# How to Be an Anticapitalist in the 21st Century by Erik Olin Wright - Blinkist What’s in it for me? A fresh take on what anticapitalism can mean in the modern era. Since the 2008 financial crisis, the world has witnessed a resurgence of anticapitalist political movements – from Occupy Wall Street in New York to Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece. Members of these movements believe that capitalism is not only deeply flawed, but can be replaced by an alternative system.  Of course, their skeptics have questions: Is that really possible? And in light of the twentieth century’s failed experiments in Communism, is it desirable?  The American sociologist Erik Olin Wright thought the answer to both of those questions was an emphatic yes. From the 1970s through the 2010s, he wrote numerous books and articles on the subject. They turned him into one of the most influential proponents of Analytical Marxism – a cross-disciplinary school of thought encompassing history, economics, sociology, and philosophy. Its aim was to take the ideas of traditional Marxism and get rid of the “bullshit,” as one of its practitioners memorably put it.  How to Be an Anticapitalist was Wright’s attempt to make Analytical Marxism accessible to all; he died of leukemia shortly after its completion. These are the blinks to the final work of one of the seminal sociologists of our time. In these blinks, you’ll learn why anticapitalism needs to go beyond classical Marxism;  why the Soviet Union wasn’t really socialist; and  why socialism is compatible with a market economy. Although capitalism can claim many successes, it also has many failings. “How to be an anticapitalist in the twenty-first century?!” a supporter of capitalism might exclaim. How could any reasonable person be such a thing in this day and age? After all, our pro-capitalist might argue, just look at capitalism’s track record. Since the mid-twentieth century, the developed world has enjoyed massive increases in overall prosperity, economic growth, labor productivity, technological innovation, average life spans, living standards, and the range of consumer goods and services available to ordinary people.  Sure, there’s still poverty and economic inequality – but thanks to capitalism, even lower-income people can enjoy modern conveniences like indoor plumbing, washing machines, and televisions. Meanwhile, all of these benefits are increasingly spreading to the developing world as well. Why would anyone oppose such a successful economic system?  The key message here is: Although capitalism can claim many successes, it also has many failings.  To begin with, the problems of poverty and economic inequality can’t be waved away so easily. Basic modern conveniences aside, millions of people in the US alone suffer from malnutrition, ill-health, unsafe neighborhoods, and other serious issues related to poverty – and all of this despite living in one of the richest capitalistic societies on earth.  Furthermore, poverty and inequality call into question all those material successes our pro-capitalist touted earlier. Sure, capitalism has produced tremendous increases in economic growth, labor productivity, and so forth – but who gets to benefit from these achievements? Mostly the elite. Because of inequality, the majority of people only get to enjoy capitalism’s bounty to a limited and disproportional degree, compared to the wealthiest members of society. And because of poverty, many people struggle to even meet their most fundamental human needs.  Meanwhile, the majority of people also have to pay a heavy price for all these “benefits” that are mostly reserved for the rich. To produce all that prosperity that flows upward, most working adults are stuck in boring, unfulfilling jobs. To make way for all that innovation that boosts the bottom lines of big businesses, many people lose their livelihoods and get thrown into destitution as their jobs become “obsolete.” And to promote all that economic growth that feeds capitalism’s insatiable desire for profit, our current economic system is destroying the environment, causing climate change, and endangering our very ability to continue living on our planet.  It all adds up to a pretty serious list of problems. Classical Marxism argues that opposition to capitalism should be based on workers’ class interests, not moral values. Many anticapitalists would argue that issues like poverty and inequality aren’t just social problems that plague our current economic system. They’re moral failings that deserve condemnation.  It's wrong that so many people suffer from want while a small group of elites live in luxury, these anticapitalists would say. It’s even worse that many of those impoverished people are children, who are undeniably blameless for their economic situation. And it’s downright perverse that capitalism perpetuates this injustice while producing more than enough wealth to eliminate it.  Now, you might expect some pro-capitalists to brush off these objections as overly sentimental and moralistic. But a similar dismissal comes from another group of people who might surprise you: proponents of classical Marxism, one of the oldest schools of anticapitalist thought.  The key message here is: Classical Marxism argues that opposition to capitalism should be based on workers’ class interests, not moral values.  Back in the nineteenth century, anticapitalism seemed like a simple proposition to the German thinker Karl Marx and his followers – a group whose school of thought became known as classical Marxism. The way they saw it, the capitalist world was divided into two main camps.  On one side were the capitalists: a small group of wealthy people who owned society’s means of production – the factories, tools, and other productive resources people need to make products and provide services. On the other side were the workers: the majority of the population, who didn’t own the means of production and whose only economic resource was therefore their own labor power.  