Anti-capitalism roundtable: Introduction and questions

Socialist Review, 2001

SR Collective

The recent rise in resistance against economic globalization and the police state exemplified in the United States by the actions against the World Trade Organization (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank, the rise in anti-sweatshop activism, and anti-prison organizing has raised excitement about the possibility for fighting capitalism. At Socialist Review, we want to seize this opportunity to ask activists and academics, Marxists and postmoderns (yes, we acknowledge that these categories are not necessarily mutually exclusive) to tell us what kinds of theorizing and politics are relevant to their practice. More specifically, we want to know what resistance and struggle in the present period looks like. The following questions are offered to spark some critical discussion about these critical issues.

1. Is "capitalism" an important category in your politics? If so, what exactly do you mean by "anti-capitalism"? What is the relationship between capitalism as a mode of production and capitalism as a discursive category? Is it just one category among others - such as race, sexuality, gender, coloniality - or does it have a special centrality in your thinking and practice?

2. Are the categories of "Marxism," or "postmodernism" useful in your political and intellectual work? If so, what kind of Marxism or postmodernism? If not, what other schools of thought are helpful to you?

3. How important is having an alternative to capitalism, i.e., socialism, for you? If so, what would you call it? How would you define and describe it?

4. How is fighting against "capitalism" connected - or disconnected - from struggles against racism, sexism, homophobia, and other systems of oppression?

5. Does it make sense to envision revolution with a capital "R" as a necessary condition for a just society? Or is radical democracy a better and more useful concept?

6. What connections, if any, do you see between anti-sweatshop and anti-globalism organizing and an anti-capitalist agenda? Does it matter if activists talk about capitalism?

7. How important - and helpful - is it to argue for the connections between the prison-industrial complex and capitalism when organizing youth of color against criminalization of young people?