"How to be an Anticapitalist for the 21st Century" by Erik Olin Wright

On March 23, 2017, Erik Olin Wright spoke about "How to be an Anticapitalist for the 21st Century" as part of the 2016/17 COMPAS Inequality program. The Department of Sociology generously co-sponsored this event.

Abstract: While capitalism has become more destructive both to the lives of people and the health of the environment, it seems to most people an unalterable force of nature. Social democratic hopes of taming capitalism by neutralizing its harmful effects through decisive state regulations have been undermined by the globalization and financialization of capital. Revolutionary ambitions of smashing capitalism through a ruptural seizure of state power, a coercive dissolution of capitalist institutions and their replacement by an emancipatory alternative, lack credibility. Are these the only logics of transformation? There may be a different route that points beyond capitalism: eroding capitalism by building emancipatory alternatives to capitalism in the spaces and cracks within capitalist economies and struggling to defend and expand those spaces.

Erik Olin Wright received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, and taught at the University of Wisconsin. His academic work was centrally concerned with reconstructing the Marxist tradition of social theory and research in ways that attempt to make it more relevant to contemporary concerns and more cogent as a scientific framework of analysis. His empirical research focused especially on the challenging character of class relations in developed capitalist societies. Starting in 1992 he directed the Real Utopias Project, which explores a range of proposals for new institutional designs that embody emancipatory ideals and yet are attentive to issues of pragmatic feasibility. His principle publications include: The Politics of Punishment: A Critical Analysis of Prisons in America; Class, Crisis and the State; Classes; Reconstructing Marxism (with Elliott Sober and Andrew Levine); Interrogating Inequality; Class Counts: Comparative Studies in Class Analysis; and Deepening Democracy: Innovations in Empowered Participatory Governance (with Archon Fung).

The webpage for this event can be found at https://cehv.osu.edu/events/erikolinw....