Let’s move on from Erik Olin Wright’s modes of transformation

When I first read Erik Olin Wright, I was enthralled. Here was a Marxist for our times who refused to hide behind inscrutable jargon, who made the contradictions of our political and economic system so obvious, so irrefutable, that being anything other than an anti-capitalist in the 21st century appeared laughable. 

Renewed interest in anti-capitalist thought has produced a cornucopia of utopian alternatives to the current social order. As these alternatives have come into focus, our lack of a coherent theory of transition has been thrown into sharp relief. Kai Heron and Jodi Dean point to transition as the “question of our times” – “a black box that lies between the present and our idealized visions of the future, whether that’s a radical Green New Deal, communism, or [...] degrowth.” 

 Erik Olin Wright and degrowth

Because it attempts to answer the question of transition, the work of Erik Olin Wright has known something of a resurgence. In his 2010 book Envisioning Real Utopias, Wright not only provides a systematic critique of capitalism; he also outlines what a utopian future could resemble, and discusses strategies for achieving it. He breaks these strategies down into three “modes of transformation”: ruptural, interstitial, and symbiotic.

Ruptural transformations refer to breaks with the status quo. The example used by Wright is the “Russian Revolution” and he relates this mode of transformation to revolutionary socialists. By interstitial transformations, Wright refers to the creation of alternatives in the cracks of capitalist hegemony. He associates this tradition with anarchist forms of organising and uses Wikipedia and the worker-owned Mondragón Corporation in the Basque Country as examples. Symbiotic modes of transformation, finally, “try to systematically use the state to advance the process of emancipatory social empowerment.” (Envisioning Real Utopias, p.228) He associates them with social democratic movements through the example of universal basic income. 

Championed by researchers including Katya Chertkovskaya, Wright’s typology has been influential within the degrowth movement. For those of us struggling to overcome capitalist realism, it offers a welcome prism through which to understand the various movements trying to transform our world – from Food Not Bombs to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Wright argues that, on its own, each mode of transformation is insufficient for building a world beyond capitalism. Not only does it suggest that different struggles can complement one another, it provides comfort in the idea that you can be as much of an anti-capitalist by putting your hands in the soil of a community garden as you can by vandalising Elbit Systems. 

Nonetheless, Wright was skeptical of ruptural modes of transformation in the 21st century: ”The reason for making this assumption is not a rejection of [...] insurrectionary violence, but rather a belief that under foreseeable historical conditions such means would be incapable of actually creating a deeply egalitarian democratic form of social empowerment in developed capitalist societies.” (Envisioning Real Utopias, p.216) In his final book, he excludes ruptural strategies from his framework for “eroding capitalism” through a combination of interstitial and symbiotic work. In Wright’s eyes, anarchists and social democrats might disagree vehemently on questions of political strategy, but by building alternatives and passing reforms they are all chipping away at the status quo. 

 Strategy and transition

While Wright placed a welcome focus on the question of transition, the popularity of his political writing within degrowth reflects our collective failure in this area rather than the quality of his argument. To begin with, transition and strategy are not the same thing. Conceptualising transition is a theoretical exercise which outlines how a departure from capitalism may transpire grounded in conjunctural analysis – a historically and geographically situated study of material conditions and social forces. Strategy, by contrast, is a step-by-step plan of action for a specific organisation based on that theory of transition and that conjunctural analysis. We can think about the contours of a transition from capitalism to socialism – as István Mészáros did over a thousand pages in Beyond Capital – but this exercise is distinct from putting forward strategies that organisations can apply in a given context. 

Moreover, rupture is not a strategy. In the past years, we have witnessed many ruptures within capitalism – Luigi Mangione’s political assassination of the CEO of UnitedHealthcare springs to mind. His actions, disconnected from broader organisation, cannot be described as a ruptural mode of transformation. The same critique applies to the cases Wright uses. Had he chosen to treat the October Revolution more seriously, he would not have described it as a sudden break with the status quo, but rather as the outcome of decades of patient, mass organising beyond the reach of the secret police – an interstitial approach, if you will. Lenin developed his ideas, in part, as a critique of spontaneous political eruptions.