To make a living, the workers needed to sell that labor power to the capitalists, who paid them wages in return. Those wages represented a small portion of the overall wealth the workers generated. The capitalists kept the rest of it for themselves and their enterprises – enriching themselves at the workers’ expense. As a group of people, or class, the workers therefore had a self-interest in seeing capitalism come to an end. In Marxist terminology, we’d call this self-interest a class interest. With that in mind, classical Marxists thought that moral arguments against capitalism were a waste of time. Anticapitalists simply had to help the workers become aware of their own class interests, thereby achieving class consciousness, as the Marxists called it. The workers would then rise up and overthrow the system for completely self-interested reasons.  But nowadays, things aren’t so simple, for reasons we’ll look at next. To be successful in the current era, anticapitalists can’t rely on appealing to people’s class interests alone. Are you the CEO of a multinational corporation? Then your class interests are clearly in favor of capitalism. Or do you work in a sweatshop? Then your class interests are clearly against it.  But if you’re like most people in the developed world these days, you’re probably somewhere in between those two extremes. Consider a highly educated professional working in a well-paid occupation. She experiences a mixture of upsides and downsides under capitalism – a good salary but long working hours, perhaps. That means she also has a mixture of class interests both for and against the current economic system.  To one degree or another, the same is true of most people. And that has some important implications for us if we want to promote the cause of anticapitalism.  The key message here is: To be successful in the current era, anticapitalists can’t rely on appealing to people’s class interests alone.  Every economic system has a class structure – a way in which people are divided into different classes. According to classical Marxism, the class structure of capitalism is extremely simple: a binary division between workers and capitalists.  Now, at the time when Marx and his early followers were analyzing capitalism, most workers had similar educational backgrounds, skill levels, wages, autonomy at work (or lack thereof), and so forth. That meant they also had similar experiences of life under capitalism, and it therefore made sense to view them as a single, unified class. But nowadays, the class structure of capitalism is more fragmentary. There are all sorts of differences in skill levels, wages, autonomy, and so on between, say, an office manager, a creative professional, and a grocery store clerk.  Each of these workers occupies a different position in the fragmentary class structure of contemporary capitalism. We can call these positions class locations, and we can say that most class locations today are contradictory. To one degree or another, they contain a mixture of conflicting class interests – that is, reasons to be both for and against the current economic system.  As a result, it’s natural for most people to feel “on the fence” about capitalism, because their class interests pull them in both directions. If an anticapitalist wants to convince them to get off the fence, he’ll have to find something else to motivate them. Anticapitalists need to recognize the importance of people’s moral values and identities. Why do you do the things you do? What motivates and guides your decisions? Unless you’re an imaginary person straight out of an economics textbook, the answer isn’t your economic self-interests alone. To at least some degree, you’re also influenced by your moral values.  That’s especially true of people’s political activism. Consider Friedrich Engels – Karl Marx’s closest comrade and coauthor of The Communist Manifesto. If ever there was an anticapitalist, Engels was one. And yet he was also the son of a wealthy capitalist who owned a manufacturing company. According to classical Marxism, Engels’s class interests would have been completely in favor of capitalism. So why did he oppose it? Because he found it morally offensive.  In other words, values are such a powerful motivating force that they can completely override people’s economic self-interests. But those aren’t the only factors that can move people into action. Another one is identity.  The key message here is: Anticapitalists need to recognize the importance of people’s moral values and identities.  Here’s another philosophical question: Who are you as a human being? Chances are, the first answer that comes to mind isn’t “I’m a worker.” And that almost certainly isn’t the only answer anyone would give. Now, the vast majority of us are, in fact, workers. In fact, putting aside the complications of modern-day capitalism’s fragmentary class structure, most of us still qualify as members of the working class in the classical Marxist sense of the term. We don’t own the means of production; we have to sell our labor power and work for a wage.  But the fact that we’re workers is just one aspect of who we are. We also have genders, ethnicities, religions, nationalities, sexual orientations, professions – the list goes on and on. In reality, all of us have multifaceted identities made up of a complicated mixture of elements like these.  Now, insofar as someone identifies as a worker and believes that capitalism is against her class interests, she may be drawn to the anticapitalist cause. But what if she also identifies as Black, female, LGBTQ+, or part of any other group that faces oppression, inequality, or injustice? In that case, she’s got other interests and social justice issues to worry about than just the economic justice issues of the working class.  