[TEASER] Four Ways to Be Anticapitalist

Upstream

Politics, Society & Culture, News

4.9 • 1.8K Ratings

🗓️ 7 January 2025

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This is a free preview of the episode "Four Ways to Be Anticapitalist." You can listen to the full episode by subscribing to our Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/upstreampodcast

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Can capitalism be reformed? Or does it have to be smashed? This is an age-old question that has generated much discussion, debate, and disagreement on the left. In this episode of our Patreon reading series, Della joins Robert to discuss these questions within the context of a Jacobin piece written by the late Erik Olin Wright, "How to Be an Anticaptialist Today."

Can capitalism be tamed? Can it be eroded? Can it be escaped? Or must it be smashed? In exploring and answering these questions, Della and Robert cover a wide variety of topics from historical materialism, Marxism, Leninism, anarchism, prefigurative politics, and much, much more. We synthesize learnings from many of our recent episodes, explore how we've developed in our analysis since some of our older episodes, bring in explorations of history and theory, and explore what has changed and shifted in the last decade of capitalism in the West.

Further resources:

"How to e an Anticapitalist Today," Erik Olin Wright
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values, Robert Pirsig
The Long Transition Towards Socialism and the End of Capitalism, Torkil Lauesen
The State and Revolution, V. I. Lenin
The Revolutionary Science of Marxism-Leninism, Joshua Sykes

Related epsides:

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everybody, Robbie here with another Patreon episode. And this time I'm actually joined by Della.
0:09.1	Hey, Della. Hey. How are you doing today?
0:12.1	I'm doing great. I'm so excited to have this conversation on this piece. So thanks Robbie for
0:18.2	being willing to dive down deep into it. Absolutely. And since this was a
0:23.3	piece that you suggested, and because I know it's something that you've been thinking a lot about
0:28.3	and have also mentioned in a couple of our previous episodes, why don't you go ahead and just
0:34.8	share an introduction to the piece and maybe whatever else you want on,
0:38.6	whatever points you want to make about it just to get us started.
0:41.8	Yeah.
0:42.2	So the article that we'll be reading and then giving commentary on is titled, How to Be an Anti-Capitalist
0:49.9	Today.
0:51.3	And it was written by Eric Olin Wright.
0:57.3	It was published in Jacobin magazine, and it was published in 2015. So it is older. But I heard it from someone named Alex Valser, so
1:05.8	appreciation to him, who I'm supervising his dissertation in donut economics, and he offered it as this frame of thinking
1:14.5	about anti-capitalism. And when I just heard the idea of these four ways to be anti-capitalist
1:21.9	today, I just found the breakdown really helpful for thinking about all the interviews and documentaries
1:29.4	and things that you and I, Robbie, have explored on upstream. And so I thought it would be a
1:34.9	great piece to bring and to analyze and also just to think about together as a community.
1:42.8	So just a little about Eric Olin Wright. So he was an American
1:47.1	analytical Marxist sociologist. He actually passed away in 2019. And we had the opportunity to
1:55.0	interview him before he passed away actually in 2019. So he was a part of our universal basic income part two documentary.
2:04.2	So glad that we got the chance to speak with him and happy to be reviewing his work now.
	...

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