Those who built Leninism into the tradition that exists today, such as the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde, focused heavily on the slow work of emancipatory political education. This project also informed Paulo Freire's writing on The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which can hardly be reduced to a ruptural approach given its focus on liberating ordinary people through education. 

Similarly, we cannot make sense of the tactics and strategies of insurrectionary and mass anarchists as an interstitial project in the cracks of capitalism. Doing so ignores some of the most momentous events in the history of anarchism – including Revolutionary Catalonia (1936-1937), the latest revolution of Western Europe. Wright’s association of interstitial strategies with anarchists and ruptural strategies with revolutionary socialists helps us understand neither group. 

 Contextualising strategy

Crucially, Wright’s framework cannot tell organisers what to do in a given context based on the forces at their disposal. Rodrigo Nunes invites us to ask what’s missing from our current movement ecology for us to win. Nathan Barlow asks a similar question in his invitation to create a strategic assemblage for degrowth. Wright’s framework, by contrast, provides no avenue for posing this question. This failure is highlighted by Wright's unwillingness to tell us how much symbiotic and how much interstitial are required to erode capitalism. How could this theory be turned into practice? What would it mean in terms of concrete tactics to adopt a symbiotic strategy? In fact, when has any organisation picked up these ideas and used them to inform their work?  

As others have argued, Wright’s model of eroding capitalism runs the risk of lulling us into believing that any and all strategies can be equally effective for transforming society. Prefiguration remains essential for imagining a different world, but Wright has little to say about the obstacles preventing anti-systemic practices from becoming hegemonic. His modes of transformation offer an academic typology of anti-capitalist struggles after the fact, but they do not provide context-specific answers to the question of what is to be done. 

The most serious attempt to expand them, pushed by Barlow and Joe Herbert, began as part of a series of interventions on political strategy for degrowth published on this website. Some of these contributors went on to work on the volume Degrowth & Strategy: how to bring about social-ecological transformation. The first part of the book creates a theoretical framework for evaluating strategies based on Wright’s modes of transformation. The second part considers various strategies in a variety of sectors, which amounts to is a categorisation exercise in which existing struggles are sorted into interstitial, symbiotic, and ruptural boxes. The book has little to offer organisers trying to come to terms with genocide, ecological breakdown, and war at a time of class dealignment and rising fascism. 

 Confronting imperialism

The greatest failure of Wright’s critique of socialist projects is that it downplays the imperialist context in which they take place. It is not that we should not discuss the mistakes of actually existing socialism; rather we should remain aware of the difficulties that come with the United States and its allies trying to crush you. Wright is perfectly well aware of this reality. In a footnote on page 52, he writes: “​​it was also the case that US military interventions – whether in the form of direct US military involvement as in Viet Nam or indirect involvement in supporting military coups in Iran, Guatemala, Chile and many other places – was a response to various kinds of threats to global capitalist economic structures in these places.”  

The relegation of imperialism in the world-system to a footnote tells us what we already know: Erik Olin Wright epitomises Western Marxism. He cannot account for the fact that following the Bolshevik Revolution that he dismisses, the motion of history turned resolutely south. He refuses to acknowledge that socialist experiments are not going to happen everywhere all at once. Instead, revolutionaries strive to build a future for themselves in a brutally imperialist insertion.

These contradictions lead to difficult trade-offs which should hold our collective attention in discussions of socialist transition: how to reconcile a commitment to peace with the need to defend a fledgling socialist project? How to maintain democracy without succumbing to backlash from a domestic capitalist class supported by imperial powers? Wright shies away from these questions to dwell on small-scale examples of workplace democracy in the imperial core. 

 Moving on

Those of us who are critical of Wright’s typology must answer the charge of how to ground ongoing debates on political strategy within degrowth. We know that while all models are wrong, some are useful. I would contend that this model of social change has outlived its usefulness. As we sharpen our political skills, we can move away from sorting struggles into boxes in favour of conjunctural analyses informing robust, evolving theories of transition. Erik Olin Wright pushed us to think deeply about the transition away from capitalism. Now let’s move on from the illusion that what we need is the right mix of interstitial, symbiotic, and ruptural modes of transformation.