If anticapitalists don’t speak to those other interests and issues, their cause won’t speak to her. By appealing to moral values, we can connect anticapitalist politics to people’s diverse identities and interests. Alright, so class interests aren’t the be-all, end-all of anticapitalist politics. Values and identities matter too, and class interests don’t even cover the full extent of people’s overall self-interests.  People can have all sorts of other interests related to their race, gender, and various other aspects of their identities. Meanwhile, class interests themselves are multifaceted and contradictory, thanks to contemporary capitalism having such a fragmented class structure.  If all of this stuff about interests, values, identities, and class sounds complicated, that’s because it is. People are complicated. The world is complicated. And, to be effective, the politics of anticapitalism must be complicated too. There’s no way to simplify these things without doing them injustice. But there is something we can do to make them a little more tractable, at least.  The key message here is: By appealing to moral values, we can connect anticapitalist politics to people’s diverse identities and interests.  Consider a Black person living in the US. Now, he’s not just Black. He’s many other things too – maybe a jazz lover, book reader, father, New Yorker, and so on. As a person, he’s all of these things at once. But in particular contexts, different aspects of his identity come to the fore. At a book club, he’s primarily a book reader – at a jazz concert, a jazz lover.  However, he also lives in the more general context of a society where racism continues to deeply affect Black people in all sorts of ways. Consequently, he could be a worker too, but on a day-to-day level, he might identify – and be identified by others – as a Black person first and foremost. His interests in racial justice issues might therefore be of more prominent concern to him as a Black person than his interests in economic issues as a worker.  That’s not to say these interests, issues, and identities are in opposition to each other. On the contrary, they often align and intersect. For example, Black people face discrimination at the workplace – an issue of both racial and economic justice. It’s something that should be of concern to anyone who cares about equality and fairness. Those are bedrock values that most of us share, and they help to link anticapitalist politics with antiracist politics, in this case.  Drawing attention to these sorts of value-based alignments and intersections is a crucial task for anticapitalists today. But to carry it out, we need to be clear about what our values are – an issue we’ll look at next. Anticapitalism can be based on three pairs of values – equality/fairness, democracy/freedom, and community/solidarity. If we want to mount a moral argument against capitalism, we can’t rely on claims of fact alone. For instance, we can’t just say that poverty still exists under capitalism. We need to be able to give a reason why this problem is morally unacceptable in the first place.  To do that, we need a normative foundation for our argument – a set of core values we can use to judge the current system and its possible alternatives. For this purpose, the author proposes three pairs of values: equality/fairness, democracy/freedom, and community/solidarity. Each pair is joined by a slash because they’re like two sides of the same coin. Together, they form the moral bedrock on which we can build our anticapitalist politics.  The key message here is: Anticapitalism can be based on three pairs of values – equality/fairness, democracy/freedom, and community/solidarity.  Let’s start with equality/fairness. We can define the value of equality as follows: in a just society, all of us would have equal access to the material and social means we need to live a flourishing life. Material means are physical resources like food, shelter, transportation, and health care. Social means are things like meaningful work, family time, and other ways of connecting with, contributing to, or enjoying the company of other people and society as a whole.  If you have access to all of these things, you can live a flourishing life – a life in which you can meet your needs and feel a sense of happiness, fulfillment, and purpose. Each of us has an equal right to be able to live such a life, so it’s only fair that everyone has equal access to the things that make it possible.  One of those things is the ability to feel a sense of autonomy and self-determination in our lives. This brings us to our next pair of values – democracy/freedom. We can define the value of democracy as follows: in a fully democratic society, we would all have equal access to the means of participating in decisions about issues that affect our lives. Those would include decisions about our freedom – the extent to which we’re able to live our lives the way we please, without external interference.  Finally there is community/solidarity. We can define the value of community in terms of the following principle: we should cooperate with each other not just for the sake of advancing our individual self-interests, but out of a sense of togetherness and concern for each other’s mutual well-being. When that sense of togetherness and concern gets channeled into a shared struggle for a common cause, we call it solidarity. Capitalism fails to live up to our moral values. With our normative foundation in place, we’re now ready to build our moral argument against capitalism. All we have to do is take our three pairs of values and see how capitalism measures up to them.  