How to Be an Anticapitalist in the 21st Century

Capitalism stands as the dominant economic system of our time, yet it generates profound inequalities, environmental destruction, and democratic deficits that demand serious examination. The conventional wisdom suggests there is no viable alternative, but this assumption deserves rigorous challenge. A systematic exploration of capitalism's inherent contradictions reveals pathways toward more democratic, egalitarian, and sustainable economic arrangements that could better serve human flourishing.

The analysis proceeds through strategic thinking that combines moral critique with practical political strategy. Rather than relying solely on abstract philosophical arguments or historical precedents, the approach integrates value-based assessment with concrete institutional alternatives already emerging within capitalist societies. This methodology offers a framework for understanding how transformative change might occur through the gradual erosion of capitalist dominance rather than its sudden overthrow, making the discussion immediately relevant to contemporary political movements and policy debates.

Three fundamental values provide the foundation for evaluating any economic system: equality and fairness, democracy and freedom, and community and solidarity. These interconnected principles offer criteria for assessing whether social institutions enable human flourishing or create systematic barriers to it. Equality demands that all people have broadly equal access to the material and social conditions necessary for a flourishing life, extending beyond mere equal opportunity to encompass genuine equal access throughout people's lives. This standard recognizes that individuals cannot be held fully responsible for circumstances largely beyond their control.

Democracy and freedom, often seen as distinct or even conflicting values, actually reflect a common underlying principle of self-determination. Freedom applies when decisions affect only the decision-maker, while democracy becomes relevant when decisions impact others. Both values require that people have meaningful access to participate in decisions affecting their lives, whether in personal choices or collective governance. The boundary between private and public spheres must itself be subject to democratic deliberation.

Community and solidarity emphasize cooperation motivated not merely by self-interest but by genuine concern for others' well-being and moral obligation. This value manifests in everyday community interactions and collective action for common goals. While community can sometimes foster exclusion of outsiders or conformity, when properly articulated with equality and democracy, it enhances both individual flourishing and collective capacity for positive change.

These values provide the normative framework for critiquing capitalism and evaluating alternatives. They are not abstract ideals but practical standards that can guide institutional design and policy choices. Their integration challenges the assumption that economic systems must sacrifice one value to achieve others, instead pointing toward arrangements that could advance all three simultaneously.

Historical anticapitalist movements have employed five distinct strategic approaches, each with different assumptions about how social transformation occurs. Smashing capitalism represents the revolutionary approach, arguing that the system is fundamentally unreformable and must be destroyed before alternatives can emerge. This strategy proved catastrophically unsuccessful in the twentieth century, producing authoritarian outcomes rather than emancipatory ones. The complexity of modern societies makes ruptural transformation both politically implausible and likely to generate chaos rather than democratic alternatives.

Dismantling capitalism takes a reformist approach, gradually introducing socialist elements through electoral politics and state action. This strategy envisions an extended transition period with mixed economies combining capitalist and socialist institutions. While initially promising after World War II, this approach lost momentum as capitalist dynamism reasserted itself and neoliberalism gained political ascendancy. The structural constraints of global capital mobility and domestic political opposition proved difficult to overcome sustainably.

Taming capitalism accepts the system's continued existence while seeking to neutralize its worst harms through regulation and redistribution. Social democratic policies in the mid-twentieth century demonstrated this approach's potential, significantly reducing inequality and insecurity. However, neoliberalism's subsequent success in rolling back these achievements raises questions about whether capitalist systems can be permanently tamed or whether such reforms are historically contingent and reversible.

Resisting capitalism encompasses various forms of opposition that do not seek state power directly, from labor organizing to environmental protests. This grassroots approach addresses immediate harms and builds solidarity among affected communities. Escaping capitalism involves creating alternative economic relationships in available spaces, from cooperatives to intentional communities. While often dismissed as marginal, such initiatives can serve as laboratories for different ways of organizing economic life and prefigure broader transformations.

Democratic socialism represents an economic structure where social power - the capacity to mobilize voluntary collective action - takes precedence over both state power and economic power in organizing production and distribution. This framework reconceptualizes socialism as economic democracy rather than state ownership, opening space for diverse institutional arrangements that embody democratic, egalitarian, and solidaristic values. The vision encompasses multiple building blocks that could combine in various configurations rather than any single institutional blueprint.

Unconditional basic income emerges as a foundational element, providing every legal resident with sufficient income to live above poverty without work requirements. Beyond reducing inequality, UBI would liberate people from dependence on capitalist employment, enabling participation in cooperative enterprises, artistic creation, community activism, and caring work. This transformation of the relationship between work and livelihood could catalyze the expansion of non-capitalist economic activities.

