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Introduction

When I was in the seventh grade, I was fortunate enough to have an older sibling in college to help provide the framework for my own intellectual endeavors. A university senior finishing up a joint degree in Religious Studies and Politics, Naomi had amassed a considerable library that reflected her academic curiosities as a young Jewish leftist. Although I was too young to discriminate between the volumes on her shelves, there were two books with titles that lodged in my mind in the same way that the names of albums circumscribe the imagination of dedicated music fans: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s legendary Communist Manifesto, and Rudolf Bahro’s 1978 work, The Alternative in Eastern Europe.

To this day, I can only begin to surmise why these book titles were so fascinating to me. Perhaps it was because this was the start of the last decade of the Cold War and it was impossible to avoid every name and phrase associated with the conflict becoming a potential gateway to some great realm of ideas. After all, to an inquisitive adolescent living in the United States just before the dawn of the Reagan years, what could have been more compelling than two books outlining the possibilities for utopia from the perspective of communism and the former Soviet Bloc? Even though my reading skills were poor, this much I could intuit. I revelled in the mysterious impenetrability of these two books, knowing somewhere, deep down, that I was holding in my hands the ideological equivalent of forbidden fruit. They felt good. They reminded me of my favorite Black Sabbath records.

It would not be until I actually bought my own copies as an undergraduate student in the late 1980s that I’d move beyond the countercultural mystique these rather awkward books held for me and actively try to understand them. By that time, the pro-democracy movement had already started to take root in Eastern Europe, and Bahro’s anti-Stalinist notion of a “third way” for socialism would not figure prominently until the mid-1990s, when it became a catch-all phrase employed by former communists in Western Europe to describe their new-found appreciation of the free market.

“What are these books about?” I once asked Naomi in the spring of 1980.

“Oh,” she replied, “that first book inspired most of the communist revolutions over the past hundred years, and the book by Bahro is about what went wrong, and how a more humane socialism might be achieved.”

Looking at the trajectory of my own interests over the years, I find it highly ironic how two volumes I became fascinated with as a teenager came to metaphorically book-end the parameters of my own political thinking, as well as the opinions and perspectives espoused by most of the essays herein. While the historical circumstances informing the basis of this collection are entirely different than those of Marx and Engels during the late 1840s (and those of the German Democratic Republic in the late 1970s), what they have in common is a suspicion about the limitations that market economies impose on people’s freedom, and a decidely heterodox Marxist slant, informed by the varieties of progressive intellectual currents which contributed to the rearticulation of materialist thinking after the 1960s.

The underlying theme which ties this book together is a sense that a healthy respect for democracy requires an appreciation of the forces that inhibit its realization and prevent its logic from being extended to every sector of modern society.

This is not meant to suggest that this book is a nostalgic invocation of Marxism. The Anti-Capitalism Reader is not intended to be a comprehensive representation of the varieties of anti-capitalist movements making themselves felt around the world. To accomplish that task would require a far different, more exhaustive, multi-volume set than this modest collection could ever hope to achieve. Rather, these pieces are contemporary reflections on the role that the market continues to play in our lives, on the ways in which we might construe critical responses to it.

This collection is broken up into four sections. The first, My Definition Is This, concerns itself with defining “anti-capitalism.” The second, Done By the Forces of Nature, attempts to break down the ways in which some people critically interrogate the political effects of the market in terms of revolutionary social movements; struggles for national self-determination; popular conceptions of the “freedoms” granted to indviduals by the market; the redefintion of imperialism and sovereignty in a post-9/11 world; as well as the insufficiency of historical discourses about human rights.

Section three, Open Up the Iron Gate, grapples with how it is that people react to the market, both in terms of progressive forms of resistance—developing alternative methods of economic exchange, engaging in creative and symbolic forms of protest, and reconsidering the language that the left uses to express itself—to more alienated, and yet no less critical forms of anti-market social movements and ideologies, such as religious fundamentalism. After all, anti-capitalism is not the sole domain of the left. If anti-capitalism has any articulation equally eloquent to that made by progressives, it is in religion.

The focus of the fourth and final section, Culture and the Angels of History, is devoted exclusively to what more orthodox, labor-oriented leftists have historically stressed as the least important zone for anti-market activism: culture. As many a scientific, facts-and-numbers-driven revolutionary continues to insist—and here it is worth echoing the words of James Carville, quoted again in Charlie Bertsch’s essay, “Anti-Capitalist Taste”—“it’s the economy, stupid!” According to the contributors to this concluding portion of the book, this dynamic has always been true. Culture is consistently conditioned by the economic and historical circumstances in which it is produced, and like any symbolic reflection of the world, it is more often than not deployed to mystify inequality and represent the perennially unjust status quo as though it were natural.

But to allude to two highly influental intellectuals cited in this volume—Jürgen Habermas and Antonio Gramsci—culture is also a synonym for the social space in which critical reflection can and must take place, because culture can always become a material force. This insight is already taken for granted by those critics of cultural activism who choose only to read culture as a conistently symbolic realm of total affirmation. Like many materialist theorists of culture before them, and in the tradition of good dialectical analysis, this section’s contributors consistently reverse this equation, because they rightly believe that culture is the space where it remains possible to have something resembling a public sphere—a space for exchanging critical thoughts, a space where it is still possible to create new constellations of ideas and beliefs in order to critically influence the common sense of our age.

In essence, this sums up exactly what this book is about.

Joel Schalit

San Fransisco, August 2002