Let’s start with community/solidarity. This one is easy to make short work of. As pro-capitalists would be the first to admit, capitalism encourages people to think and act in highly competitive, individualistic, and selfish ways. It’s a system that pits everyone against each other, splits people into “winners” and “losers,” and urges them to just look out for themselves. These behaviors and mentalities are directly at odds with the values of community/solidarity, which are animated by the spirit of cooperation and the sense that “we’re all in this together.” But the moral case against capitalism is just getting started.  The key message here is: Capitalism fails to live up to our moral values.  Let’s look at equality/fairness next. Because of economic inequality and poverty, capitalism obviously does not provide everyone with equal access to the material and social means of living a flourishing life. While the rich can buy almost anything their hearts desire, many low-income people struggle to meet their basic needs for things like food and housing. And because they’re stuck doing tedious jobs to survive, even more people are unable to devote themselves to meaningful and fulfilling work that contributes to society.  Under capitalism, the majority of people’s lives are also lacking in terms of democracy/freedom. Sure, in countries with democratic governments, most adults have the right to vote. This gives them the freedom of choosing between various politicians. But wealthy people and private institutions like banks, investment firms, and corporations exert much more influence over those politicians than ordinary people. For instance, to get the policies they want, they can make campaign donations, engage in lobbying efforts, or simply threaten to move their capital or their business operations to a different city or country.  In a fully democratic society, none of this would happen. Not only that, but democracy would mean so much more than just voting once a year. Remember, it would mean everyone being able to participate in decisions that impact their lives – including decisions about how work is organized and carried out at their workplaces. Under capitalism, these decisions are largely made by the capitalists who own those workplaces, which are essentially run like mini-dictatorships. Democratic socialism provides an alternative to both statism and capitalism. “All right,” a skeptic might say. “Maybe capitalism does fall short of all those values you’ve set forth. But what’s the alternative? Socialism? Countries like the USSR tried that in the twentieth century, and it failed miserably. Not only were they ruled by oppressive regimes, but their economic systems didn’t even work. That’s why they collapsed. Surely you don’t want to live in a place like the Soviet Union, do you?”  In a word, no. While societies like the USSR claimed to be champions of socialism, they were really examples of an economic system that could more accurately be called statism – a system where the economy is controlled by the state. We don’t want that. But there’s another option: democratic socialism.  The key message here is: Democratic socialism provides an alternative to both statism and capitalism.  The differences between these systems boil down to two questions: “Who has the power to make decisions about how society’s resources are used and allocated?” and “How is that power exercised?”  Under capitalism, the decisions are made by capitalists – wealthy individuals and institutions like private banks and investment firms that own the financial assets known as capital. They call the shots about which enterprises receive funding, how work gets done in the workplace, and so on. How? By exercising economic power, which is basically a form of bribery. Capitalists can get people to do things by offering them money – or threatening to take it away. And they can do that because they control most of society’s wealth, which they can dole out in the form of wages, investment capital, and loans.  Under statism, by contrast, economic decisions are made by state officials – a mixture of politicians and bureaucrats. State-owned banks allocate state-owned resources to state-owned firms, all of which are run by state officials who exercise state power. This is essentially a form of coercion. Through various governmental agencies, state officials can make people do things by imposing rules, which they can enforce by threat of punishment.  Finally, under democratic socialism, economic decisions are made by ordinary people organizing themselves into democratically run associations and institutions. One example would be worker cooperatives – enterprises that are jointly owned, managed, and operated by their own workers. These entities allow ordinary people to exercise social power, which is the ability to get things done by coming together and cooperating with each other.  Instead of bribery or coercion, social power relies on persuasion and democratic decision-making to make things happen. For example, members of a worker cooperative might debate and vote on how to expand their operations, rather than having a decision imposed on them by the state or a capitalist. Elements of democratic socialism already exist in our current society. Worker cooperatives would be just one of many possible features of a democratic socialist society.  Participatory budgeting committees could allow residents of cities to decide for themselves how public funds are spent in their own neighborhoods. Peer-to-peer collaborative production networks could allow innovators to link up and build things together on a similar model as Wikipedia. Nonprofits, mutual societies, and a variety of other local community organizations could help people meet their needs for childcare, eldercare, and affordable housing.  We could go on with the list of possibilities and describe each of them in more depth – but what’s the point? Isn’t this all just speculative fiction? This society we’re describing doesn’t exist; it’s simply an imaginary future we’re dreaming up, right?  Well, yes and no.  