s not a lot there that most readers won’t be familiar with but it’s discussed a clear manner and the characterisation of the three “normative foundations” on which EOW’s anticapitalism is founded - equality/fairness, democracy/freedom and community/solidarity are nicely drawn.

It’s the 3rd chapter, “Varieties of Anticapitalism" where things start to go downhill. EOW divides anticapitalist into five different “strategic logics”
  • smashing capitalism (effectively revolutionary socialism)
  • dismantling capitalism (reformist socialism)
  • taming capitalism (social democracy)
  • resisting capitalism (grassroots activism)
  • escaping capitalism (building alternatives e.g, workers co-operatives, open licenses, DIY movement etc)
He then uses the analogy of playing a game to illustrate these strategies - you can play a different game altogether (smashing), change the rules of the game (dismantling, taming), or make changes to the moves of the game (resisting, escaping).

“EOW” said:
Conflicts over what game to play are revolutionary versus counterrevolutionary politics. The stakes focus on whether we are playing the game of capitalism or socialism. Within the game of capitalism, reformist versus reactionary politics constitute conflicts over the variable rules of the game. The stakes then concern what kind of capitalism shall dominate the economic system—for example, social democratic capitalism with rules that reduce risk and vulnerability and protect the collective organization of workers, or neoliberal capitalism, with rules that protect corporate power, prevent redistributive state interventions in the market and reduce the production of public goods. Finally, conflicts over the moves in the game are mundane, interest-group politics, in which individuals and collectivities adopt strategies in pursuit of their economic interests, taking the existing rules of the game as fixed.
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Now while I think the specific characterisations EOW draws are often poor (see above post of revolution, resisting capitalism is very roughly sketched and easily merges into other strategies, and he has peculiar insistence on placing anarchism in the resisting and escaping strategies) his overall point that there are a variety of different strategies operating at different levels that anticapitalists have used to oppose capitalism is fair enough.

But EOW then goes on to claim that there is a new strategic approach beginning to be developed - eroding capitalism which combines elements of all the above strategies except revolutionary socialism.

“EOW” said:
This strategic complex combines the progressive social democratic and democratic socialist vision of changing, from above, the rules of the game within which capitalism operates in order to neutralize its worst harms and create alternatives anchored in the state, with more anarchist visions of creating, from below, new economic visions of creating, from below, new economic relations that embody emancipatory aspirations.
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Again I, and IMO most socialists whether revolutionary or reformist, would agree that within capitalism “more democratic, egalitarian, participatory economic relations [are being built] in the spaces and cracks within this complex system.”. In fact one of my main criticisms of EOW vision of eroding capitalism is that it is something that has been going on from the start! The working class has always used a variety of strategies and tactics to advance itself. EOW even partly admits this when he accepts that revolutionaries not only engaged in smashing capitalism but also build up organisations to resist/tame/dismantle capitalism. As such declaiming eroding capitalism as a new strategy seems rather a case of the emperors new clothes, even more so when the, admittedly partial, examples of this “new” strategy given are

“EOW” said:
But impulses in this direction can be found in political parties that have close ties to progressive social movements, such as Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain. Eroding capitalism might also resonate with youthful currents within some established center-left parties—for example, Bernie Sanders’s supporters in the Democratic Party during the 2016 American presidential election or the Corbyn forces within the British Labour Party.
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So we have one social democrat/democratic socialist political party and two SD currents within long term centre-left as examples of the new strategy. And then there is Syriza, I know that this was written a few years ago but even so you would have to be wilfully blind not to see the complete collapse of any progressive politics within Syriza, that from any opposition to neo-liberalism it has in fact become the agent of attacking workers. If that is eroding capitalism then frankly I think we are better off without it.

But it’s not just that the vision of eroding capitalism is not particularly “new”, it is not actually consistent with EOW’s own logic. EOW likens capitalism (or any economic system) to an eco-system.

Social systems, in general, are better thought of as ecosystems of loosely connected interacting parts rather than as organisms in which all of the parts serve a function. In such an ecosystem, it is possible to introduce an alien species of fish not “naturally” found in the lake. Some alien species will instantly get gobbled up. Others may survive in some small niche in the lake, but not change much about daily life in the ecosystem. But occasionally an alien species may thrive and eventually displace the dominant species.The strategic vision of eroding capitalism imagines introducing the most vigorous varieties of emancipatory species of noncapitalist economic activity into the ecosystem of capitalism, nurturing their development by protecting their niches and figuring out ways of expanding their habitats. The ultimate hope is that eventually these alien species can spill out of their narrow niches and transform the character of the ecosystem as a whole.
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And while I might quibble with terminology and the nature of the analogy I would not disagree too much with the general point. But within this logic there is absolutely no reason (bar EOW’s own bias) to rule out smashing capitalism as part of the eroding capitalism strategy.