The cooperative market economy encompasses worker cooperatives, credit unions, consumer cooperatives, and other democratically governed enterprises. Technological changes reducing economies of scale in many sectors may enhance cooperatives' viability in the twenty-first century. Supporting institutional changes include public programs for converting capitalist firms to cooperatives, specialized credit institutions, dedicated urban space, and training programs for cooperative management. The social and solidarity economy complements market cooperatives with community-based organizations serving social missions, from care services to local currencies.

Democratizing capitalist firms involves extending workplace democracy through measures like bicameral boards of directors with one chamber elected by workers and another by shareholders. Banking as a public utility would transform money creation from a profit-maximizing activity to one serving broader social priorities. State provision of goods and services, peer-to-peer collaborative production, and knowledge commons represent different forms of non-market organization that could expand significantly in a democratic socialist economy.

The capitalist state poses both the greatest obstacle and the most necessary instrument for democratic transformation. While structurally biased toward supporting capitalism through revenue dependence, elite recruitment patterns, and legal protections for private property, the state also contains internal contradictions that create possibilities for progressive change. State apparatuses vary in their capitalist character, with more democratic institutions embodying greater tensions and uncertainties than purely technocratic ones.

The state faces contradictory functional demands in managing capitalism's self-destructive tendencies. Policies addressing immediate problems may have long-term consequences that weaken capitalist dominance, as occurred with social democratic reforms that strengthened labor power and expanded public alternatives to market provision. The complexity of capitalism's functional requirements means no stable equilibrium exists, creating ongoing opportunities for progressive interventions that solve short-term problems while opening space for democratic alternatives.

Two emerging trends may undermine neoliberalism and create new political possibilities. Climate change adaptation will require massive state investment in public goods and infrastructure, necessarily expanding state economic roles and challenging market fundamentalism. Technological unemployment from automation and artificial intelligence will create social instability that market mechanisms cannot address, potentially making policies like UBI attractive even to capitalist elites as solutions to legitimacy and demand problems.

These symbiotic transformations could simultaneously strengthen capitalism by solving its problems and expand possibilities for democratic alternatives by reducing people's dependence on capitalist employment and creating space for cooperative and community-based economic activities. The key political challenge involves democratizing democracy itself through reversing neoliberal constraints on popular participation, empowering decentralized governance, creating new forms of citizen participation like participatory budgeting, and insulating electoral processes from private wealth through public campaign financing.

Effective collective actors remain essential for any strategy of social transformation, yet their formation faces unprecedented challenges in contemporary capitalist societies. The strategy of eroding capitalism requires coordination between community-based initiatives building alternative economic relationships and political parties capable of changing state policies to expand space for such alternatives. This coordination demands collective actors that can bridge diverse constituencies and sustain long-term political projects across different scales and time horizons.

Three interconnected concepts shape collective actor formation: identities rooted in lived experiences within social structures, interests in solutions to problems people encounter, and values about desirable social arrangements. Class identities that once provided the foundation for anticapitalist politics have become fragmented by capitalism's increasingly complex and differentiated impact on workers. Rather than the homogenization Marx predicted, capitalist development has created diverse experiences of precarity, autonomy, skill, and reward that complicate shared identity formation.

Multiple non-class identities based on race, gender, sexuality, nationality, and other factors compete with class as bases for political mobilization. Some of these identities have emancipatory potential aligned with anticapitalist values, while others, particularly those rooted in racial dominance and exclusionary nationalism, actively oppose egalitarian projects. The rise of right-wing populism reflects partly the political vacuum created by mainstream left parties' embrace of neoliberal assumptions, demonstrating how political context shapes which identities become prominent.

Contemporary collective actor formation must overcome three principal challenges: privatized lives focused on consumption and individual advancement, fragmented class structures that divide rather than unite potential supporters, and competing identities that may conflict with or subordinate class-based appeals. While no general formula exists for resolving these challenges given their context-dependent nature, successful strategies likely require emphasizing shared values that connect diverse identities, treating identity politics as integral rather than secondary, prioritizing democracy as a unifying demand, and recognizing the importance of non-state alternatives alongside electoral politics.

The fundamental insight driving this analysis is that capitalism's dominance can be gradually eroded through the strategic combination of building democratic alternatives within its interstices and using state power to expand the space for such alternatives. This approach rejects both the fantasy of revolutionary rupture and the resignation of permanent capitalist domination, instead identifying realistic pathways for expanding economic democracy that build on existing possibilities and emerging trends. The strategy recognizes that transformation requires both practical institutional alternatives and collective actors capable of sustaining long-term political projects.

The vision offers hope for readers concerned with growing inequality, democratic deficits, and environmental destruction while remaining grounded in rigorous analysis of political possibilities and constraints. Those interested in connecting moral values to practical politics, understanding how progressive change might occur in complex modern societies, or participating in contemporary movements for economic justice will find tools for both understanding current conditions and imagining achievable alternatives that could make capitalism's promise of human flourishing a reality for all rather than a privilege for few.