The key message here is: Elements of democratic socialism already exist in our current society.  Ready for an even bigger plot twist? Hold on to your hat! Remember capitalism and statism from the previous blinks? Those were fictions too.  In the language of sociology, we could call these economic systems “ideal types.” They’re completely theoretical, pure forms of capitalism, statism, and democratic socialism – “pure” in the sense of being purified of any characteristics that don’t belong to them. For example, under a purely capitalistic system, all productive resources would be owned by capitalists. None of them would be controlled by the state (as in statism) or ordinary people (as in democratic socialism).  But this ideal form of capitalism is just that: an ideal. It has never existed. All actual forms of capitalism have featured a mixture of capitalist, statist, and democratic socialist elements. In all capitalist societies today, the state controls some aspects of the economy, such as public utilities, public transit, and public health-care systems. Meanwhile, worker cooperatives already exist in capitalist countries around the world. So do all of the other possible elements of democratic socialism we mentioned earlier, like participatory budgeting committees.  However, most aspects of the economy are still capitalistic in nature, so we call the system “capitalism.” It’s a convenient shorthand way of saying it’s a mixed economy made up of mostly (but not entirely) capitalist elements. Likewise, if the economy were made up of mostly (but not entirely) statist or democratic socialist elements, we’d call it statism or democratic socialism, respectively.  This might seem like semantics, but it has some extremely important practical implications for anticapitalists in the twenty-first century. Capitalism can be gradually eroded by, and replaced with, democratic socialism. Imagine you’re walking toward a lake. From a distance, it looks like a single, unified object – just a big body of water. But if you get closer, you’ll see that it’s a complex ecosystem, full of different creatures, plants, and physical elements like rocks and soil.  Economies are like that too. Each of them is a complicated web of diverse enterprises, associations, and institutions. Some of these entities lean more toward the capitalist, statist, or democratic socialist end of the spectrum than others. And many of them lean in multiple directions at once. For instance, a corporation could be owned by private investors but governed by a board of directors whose members are elected by its workers.  The point is that capitalist, statist, and democratic socialist entities can – and do – coexist and interact with each other. And that presents anticapitalists with a huge strategic opportunity.  The key message here is: Capitalism can be gradually eroded by, and replaced with, democratic socialism.  To see why, just look at the history of capitalism itself.  Back in the late Middle Ages of Europe, there was another economic and political system called feudalism. It was a system ruled by kings, queens, and other royalty, who literally lorded themselves over everyone else. Their dominion had been going on for centuries, and it seemed like it would continue for many more – forever, perhaps.  But around the same time, another group of people began to emerge. They were enterprising individuals involved in non-feudal economic activities like merchant trading, banking, and guild-regulated artisanal production.  At first, these individuals were minor actors in society, occupying small niches in the feudal economy. But over several centuries, they gradually gained more and more power. Having established themselves in the cracks of the seemingly rock-solid social structure of feudalism, they grew and grew – expanding outward, filling up more and more cracks. Eventually, the “rock” crumbled, and a new economic system emerged.  These individuals became known as capitalists, and the new system was called capitalism.  The moral of the story? Worker cooperatives, participatory budgeting committees, and other proto-democratic socialist entities may occupy marginal positions in society today. But so did the proto-capitalist enterprises of the Middle Ages. From humble beginnings, these things can grow bigger and stronger, maturing with time, becoming more numerous, and eventually transforming society – not with a dramatic revolution, but as the culmination of a long, gradual process of erosion that’s already underway. Both the market and the state have roles to play in the transition to democratic socialism. So what should we do? Just sit back and let the process of erosion do its thing?  Not quite. We need to give it time, but we also need to nurture it. Among other things, that means advocating for certain forms of state intervention in the economy, which we’ll look at in a moment.  But this idea runs counter to one of the defining mantras of our time: let the market take care of everything. That leads us to another important question: What about the market? Do we need to get rid of it to have democratic socialism?  Many people think we do. That’s in part because they conflate capitalism with the market, defining our current economic system as a “market economy.” Getting rid of one therefore means getting rid of the other, right? And that presumably means replacing it with something else, like the central economic planning of the Soviet Union.  But none of that’s true. The key message here is: Both the market and the state have roles to play in the transition to democratic socialism.  In economics, a market isn’t just a real or metaphorical place where people buy and sell goods and services. It’s a mechanism that allows them to coordinate their economic activities, without the need for centralized planning. How? By letting them set their own prices, make voluntary exchanges, and respond to the pressures of supply and demand.  