Erosion may be a continual, gradual process but it is not an even one. The waterfall gradual erodes the ground underneath to a point until the overhang spectacular collapses. The lake may be gradually becoming home to different species but at a certain tipping point the switch from one ecosystem to another can be dramatic and fast. You might very well rule out smashing capitalism as a major part of the strategy of eroding capitalism at the present but why reject it completely?

The fact is that for all the wordage and proclamations of a new 21st century strategy what EOW is actually arguing for is (a return to) democratic socialism/social democracy. It is not a coincidence that the examples of his new vision are all (sections of) political parties, the state is at the centre of his politics. Now I don’t have a problem with someone arguing for democratic socialism and/or social democracy as the method for opposing capitalism but if that is what you arguing for lets not (1) pretend that it is new and (2) make claims about the realism of your path, in contrast to the unrealistic nature of revolutionary politics, when you haven’t addressed the central point any reformist needs to deal with - why would social democracy provide a method for overcoming/resisting capitalism now when it has not in the last 40 (or even 140 years)?
 
After taking a break for various reason I back to Workers and Capital today and saw this statement
Tront said:
Let’s set down one premise before anything else: namely, that a research project which wants to continue the discourse on the contemporary validity of the fundamental affirmations of Marxism has to engage with Marx not in his time, but in our own. Capital should be judged on the basis of the capitalism of today. Thus, all the ridiculous petty-bourgeois banalities asserting that Marx’s work is both the product and explanation of a society of small-scale commodity production will finally fall away once and for all.
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Which to me seems to have a particular relevance to some of Wright's arguments (and those that insist Marx is, and cannot be, relevant today)
This was certainly the hope of socialists in the late nineteenth century and first part of the twentieth century, who believed, following Marx, that increasing interdependency and homogeneity within the working class would generate an increasing sense of class solidarity. The community of workers, then, would be the basis for the eventual transformation of capitalism into a new form of society grounded in the community of all people.
While solidarities do certainly emerge in the working class, these grand hopes were never realized. Instead of a trajectory of working-class homogenization and deepening interdependence, the dynamics of capitalism have produced ever more complex forms of economic inequality and intensified forms of labor market competition and fragmentation.
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butchersapron said:
It's an awful clunky reading. But it is possible to get that from Marx. You have to ignore a while lot of other stuff to do so though. This is exactly the reading of the 2nd international and it's Leninist progeny though. And i think one of the ways they managed to make it less clunky is exactly through the use of idea class in itself and class for itself. That was the cover for much of this 20th century vanguardism. For Wright it just comes from his need for clear lines, hyper rationalism etc the analytical Marxist tradition.
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hmm, not so sure - he is talking about the mid-19th century Marx, ie before the Paris Commune and the sea change in Marx's thought that brought about. Prior to the PC Marx did stick to a more 'traditional' approach of the party leading the class through those 'ideological struggles,' it was only the experience of the commune that changed that.
 
belboid said:
hmm, not so sure - he is talking about the mid-19th century Marx, ie before the Paris Commune and the sea change in Marx's thought that brought about.
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I don't have a good enough knowledge of Marx to agree/disgree with you or butchersapron. But for Wright, at least within this book, there is no division between pre- and post-PC Marx, just contentions that Marx believed X or Y.
 
redsquirrel said:
I know I was very critical of his latest but his Wright's earlier work worth checking out?
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Yes, I think so. Like I say, I haven’t read this one, but I think Class Counts is worth looking at. He writes very clearly.

belboid is of course right that you can see the differences between early, mid and late Marx. I can’t say whether Wright makes any such distinction here, as I haven’t read the latest book.
 
belboid said:
hmm, not so sure - he is talking about the mid-19th century Marx, ie before the Paris Commune and the sea change in Marx's thought that brought about. Prior to the PC Marx did stick to a more 'traditional' approach of the party leading the class through those 'ideological struggles,' it was only the experience of the commune that changed that.
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So it is possible to get that from Marx if you ignore other stuff in his thought then?
 
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butchersapron said:
So it is possible to get that from Marx if you ignore other stuff in his thought then?
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It's possible to get it if you are just talking about the Marx of around the manifesto. If he is saying that Marx's position never changed or developed, he's clearly talking out of his arse.
 
belboid said:
If he is saying that Marx's position never changed or developed, he's clearly talking out of his arse.
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He never makes any explicit assertion to that effect but he also does not make explicit the fact that Marx's positions changed over time. You just have statements like
EOW said:
This was certainly the hope of socialists in the late nineteenth century and first part of the twentieth century, who believed, following Marx, that increasing interdependency and homogeneity within the working class would generate an increasing sense of class solidarity
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