Now, under capitalism, most of the people doing those things happen to be organized into capitalist-owned enterprises. But there’s no reason why state- and worker-owned enterprises can’t operate on the market too. After all, they already do – under capitalism. In a democratic socialist society, all of these different types of enterprises would continue to sell goods and services on the market. The number of worker-owned enterprises would simply rival, and perhaps even surpass, that of their capitalist- and state-owned peers.  But to get to that point, we need the state to help worker-owned enterprises spread throughout the economy. For example, a government-issued universal basic income could allow workers to be financially secure enough to leave their jobs and form worker cooperatives. Public banks could then provide them with the credit they’d need to get their cooperatives off the ground. And publicly funded training programs could help them learn how to manage their own enterprises.  We also need to recognize that, in some areas, the state is better than the market at ensuring everyone has equal access to essential services. Examples include public health care, education, transit, and amenities such as parks, museums, and libraries. These already exist under capitalism, and they’d be expanded under democratic socialism to provide fuller coverage of people’s needs. Anticapitalists should follow a combination of four strategies – taming, resisting, escaping, and dismantling capitalism. With measures like universal basic income, we’ve only scratched the surface of the possible building blocks of a democratic socialist future. But rather than going through a laundry list of other possibilities, let’s end by stepping back and asking a question that looks at the bigger picture: How do we go about putting these building blocks into place?  Classical Marxism primarily advocated a single strategy: smashing capitalism. Destroy and replace the system in one fell swoop, they argued. But in the twentieth century, this led to many undesirable consequences in countries like the Soviet Union. We don’t want to repeat their mistakes, so we should reject our revolutionary impulses in favor of more gradual approaches to changing the system.  But which ones should we choose? Well, there are four main options, and the short answer is: all of them.  The key message here is: Anticapitalists should follow a combination of four strategies – taming, resisting, escaping, and dismantling capitalism.  Taming capitalism means counteracting the harms that capitalism causes to society. Universal basic income is one example. Giving everyone a constant source of income would counteract the effects of underemployment, unemployment, and the instability of the labor market. People’s livelihoods would no longer be precarious, and they’d no longer be thrown into destitution by changes in the economy.  Resisting capitalism means actively fighting back against the tendencies of capitalism that are harmful to ordinary people’s interests. For example, by organizing themselves into labor unions, workers could oppose capitalism’s tendency to underpay them for their work.  Escaping capitalism means finding ways of doing things in a non-capitalist manner. Worker cooperatives are an example of this. They are attempts to run enterprises in an egalitarian, democratic socialist manner – one that allows workers to escape the rule of capitalists.  Dismantling capitalism means gradually replacing the capitalist elements of society with non-capitalist ones. An example is the Meidner Plan – a policy that left-wing politicians in Sweden tried to carry out in the 1970s. If it had gone forward, it would have led to the ownership of Swedish corporations being gradually transferred from capitalists to labor unions.  Each of these strategies represents an approach to combating capitalism from a different direction. Together, they form a strategic configuration – a combination of strategies that work together. We can call it eroding capitalism – a way of gradually whittling away at our current economic system while building up a better one in its place. Final summary The key message in these blinks: Capitalism fails to live up to three pairs of core values: equality/fairness, democracy/freedom, and community/solidarity. Appealing to these values can help connect anti-capitalist politics to people’s diverse identities and interests, which are made all the more complicated by contemporary capitalism’s fragmentary class structure. Democratic socialism provides a viable and desirable alternative to both capitalism and statism. It can be achieved through the gradual erosion of capitalism, which entails building on elements of a democratic socialist future that already exist. These include worker cooperatives, participatory budgeting committees, and public provisioning of essential services.  Got feedback? We’d love to hear what you think about our content! Just drop an email to remember@blinkist.com with How to Be an Anti-capitalist in the 21st Century as the subject line and share your thoughts! What to read next: Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism, by Kristen R. Ghodsee You’ve learned about the importance of linking anti-capitalism with other political causes, looking at the issue of racial inequality as an example. But what about gender inequality? Well, the blinks to Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism help answer that question. They talk about how democratic socialism could improve women’s lives in a number of different dimensions – including sex, but so much more.  The blinks also draw further distinctions between democratic socialism and state socialism (another term for statism). While acknowledging state socialism’s dark side, they explore some of its accomplishments and try to draw lessons from both its pros and cons.